334

by Thomas M. Disch

  The smell of her, the rotting sweetness, like a suet pudding gone bad in a warm refrigerator, the warm jungle of it turned him on more than anything else, and way down there at the edge of the bed, a continent away from these events, his prick swelled and arched. Just wait your turn, he told it, and rubbed his stubbly cheek against her thigh while she mumbled and cooed. If only pricks were noses. Or if noses …

  The smell of her now with the damp furze of her veldt pressed into his nostrils, grazing his lips, and then the first taste of her, and then the second. But most of all the smell—he floated on it into her ripest darknesses, the soft and endless corridor of pure pollened cunt, Milly, or Africa, or Tristan and Isolde on the tape recorder, rolling in rose-bushes.

  His teeth scraped against hair, snagged, his tongue pressed farther in and Milly tried to pull away just from the pleasure of it, and she said, “Oh, Birdie! Don’t!”

  And he said, “Oh shit.”

  The erection receded quickly as the image sinks back into the screen when the set is switched off. He slid out from under her and stood in the puddle, looking at her uplifted sweating ass.

  She turned over and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, Birdie, I didn’t mean to … ”

  “Like hell you didn’t. Jack.”

  She sniffed amusement. “Well, now you’re one up.”

  He flipped the limp organ at her self-deprecatingly. “Am I?”

  “Honestly, Boz, the first time I really didn’t mean it. It just slipped out.”

  “Indeed it did. But is that supposed to make me feel better?” He began dressing. His shoes were inside out.

  “For heaven’s sake, I haven’t thought of Birdie Ludd for years. Literally. He’s dead now, for all I know.”

  “Is that the new kick at your tutorials?”

  “You’re just being bitter.”

  “I’m just being bitter, yes.”

  “Well, fuck you! I’m going out.” She began feeling around on the rug for her slip.

  “Maybe you can get your father to warm up some of his stiffs for you. Maybe he’s got Birdie there on ice.”

  “You can be so sarcastic sometimes. And you’re standing on my slip. Thank you. Where are you going now?”

  “I am going around the room divider to the other side of the room.” Boz went around the room divider to the other side of the room. He sat down beside the dining ledge.

  “What are you writing?” she asked, pulling the slip on.

  “A poem. That’s what I was thinking about at the time.”

  “Shit.” She had started her blouse on the wrong buttonhole.

  “What?” He laid the pen down.

  “Nothing. My buttons. Let me see your poem.”

  “Why are you so damn hung up on buttons? They’re unfunctional.” He handed her the poem!

  Pricks are noses.

  Cunts are roses.

  Watch the pretty petals fall.

  “It’s lovely,” she said. “You should send it to Time”

  “Time doesn’t print poetry.”

  “Some place that does, then. It’s pretty.” Milly had three basic superlatives: funny, pretty, and nice. Was she relenting? Or laying a trap?

  “Pretty things are a dime a dozen. Twelve for one dime.”

  “I’m only trying to be nice, shithead.”

  “Then learn how. Where are you going?”

  “Out.” She stopped at the door, frowning. “I do love you, you know.”

  “Sure. And I love you.”

  “Do you want to come along?”

  “I’m tired. Give them my love.”

  She shrugged. She left. He went out on the veranda and watched her as she walked over the bridge across the electric moat and down 48th Street to the corner of 9th. She never looked up once.

  And the hell of it was she did love him. And he loved her. So why did they always end up like this, with spitting and kicking and gnashing of teeth and the going of their own ways?

  Questions, he hated questions. He went into the toilet and swallowed three Oralines, one just nicely too many, and then he sat back and watched the round things with colored edges slide along an endless neon corridor, zippety zippety zippety, spaceships and satellites. The corridor smelled half like a hospital and half like heaven, and Boz began to cry.

  The Hansons, Boz and Milly, had been happily unhappily married for a year and a half. Boz was twenty-one and Milly was twenty-six. They had grown up in the same MODICUM building at opposite ends of a long, glazed, green-tile corridor, but because of the age difference they never really noticed each other until just three years ago. Once they did notice each other though, it was love at first sight, for they were, Boz as much as Milly, of the type that can be, even at a glance, ravishing: flesh molded with that ideal classic plumpness and tinged with those porcelain pink pastels we can admire in the divine Guido, which, at least, they admired; eyes hazel, flecked with gold; auburn hair that falls with a slight curl to the round shoulders; and the habit, acquired by each of them so young that it could almost be called natural, of striking poses eloquently superfluous, as when, sitting down to dinner, Boz would throw his head back suddenly, flip flop of auburn, his ripe lips slightly parted, like a saint (Guido again) in ecstasy—Theresa, Francis, Ganymede—or like, which was almost the same thing, a singer, singing

  I am you

  and you are me

  and we are just two

  sides

  of the same coin.

  Three years and Boz was still as hung up on Milly as he had been on the first morning (it was March but it had seemed more like April or May) they’d had sex, and if that wasn’t love then Boz didn’t know what love meant.

  Of course it wasn’t just sex, because sex didn’t mean that much to Milly, as it was part of her regular work. They also had a very intense spiritual relationship. Boz was basically a spiritual type person. On the Skinner-Waxman C-P profile he had scored way at the top of the scale by thinking of one hundred and thirty-one different ways to use a brick in ten minutes. Milly, though not as creative as Boz according to the Skinner-Waxman, was every bit as smart in terms of IQ (Milly, 136; Boz, 134), and she also had leadership potential, while Boz was content to be a follower as long as things went more or less his own way. Brain surgery aside, they could not have been more compatible, and all of their friends agreed (or they had until very recently ) that Boz and Milly, Milly and Boz, made a perfect couple.

  So what was it then? Was it jealousy? Boz didn’t think it was jealousy but you can never be sure. He might be jealous unconsciously. But you can’t be jealous just because someone was having sex, if that was only a mechanical act and there was no love involved. That would be about as reasonable as getting uptight because Milly talked to someone else. Anyhow he had had sex with other people and it never bothered Milly. No, it wasn’t sex, it was something psychological, which meant it could be almost anything at all. Every day Boz got more and more depressed trying to analyze it all out. Sometimes he thought of suicide. He bought a razor blade and hid it in The Naked and the Dead. He grew a moustache. He shaved off the moustache and had his hair cut short. He let his hair grow long again. It was September and then it was March. Milly said she really did want a divorce, it wasn’t working out and she could not stand him nagging at her any more.

  Him nagging at her?

  “Yes, morning and night, nag, nag, nag.”

  “But you’re never even home in the morning, and you’re usually not home at night.”

  “There, you’re doing it again! You’re nagging now. And when you don’t come right out and nag openly, you do it silently. You’ve been nagging me ever since dinner without saying a word.”

  “I’ve been reading a book.” He wagged the book at her accusingly. “I wasn’t even thinking about you. Unless I nag you just by existing.” He had meant this to sound pathetic.

  “You can, you do.”

  They were both too pooped and tired to make it a really fun argument, and so j
ust to keep it interesting they had to keep raising the stakes. It ended with Milly screaming and Boz in tears and Boz packing his things into a cupboard which he took in a taxi to East 11th Street. His mother was delighted to see him. She had been fighting with Lottie and expected Boz to take her side. Boz was given his old bed in the living room and Amparo had to sleep with her mother. The air was full of smoke from Mrs. Hanson’s cigarettes and Boz felt more and more sick. It was all he could do to keep from phoning Milly. Shrimp didn’t come home and Lottie was zonked out as usual on Oraline. It was not a life for human beings .

  2

  The Sacred Heart, gold beard, pink cheeks, blue blue eyes, gazed intently across twelve feet of living space and out the window unit at long recessions of yellow brick. Beside him a Conservation Corporation calendar blinked now BEFORE and then AFTER views of the Grand Canyon. Boz turned over so as not to have to look at Jesus, the Grand Canyon, Jesus. The tuckaway lurched to port side. Mrs. Hanson had been thinking of having someone in to fix the sofa (the missing leg led an independent existence in the cabinet below the sink) ever since the Welfare people had busted it on the day how many years ago that the Hansons had moved in to 334. She would discuss with her family, or with the nice Mrs. Miller from the MOD office, the obstacles in the way of this undertaking, which proved upon examination so ramiform and finally so formidable as very nearly to defeat her most energetic hopes. Nevertheless, some day.

  Her nephew, Lottie’s youngest, was watching the war on the teevee. It was unusual for Boz to sleep so late. U.S. guerillas were burning down a fishing village somewhere. The camera followed the path of the flames along the string of fishing boats, then held for a long time on the empty blue of the water.

  Then a slow zoom back that took in all the boats together. The horizon warped and flickered through a haze of flame. Gorgeous. Was it a rerun? Boz seemed to think he’d seen that last shot before.

  “Hi there, Mickey.”

  “Hi, Uncle Boz. Grandma says you’re getting divorced. Are you going to live with us again?”

  “Your grandma needs a decongestant. I’m only here for a few days. On a visit.”

  The apple pie colophon, signaling the end of the war for that Wednesday morning, splattered and the decibels were boosted for the April Ford commercial, “Come and Get Me, Cop.”

  Come and get me, Cop,

  Cause I’m not gonna stop

  At your red light.

  It was a happy little song, but how could he feel happy when he knew that Milly was probably watching it too and enjoying it in a faculty lounge somewhere, never even giving a thought for Boz, or where he was, or how he felt. Milly studied all the commercials and could play them back to you verbatim, every tremor and inflection just so. And not a milligram of her own punch. Creative? As a parrot.

  Now, what if he were to tell her that? What if he told her that she would never be anything more than a second-string Grade-Z hygiene demonstrator for the Board of Education. Cruel? Boz was supposed to be cruel?

  He shook his head, flip flop of auburn. “Baby, you don’t know what cruel is.”

  Mickey switched off the teevee. “Oh, if you think this was something today you should have seen them yesterday. They were in this school. Parkistanis, I think. Yeah. You should have seen it. That was cruel. They wiped them out.”

  “Who did?”

  “Company A.” Mickey came to attention and saluted the air. Kids his age (six) always wanted to be guerillas or firemen. At ten it was pop singers. At fourteen, if they were bright (and somehow all the Hansons were bright), they wanted to write. Boz still had a whole scrapbook of the advertisements he’d written in high school. And then, at twenty …?

  Don’t think about it.

  “You didn’t care?” Boz asked.

  “Care?”

  “About the kids in the school.”

  “They were insurgents,” Mickey explained. “It was in Pakistan.” Even Mars was more real than Pakistan and no one gets upset about schools burning on Mars.

  A flop flop flop of slippers and Mrs. Hanson shambled in with a cup of Koffee. “Politics, you’d try and argue politics with a six-year-old! Here. Go ahead, drink it.”

  He sipped the sweet thickened Koffee and it was as though every stale essence in the building, garbage rotting in bins and grease turning yellow on kitchen walls, tobacco smoke and stale beer and Synthamon candies, everything ersatz, everything he’d thought he had escaped, had flooded back into the core of his body with just that one mouthful.

  “He’s become too good for us now, Mickey. Look at him.”

  “It’s sweeter than I’m used to. Otherwise it’s fine, Mom.”

  “It’s no different than you used to have it. Three tablets. I’ll drink this one and make you another. You came here to stay.”

  “No, I told you last night that—”

  She waved a hand at him, shouted to her grandson: “Where you going?”

  “Down to the street.”

  “Take the key and bring the mail up first, understand. If you don’t… ”

  He was gone. She collapsed in the green chair, on top of a pile of clothes, talking to herself or to him, she wasn’t particular about her audience. he heard not words but the reedy vibrato of her phlegm, saw the fingers stained with nicotine, the jiggle of sallow chin-flesh, the MOD teeth. My mother.

  Boz turned his eyes to the scaly wall where roseate AFTER winked to a tawdry BEFORE and Jesus, squeezing a bleeding organ in his right hand, forgave the world for yellow bricks that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  “The work she comes home with you wouldn’t believe. I told Lottie, it’s a crime, she should complain. How old is she? Twelve years old. If it had been Shrimp, if it had been you, I wouldn’t say a word, but she has her mother’s health, she’s very delicate. And the exercises they make them do, it’s not decent for a child. I’m not against sex, I always let you and Milly do whatever you wanted. I turned my head. But that sort of thing should be private between two people. The things you see, and I mean right out on the street. They don’t even go into a doorway now. So I tried to make Lottie see reason, I was very calm, I didn’t raise my voice. Lottie doesn’t want it herself, you know, she’s being pressured by the school. How often would she be able to see her? Weekends. And one month in the summer. It’s all Shrimp’s doing. I said to Shrimp, if you want to be a ballet dancer then you go ahead and be a ballet dancer but leave Amparo alone. The man came from the school, and he was very smooth and Lottie signed the papers. I could have cried. of course it was all arranged. They waited till I was out of the house. She’s your child, I told her, leave me out of it. If that’s what you want for her, the kind of future you think she deserves. You should hear the stories she comes home with. Twelve years old! It’s Shrimp, taking her to those movies, taking her to the park. Of course you can see all of that on television too, that Channel 5, I don’t know why they … But I suppose it’s none of my business. No one cares what you think when you’re old. Let her go to the Lowen School, it won’t break my heart.” She kneaded the left side of her dress illustratively: her heart.

  “We could use the room here, though you won’t hear me complaining about that. Mrs. Miller said we could apply for a larger apartment, there’s five of us, and now six with you, but if I said yes and we moved and then Amparo goes off to this school, we’d just have to move back here, because the requirement there is for five people. Besides it would mean moving all the way to Queens. Now if Lottie were to have another, but of course her health isn’t up to it, not to speak of the mental thing. And Shrimp? Well, I don’t have to go into that. So I said no, let’s stay put. Besides, if we did go and then had to come back here, we probably wouldn’t have the luck to get the same apartment again. I don’t deny that there are lots of things wrong with it, but still. Try and get water after four o’clock, like sucking a dry tit.”

  Hoarse laughter, another cigarette. Having broken the thread of thought, she found herself lost in the labyri
nth: her eyes darted around the room, little cultured pearls that bounced off into every corner.

  Boz had not listened to the monologue, but he was aware of the panic that welled up to fill the sudden wonderful silence. Living with Milly he’d forgotten this side of things, the causeless incurable terrors. Not just his mother’s; everyone who lived below 34th.

  Mrs. Hanson slurped her Koffee. The sound (her own sound, she made it) reassured her and she started talking again, making more of her own sounds. The panic ebbed. Boz closed his eyes.

  “That Mrs. Miller means well of course but she doesn’t understand my situation. What do you think she said I should do, what do you think? Visit that death-house on 12th Street! Said it would be an inspiration. Not to me, to them. Seeing someone at my age with my energy and the head of a family.my age! You’d think I was ready to turn to dust like one of those what-do-you-call-its. I was born in 1967, the year the first man landed on the moon. Nineteen. Sixty. Seven. I’m not even sixty, but suppose I were, is there a law against it? Listen, as long as I can make it up those stairs they don’t have to worry about me! Those elevators are a crime. I can’t even remember the last time … No, wait a minute, I can. You were eight years old, and every time I took you inside you’d start to cry. You used to cry about everything though. It’s my own fault, spoiling you, and your sisters went right along. That time I came home and you were in Lottie’s clothes, lipstick and everything, and to think she helped you. Well, I stopped that! If it had been Shrimp I could understand. Shrimp’s that way herself. I always said to Mrs. Holt when she was alive, she had very old-fashioned ideas, Mrs. Holt, that as long as Shrimp had what she wanted it was no concern of hers or mine. And anyhow you’ll have to admit that she was a homely girl, while Lottie, oh my, Lottie was so beautiful. Even in high school. She’d spend all her time in front of a mirror and you could hardly blame her. Like a movie star.”