Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee

by James Tate

“Vietnam, for Christ’s sake, what the hell do you think I’m talking about?”

  “Todd? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Yes, Todd, in Vietnam, what do you think . . .?”

  And that’s when Maxine started to laugh. She laughed doubled over, clutching her stomach. “Todd? Vietnam?” She couldn’t stop laughing long enough to talk. I was completely confused as to what was going on now.

  “Stop laughing, damn it. Stop it.”

  “Oh you poor boy, you poor, stupid boy.”

  “Stop it. What are you talking about? Stop it now, damn it.”

  She tried to stop, she put her hand over her mouth, but squeaks and howls continued for another minute until I forced her to sit down and talk straight to me.

  “Come on, what’s going on now, you can’t do this to me.”

  “The closest Todd ever got to Vietnam was Boston. You actually believed him? I can’t believe it.”

  “Todd wasn’t in Vietnam? Are you kidding me? Why would he tell me that whole story of 26 buddies . . .?”

  “Todd has never done anything, get it through your head. He’s a pathological liar, a completely pathological liar. It started when he was very young. He’s an extremely lazy and boring person, that’s a terrible thing to say about one’s brother, but it’s true. We’ve just given up on him, we don’t talk about him because there’s nothing to say, except that he lies and never does anything.”

  “Then that woman today at the supermarket . . .”

  “Woman? Are you crazy? The little twerp is a virgin, I’ll swear to that.”

  “He just sits in there and watches television?”

  “You got it, buster. That’s the complete picture. He’s just boring and he lies to cover it up. But nobody believes anything he says, nobody but you.”

  I thought about this last utterance of Maxine’s. I thought about it all night. In fact, I couldn’t sleep. I kept dreaming of the raid on Ashair, all that pain and gore, but then I would switch and think about that incredibly sexy lady at the supermarket, “I can polish better than that,” she said, over and over. It was not such a bad life, and I liked Todd better than ever. He fascinated me, and I wanted to get to know him.

  HER LIFE’S ADVENTURE

  Alexandra Huntington—known to her friends as Alex—was a painter whose specialty was nude self-portraits. At thirty-nine she was still a handsome woman, dark, of medium height, thin-boned without an extra ounce of meat. Having never been married, she had a lot of thoughts about herself. Despite her olive skin, she was pure-bred British upper-class. She was widely traveled, at home in Paris or Rome or, indeed, Tanzania. And she was a woman of ideas. Many of her lovers had been writers and intellectuals, professors, and she prided herself on picking up at least one good idea from every affair. She could talk for ten minutes on any number of lofty subjects.

  More than a few of Alex’s affairs had been with married men. And in her own analysis, she had comported herself with the utmost sophistication and moral equanimity. Her solution in each case was to make friends with the wife, to be as open, gentle and non-threatening as possible. The wives would quickly discover in her a true friend, one who did not want to steal their husbands, just borrow them from time to time. In fact, more often than not, after several months of vigorous sexual use, the friendship with the wife would begin to take precedence over the borrowing of the husband. Then, inevitably, there was the question of the next step: should the two women actually make love with one another, even though neither was lesbian by nature. By the time this question had arisen, the husband had usually moved on to a new mistress, and was just as happy to let the women forget him and pass the time solving their own quandary.

  So, in a sense, she was attaching herself to families. Often there were children, and Alex gladly accepted the role of surrogate mother. She took the children on outings to museums and zoos, bought gifts of clothing for them. Their real mothers couldn’t help but be grateful. She would become a known figure, an important family friend, to all the in-laws. A few might have suspected an unusual arrangement, this attractive woman always visiting, never married herself; but Alex would soon have them charmed into trusting her as if she were a real family member.

  When she did return to her own apartment her first action was to undress and stand before her mirrors—she had several arranged in a half-circle—and study her body from as many angles as possible. Her absorption in the examination would increase as she poured herself numerous glasses of scotch. She held her breasts with both hands and seemed lost in a trance, oblivious to time. Would Time sneak up behind and ravage her? Was she immune? Was she an exception? She liked to flirt with these thoughts but had ways of escaping them if they became too grim. Her paintings hinted at these dark thoughts, she liked to think. Their intention was far more than to capture fleeting beauty, she was a deeper person than that.

  One affair that haunted her, that raised certain questions about her character, was with a Hungarian violinist in Toronto. He was married and had a family, but they were back in Budapest, and so there was no question of a menace. Emil was an eager and imaginative lover, and Alex immediately felt he had been created especially for her. They made love at least twice a day in the first months of their relationship. She went to all his concerts and sat in the audience with pride and lust in her heart, knowing he found her desirable and worthy of his hands, his mouth, his whole body and mind. She would even secretly arouse herself during the concert, and experienced orgasms on more than one occasion. This was the life she had been preparing for herself all along: Culture, good looks, and continual sexual satisfaction, even ecstasy.

  One night, after making love, she told Emil about the orgasms she experienced watching him perform in the concert hall. “Really,” he said, “just watching me? I must be very good. Perhaps you aren’t the only woman in the audience experiencing these climaxes. Did you ever think of that?” And then he bit her neck, and they wrestled in the sheets until they both desired to make love again.

  This was without question the happiest time in her life. She did several life-size canvases of Emil in the nude. They joked. He requested a larger penis, and she obliged. He suggested she make his tongue into a lascivious serpent in honor of his superb cunnilingus technique, and she, with delight and laughter, again complied. And the hands, the hands should be as soft and sensual as velvet or silk, in honor of the endless pleasures they had given to every inch of her olive skin.

  But then something unimaginably tragic occurred, something even too hideous and ironic for novels or cinema. It was a night in February, the coldest of the year. The apartment was cold. They had called the landlord and he had said he was doing everything he could, but repairmen were on call and it would be several hours before he could promise more heat. Alex and Emil had made love once, but they were still cold. They had lit candles and warmed their hands over the flames. They had drunk one bottle of wine between them, but Emil wanted more, or better yet, he wanted cognac. Alex told him he was a fool if he thought he was going out into the freezing night air just for a bottle of cognac. But, secretly, it was an example of what she loved most in him, his impetuosity, and so she let him go.

  But he was gone for more than an hour. The city was dark and there was no traffic and certainly no pedestrians. He had found the liquor store, some eight blocks from their apartment, but had somehow gotten lost on the way back. Not badly lost, just a wrong turn that took him several blocks in the wrong direction. The air burned the skin, burned it as if a blow-torch was aimed at him just inches away. He hurried, thought of Alex, thought most of all of the cognac, how good it would feel.

  Alex threw her arms around him when he finally opened the door. “My god, I was worried. Quick, get your shoes off. Put this blanket around you.” She tried to warm him up as fast as possible. Emil joked and demanded a large tumbler of cognac.

  They woke the next morning with sizable hangovers, having finished the entire bottle. Neither could remember the end of the eve
ning. Emil had a rehearsal at ten and Alex planned to stay home and paint as it was still way below zero outside.

  Around 10:30 the phone rang. It was Emil, he sounded strange and had trouble speaking. “Something’s wrong,” he said over and over, and then couldn’t find words to describe what it was that was wrong. “I have to come home, I’ll be home in half-an-hour.” “Okay, I’ll be here. Emil, what is it? Can’t you tell me what it is?”

  She had never seen him so dispirited. He paced the apartment, rubbing his hands together, unable to speak. “Are you sick?” she asked. “Do you want something for your stomach? Is that it? Are you still hungover?” But he was remote from her; for the first time since they had met she couldn’t reach him. He responded to none of her usual ploys.

  Finally his nerves exhausted him and he crawled into bed and pulled the blankets up to his chin. Alex sat nearby in a chair and stared at his face, his whole head really, and then she herself began to have terrible thoughts: at odd moments, his head weakly rolled to the side, Emil resembled John Keats on his deathbed as painted by Walter Severn.

  About five o’clock that afternoon she called a doctor-friend of Emil’s, a Hungarian emigrant by the name of Otto Pick. She told his secretary that it was an emergency.

  Otto arrived at the apartment a little after six, his concern for their emergency could be seen in his demeanor. Usually a friend of quick wit and immense charm, he now moved to Emil’s bedside and spoke in almost hushed tones. Alex could tell him only of Emil’s return from rehearsal, his nervous pacing, his unwillingness to tell her what was wrong.

  The doctor pulled back the blankets and began to probe Emil’s abdominal area gently. He, with Alex’s help, removed Emil’s trousers and shirt.

  “I am taking him to the hospital now. I want to give him some tests.” He would tell her nothing more.

  The two of them helped Emil down the stairs and into the backseat of Otto’s Mercedes Benz.

  Emil the violinist, Emil the lover, Emil the bon vivant, had seven fingers and four toes amputated the next day, a victim of frostbite. Alex was at the hospital every minute permitted. She herself was in shock, and Otto insisted she take strong tranquillizers. Still, she chain-smoked, and stared ahead at the white walls with sickness in her heart.

  Emil was permitted to return home six days later, feet and hands bandaged thickly. Alex made soups for him. He wouldn’t talk so she began to read to him, first from The Magic Mountain, his favorite novel, but it was too depressing and she switched to Growth of the Soil. It was a sober, long-winded book, with no flash of comedy. And when Emil slept, she tried to imagine their life together. Everyday, as the days went on, she spent two or three hours daydreaming about what their life would be. Emil, most obviously, would never play again. But also—and this at first pained her unbearably to even think, and she hated herself for allowing such a selfish thought to even occur to her—never again would he twirl her nipples sensuously between his thumb and finger. And more. And more. Most likely, he would never again be the light-hearted, impetuous lover and gentleman she had known during these past months. O how it hurt to allow these thoughts to surface. How selfish!

  After several weeks Emil had his bandages removed, and the sight was hard to bear for both of them. Alex feigned good cheer, and to her surprise Emil began to joke about taking up the ukulele, playing on streetcorners to support them. He even wanted to make love again, but during the course of their love-making Alex’s heart locked shut and she knew it was now only a matter of finding the least hurtful moment to leave, to leave Emil but also Toronto. This chapter was closed.

  She was lucky to find a job teaching painting at a small women’s college in New England. After six years, she was awarded tenure. Only now and then, when she is getting to know someone new and trying to convey an essence of what her life adventure has been to this point, will she make reference to those extraordinary months with Emil in Toronto. She usually concludes the anecdote by saying, “But of course I had to leave him then, I’m such a sensual person.”

  VACATION

  Rita and I had just driven 120 miles for no reason. We had bought some lawn ornaments from an Asian lady who had warned us that people often shot the bears because they were so realistic. And we had also purchased some very tiny lawn furniture, though we didn’t own children, it was just an inspired idea.

  We stopped at Dot’s Restaurant and ordered some Jailhouse Chili, it had won first place for taste and presentation the year before. I’m not entirely sure what the waitress meant by presentation. It had a sprig of parsley on it or something, a maraschino cherry. Maybe the woman who served it was nude.

  “And I’ll have a glass of iced tea,” I added.

  “No iced tea,” the waitress told me. She was cute and had a Long Island accent. We were far from Long Island.

  “It’s iced tea season,” I said.

  “We’re not serving it because the town water stinks. No one’s drunk water here for five months.”

  “Busted pipe?” I inquired.

  “Dead bird,” she replied, walking away.

  There was an enormous fat guy seated at the counter. He was about seventy years old and was missing every other tooth. His face had been carved out of mush with a meat cleaver. He said to the waitress, “How about a ham hock?”

  “You wanna fork?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’ll use my fingers.” He popped the tenderloin part into his mouth immediately upon delivery. And then stared at the revolting fat circle for a few moments. There seemed to be a little debate going on in his fat head. Then he threw the whole thing into his mouth and swallowed.

  We grinned at him. He was enjoying his life. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon and I figured that all his nutritional needs had been met for this day.

  “Rita,” I said, “are we in Griswoldville or what?”

  Rita bit into a chip and smiled, “Well, it ain’t the end of the world but it’s as close as we’re likely to get.”

  “You’re a poorly conceived character, you know that, Rita?”

  “Well, I’m not walking away, if that’s what you’re getting at. Everything about this place suggests my pre-existence.”

  Rita had flown up from Oklahoma and was about the size of a lawn ornament, a big one. People were always taking shots at her, but she wasn’t shy of shooting back. Once she stabbed a raccoon to death for just looking at her.

  I was on vacation.

  When we left Dot’s I told the waitress we’d be back, but that was a lie. There are a lot of places that just don’t merit a return. Dead bird, my ass.

  We looked at the map for a good long time. “Ever been to Marlboro?” Rita finally asked me.

  “No, but I have a Marlboro beach towel.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  She threw the map out the window. “It just gets in the way,” she explained. I knew what she meant. The Asian lady who had sold us the bear had referred to Rita as my wife. She said, “You and your wife might like that.” We were comfortable with that, even though Rita was a little lesbian. She wasn’t very lesbian, and yet she was only lesbian. I barely know what I’m talking about.

  It was a great day for driving fast and turning up the volume on the radio. We stopped at several junk shops and bought stuff we didn’t need. It was important to touch base with the people, to see if they had any thoughts about the world’s decline or new products. Most of them seemed to be surprisingly happy. I really was surprised. Even relieved, I guess you could say. Even the people in trailers waved to us. We stopped at a phone booth and Rita called some girl in Norman, Oklahoma to tell her she wanted to have her baby or something.

  Marlboro wasn’t much of a town, two churches, a gas station, a couple of kids on bicycles, an old guy leaning on a tree. There was one tiny shop called The Other Shop with a closed sign on the door. We parked the car and walked around for a half-an-hour looking for the other shop, but there didn’t seem to be one. I guess that’s what you might call an
excellent example of desperate small town humor. Rita and I were holding hands and probably looked to the natives as if we were thinking of settling down here, and maybe even opening a shop. It wasn’t entirely out of the question, at least as far as I was concerned.

  “But you can’t get a drink in this metropolis,” Rita noticed.

  “You’re a genius,” I said. “What was I thinking? You also can’t get a meal, you can’t get laid, you can’t buy a book or a record or a pair of socks. This is the end of the world, a little patch of nothingness for people who don’t care enough to bother. Would you care to interview anyone before we motivate on out of here back into the zone of engagement?”

  The gas station attendant had been staring at us for a while. Rita lifted her shirt and flashed her tits at him. He waved back.

  I love to vacation with Rita. She’s so affirmative. So zesty.

  Five days later we stopped in a place called Buckland and ordered chocolate malts. We both had the hots for our waitress. Her name was Nadine and she was about six foot three. She looked like she could find herself around an aisle full of cleaning products real handily.

  “You’d disappear in her,” I told Rita rather cruelly. “She’s more my type.”

  “I bet she threw the javelin in high school,” Rita said.

  “That suits me just fine,” I said. “Useful.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, if I get laid off. At work. She could throw the javelin.”

  “Frieda pole-vaulted to glory,” Rita said.

  “Who the hell is Frieda?” I asked. Nadine really was about the size of a totem pole, but she had a much better figure. She looked like Jayne Mansfield on stilts, except she wasn’t a bleached blond.

  Actually she doesn’t look like Jayne Mansfield at all. That was a hasty and inaccurate cheap little simile entirely inappropriate. She looks like Connie Chung on stilts, except that she isn’t Asian, even marginally. She was born and bred in Buckland. What does that mean, bred? Did they actually breed her? I know I would like to be her stud. Rita has always called me “Spud.” She knows I don’t much like it, and that I would rather be a Stud, Nadine’s own personal Stud, as it turns out, for now, at least, while we founder awhile here in Buckland.