“Here, I’ll get for you,” she said and minced her hips to one side as she held two out to them. “Have a nice sandwich. I’m sorry we don’t have hot dogs.”
James did not glance her way. He raised blond brows at Margy. His eyes bored into her.
Springing on tiptoe, Cia lifted the crostini to his mouth. He jerked his head away. With a lunge, she mashed it to his lips. Eyes bulging, he flashed a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his face.
He said something in Italian, too quick for Margy’s ears. Surely not that vile Italian curse about a certain type of sexual intercourse? Cia snapped back, light in her black eyes.
“Questa,” she said and gestured with her whole arm at Margy. “Questa, questa” something. Could it be farfalla? James’s voice rolled lyrically, not English in the least. He seemed to call Cia a bird of prey.
“E tu, uccello sanguinario! What a beautiful disguise!”
Cia tossed her hair back, spoke quite clearly.
“The angels go naked,” she said and fired off something much too quick. Margy stood beside them, felt a spray of spit. Neither of them seemed to notice when she walked away.
“Oh, Christ, there she is again!” His voice shot up. “Quick, over there!”
Margy looked, but saw only the front of the hotel, where men with cameras surged back and forth like soccer fans, trampling the jasmine and azaleas. A searchlight zigzagged, dazzling, on the stone walls. James perched on the limo seat, tense as a string about to snap.
“Driver! Ragazzo, prego! We can’t stay here tonight!”
Margy cut in, firm. “You must be hallucinating. Do you realize you see her everywhere? Isn’t that the definition of obsession?”
“Oh, I see, it’s I who am obsessed. By all means, stay here if you like, and call up Webster all night long. See if anyone believes you’re not obsessed!”
“Me! That’s ridiculous!”
James laughed. “Don’t mind me. Of course I’ve never understood what you could possibly have seen in him. Cretin that he is . . . ”
“Cia waddles when she walks,” she hissed.
Three men with klieg lights rushed the car. In a moment, the whole crowd surrounded them. James moved, calm and stately, to a dark corner up by the driver’s seat. Bowing, he swept one hand to point her toward the door.
“Fine,” said Margy. “Go ahead and run from your chimera. Have a nice evening.”
Clutching her violin, she stepped out into exploding lights. The paparazzi all looked devastated and confused.
“Ah, signora, signora,” one moaned and shook his head as if she had betrayed some code of decency. Haggard, with a skinny neck, he trembled violently.
Every composer had a tune he couldn’t shake. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” broke out in other choruses, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” leaked into his cello concerto. Gershwin never quite got free of “Summertime.” Margy went up to her room, took off her wedding ring. Obsessed? Obsessed with Webster? Worms on the ocean bottom learned to eat bacteria, Webster himself had told her that. Antarctic lichen learned to grow inside rocks. Other people got divorced, and so could she.
It would be afternoon in Chicago, Webster at the lab. She dialed his number anyway, to leave a message on the machine. She’d tell him she was through with him for good. He picked it up.
“I can’t talk now,” he said.
Flaming plutonium shot through her bones. “What are you doing, fucking in the afternoon?”
“Never mind.” He hung up.
Minutes later, her phone rang.
“Margy,” he said mournfully. It had a different sound, as if he’d rushed out to a pay phone on the street.
“Webster. Where’d you leave the little girl? Did you tell her you were going out to walk the dog?”
“Ice cream,” he said in a tone of woe.
“I bet she’s dumb enough to believe that—”
“You keep your mouth off her! That girl loves me, unlike you. You, who—”
“Oh, and you’re so pure. Why did you sneak out to call me? Is that what you’re really like? I suppose I didn’t know what you were doing all along. I have news for you. I’m not the other woman. I’m your wife.”
“The hell you are. You never were, not for a day. You lied to me, right from the start. You lie and lie—”
“I lie? How long have you had a taste for teenagers? That’s what you want—” They were both screaming now.
“Oh yes, look who you picked. English scum—”
“A baby bimbo—”
“Moral maggot—”
“She’s no threat to your—”
“You slut—”
“You adolescent—”
She had no idea she could hit a note like that. She sounded like a pipe organ, and so did he. It was a duet for screams, obscene as what you heard of the insane. They subsided, breathing hard. Nobody hung up.
Expensive moments passed.
“Where are you?” she said quietly. “On the corner by the ice cream store?”
He sighed. “Just down the block, on Clark. I can see our building, sort of. It’s blurred.”
“Why don’t you go to the eye doctor? Don’t you want to see?” She felt a rush of tenderness. “You should take better care of yourself.”
“I’ve decided that a little blur improves the look of things.”
“The Impressionists were all myopic. It expressed their inner being. Maybe yours too.”
“Maybe. I’ve been plenty myopic.” His voice tightened, slid up several tones. “So, were they all cuckolds? Did Madame Monet let her bloomers down for everyone?”
Slam, went a door in Margy’s chest. “Where did you leave the bimbo, anyway? In bed, keeping your spot warm?”
“Don’t call her that, all right? Don’t call her anything—”
“You think you can just call me up, and then go back home to your little—”
“I said shut up about her!”
“Inflatable doll—”
“She’s a saint beside—”
“With her soap-opera name—”
“Your gigolo—”
“Shut up! Shut up! Am I supposed to kill myself, or what?”
She went down to the bridal suite. It wasn’t locked, and James was gone. The bridal suite gave her the creeps, but she borrowed a bottle of his gin and took it back up to her room, poured it in a bathroom glass. She washed a tranquilizer down with the first glass, and poured another one.
Sweet smells of sage came lilting in her windows on the downhill side, and she sat in front of them, while the lights of Florence glowed like candle flames, unwavering in the warm air. Of course James was right. She was mixed up with Webster in some way she didn’t understand. She seemed to love him, actually, and now she had arranged to hand him over to someone else. Way to go, Margy. He’d probably get married, even have a kid. He certainly would not come back to her. What was she going to do? She wasn’t sure. She drank more gin.
Pushing a window open wide, she wound up her right arm and pitched the wedding ring out as far as it would go. It seemed the healthy thing to do. That was it, the end.
She took a sleeping pill and felt a rosy moist sensation, like the inside of a tiger’s mouth. It seemed to be a sort of happiness. She wrote herself a note, in French, the only language she could recall. Il faut être toujours ivre. Toujours dancent au bout de précipice. She did some leaps she’d learned in elementary school ballet. The floor seemed portable, flew up to meet her cheek.
She dreamed she was back home in Chicago, carrying a suitcase. She had been to Europe, not with James but with Michael Sein. He followed her inside and watched her take a shower, sitting on the toilet seat, shower curtain clear as glass. The door opened, and Webster walked in.
“Look who’s here!” she cried and leaped out of the shower, trying to smooth over the awkwardness of the situation. She opened her suitcase, and a wolf came out. It was only a small wolf, but it ate Webster, and her mother and father. C
hunks of flesh lay across the hardwood floor in pools of blood.
“Unnhhhhh! Unnhhhhh!”
She tried to scream, but couldn’t move her tongue.
The pain in her wrists woke her. The splints were off, her hands bent hard, like a coma patient’s in the fetal position. She couldn’t seem to move. Her head felt big as the Duomo and just as hollow, echoing. Lifting it an inch, she crawled into the marble bathroom, retched into the marble toilet, cheek resting against the seat.
It seemed to take an hour to get into shorts, T-shirt. Shoes she couldn’t manage, and she crept barefoot down the cold stone stairs. The hotel felt enclosed in sleep, dust motes floating in the early light.
Outside, the sun already blazed, the sky a vicious blue, horseflies circling the pool. Stomach lurching, she made her way around the back, into the garden underneath her window, where she knelt to comb her fingers slowly through the dirt in beds of jasmine and azaleas, around a fountain, under cypress trees. Ornamental hedges scratched her arms. She did not find the ring.
A yellow bird flew past, wings with black-and-white stripes like a huge butterfly. Landing on a wall, it raised its spiky yellow crown at her, like the Statue of Liberty. Webster would have known its name, but she couldn’t ask him anymore. Sitting in the dust under a cypress tree, she was too dehydrated to cry. Zing, a horsefly bit her neck. She slapped it and began to bleed.
She made her way back up the slippery steps. Inside, at the second floor, she had to pass the bridal suite. Maybe she should see if James had gotten back all right. He might be passed out in the piazza, under Perseus, or on some bridge over the Arno. James was not so bad. She would just have a look at him, and see how she felt. He was not fat really, just big and flamboyant like the fifteenth-century marble heroes lounging in fountains all over Italy. When he slept, he lay sprawled out, pink face creased like a glove thrown down, one big arm dangling out into the air.
She tried the knock he knew, but there was no reply. Pressing her ear against the grainy oak, she couldn’t hear a thing. She took hold of the brass knob, gave it a turn.
Sunlight scorched the white bride’s bed. At first she could not see, the bed too bright, like a mirage. Then two figures emerged, one large and pink, a scar around its chest, the other short and round with bracelets on its arms. Heads near the door, they faced each other, almost not touching, while their hips pulsed in and out like waves, only the purple shaft of penis in between. A rush of breath, a gentle suck and smack. They could be starfish in a pool, or snails connected by hermaphroditic arms. They could be jets in space, the bigger one maneuvering a tube to inject fuel into the smaller as they flew.
She watched them from two yards away, and they did not glance at her, or pause. Backing out the door, she tried to ease it closed. But it stuck on the old stone floor and squealed across it like the little piggy that cried wee wee wee all the way home.
Risk
Margy and Webster needed a vacation, after the year they’d had. After the year they’d had, they couldn’t afford one, but that didn’t worry them. Nothing further, they decided, was going to worry them. Their apartment had been broken into twice, but they didn’t look for anyone to stay in it. Payments on Margy’s violin were twice their rent, but they left it inside. They packed the credit cards, turned out the lights, and didn’t even bother to close the blinds.
They got onto an aging DC-10 and flew to San Francisco, where an earthquake, possibly major, was predicted to happen within five days. In those five days they slept in a room on the nineteenth floor, drank in revolving bars atop tall buildings floating on landfill, and idled in traffic on the lower decks of freeways and on bridges over the bay. In a new rental car, with no replacement insurance, they took a drive along the San Andreas Fault and parked near a fissure that had swallowed a cow in 1906. They hiked the crumbling coastal mountains, on paths made famous by the Trail-side Killer, and loitered on the edge of a sandstone cliff that had once slid sixteen feet in forty-five seconds, watching seals cavort in the ocean below.
They ate sushi without inspecting it, though a man in Webster’s lab was studying the worm that lives in raw fish and digs into the human stomach, from which it must be surgically removed. They drove to a deserted headlands parking lot at midnight, left their wallets in the car under a sign saying not to do that, slid down a narrow path through poison oak and rattlesnakes by moonlight to a secluded beach, and swam in the icy waters where a great white shark had eaten a swimmer in 1964. They drove to Yosemite and carried backpacks up ten thousand feet, though altitude made Webster sick, could leave him retching on the trail, unable to walk, and they timed the trip to see the full moon in eclipse, though Margy was having her period, and bears in other parks had killed menstruating women. They slept on the ground in a tent and did not hang their food in a tree. The moon rose, shimmering white, and tinted bloodstain red.
“We seem to be taking our chances here,” they noticed, everywhere they went. They didn’t mind, so long as they were holding hands. They had yet to pay the phone bills from their months apart, which came to several thousand dollars by themselves, plus airfare back and forth to Europe several times, therapy for both of them and Tiffany, another ten thousand that they could not account for at all. It might be years before they made it into the black.
But they were back together, and happier than they had ever been. Breaking up had cleared the air, and they could fall in love again. Nothing else was going to worry them. Was that a mossy rock on the brink of a high waterfall? A hidden beach, soon to be cut off by the advancing tide?
“Now, there’s an inviting spot,” they said. “Let’s go over there and check that out.”
And they clutched hands, and kissed each other, and looked for some new way to risk their lives.
On their last day in California, having exhausted the possibilities for disaster, they called old friends who had lately moved to Berkeley. David had been Webster’s friend since MIT, and until lately he and his wife had lived in Lincoln Park, close enough for Webster to stumble through the streets and throw himself tragically on their carpet. He had not seen them since getting back together with Margy. He had sent a postcard, saying they were coming west, but he’d put off calling until now.
“We’ve rebuilt our marriage from the ground up,” he said on the phone, trying to sound relaxed. He remembered other calls he’d made to them, like the night he took a hatchet to Margy’s clothes. When he had them all in pieces, the Belle France skirts, weeping and tearing silky fabric with his teeth, the winter coats, the high heels, all the miniskirts, he put his head into the oven, took it out, and called David and Isa.
“The main thing is,” he told them now, “the main thing is, we’re all right. I mean, we’re better than all right. Things are better than they’ve ever been. Of course there might have been a better way to do it, something less confusing for our friends. But that was the way we did it, and therefore, in the Zen sense or something, the way it had to be done.”
David and Isa sounded wary. But they agreed to meet them for a peripatetic dinner, progressing course by course through Berkeley restaurants. Margy felt a little wary too, crossing the Bay Bridge. How much did David and Isa know about the year they’d had? How much had Webster said?
He would not have told them why she left. Not the big reason, and not the little ones, the years of all his small hysterias. Once he forbade her to go to a free car wash, because even for free it pampered the car. He refused to buy products in plastic or let Margy kill a bug. If an ant came into their apartment, Webster fed it, made a house for it, while spiders fattened overhead, sent offspring through the air on tiny filaments. Once he kept a housefly as a pet, closing it in the guest room, where it lived in safety for several weeks, since it was winter and the spiders were asleep. Flies are losing ground, he said. The human race is already redundant. Once he said he’d leave her if she got pregnant.
“Sweetheart,” she said, glancing back and forth expertly from him to the road. She di
d most of the driving, since she was better at it, and cared more. Webster didn’t care what lane they were in, or how to get where they were going. He had no sense of direction, and his eyes were bad at night, when the thickness of his new contacts warped his view of the oncoming lights. Fingers lightly but alertly on the wheel, she glanced at him. “Sweetheart, how much do David and Isa know?”
Webster was looking down, examining his tie, which Margy had bought for him. It was sage-green silk with a 1920s print, and a little on the lavish side. But when Margy had broken his heart, he’d made a remarkable discovery, that women noticed him more often when he wore a tie. All he had to do was walk down the street in one, and every young woman he passed gave him a searching look. Here was a man of substance, a tie must say to them, like the courtship displays of certain birds, who puffed up the orange air sacs in their necks, did backflips over branches, turned their feathers inside out. Here was a man who could build a fine nest. Had other men noticed that ties had that effect? He should bring it up to David if he got the chance.
“How much do they know?” he said and smoothed his tie.
“You know,” she said and tried to catch his eye.
He blinked to resettle his contacts, get them into position so he could focus on her. Tonight she had her hair in springy ringlets, a way he liked. It made her look about eight, playing in a grown-up dress. She could pretend to be a full-sized human, but he knew the truth. He folded her clothes out of the dryer, tiny shirts and socks, underpants the size of his hand. Lying on her back in bed, she didn’t make a bump in the comforter.
He batted some ringlets around. “I know what, Mouse?”
She ducked. “Hey.” She’d spent an hour in rollers with the dryer, getting out the frizz.
“You know. About this year. I suppose they heard about my glorious behavior?”
“Oh, well.”
Grimly he looked out the window. Of course he’d talked to David about what she had done. “You are the victim of a terrorist attack,” David had said, and he was right. Margy believed she could have what she wanted, no matter how impossible or who got hurt, and that life was full of second chances. She arrived at airports when her plane was due to leave and ran gaily through the terminal, waving her ticket overhead. She planted peonies in October and felt betrayed when they were under snow. Her credit cards were a disaster. Living with Margy, he had gotten in the habit of forgiving her. He could get off a plane and wait for her to meet him, just an hour late. He could try to understand when she left him for another man. He could let her drive. That was the secret of marriage, he’d come to realize. You had to stop yourself from clutching the wheel when your wife turned her back to the traffic, trying to look you in the eye.
Angels Go Naked Page 14
