I Smell Esther Williams

by Mark Leyner

  PROSE POEM /

  A JOKE FOR GINGER

  The exposition’s lights are pale and diffuse through the condensation, the trolley cables and pylons are lightly dusted with snow outside the big shed, downtown St. Louis, the mechanical chicken scuttles off the cutting board and the thread of gold at her ankle throws light off its turning key. The snowy streets record the trails of unnaturally bulky particles that splinter and fuse in millionths of seconds though, elsewhere, and more indigenous to this version, his prints lead to the door of a household, that he opens. “Ooooooh,” she shivers, “this earth shuttle is lonely.” “Pass over that bottle of Sniggering Walter,” he says, “Daddy’s home.” Mental months spire into the air and swerve as if pulled by the oven fan. It’s hard to forget this scene that plays and replays so often. He goes and sits at the piano and she follows and stands behind him with her arms around his neck. And they sway together as he plays. Dinner burns, giving off a warm ocher glow. In one version the woman is someone I know. In another version their bodies look like decoupage-covered wood. And although in some versions the piano is electric and they’re literally bottomless, the only one with a provocative conclusion is the version in which they affiliate themselves with a community theater’s production of Special Yearnings which ends with the fiery crash of a red convertible that in turn detonates a domino chain of underground nuclear reactors from St. Louis to Worcester, Mass. And in this version, I’m visiting someone in Worcester and I’m too blasted to make love, so I find a station I like on the radio and go lie on the rug. Get it, Ginger? Too blasted.

  KING PLEASURE’S MOOD /

  A FABLE FOR LAURA

  The guy smoking the cigar used to be a stunt man, sunlight glaring off the missile’s warhead, as he slips an assortment of pamphlets about cryonics into his wife’s purse. The town had just instituted a pee-wee football league. He had to drop junior off every Sat. afternoon, 1:30. The field was ten minutes away and the car had to pass the community pool’s parking lot—the side with the basketball hoops. Even the Russians knew his route. His daughter rides on top of the car, straddling the hood, with white vinyl boots on and a men’s thermal undershirt as tight as skin, she has no breasts yet, her nipples are dark wide ovals. At home, his wife draws a bath. The mirror fogs. She tests the water with her foot. They’d lived in the house for almost a year. For years before that, a For Sale sign remained jabbed in the hedge. The missile scared off prospective buyers. “That thing,” they’d grimace, turning on their heels. Walter waited in the bushes by the hoops, loosening up his wrists and readjusting his grip on the rope. As the car passed, he lassoed the daughter. And reeled her into the shrubbery. “What’s this about?” she coughed. “King Pleasure’s in one of his moods,” he said. She curtseys. “King Pleasure.… it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she says, blushing. “I’m sick of the dehydrated pussy all my available girlfriends offer,” he says, stamping his feet. “Sing this:” she says, “Don’t think about the future / don’t think about the used to be / here’s a feeling that’s growing / feed it orally … you fool.” He kisses her. “You’re too young for any more sex,” he explains. He pats her head. “When I used to see you on top of that car, I thought you were older.” “I’m old enough! You wanna see?” she whines. Her expression is sullen. “See what?” Walter asks. “Follow me” she says, slipping the rope off her waist, emerging from the bushes onto the street. She takes him home. The walk takes about twenty-five minutes. When they arrive she leads him into the backyard, putting a finger to her lips as she relatches the gate behind her. “Shhhh … quiet, my mother’s still home.” She gets a lawn chair from the shed and unfolds it for him, “Watch.” She walks up to the missile, opens a panel, tinkers with something and dives behind a mound. With an ear-splitting howl and a dense circle of white flame at its base, the missile begins to climb. It lifts slowly at first, rising above the roofs, tree tops, and telephone poles. And then it seems to accelerate at a more severe angle and, in a matter of two minutes or so, disappears from sight. She’s crying hysterically, ripping at her hair, kicking clumps of dirt and grass out of the ground. “See what you made me do?!” she wails. Walter feels sick now. “Me and my moods …” he mutters.

  UNTITLED /

  A LULLABY FOR SHARON

  The anonymous citizens of Targetgrad conduct business as usual: the saxophone student with overbitten embouchure squeaks throughout the early P.M. & I’d rather be with you in the fields of meadow mushroom and sundew where antelopes in sapphire blue satin regimentals slide on their asses across the unrestricted downgrades—jews can play there—did you remember to bring the Bloomingdale’s bag with the box of marzipan fruits that I, and don’t ask me why, bought for judy—there’re ants getting in my boiled picnic lunch!—Quiet. Quiet! I thought I heard something funny. Funny ha-ha like Joan Rivers?—Quiet! Shhhhhh! Like a jump rope cutting through the air. Like a tea-kettle whistling on a distant stove. Like a wheezing daughter coming to me. It’s chillier. Quieter. Maybe dustier. Where will you tell me you were? Now how do I put you at ease at this conjectured distance? Dark clouds with cartridge bandoliers slung across their chests escort the sun to its remote place. Now how do I smooth your hair, or refold the sheet under your chin, or pour the inky ointment from that unmarked vial in a river between your breasts and yodel and beat my chest and swing from a vine and share a cigarette with you and twirl the revolver around my finger and cajole you into shutting your eyes, and sleeping through the racket this’ll make? Undoubtedly you are somewhere dining with a gentleman of considerable means. His head is as sparse of hair as an insect’s. Picturing spittle at his lips is no problem. You ask someone at an adjoining table where a phone is. They direct you. You dial my number. I answer and proceed as rehearsed. Sleep, I say, shut your eyes and shut everything but tranquillity from your mind and, if possible, wake me up tomorrow. It’ll be early, I know, barely after dawn. I’ll drag myself out of bed, look out of the window, see the snow and say, well, judging from the looks of things outside, I guess I’ll take a train to the today factory. Now, farewell. From my vantage point, in this fusty room, on this stiff carpet, watching the battle-ax and pike rattle against the wall, discerning that sound’s approach, farewell, farewell. Tonight will be a false bottom. The water you gulp down will taste like a mountebank’s elixir. In the corner of the sky, his necktie glows like a filament. The trees are momentarily flamboyant.

  THE SPIN CYCLE

  Everything I love is gone.

  The blue jay hops

  from Corinthian column to Corinthian column,

  alternately aphasiac and wildly logorrheic.

  My hands are meaty like two catcher’s mitts.

  Your nose is bleeding into the plastic dish of meow mix

  like a leaking faucet in a mobile home where

  he is eating a baked potato with chives and sour cream,

  the liver of a blaspheming jew, a salad of pistils and stamens,

  and the bicycle seat on which you’d ridden to grandmother’s house.

  The fishermen serenade their Juliets, adrift in listing dinghies, and the tall trees undulate in the rain like thick inky manes of hair. I am speaking a language called There’s Gold In Them Thar Hills. You are speaking a language called She Feels Like Buttering The Palm Of His Hand And Frying It.

  A is for an anonymous man, chasing bubbles of your saliva through the forest with a slingshot made from the elastic waistband of his jockey shorts. B is for Brenda, waving to the peculiar foil ships which flicker against the sky like yahrzeit candles. C is for Gianni Clerici, the flamboyant columnist for Jerusalem’s irresponsible tabloid, Il Giorno, his windshield dappled with the ocher and burgundy leaves of autumn.

  There is a lake for lovers only, called He’d Known Janet In Delaware When She Was A Super-Realist Painter With Freckled Breasts, and rising from the lake is a spectacular monolith that makes the Statue of Liberty look like an anorexic Barbie doll, and from a window in its bronze bouffant I can see you th
rough my telescope, whispering into the ear of another man.

  In the moonlight, in your sheer camisole, in your cadaverous eyeshadow, you wind your Timex, and call him the best fuck in Jerusalem. You call his mouth Hans. You call his chest Jan. You call his penis Inspector Soto. You call his buttocks Officer Shange and the Prosecutor Nickie DuBois.

  Ahmed and his ugly daughter are playing catch with a boneless chuck steak. She’s making a sound like boom lakka lakka lakka boom lakka lakka lakka.

  I am the chattering wooden teeth of the president who never told a lie in the crooked mouth of the president who never spoke the truth, and you are the sound of a match striking the unshaven chin of a cowboy, you are the sound of a harmonica falling from a tree and hitting me on the head as I stretch my penis like a bungee cord, chianti-sodden and disconsolate.

  The Scarsdale Diet is dead.

  Give me a t-shirt the color of azalea

  and call Deng Xiaoping, Chapstick Xiaoping.

  The industrial countryside vibrates powerfully beneath our sleeping bags and hibachis. Like voltage, “csók” (the Magyar word for kiss) passes from Gabor sister to Gabor sister to Gabor sister. But why do we plunge our faces into vats of formaldehyde like half-witted marines and allow these ghosts, however Rubenesque, to rifle through our luggage and filch our implements of happiness, our insect repellant, our tinker toys, our Spanish fly, and puerto rican rum? Is it because, in the diffuse moonlight, this coppice of barbershop poles resembles the magnificent Piazza di Spagna; and, unable to articulate our loneliness, we belch like prehistoric animals and count our remaining days on the fingers of a single hand …

  Distant tom-toms herald the approach of bedtime,

  and you, “drows’d with the fume of poppies,”

  sleep the sleep of enormous emu.

  How I long to give you one last csók.

  But now you are far away.

  And here I waste,

  sequestered deep in the forgettable mountains

  of my ancestral homeland.

  ALSO BY

  MARK LEYNER

  Et Tu, Babe

  “Very smart and very funny and—this is meant as a compliment—very, very weird.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

  In this fiendishly original novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria’s Secret models—which naturally revolve around him.

  Fiction/0-679-74506-8

  My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

  “Kicks with the amphetamine-addled impact of a Hong Kong gangster flick.”

  —Village Voice

  Welcome to Mark Leyner’s America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and anabolic steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Welcome to a wildly post-Einsteinian fictional universe where the locals include a speech pathologist with a waterbug fetish and the lead singer for Brazil’s most notoriously nihilistic samba band.

  Fiction/0-679-74579-3