Drowning Lessons

by Peter Selgin

  It’s raining. We ride the no. 1 local downtown. I love riding the subway; I love the element of surprise each passenger brings into the car, like guests on a variety show, or show-and-tell. You can smell the damaged souls as they enter — a sharp, electronic odor of massed negative ions, a smell of anxiety and defeat. The lady seated across from us says over and over to herself, desperately, “He was all I had!” I hear my father’s whiskey-logged voice, “Want everything; need nothing,” and want to correct her. I’ve no business giving people advice — I’m not sure anyone does. Still, I can’t resist. And as I lean forward, Marcia’s head, which she’s been resting on my shoulder, stirs in protest. She opens her mouth to try to stop me, aware of my habit of confronting troubled strangers in public places. But this time Marcia is too late.

  “No, ma’am, he wasn’t,” I say, reaching forward to grasp the subway soliloquist’s hand.

  The lady, whose cheeks are like powdered dough, looks surprised but doesn’t pull away. “How do you know?” she asks.

  “Because — I know.” Marcia elbows me; I elbow her back. My cousin has deep brows and silky black hair and is exotic looking, for an Astoria girl.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the lady wants to know.

  “Steven — mind your own business!”

  “My name is Steven Papadapoulis. This is my cousin, Marcia.” She elbows me again. “I’m taking her sightseeing.” I elbow her again.

  The woman stares at me. I raise her hand to my lips and kiss it, then fold it gently back into her lap, where I pat it like a small creature.

  “What is wrong with you?” says Marcia as we climb out of the subway at South Ferry. Then, realizing where we’re headed, she cries, “Not the Staten Island Ferry again!”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you like the ferry?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Tsk! Language.”

  “Can’t we at least go to the Statue of Liberty?” she whines.

  “What, and get trapped with all those tourists?”

  She stops dead, gives me a devilish look, hand on out-thrust hip. “Or else take me to your place,” she says. Her lips part hormonally; spermatozoa swim in her eyes.

  Patience, I tell her with my flattened palm. Soon I’m marching three steps ahead of her into the crowded waiting room, an echoing cavern of spent faces. On the wall a lighted sign tells when the next ferry departs. The place smells of crowds and sticky orangeade. It’s our third date here. Marcia grabs the tail of my windbreaker.

  “Come on,” I say. “Be a sport.”

  “You really, really hate me, don’t you?” she sniffs. Our family runs to long, narrow heads, and she’s got one.

  “Hate you? What makes you think I hate you?”

  The truth is, I like Marcia — more than I should. She’s quite wonderful in bed and can be funny. I just don’t want her getting wrong ideas about me, such as that I’m the type of guy who takes a girl out to dinner and the movies.

  “It may surprise you to learn,” I say, seating her on a long, chewing-gum-barnacled wooden bench beside me, “that there are in this world women who would all but die for a chance to ride the Staten Island Ferry in the rain with the likes of yours truly.”

  “You’re right — it would surprise me,” she says.

  “You’re sullen.”

  “And you’re a creep.”

  “I’m also your cousin, and I have deep feelings for you.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means —”

  A bell rings. Grappled to each other by DNA, we shuffle up the gangplank.

  “You were saying, creep?”

  “Blood is thicker than water. Didn’t your dad ever teach you that?”

  “My father thinks I’m still a virgin.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  At seventy-five cents a round trip the Staten Island Ferry is still one of the best deals in town. And for one fare you can ride forever. Having grown up landlocked, with the hot breath of hat-factory smokestacks breathing down on me, I love everything to do with the ocean, including scavenger birds and iron corroded by salt. My father found his ocean in bottles and drank it. I won’t make that mistake. Far better to be corroded from without, more natural. I watch the dirty waves slosh up against the pier coming and going. The galumphs of water against black pylons waterlog me with joy. Salt air inflates my lungs.

  “Isn’t it great?”

  “You make me puke.”

  I plan our dates for late in the afternoon, in time to watch the sun spatter downtown with gold dust. Smoke-colored gulls follow orange and black tugs. The towers of downtown Manhattan pockmarked with twenty-four-karat gold. It’s strange seeing the city looming so giant and silent, the towers like stalagmites and the sky a Hollywood rear-screen projector fake. So much removed beauty, silent, majestic, while at our feet banana peels and scum float in brown, murky waves, and in the waiting room behind us people swallow their daily dose of shouting headlines (I swear, some people live for gray suits and newsprint). Only the tourists pretend to see the skyline.

  As for my cousin, she doesn’t give a fig about this display. She huddles inside with the rest of the drained newspaper faces, her hands folded in her pugnacious lap, hating my guts while dreaming of the warmth between my sheets. I lean on the rail, feel the salted breeze in my hair, toss bits of pretzel to raucous gulls, glance at my cousin through rain-beaded glass, knock on it, point out the Statue of Liberty. Her sulk is as fixed as the skyline. I go to the concession stand, buy two oranges for fifty cents, toss her one.

  “Eat up!”

  “Up yours.”

  I sit beside her, peel my orange. “You know,” I say, “it bothers me that you think I hate you. I think you have lots of good qualities.” She gives me a fish eye. “Really. You’re honest, fair … a bit on the flip side, but fair. You have a sense of humor, and integrity — a rare quality these days, or so I’m told. Plus you’ve got a very nice figure.”

  “I’m fat.”

  She’s not; she’s pudgy. But I like a little flesh. “The point, Marcia, is I think we have lots in common. I just wish you could understand just what these ferry rides mean to me; then you’d realize I’m trying to share something very important with you.”

  “Why does everything you say sound like a rehearsed piece of shit?”

  I clutch myself, wounded. “What I’m trying to say, Marcia, is that … well … it’s very possible that I’m in love with you.” Do I mean this? Could I mean it? Honestly I don’t know. As if to plug up the hole from which that statement leaked, I plop an orange section into my mouth. Marcia looks at me. Her orange has fallen with a thud to the steel deck; I hand it to her. She beats her skull with it. I go back outside and finish peeling my orange in the drizzle. The peel floats out to sea. Then she’s next to me.

  “What did you say?”

  She bends way over the rail to catch my eye. I face the water, take in flotsam and jetsam, finish segmenting my orange. The faint, oily smell of the bay corrupts its flavor.

  “If you love me so fucking much, why don’t you take me someplace decent — like the Rainbow Room?”

  “This is fun,” I say quietly.

  “It was fun the first time.”

  “The first two times it was the Samuel I. Newhouse. This is the American Legion. It’s a whole new ball game.” I’m still not looking at her.

  “It’s boring! And my ass is frozen!” Boredom: when people refer to it, do most of them really have any idea what they’re talking about, one of the most complicated emotions — a heady mixture of fear, loathing, and dread — a silent, poker-faced form of sheer terror?

  She leans her plump breast into my arm. I feed her the last piece of orange, put an arm around her. She bites her lip. She has her father’s eyes, my uncle’s eyes, my father’s eyes. The sunset turns bloody red against ash gray towers. My pulse stumbles, dies.

  “Oh, God, Steven, no — please don’t faint!”

&
nbsp; From where I live, in Sunnyside, you can see the spire of the Empire State Building, but it may as well be on Jupiter. When not otherwise engaged, I’m here, in my rented room, with its foam mattress and metal trash pail stinking of yesterday’s banana peel. Every so often, on weekdays when I’m not getting fed at Uncle Nick’s or at the restaurant, I go out for dinner and to escape the funereal vibrations of my landlord’s organ. There’s a Chinese place a few blocks from here, where the boyish waiter always seats me facing the boulevard, where, under the elevated’s girders clawing up into darkness, a red neon sign flashes

  STEVEN’S

  with the T and V in “STEVEN” turning blue every other flash. For the price of an order of chow mein, I can sit there all night watching my namesake flash in neon.

  There’s something very cosmic about eating alone in a Chinese restaurant in Sunnyside on a cold night. But mostly I stay holed up in my room in Filbert’s apartment, at the mercy of a boredom so intense it turns the fruits in a bowl on his dining-room table gray as if seen through color-blind eyes. Thus I avoid the banality of having to go anywhere. It seems to me, has seemed to me for a while now, that many if not all of the ills of this world would be solved if only people could learn to sit quietly in their rooms. Where’s there to go, anyway? What’s to be done? Why all this hunger for activity? The earth spins: isn’t that activity enough? Not that I mean to hold myself up as an example. It’s just something that’s occurred to me, as it occurs to me that my Christian name, punctured by a period, turns me into a saint of uniform disposition, an angel in equilibrium.

  Lives are so disposable, moments like after-dinner mints melting in our mouths. It isn’t so much a feeling that things don’t matter, but rather a feeling that what we choose to make matter is arbitrary: a bright, vertiginous feeling, like sunstroke shining through gloom. This remarkable yet perturbing sense of arbitrariness goes everywhere with me, carrying with it the seeds of both possibility and impossibility, the need to do so many things, and likewise the urge to do nothing.

  I bungle along Queens streets, dark with newspapers blowing. The lights of Manhattan shine upward, painting a fake aurora borealis in the night sky. A drunken sailor — or someone wearing what looks like a sailor suit — stumbles along ahead of me, clanging a section of metal pipe against the cast-iron fence that separates us both, at least for the time being, from the dead. My breath fogs the air. Within a block of my building it starts to rain; I hold my collar close. The wind makes a sound rushing through alleys, a drawn-out moan, a dreary sound. It seems to be telling me something, to want to grab me by the shoulders and shake me, as if I’m dreaming and it wants me to wake up, to snatch me from oblivion and call me a fool as the subway rattles off into darkness overhead.

  Then I realize it’s not the wind at all. It’s Filbert’s organ wafting down into the street.

  Sunday morning, before lunch, Marcia and I make love on my foam mattress. We do it to the vibrations of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor; we do it to the Tune of Conspiracy, to the Beat of Betrayal, to the Melody of Mutiny. Above the urn containing my father’s ashes, Uncle Nick peers down at us, sipping ouzo from a glass as he watches the slow dance of his daughter’s unvagination unfold under goose-pimpled flesh. Like the explosion that ten billion years ago sent all the stars and planets hurtling into space, our lovemaking is cataclysmic and chaotic, as if a critical mass had been reached, a density beyond that of all existing stars. In my fervor I forget about such things as guilt and where my skin ends and how long it takes Marcia’s inverted nipples to pop. One of us is the chameleon, the other the scotch plaid. We disappear each in each.

  “More ouzo, loverboy?”

  We’re woefully late for dinner. Uncle Nick keeps shedding his eye on me, a different look this time, like this time he knows for certain that I’ve deflowered his daughter, but whether this means victory to him or defeat I can’t say for sure. Ourania seems to know it, too, but she merely looks thoughtful and sad. But then she looks that way always.

  “You kids had a nice time last Sunday?” Uncle Nick asks.

  “Oh, yes, very nice,” I say.

  “We rode the ferry,” says Marcia through a lamb-stuffed smile.

  “Again the ferry?”

  “The American Legion,” says Marcia.

  Uncle Nick leans close and whispers, ouzo-breathed. “I give you good money and you take her on the ferry?”

  “Next week we go to the Transit Museum,” Marcia blurts. “Right, Steven?”

  I smile.

  Passing by Rockefeller Center. The heaven-topping tree is up. A crowd watches the colored lights as golden Prometheus burns, his torch shooting colored sparks that scurry up the dark facade of the RCA tower. I think of my father, who stole fire not from heaven but from burning hat factories. How I long to curl up in red and gray stripes, to sleep tucked into their ripe smell.

  Snow falls as I cross Fifty-seventh. A cold gust blows. I fold up the collar of my windbreaker, wait for the ache to pass. The sky thickens to darkness.

  “I’m looking for pajamas,” I tell the salesclerk at Bergdorf’s, a man with a nervous twitch to his upper lip and thick lines shooting up the middle of his forehead.

  “What size?” He seems completely uninterested.

  “My size. But it’s the pattern and colors that concern me.”

  I follow the salesclerk’s dispassionate back to a display case bursting with pajamas — diamonds, shields, polka dots — and, yes, stripes.

  “Any wide ones?”

  “Wide?”

  “I’m looking for wide stripes. Red and gray, preferably.”

  With a desultory air the salesman opens drawers. From one he withdraws a stack of striped pajamas. Second from the bottom, I see them: a pair with red and gray wide stripes.

  “It’s a medium,” says the clerk, unfolding them. “They run a bit large. These should fit you just fine.”

  I nod thoughtfully into my index finger, which I’ve pressed against my lips as if to suppress a painful outburst — something between a groan and the mewl of a cornered, pocket-sized creature — then take a step back, and then another, as the clerk, a toreador dangling a red and gray striped cape, fixes me with questioning eyes and the department store walls (decorated in wide vertical red and gray stripes) close in on me like the bars of a colorful jail cell. Question: how did they kill him? Answer: they gave him everything he wanted. (He was all I had. No — not exactly.) I think I’m going to die; I know I’m going to faint. Minutes later I’m sitting with a Dixie cup of cool water to my lips, surrounded by concerned faces, including that of the desultory clerk, who asks me do I still want the pajamas? should he ring them up for me? My mouth goes dry. I stammer.

  “Well … actually … I really wanted … pink and blue,” I say, merely to extricate myself. “You haven’t got pink and blue, have you, by any chance?”

  Spring. Together with my cousin I watched the magnolias in Central Park blow out again, flinging their snowy branches to snare the sky. The daffodils the gardeners had planted bloomed in sudden affray. By May’s end I’d never felt better, only lighter, as if my bones had hollowed, like the bones of birds. I no longer floated; my lightness attached itself to earth. When the magnolia blossoms shivered, I shivered with them; when fat raindrops dimpled the glassy surface of the rowboat pond, my skin took their imprint, too. There was no obvious joy in any of this, mind you, only a great substantive indifference, as if the long, nearly total vacuity of the past year — my year of searching for red and gray wide-striped pajamas — had served its purpose, had scooped my longing for old comforts out like so much melon meat, had emptied me of something I didn’t need or really want, and by emptying me had freed me — or at least delivered me from department stores.

  I no longer suffer from fainting spells.

  Standing on the stern of the American Legion, sifting my father’s ashes into its wake, I watch the wind whip them into gray smears. I toss the plastic urn in; it bobs, floats. O sweet gr
ay banality of life! O bloody shank of day’s end! O bourbon-and-ouzo-scented breath of night! Under a red bay of sky Marcia wraps her plump arms around me.

  Uncle Nick has asked me to go to work for him, setting up his symposiums, peddling his chrome yellow manifestos. A man needs a purpose, after all. A man without a purpose is a chameleon on a scotch plaid. In celebration we locked arms across his dining-room table, drained each other’s ouzo glasses, then hurled them synchronously into the fire grate, where they shattered like snowballs. Stinyássas!

  So I shall live on, lightening and lightening, until my body cells quaver in frequencies of every wavelength and spectrums of every hue.

  Speaking of spectrums: next Sunday I’ve promised to take my cousin to the Rainbow Room.

  Uncle Nick is pleased.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Swimming: Literary Review 46, no. 4 (Summer 2003)

  The Wolf House: Missouri Review 26, no. 2 (2003)

  Color of the Sea: Missouri Review 27, no. 3 (Winter 2004)

  Driving Picasso: Boulevard 22, no. 1 (Fall 2006)

  Sawdust: The Sun, no. 352 (Winter 2005)

  Our Cups Are Bottomless: Alaska Quarterly Review 23, nos. 3–4 (Fall and Winter 2006)

  The Girl in the Story: Wisconsin Review 38 (Fall 2003)

  The Sea Cure: Carve Magazine (Fall 2005)

  Wednesday at the Bagel Shop: Oasis 6, no. 3 (Winter 1998)

  El Malecón: South Dakota Review 32, no. 4 (Winter 1994)

  Boy B: Global City Review (Winter 2005)

  The Sinking Ship Man: Like Water Burning (Summer 2005)

  My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas: Glimmer Train Stories 52 (Fall 2003)

  David Walton, Evening Out

  Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up

  Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups