I Smell Esther Williams

by Mark Leyner

  “That asymptotic line business was a mean trick,” Barbara said.

  “I know. But anyway—then, for some reason, I told him that he wasn’t like an M&M—that he’d melt in my mouth and in my hands.”

  “Did he yell at you? Did he chase you out?” Barbara asked.

  I looked at her. “Why do you cover your neck. It’s either covered with your hair or you wear turtle-necks. Why don’t you either wear your hair up in buns or gathered, at least, in braids or ponytails and not wear turtle-necks.”

  “Those … are your ideas,” she said bitterly.

  I decided to consult a hypnotist in order to find out exactly what had happened. I picked one out of the yellow pages. He was located on Canyon Boulevard. He took me back into his apartment which he apparently used as his office. It was a mess.

  “Before I got into hypnosis,” he said, “I used to run the Boulder Institute of Balneology. The science of baths. Everyone specializes these days. There aren’t any general balneologists anymore.”

  “What was your specialty?” I asked.

  “Cyst soaking.”

  Then he said “Let’s get down to business.”

  I inquired as to his methods.

  “My method’s one of the latest. What I’m going to have you do, Mark, is to wash dishes until you fall into a trance,” he said, pointing to a sink full of dirty skillets, and saucepans and utensils, “If that doesn’t work we’ll have you vacuum and dust and do some laundry until the trance is achieved.”

  “Well,” I said, “let’s get going,”

  Two hours later, I’d cleaned the whole kitchen, made the beds, shampooed the rugs and straightened the book shelves and magazine racks.

  “Well,” I asked, “what did I say?”

  “Mark,” he said, plucking the check from my hand, “we’ve found that relating to the patient the details of what he’s said under hypnosis is generally contraindicated. Have a nice day.”

  “You too.” I said.

  When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was at the stove.

  “I haven’t read about anyone being killed,” she said.

  “How could you have—we never see a newspaper around here.”

  “Well, we would’ve heard.”

  “I think I heard about it—I think I heard one of the Tai Chi people talking—he said ‘Because of these murders, the whole Tai Chi community is very tense. And we hate being tense. And we hate ourselves for hating something. And we can’t stand the anxiety that brews in the self-hatred. So we’re all really unbalanced.’ And then they asked him what games Tai Chi people like to play with their kids when they get bored in the car on long trips—and he said, spotting the most license plates from a particular state, or naming state capitals, or the animal-mineral-vegetable game. Then he said, ‘Once, a Tai Chi person hit a toll attendant in the forehead with a quarter because he thought it was one of those change receptacles. We think that’s a funny story—and when we think something’s funny—we laugh.’ ”

  Then the phone rang. It was Lisa.

  “I can’t talk—I’m in the middle of shaving. Bye.”

  Barbara started to tickle me. “Don’t,” I giggled. “I’ll keep doing it if you laugh.” I couldn’t stop laughing though—so she wouldn’t stop tickling me. I was in convulsions. At one point, she tickled me so well that my body had a great spasm and my head crashed through the television screen. Everyone was in there.

  “I gotta get out of here for awhile,” I said, “while I’m gone I wonder if you could do that seam on my blue corduroy jacket.”

  I kept trying to fly to the District of Columbia. But each time, the plane would take off from Denver, fly for four hours or so and then land in Denver—and the passengers would get up and stretch and reach into the overhead luggage compartments for their coats, queue up and deplane, as if we’d really arrived in the District of Columbia after all. But I doubt we ever had.

  Each day I’d watch the newspaper boy arrive at my apartment and stand in the center of the complex’s vast atrium and toss the papers up towards the second and third floor balconies. But he could never reach the apartments and the papers would just fall back to the ground. And he’d throw them again and they’d fall short again. Then he’d throw them with more force and they’d land on the roof. Then he’d throw them a little softer and they’d hit the balcony’s railing and tumble back to the ground. Then much much harder and they’d fly over the roof. And finally he’d leave, not having delivered a single paper. So tenants were held virtually incommunicado from the world and not infrequently there’d be screams from apartment windows “Is it baseball season or basketball?!”

  Another week began on the radio. Air blew through the heat vent and someone in an adjoining apartment was using their garbage disposal. These were things I noticed. Because in many ways I lived with my apartment and not in it, I knew its moods and habits. I thought the apartment was so horny. I looked for its diary everywhere. It must have longed for something as neuter and clean as it was. Within its confines, I could smell myself and vent in the inexpressible ways an unexpurgated hatred of the other women I wanted desperately desperately to just hold me and kiss me—that would be better than fucking—just being held. A friend lent me his guitar and one night I just played Under The Boardwalk. Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk “On a blanket with my baby …” These were the feelings I held. The walls of the apartment were covered with lipstick marks of big inhuman kisses. The next morning I woke up and began to live more realistically. I ate breakfast quickly and put my sweat pants and orange sweat shirt on and drove to the basketball courts at the Williams Village dormitories. As I entered the court, there was an almost unprecedented ovation and I sang the Everly Brothers’ “never knew what I missed until I kissed ya” as I dribbled. It was there, I think, at mid-court, beneath the clouds’ pink under-bellies, that I decided that the most prudent and expedient thing I could do was leave Boulder.

  I made up my mind not only to relocate but to assume a new identity. To weather the future under cover. To lose myself in the great anonymity of the mid-west. I applied to an exchange program that would place me with a mid-western farming family. And with greater dispatch than I could have hoped for, I received notification that I’d been accepted and that I was to join my new family at the first opportunity. The speed with which my application was processed was due, I think, to the unassailable discretion with which I’d answered the application’s queries. Where it asked why I wanted to live with a farm family, I wrote, “Because I like farmers.” Where it asked why I liked farmers, I put, “First the farmers angered Washington residents by trampling the mall and driving their tractors into the reflecting pools, but then really charmed them by plowing capital motorists out from under that uncharacteristically heavy snowfall. And some farmers even sought a brief respite from controversy beneath snowy monuments and dashed off impassioned letters to wives and sweethearts.” And on the part of the application where it asked what kind of letters the farmers sent, I put: “Dear Helen, If you got telephone cable and wrapped it around all the planets and stars so that if you wanted to you could call other galaxies and universes you would not speak to a finer prettier best-cookinest gal than you are Helen. I mean it too, brown eyes.”

  Needless to say, I was delighted at the sudden prospect of being able to live quietly, and without constant foreboding.

  I called my friend Bianca and invited her to the Boulderado for a drink. It’s funny, y’know I even remember what we had—she drank Spanish coffee and I had bourbon and soda. And while we were drinking, the waiter brought a telephone over, “It’s for you, sir.” It was Lisa.

  “I can’t talk now,” I said, “I’m insulating. I’ve got fiberglass all over me. Bye.” I hung up and called Barbara.

  “Listen Barbara, I’m having a drink with Bianca at the Boulderado. Call up the airline and make a reservation for me.”

  “Forget it,” she said, “If it’s so important
to have a drink with Bianca, let her make your calls.”

  “Look Barb, do as I say or I’ll read your letters to a room full of English 119 students.”

  When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was on the floor, filling a syringe with soy sauce and mayonaisse. She clenched and unclenched her fist a few times, looped her belt around her arm and pulled it tight with her teeth.

  I could see the words at the bottom of the glass I’d been drinking from.

  Barbara turned to me, “There are cops in the kitchen.”

  There were four cops disguised as three cops. One cop was part wasp, part fascist pederast. One cop was short and fat. One cop was drenched in Aqua Velva. They were in my kitchen.

  My heart hit the linoleum like a clump of dough, with a real bottom of the ninth splat that evaporated into a cloud of valerian vapor, a real gaseous calm, a real back-to-mom, a real relieved throb. Cause being caught for the wrong thing is the loftiest exoneration there is. And maybe they got me for stealing cigarettes from King Soopers, or stealing books from Brillig Works, or reading other people’s letters in the mail room, or stealing newspapers from other apartment complexes, or lying without let-up, lying about the woman I love without question so other women will sleep with me, or napping when most of the citizenry is slaving away, or keeping my sea-onion in the closet or overbreading my chicken or being myopic and algophobic and predatory.

  “Big deal,” I said. “Big shit. What’s the big fuss all about,” I said, as they led me outside to the car.

  I stopped walking and tilted back my head and for a minute just felt the rain fall on my face and for just a second it felt like being very young again … another little kid who’d skated in his dress shoes across the frozen ponds that had formed on the settlement’s big plans, for a big future, for big thinkers, with big wallets, on big behinds.

  “Asshole.” I said.

  Taken off the face of the earth.

  From its static electricity and unctuous detergents.

  “Face of the earth!” I swore.

  I swore at the crowd of things I knew.

  And someone yelled from a window, “Is it hockey season or baseball?”

  “Asshole season,” I said, “Asshole season.”

  HISTORICAL PLAYS:

  Sides A and B

  A

  DISCO DIASPORA

  WAITRESS: Sir, I’m sorry but we’re out of Thousand Island. You can have French, Blue Cheese, Russian, or the house vinaigrette.

  IRTZY: Alright … French. (Then hissing to himself.) Oh bold stalk of enmity. Phototropic tattersall of crimson and black. Lopped far above root by the blunted edge of compromise’s loose desultory scythe! You shall stretch forth again. And nourish the air with fragrant revenge!

  LEIBMAN: Your stalk, sahib, is still redolent of that wench’s soiled hole.

  IRTZY: That is no wench, Leibman, that is my dear wife.

  (Enter IRTZY’S wife, MUE)

  IRTZY: What bulletin do you bear, faithful partner?

  MUE: Only this, dearest.

  IRTZY: What?

  MUE: This.

  IRTZY: What do you mean this? This what?

  MUE: The Hebrews, and that means me and you, are dispersing to a heavy beat.

  IRTZY: Like what beat, you thing.

  MUE: Just snap your fingers and get it, get to it. Get it to it. Uh shma yip uhh yich yisro ya yaka!!!!

  (Exeunt)

  B

  I LOVE (TO FEEL YOUR LOVE)

  VOICES FROM THE CROWD: He doesn’t take the static concept of time seriously!

  He’s hyper-heroic!

  He’s like menacingly good-looking!

  ENVOY: You are loved by my country’s people, Mr. Premier.

  TRANSLATOR: “Bilos derung zha afshler biobnz, Di. Premebnz.”

  PREMIER (nodding and smiling): Er vagator ma wot; af gevunt ben hadis menoritz gool āā pen sodrana helopants banistrosa eeko vantrick al put, shen so glisso va lamotor ben mu fak. Hhaa … Hho hho!

  TRANSLATOR: “This makes me warm; there are those in my country’s neighboring regions who would decorate me not with laurels and medals of valor, but with a tight noose around my throat. Haa … Ho ho!”

  (A massive asteroid collides with Earth.)

  CROWD:

  ENVOY: Aaaaaaaaah!

  TRANSLATOR: “Yaaaaaaaah!”

  PREMIER: Yaaaaaaaah! Yaaaaaaaah! Yaaaaaaaah!

  (Fade)

  THE RIVER

  Look in my closet. There is a blue double-breasted blazer with gold buttons. It is the afternoon and someone is watching us from their sofa and eating cheez doodles. O.K.? Do you hear the anvil falling from the sky and striking you on the head? Now you’re an accordion. I’m putting on my blazer and I’m skipping along the river bank, playing a polka on you. The crippled mice are tossing away their crutches and dancing behind me! The cute mouse women are screaming and fainting. But someone with a big vacuum cleaner is chasing us, and sucking the mice up. There goes the last one! Thup! Now I’m sitting alone on the edge of the river in my blue blazer, and you’re an accordion. Assume your old shape and let’s go for a drive in my motorboat, or else we will die.

  THE BOAT SHOW

  Look. I’ve just returned from a used bookstore. It’s run on the honor system. You pay at the main store across the street. It’s easy to steal the books. There are economics textbooks, volumes of Shakespeare filled with sophomoric underlining and marginalia, books that people probably purchased in drugstores and supermarkets before going on vacation, marriage manuals, and stacks and stacks of National Geographies. That’s clear, isn’t it? I’ve given a partial list in order to generally characterize the store’s stock. Once I stole an art magazine from the place. I felt guilty. After all, it’s commendable that someone has faith in other people these days, and it’s commendable that someone is offering books at such cheap prices. More people should read, right? So this time I didn’t steal anything. I simply went through a few piles of Modern Photography magazines and ripped out all the photographs of nude women I could find. When I got home, I tacked them up to the walls of my study. Are you following me so far? Now I am looking out the window of my study. I am going to try to make you see what I see. With me? O.K. A red car just drove by. A blue one. And then a white coupe with a black vinyl roof. A man in a white v-neck undershirt just leaned out his door and took his mail out of the box. His house is painted a kind of olive-green color. The house to the right of his is a very muted salmon-pink. The house to the right of that is a deep scarlet with white trim. Now, what color is the house next to that? I’ll give you a minute or two. While you think, I’ll have a cigarette and look at my new photographs. There’s one of a blond woman I particularly like. She looks like a girl named Sharon I knew in Boulder. I think Sharon’s married now and lives up in Buffalo, New York. Anyway … O.K., time’s up. How many of you wrote down, red brick with beige trim? Good. Alright, now you’ve got the hang of it. Again, I’m going to try to make you sense what I sense. Ready? Here we go. The electric heater in my study runs on a thermostat. So all day it turns itself on and off. Sometimes, though, it gets too hot. Let’s say it’s getting too hot now. Follow me? I’m taking off my flannel shirt. O.K. O.K. I’ll take off my undershirt too. Now I’m bare-chested. And for the sake of argument, I’ll tack a spare, photograph of two nudes on horseback to my chest. Ouch … there. Nice horse, huh? Now I’m looking out the window. A dog is howling. Awwwooooo. Awwwooooooo. I hear a helicopter. I lean next to the window and check the sky. Very gray. A guy with a trainman’s cap and ponytail just got out of a pick-up truck and walked up the street carrying a clipboard. Did you see him take the pen out from behind his ear? Good. A group of about fifteen African diplomats just walked by. If I didn’t know better, I’d say one of them is pointing right at me. Look at all the litter in the street. That’s terrible. Whatever happened to “keep American beautiful”? Went out with hula hoops and swallowing fish, right? O.K. Look at the beer cans. I can make out Stroh’s, Miller, a
Michelob … and a Budweiser. Now I’m going to look directly beneath my window. I’m going to try to be very specific here. Next to the curb are two plastic trash barrels, green and red with black lids. Adjacent to the trash barrels is the neighbor’s hedge … it’s made up of some kind of perennial shrub, (I’m squinting now and leaning way over), some kind of perennial shrub with prickly … prickly bipinnate leaves and tiny tiny pink flowers. You are enchanted by the tiny delicate pink petals. N’est-ce pas? You want to crush them with a mortar and pestle and massage them into your scalp. You are repeating the word “pestle” to yourself until it loses its meaning. Alright. Don’t move. Do you see the reflection of my finger in the window? Do you see the reflection of my face? Am I pointing to a dimple, a pock mark, or a dueling scar? Yell out your answer! Now we are dancing. Are you inhaling as I exhale? In other words, have our gears meshed? Are you still lashed to the cross of my thoughts? Uh oh. I’m feeling light-headed. The right side of my brain is giving a blow job to the left side. You don’t get a choice on this one—I’m going to do all four—I’m going to a. Smash my china to the music of Felix Mendelssohn, b. Drive the endless highway west, c. Collect the latex footprints that lead to this room, and d. Open my veins in a warm bath. Now where is my tweed jacket with a wedding band in every pocket? Where is my yiddish phrase book? My itinerary? That’s the last one. You’ll have to leave. I’m going to throw myself out the window. Put me in one of the plastic trash barrels. Tack a photograph of yourself to my forehead. Goodbye now. We part!