Lucinella

by Lore Segal

  The grocer gives me an apple for a present, he says, because I look happy.

  Zeus arrives today. It is our anniversary. He asks, “What shall I give you, Lucinella?”

  Dumbfounded, I wonder: What does one ask of a retired god?

  “Shall I show myself to you,” he offers, “in my glory?”

  “Great heavens, no!” I cry, remember what happened to Semele. (Once I peeked, and saw his face in mid-passion hanging above me, and quickly closed my eyes.)

  “Would you like me to translate you among the stars?” he asks, and I’m tempted. The constellation of Lucinella the Poet, in the heavens for all eternity. “That’s not what I want!” I say, surprised. I’d rather thought it was.

  “Ask me for something,” he says. He rises, comes toward me, embraces me, though it’s already 7:15. Still I hesitate.

  “What, what?” he asks. I am afraid. “What, love?” He kisses me.

  “Become human for me,” I whisper rapidly, so he won’t hear what I am saying. He throws his head back and laughs and kisses me delightedly as if I’d said something superlatively witty. We’re both laughing. Still he holds me. This is our anniversary.

  It is 7:20.

  THE END

  Ulla calls on the telephone. “There’s going to be a block party in Times Square on the twenty-second. Big blast! Hope it doesn’t rain! Are you coming?” she asks me.

  “Not with you, I’m not,” I say.

  “Why?” cries Ulla. “What did I do?”

  “You put me in your novel,” I say.

  “Did I say something unkind or untrue?” she says. “You come off perfectly interesting and nice!”

  “I know,” I say, and hang up on her. How could Ulla make me into a minor character with walk-on in Chapter VIII and one eleven-line speech at the very end, when it’s obvious the protagonist is me.

  XI

  And so she washed the soot off

  her face and hands, opened the

  walnut …

  The block party is on the twenty-second. That gives me ten days to shape up.

  First, my fingernails. How can the millennium come as long as my hands are dirty? There are people I know whose fingers always have that washed look. They think, “Lucinella has dirty fingernails,” because they don’t understand my life’s object, along with learning French, is to get my fingers as pink as new soap. So this morning I have a bath without reading and soak my hands in the hot water before going down to the Whole Earth Shop at the corner, where a young man with sweet, smudgy eyes, in a Mickey Mouse shirt and hair tied in a ribbon, like Mozart, sells the American flag at half-mast, handwoven blue-jeans made into mini muumuus, and jars of organic brewer’s yeast. I buy one.

  Next morning, after I soak my fingernails, I eat a healthy heaping tablespoonful of brewer’s yeast before I take the bus downtown to Siegfried’s Salon on Madison, very chic—all slate and mirrors. I’m assigned to Mr. Andre. He runs his fingers through my hair and gags. He asks me if I regularly exercise my hair. “Look at mine,” he says. “For fifteen minutes every morning, I bend each separate strand forward three times, back three times, side three.” Mr. Andre snips. I was wrong to think it was my hair that made him gag. It’s me. But I refuse to reciprocate. I can appreciate that fourteen-inch waist, the yellow pants, those twin grapefruits operating inches from my cheeks, in their own terms.

  “Ginny!” Mr. Andre kisses a beautiful blonde.

  “Have!” Ginny says. She feeds Mr. Andre bites of glazed doughnut.

  Mr. Andre twirls her around and says, “I like, I like!”

  Ginny’s golden hair is sculptured in three chevrons across a forehead which is rosy brown, as if lit from within, though I am sure she has no soul. How does she come by that pure line of jaw? I know where my heart grows because I feel it cramp with envy and pleasure.

  “So? How was the audition?” Mr. Andre asks.

  “Oh god!” cries Ginny. “What if I get it! I think I’m pregnant!”

  “God!” cries Mr. Andre. “No! Listen,” he says, “I’ll see you in Times Square on the twenty-second. Stunning girl.” He’s talking to me! I’m pleased. “Very talented. She’s auditioning for a Pepsi commercial.”

  “There’s a poem of mine in this magazine, on page 36,” I tell Mr. Andre. He doesn’t say he’ll see me in Times Square. He twirls my chair, hands me a mirror, and, like a circus artist after his bravura stunt, poses with his back arched, hand extended to my head. I applaud. “Fabulous!” I say. But under my right eye I see the sign that copy editors use to indicate a new paragraph, which this morning I took to be the imprint of my pillow.

  So next morning, after I soak my nails, and eat a wholesome tablespoonful of brewer’s yeast, and exercise my hair for fifteen minutes, I take the bus to Princess Romanoff, upstairs, on Fifth Avenue, for a free skin analysis.

  The décor is wall-to-wall pink Leatherette trimmed with gilt Louis Quatorze. A large, mature girl levels her eyes at the point just below where they would meet mine. Though she too was born, suffers daily to come by that flat stomach at her age, and, like me, will die, we travel by such different routes she doesn’t like me. I can always tell.

  By the authority vested in her white coat, she turns a purple light onto my face, which turns green. She enters a number on a chart. She flays a square inch of skin off my forehead and spins it in a tiny centrifuge. It disintegrates. She enters a second number, collates both with a slide rule, and determines that I need a treatment.

  “Which won’t make the slightest difference, as you and I know!” I say, smiling into her eyes. I don’t want to have her think I’m taken in.

  She does not smile back. She says, “In seven days you’ll be a different woman.”

  Just in time for the twenty-second.

  I invite her to the block party.

  In a clinical white cell an old, motherly Roumanian tucks me under an eiderdown and douses every light except where her face leans upside down over mine.

  Multiple fingers descend my cheek to my chin.

  “What’s that for?” I ask her.

  “Is for relax,” she says. “Is pleasant?”

  “Very …” I say.

  Steam rises.

  “Smells like my grandmother’s kitchen,” I say.

  “Is prune tea,” she says, “like enema your skin, relax very heavy now, for clean out your pores.”

  What’s this sharp coolness that prickles on my cheek, I ask her.

  “Is lemon I put for ascorbic and vitamin C. Close your eyes very relax.”

  “That feels like butter on my forehead,” I say drowsily.

  “Is butter. For alkali butter soft your skin and smooth vitamin A.”

  “And the sticky stuff?”

  “Honey, to make sweet and golden, mix with yolk of egg like baby chicken, a younger, fluffier you. Go yourself very heavy now, very relax, nourish masque for thirty minutes.”

  Relaxed, almost asleep, I hear two voices whispering and open my eyes. The yellow, old, shriveled peasant face floats upside down into my line of vision and says, “Pleasant all right?”

  “Very pleasant,” I say and close my eyes.

  Softly, softly, the two foreign whispers laugh in my darkness.

  Next morning, when I have soaked my fingernails, eaten my brewer’s yeast, and exercised my hair for fifteen minutes, I apply a concentrate of prune, lemon, butter, honey, and egg, with the admixture of a splinter of the True Cross at $34.98 an ounce, and leave it on my face for half an hour, so that I barely make it to Dr. Treublau on time.

  The doctor’s office has the dowdy richness of Persian carpet, leather books, and old, large, bad oils in their massive golden frames. “What would you like to talk about today?” he asks me.

  “Why I am feeling happy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Why I keep liking everyone I meet.”

  “Whom do you like?”

  “Everybody. All the poets at Yaddo, a gay hairdresser, voluptuous young gi
rls both black and white, and my phony Roumanian beautician, and you too, Dr. Treublau,” I say, because he seems very beautiful. His El Greco hands are folded in an attitude of prayer, pointing downward on his stomach, his chin on his dry old chest, face elongated with listening.

  “And why do you think you like all these people?”

  “Because,” I say—am I going to cry?—“I don’t want them blown up.”

  “Will they be blown up?” he asks.

  “Are you kidding, Doctor?” I point around at his furnishings from Vienna of the thirties translated to East Seventy-second Street. “Our mothers started to get us ready as infants. We had biennial dental and ophthalmological checkups, were taught our manners and virtues, went through a liberal education, traveled, read, had friends, made love, and now there’s only four days left to get my nails clean, stomach flat, hair styled, skin and psyche in condition for the big blast in Times Square.”

  I recognize the shadow passing across the doctor’s eye—or is it a temporary lightening of the absorption with which he listens? Dr. Treublau is waiting for me to stop showing off.

  “Have you a dream that you want to tell me?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Though it’s a cheap fictional device for sneaking in one’s point.”

  A shadow crosses the doctor’s eye.

  “In this dream I’m sitting in something … in a boat … like a gondola, with some people …”

  “Who are the people?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest notion … except they’re people I love, my ex-husband, William, and young Lucinella, his mistress, who’ll be okay when she gets over her protracted adolescence. Doctor, what happened to the brassy chippies who used to shanghai our husbands? And there’s my ex-lover, Zeus, and his wife, who’s even smarter and nicer than he is. Where are the bores and harridan wives whose husbands we used to liberate?”

  Dr. Treublau is waiting. “What happens in your dream?”

  “We’re facing downstream, toward the city. I’m crying. I plead with my mother or whoever it is in a white coat standing just out of sight behind my left shoulder. I can’t understand why she will not stop them from blowing the beautiful city up.”

  “And what do you think this blow-up means?” the doctor asks.

  “The Big Bomb,” I say.

  “What else?”

  “Doomsday? The Second Coming? The Meshiach!”

  “And what else?” he asks. “This explosion you’re asking your mother or some figure in a doctor’s white coat of authority to stop?”

  “The Great Orgasm! Of course!” I cry excitedly, because now I see how this chapter is going to end. I blush.

  “That explanation bothers you?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I cry. What modern woman would be caught dead blushing at sex. “I’m embarrassed by the way my symbols dovetail, and annoyed, because you won’t believe that is the cause.”

  “That’s all for today,” he says. He wants me to dream him a dream every day.

  So next morning, when I’ve soaked my nails, taken my yeast, exercised my hair, and masqued my face, I go back to bed and dream a dream, and have to run all the way to my French lesson, with only three days to go, so next morning I study my verbs in my bath and after bending my hair this way and that a bit, I can’t do my skin because I got tired of brewer’s yeast and ate my masque for breakfast and can’t dream a thing with this nervous sense I have of time running out, and next morning I’m so demoralized I don’t feel like bathing at all, the hell with my hair, I’ve been a slob all my life and now it is too late, I’ll never learn French now!

  William calls. Would I meet him in Times Square tomorrow. I am the one he loves, he says, and has all along.

  XII

  For weeks the city has been sprucing up the area in preparation for the block party on the twenty-second.

  The Allstate Insurance eagle flaps its neon wings on high, and Mickey Mouse, so cleverly constructed out of bulbs of light, runs, stops, does a double-take, and continues running. The Marlboro man—a good father and provider, one can tell—blows his eternal smoke rings through the perfect cardboard circle of his mouth.

  Tonight traffic has been diverted and Times Square handed over to its citizens for a public celebration.

  Garlands of pennants connect the street lamps. Their posts are vomit-colored with bands of yellowish-lilac, blackish, greenish, and orange paint, contributed by the private sector through a collection instituted by the Police Athletic League as a project for the metropolitan schoolchildren, who got time off from lessons. If the brushwork is messy, it’s the “Neighborhood Spirit,” which is the theme of this day.

  The invitation moves on a crawl around the three sides of the old Times building: … EVERYBODY WELCOME TO THE BIG BLAST ON TIMES SQUARE … FIND YOUR FRIENDS … MEET PEOPLE YOU HAVE NEVER MET BEFORE … THREE ROCK BANDS … BOOTHS … BARGAINS … A MOBILE ROLLER COASTER FOR THE KIDS … ETHNIC GOODIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD … RAFFLES … PRIZES … AND A GRAND MIDNIGHT SURPRISE …

  The first rock band, which calls itself the Spheres, plugs itself into the electricity. My eardrums burst and inhibition suppurates. I spread my arms to the family of Puerto Ricans drinking beer in a window on the second floor. “Come down!” I call to them. “Come and join us!” cry all the people in the street around me. The young man in BVD’s turns to the woman leaning her arms on the windowsill. She laughs. At us? Or didn’t they understand? We make great pantomime motions with our arms, meaning “Come!” Are they too shy? Now the street door opens and a little boy bursts out and scuttles across the street, where the children stand around the wonderfully blaring Spheres.

  The kids, supplied with fat sticks of colored chalk, draw clowns and elephants and write FUCK YOU in letters reaching from sidewalk to sidewalk.

  Where in all this crush will I find William?

  There’s the Contact paper man with his wife and children. My super! My doorman! “Hi!” I say to them all. Here’s the old floor scraper. I tell him, “You were quite right about the sealer,” and nod my head up and down. “How are you?” I say to the Fuller brush man who sold me the millennium, and to the grocer who gave me an apple, when I was happy. “Mr. Andre!” I say shyly. “Hello!” he cries in the friendliest fashion. We kiss. He twirls me. “You see,” he says, “what exercise did for your follicles!” It’s true! And before I left home I looked in the mirror and saw the sign of the new paragraph under my right eye definitely fuzzier, I think.

  From the sidewalk an elegant hand waves. Dr. Treblau, you! All the way from Vienna to come to a block party in Times Square! He steps forward and, just like a regular person, kisses me on the cheek.

  Here’s Maurie’s Book Booth. “How’s the poetry moving?”

  “They won’t even steal it,” Maurie says sadly.

  “Winterneet! What are you selling?”

  “Live poets reading from their work,” says Winterneet. “Handshakes are ten cents extra,” he says to a woman with a manuscript under her arm. She says, “I’ve come all the way from Nebraska. Do you do it on a typewriter, with a ball-point pen or pencil? Mornings or at night? Facing any particular direction?”

  Winterneet says, “Interviews $2.50 for five minutes. Did you know,” he says, turning to me, “that William won the Times Square Prize for the Best Younger Poet? It’s to be presented at the midnight ceremonies.”

  “William? The Best Younger Poet!” I cry, delighted but surprised. “He himself told me his poetry was worthless. Winterneet, you’re sure it was William who got the prize?”

  “I’m one of the judges,” says Winterneet.

  “But, Winterneet, whenever you meet William at a party you don’t remember who he is, and Maurie ignores him.”

  “Maurie was the other judge,” says Winterneet.

  “Where is William? I want to congratulate him. Newman! Good to see you. You didn’t come to my party.”

  “Hello, Lucinella,” says Newman and steps on my right toe. “I’m sorry!” I say
. He steps on my left toe.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, walking beside him.

  “To the Black Booth under the sign of the Raised Fist.”

  “Hi!” I say to our stage manager. The lovely black Wedgwood girl with the two-by-two-foot topiary Afro is passing out cookies to the little children; those eleven and over are lined up on the left for their hand grenades with mini hydrogen warheads.

  “Have you seen William?” I inquire at the Women’s Booth.

  “The hell with William,” says Cilena Betterwheatling.

  Ulla holds out her hands to me, but I put mine behind my back. “I’m not talking to you,” I say, surprised.

  Ulla looks unhappy. She says, “I thought you were kidding!”

  “So did I!” I say.

  “Come and join us,” say Pavlovenka and Alice Friendling and the furiously pretty girl.

  “I will,” I say. “But first I’ve got to go find William and congratulate him on winning the prize for the Best Younger Poet.”

  “Which you’d have got, if you were a man!” Cilena cries.

  “Fuck the whole lot of them. None of them, is what I mean,” shrieks Alice.

  It’s not that I’m not tempted by the feminist mystique. Oh, for the blessings of anger! To have the trouble identified, once and for all, to know whose fault it is! Except that commits one to battle. “Forgive me,” I tell them. “It’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that I tend to resist conversions.”

  Already the sky is darkening. The street lights have come on.

  What is it that keeps butting me in the shins? I look down. There’s a swarthy, bearded man without arms or legs, strapped on a rolling platform three inches off the ground. Why here, where the crowd is thickest? If he gets trampled, it will be his fault, I think, annoyed. “Watch where you’re going,” he snarls. His strong yellow teeth control the kind of switch that operates electric trains. He stops, backs up, reverses, and rams me, again and again. He’s clearing a path for a man and woman who converse deftly with fingers, palms, wrists, their faces tense with animation, mouths wide in voiceless hilarity. The woman lofts her sign, which says

  We don’t care

  if you stare

  O.L.