Side Effects

by Harvey Jacobs

  It wasn’t until they reached home that Simon understood why his employer’s list of terms and conditions had included a taboo on any fiddling with Martha Marie. When she took off the porcupine coat, he confronted a perfect body: lovely thrusting breasts, a small waist, trim thighs connected to endless legs. He had to stop himself from floating toward that nirvana of curves and crevices, like a space-walking astronaut pulled by the sudden gravity of a shooting star.

  The realization that lying with this incarnation of Aphrodite was denied him for reasons light-years beyond the mere obstacle of the oath imposed by Wanda Hubbard was unbearable. Simon’s sad excuse for a penis, the inch worm bequeathed to him by Dr. Merriweather and Thumicsk, tingled with the intensity of a tuning fork. Feeling dizzy, blaming fatigue, Simon said his good nights and went to his room. From the stairs he heard Martha Marie tell Grandma she planned to stay for a full week, weather or no weather.

  72

  By the next day, Simon’s frustration had eased somewhat. The untouchable intruder was a terrible drummer, absolutely anti-aphrodisiac. Martha Marie banged and clanged at her bass, kettle and cymbals with no perceptible sense of rhythm.

  Her racket began after breakfast and continued for most of the day, loud enough to penetrate downstairs to the store where Simon sat trying to read. The banging made Wanda’s antiques tremble in sympathetic vibration; it made them seem alive. As much as he winced from those grating drumbeats, he was happy that they beat the shreds of lust from his mind like dust paddled from a mangy rug. But her pernicious percussion also reminded him that Martha Marie was there, one short flight above his head, her breasts and bottom, arms and legs delicious in perpetual motion.

  That same evening, Simon learned that Martha Marie was an incorrigible flirt who’d probably stained the seat of every pickup truck in Serene Harbor. When she came with him to the Skull & Crossbones, the few female regulars went silent as zombies. They resigned from combat, outclassed and outflanked. While the women froze, every man in the place, including old Marco the bartender, turned into an erection.

  While Martha Marie worked the room, renewing acquaintances, Simons’s skin wrinkled with raging envy. Envy turned to jealousy when he saw thirty eyes, usually as expressive as boiled eggs, focus lasers on her cleavage, and when she bent over the pool table, the rump crease clearly outlined against her spandex slacks, Simon knew his reaction was way out of proportion. Martha Marie wasn’t exactly his date, but he felt as possessive toward her as if she were his wallet.

  He also learned that this generic object of desire was more planet than star; she shone by reflected light. The girl was a shameless narcissist—tossing her reflection at every mirror, drinking glass, and bit of metal trim along the bar, even half-full ashtrays. He watched her blatantly evaluate how effectively those reflections reflected in eyeglasses, empty bottles, light fixtures, jacket buttons, the juke box’s chrome coin slot, the silver metal knobs on the cigarette machine, anything capable of capturing her image.

  The jealous agonies Simon endured at the Skull & Crossbones were ant bites compared to the traumas he suffered late at night or in the early morning when Martha Marie headed for the only upstairs bathroom in bikini panties, using her arms for a bra, or, still steaming from a hot, perfumed tub, headed for her room, wrapped in a tight Turkish towel. By choice or chance she left her door open wide enough for Simon to catch flashes of her naked knee bends, stretches and—most excruciating of all—doing push-ups that allowed her nipples to brush the stripes on an authentic 19th-century zebra rug.

  To avoid going completely berserk, Simon kept his focus on that designer nose with its humongous set of nostrils whenever Martha Marie teased him with wide-eyed stares, adorable grins, pouting lips, and an acrobatic tongue that licked ice cream or chocolate sauce off her spoon after one of Wanda Hubbard’s elaborate dinners.

  Grandma had commanded Simon to share evening meals during Martha Marie’s stay in order to keep her company. Home cooking was a welcome change from his usual diet of spaghetti and meatballs or fried chicken at the Skull & Crossbones, but the price in personal anguish was high. That Simon hadn’t openly demonstrated any interest in bedding Martha Marie threatened her self-image as the Empress of Ripe, succulent as a honeydew from Eden. At the dinner table, her advances became more and more tantalizing; he felt his defenses cracking like castle walls pummeled by catapulted boulders. He identified with the watch factory’s shaky façade, holding together but on the verge of collapse.

  When Wanda left the pair alone while she went into the kitchen to check her pot roast, stir a sauce or top a warm pie with swirls of frosting, Simon would feel a shoeless foot slide up his leg and grab for his lap napkin with an educated toe. He’d watch his tablemate dip her pinky into a honey jar and suck it like a lollypop. She’d complain about the heat from the stone fireplace, fish an ice cube from her water glass and reach into her blouse, massaging her breasts to cool down. Martha Marie monitored her stunts in the shiny belly of a water pitcher, then measured Simon’s response by any telltale wince, twitch or facial spasm.

  During that interplay, the two of them kept a soundtrack going for Wanda’s benefit, casual conversation as innocuous as the bleating of diplomats. Martha Marie did most of the talking, commenting on movies Simon had never seen and celebrities he’d never heard of. “You two are such chatterboxes,” Granny Hubbard would say or, “How can you young people eat and talk at the same time?” Wanda seemed oblivious to the fact that her granddaughter was driving Simon Apple crazy with temptation while his unshakable resistance left Martha Marie in private panic, but Simon had the eerie feeling that Granny enjoyed their torment, tender chickens turning slowly on a spit.

  Five days into Martha Marie’s visit, in the dead of night, he woke to find her tugging at the blanket covering his naked body. His eyes popped open just in time to roll himself over to conceal his miniaturized equipment. “What are you doing?” Simon said, sounding like a hopeless idiot.

  “I want you,” Martha Marie said, rubbing Simon’s bare bottom, “and I know you want me. Well there you are and here I am. So let’s get on with it because my affection is already turning to anger and what could be something beautiful might end as one of those grotesque memories of what might have been.”

  Simon defended himself with a top sheet, sat up and snapped on a flashlight he kept on his night table. Martha Marie was wearing a black lace-trimmed teddy held together by bowed ribbons and a few uncomplicated hooks. “You’ve got to understand,” Simon said, “I made a solemn promise to your grandmother. I swore on the Holy Book to avoid any physical contact with you. This is not only a matter of honor, it’s about keeping my job.”

  “We could be quiet as consenting adult mice.”

  “No,” Simon said. “I’m a screamer. A very noisy fucker. I’m famous for that.”

  “You are a strange boy. Move over. Let me climb in with you. I’m cold out here. Cold and lonely.”

  “Martha Marie, I can’t deny that you are a very desirable woman. I’m flattered that you find me worth a second look. Aside from betrayal, giving in to your considerable charms would leave me homeless and broke. Go back to your room. We can have an abstract fusion like phone sex.”

  “You’re telling me to get myself off? I can do that right here if it turns you on.”

  “Not here, not tonight. Martha Marie, there are other factors.”

  “You have a girlfriend? So what? I have a boyfriend. We can pretend to move back in time, long before we met them. Say this is the first century b.c.”

  “Now that you mentioned it, I do have a girlfriend. Did have. She recently died. I’m still in mourning,” Simon said.

  “She’d want you to get on with your life. I can’t accept that as your reason for being so nasty to me. Is there something else? Like for example herpes or clap? Is that it? Are you being protective? Don’t worry. I have a fabulous immune system and a pack of rubbers.”

  “It could be worse. My tests haven’t come bac
k yet. I’m not going to move over and that’s that so don’t make it harder for me.”

  “Haven’t I made it harder for you? I’ll bet it’s nice and hard, Simon. I need to be held. I need you inside me.”

  “I know rejection is hard for you to take. I’m not rejecting. There are things I can’t explain. I’m having a nervous breakdown here. Shoo. Go away.”

  “You won’t get another chance,” Martha Marie said. “Because now I am furious.”

  “I accept that,” Simon said, “and I don’t blame you. We can still be good friends.”

  “I get the picture. You’re queer. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re in the closet.”

  “I can understand why you might think that,” Simon said. “Give me Rock Hudson or give me death.”

  “Up yours,” Martha Marie said and stormed back to her room. She left Simon bathed in drenching sweat, cursing out God, the Devil and the new bottle of Stalagamide, sent by Dr. Merriweather. He was in no mood for sleep so he dressed as quietly as he could, pulled a heavy sweater over a woolen shirt and went out for a walk around the town, taking deep, burning breaths of frigid air to erase the tenacious traces of Martha Marie’s perfume that managed to get past his sinuses and lodge in his brain.

  The humiliation of refusing the most precious of gifts, even from a nympho-narcissist, made Simon cringe under the umbrella of winter stars. Whole constellations sang lamentations, as they must have for Tabitha Ulman’s favorite hero, Hemingway’s macho castrato, Jake Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises. At least Jake’s truncated tower was the result of fighting a good war. Simon Apple had done nothing but swallow a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill to counteract a pill.

  He walked east, eager to meet Serene Harbor’s next sunrise. Dawn’s early light had a way of routing the vultures of despair, albeit temporarily; dawn was Simon’s only ally, but walk as fast as he might through a fresh carpet of crunching snow, dawn was still an hour away.

  Simon’s itinerary took him along the waterfront to where the abandoned watch factory loomed like a decaying cadaver. He welcomed the chance to inhale its toxic emanations, an odorless essence less malevolent than Martha Marie’s delicious Opium by Yves St. Laurent. Simon would have been relieved to have his flesh fall off in clumps, leaving a radioactive skeleton, free of recrimination and regret, striding jauntily toward the arm-locked relic of a windmill at the end of Revolution Street.

  Simon stopped abruptly. He thought he saw a dull gleam of yellow light dribbling from behind a boarded window on the factory’s top floor. It had to be an illusion or reflection but there was nothing to reflect; there were no lampposts rooted near that building, no security lights; the last remnant of a waning moon was stifled by a Brillo pad of clouds.

  Yet there was definitely something luminous up there—a soft, steady glow. Simon wondered if it could be from the residue of radium paint soaked into the factory’s brick-and-mortar skin. If that was the source, why wasn’t the whole structure beaming like a beacon? No, it was definitely bulb-mothered light confined to a single window. Simon stopped to ponder that mystery when he was grabbed from behind.

  “So what are you looking at?” said a crumpled cellophane voice with the same accent as Hyman Vornik’s, Glenda’s best and only tailor, a refugee from Romania.

  The arms wrapped around Simon’s jacket were thin as insect legs. He easily freed himself and whirled, buoyed by a rush of adrenalin, his own startled arms ready for a fight. Before he threw a punch, Simon saw that his enemy was the oldest vertical human he’d ever encountered, a man hardly five feet tall dressed in infantry camouflage with a wrinkled face the size of a dime.

  That little face peered out from behind the white foliage of an enormous beard, linked by a bush of sideburns to wisps of hair hanging from underneath a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap. Simon realized if he’d thrown a punch at the sprouting head supporting that face, the whole skull would have snapped off a neck no wider than a heron’s and rolled into a snowdrift. “Answer my question,” the man said. “What are you looking at?”

  “Before I answer any questions, can I make a suggestion? It’s not a good idea to sneak up behind a person in the dark.”

  “I scared you, right?” the man said, laughing. “You nearly pissed your pants, right?”

  “You mind telling me what this is about?” Simon said.

  “He answers my question with a question,” the man said.

  “Who are you, the night watchman?” Simon said.

  “The night watchman? That’s good. Ha ha. You got a sense of humor. Before I get nasty, take some advice, go home because I got no time for a conversation.”

  The man headed for a heavy door at the side of the factory marked keep out! private property! trespassers will be prosecuted! The door was bolted shut by an iron bar and a lock the size of a fist. The wispy man didn’t reach for a key; he pulled at the knob using his legs for leverage. After a few tugs, the bar and lock moved with the door, leaving a wedge of space. The man squeezed inside and pulled the door shut behind him. Simon went to investigate and saw that the massive lock was attached to nothing; the bolts that once anchored it to brick had corroded to stubs. Simon looked up at the window that first caught his attention. The light flickered and went out.

  73

  Later that morning, Simon gulped his third cup of coffee, trying to keep awake behind the counter of Better Times. Wanda Hubbard came down to the store to do some quick dusting. She threw a rag and a spray can of Lysol in Simon’s direction, pointing toward a wall filled with a newly acquired cache of terrible circus paintings by an anonymous artist with a fondness for clowns, dwarfs and acrobats. The pictures, in faded oils under glass, were bordered by mildew-stained mats surrounded by thick, warped gilded frames. Wanda bought the collection for a song at a barn sale.

  “I heard a lot of noise last night,” Wanda said. “The patter of little feet. Doors opening and closing. What was going on, Simon? You remember what you swore to me about Martha Marie?”

  “I didn’t hear a thing. I slept like a log,” Simon said, spraying and wiping around a trapeze flier in free fall grasping for his catcher’s bulging arm. “I haven’t seen Martha Marie since last night’s marvelous dinner.”

  “Sure, sure,” Wanda said. “But if she happens to get knocked up, consider yourself a bridegroom. One way or another, you must have rolled off that log you slept like because I heard you go out around five o’clock.”

  “Oh, that,” Simon said, “yes, well, I did get the urge to snort some fresh air. Which brings me to something I wanted to ask about. I was ambling along down by the factory and I swear I saw a light up on the top floor. That struck me as pretty odd in itself but it gets more interesting. There was this little old man with a beard . . .”

  “Last night I saw upon the stair a little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh how I wish he’d go away,” Wanda said. “You know that poem?”

  “My father used to recite it,” Simon said, “but the little man upon the stair didn’t have a Jewish accent and he wasn’t dressed like a commando.”

  “I doubt you saw any lighted windows in the factory. Everything there is long since disconnected. And why would a little man with a beard be wandering around in the cold at five in the morning? I’d forget the whole thing if I were you. You must have been hallucinating. Did Martha Marie feed you some of her mushrooms? I thought she was off that stuff.”

  “No mushrooms,” Simon said. “No Martha Marie.”

  “No lights, no wandering Jews,” Wanda said. “You’re a good man, Simon. I’m very pleased with your work. I know you won’t abuse my hospitality. I trust you. A word to the wise. Several people have mentioned to me that you fit in nicely here in Serene Harbor. This is a sturdy old town but it balances on a fragile ecology. It’s best not to rock any boats. Now I’ve got to get over to an estate sale in Wainscott. When you finish with the frames leave
the window open for a while. The shop smells like an armpit.”

  From upstairs, Simon heard a symbol crash and the rat-tat boom-bang of Martha Marie’s drums. He pretended not to notice. “Good hunting,” Simon said. “I hope you find something fabulous.”

  “Listen to her,” Wanda said. “She don’t sound too happy. She’s a lot like her mother. My sister. Some people like to make noise. If by some miracle a customer walks in tell them we’re doing construction.”

  An hour later, when the doorbell jingled and a lanky middle-aged man who looked to Simon as if he were assembled from a Leggo kit walked in, the drums were still beating. “If you have any questions, it’s what I’m here for,” Simon said over the banging. “I hope all that racket isn’t too much of a bother. We have a crazy person upstairs. Locked in the west wing. Harmless, though.”

  “I’m not a shopper,” the man said. “I’m a close personal friend of Mother Hubbard. I gather she’s being a doting Granny this week.”

  “The boss lady is out looking for product,” Simon said. “I don’t know how long she’ll be away.”

  “I came to talk to you, Simon Apple. You are Simon Apple?”

  “Talk to me?”

  “I’m Evan Crimmins. Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “It certainly does, Mr. Mayor.”

  “So, you keep up with town politics. Impressive.”

  “You’re mentioned in every issue of the Star Express.”

  “I own the paper. And half the property on Revolution Street including this building. Which is to say Evan Crimmins has a large investment in the future of Serene Harbor. I have every faith that we’re on the verge of an explosive period of growth and development. This is tomorrow’s boom-town.” Martha Marie’s playing added punctuating volume.

  Simon had to shout: “Considering the town’s location, a few miles from the richest territory in America, it’s amazing the explosion hasn’t happened yet. Did you know that during the Cold War the Reds had a nuclear missile programmed to hit the Hamptons? The highest form of flattery. They knew where the power was. And here’s Serene Harbor, a trot from ground zero, and still affordable. If I were in real estate, I’d say this area is a goldmine, Mayor Crimmins. The thing is, I like Serene Harbor the way it is but I suppose nobody can stop the future from happening.”