DIANA
25, Princess of Wales
CHARLES PHILIP ARTHUR GEORGE
37, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick and Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, heir apparent to the British throne
at King Juan Carlos’s Marivent Palace near Palma, Majorca, August 1986, for the last time
DIANA
now that he’s begun this and is humphing softly in confusion, trying to work out just why he’s even trying, I need to breathe deep and curl my toes on the edge of the pool at Park House and there’s a smell of the salt sea in the air and there are yew trees and silver birch and pine all around and I saw a young fox in the morning and he and I stood on the lawn and looked at each other for a long long while and I stand now waiting for just the right moment to dive, my arms outstretched, bending over the water at the deep end, and all my dolls have been properly walked in their pram and all the animals on my bed have been stroked and put just so and Daddy is puttering in the garden and my sisters are lounging in the sunlight and my brother is napping inside and Mummy hasn’t legged it yet—I don’t even know it’s coming—so I wait at the edge of the pool for just the right moment and I don’t understand that it would be ever so advisable just to plunge on in and glide to the bottom and not come back up at all, not at all, for it will never be anywhere near as nice as this again, ever
CHARLES
Uncle Dickie, how can I disagree with you, and Mum, you are the paragon of Uncle Dickie’s advice are you not, how unsettled one should be if another man has touched your wife before you have found her, how disturbing for her sweet-charactered allure, for her fresh-budded tenderness to have been known fully by another man who shall then carry around forever the intimate memory of the King’s wife in his mind to take out and fondle and treasure as if it were all still his, and so she is thus, my wife, but she is gaunt from her virginity, she is chlorine and ammonia and antiseptic, and of course she weeps and faints and has no sense of me because there is no sense in her of any other life, no sense of any other man by which to measure me, to give meaning to any loving word she would say to me: she is slick and untouched as a fish and I would cling to a horse who’s been ridden
ROOSTER
2, stud
CHICKEN
1, roaster
in a barnyard in Alabama, 2000
ROOSTER
they used to look at me different, the sweet chicks—I know that much—not so detached, not so stupid, but they didn’t used to have wings and feathers, either—I peck at little bits of that previous life I must have lived like pecking at yummy pieces of overlooked corn out in the midst of the grit and pebbles oh boy, and now I’m on her and oh boy oh boy, and yes the chicks used to be—how did I stand it?—utterly featherless, utterly, and they used to look at me with pleading awe and wonder, which was a better look—why the difference now?—I was rich then, oh yes, and I had splendid plumage, I’m sure, great red hackles and a tall comb, I was a magnificent looking something or other, a cock, a cocksman—oh ruffle and strut oh ruffle and strut and hop on and I am really something right now and I’m fucking and clucking and she’s loving it like crazy because I am the man around here, and over there beyond the fence are the featherless ones, who, in spite of their puny plumage—or perhaps because of it—seem very familiar to me, and suddenly I understand: they are watching me and they are listening to me cluck and they are laughing at the sounds I make that they don’t understand, but I know that someday they will be sweet little chicks, too, and I’ll be waiting for them
CHICKEN
eggy eggy eggy and then the little fluffs will come out and I will hover and fluff up too and they will huddle beneath me and this is a very useful cock I think, he flares his tail and puffs up his hackles very nice and he struts very nice and sometimes I wonder what that’s all about why I am impressed with that and then I wonder what is this farm thing going on and then it’s like, whoa, was that a stop sign I blew through, and there’s a big commotion all around me and I think I better call my agent, and then I go, like, what’s a stop sign? what’s an agent? and just as I am about to answer myself, the thoughts are gone—these moments of confusion don’t come so often anymore—I just wish this dude would get it over with because I’ve got a lot of pecking in the dirt to do, like it’s all I can do to score some corn around here
KEVIN SMITH
32, advertising copywriter
JULIA HANSON SMITH
30, graphic designer
in their apartment in Brooklyn, the night of September 11, 2001
KEVIN
I know the night is filled with smoke and with fire and I would not have thought it would be my wife clinging to me now because of what I have done: I should have gone out the door last night after my clumsiness, she was half-turned at the stove, the steam rising before her from the boiling rice, and all that I’d planned carefully to say came out impulsively, simply, badly, I am in love and she knew it was not her and she laid the lid on the pot and she turned her back to me and later we sat in chairs in the dark of our living room for a long while, the pot charred black on the stove, and I did not go and then it was this morning and then the long day and I am in love and I think it is not with her, but tonight, in this moment, we dare not change a thing
JULIA
how can it be so quiet from across the river, if you do not make yourself look you might never realize the terrible thing going on, and he and I do not look, we know but we choose for this night not to look, even into our own hearts, though I can hear faintly through the wall someone weeping and from another place the murmur of television voices, and I see myself standing in an open window high above the city: I cannot go back inside and I cannot step into the empty air, and from this distance I am only a figure standing in a window, I can only try to imagine what I am feeling
GEORGE W. BUSH
57, President of the United States
LAURA BUSH
57, First Lady
in the master bedroom of the White House, March 2004
LAURA
the Nancy Reagan wallpaper here is very nice, actually—all the peacocks and roosters and bluebirds hand-painted on Chinese paper—she was a good strong Republican woman—is that my cell phone?—no, just a ringing in my ears—I’ll have to hold my nostrils and blow when I get a chance, which won’t be long—wallpaper, wallpaper—I’m not sure about the wallpaper design in the Lincoln Bedroom, but that pallid lemon stuff will go and also the carpet, with those flowers so pale they look dead—a diamond-grid English Wilton’s the thing for the floor, bold Victorian greens and purples and yellows like the sunlight—and a new mattress for the bed, though I better not let Mother Bush know or she’ll have one of her conniptions, since it was she who finally replaced the horsehair, but her mattress is lumpy and always was—everybody says so, including Jeb—and it has to go—and I guess I’ll leave the Lincoln Bathroom alone for now, it has a quaint Fifties air about it and it’ll make George happy to keep it the same—he does have his own sense of history, with his project of peeing in all thirty-five of the White House bathrooms and he wants them to be just like they’ve always been
GEORGE
so I should have said to Pretty Boy from the National Public Radio today that I meant what I said when I said the tar on wearer instead of the war on terror ’cause I had on my new boots down in Crawford, see, and the county was resurfacing Mill Road and I got tar on those boots, walking along, so I said what I meant and I meant what I said: I regret the necessity to have tar on the wearer but you got to walk on the road to get someplace in Iraq ’cause over there they die with their boots on, I should have said that and Pretty Boy would’ve just scratched his pointy head and I’d’ve given him my special little knowing smile which I have given to plenty of these pencilheads and they don’t even have a clue what that smile means, which is when I’m out of office I’ll have each of you that got that smile down to
Crawford, one at a time, and you think it’s to get a story about the doofus back on his ranch, but when you get there, I’ll make you a proposition, each one of you, which is: admit it, you’ve dreamed about punching me in the nose, you figure I ain’t so tough without my Presidential war powers and you figure I’m plenty stupid and you’d like to whip my ass, well now’s your chance, just real private, we’ll go out to the clearing by Rainey Creek and take off our jackets and we will have it out like real men and I will kick your ass unremittlessly till you’re crying for your white-haired little old mama even though she slapped you around pretty good when you were a boy ’cause that’s who you’re dealing with. Not the mama. The guy who can whip your ass
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER
62, writer, Vietnam veteran
MISS X
36, hotel desk clerk, daughter of North Vietnamese soldier
in room 1503, Sheraton Saigon Hotel and Towers, August 11, 2007
ROBERT
we washed with Sheraton soap, a Coca-Cola on the night table, CNN muted on the TV screen, the new Saigon outside, fifteen stories below, the motorcycle roar barely audible over the AC fan, she’d reached her hand around her computer and across the registration desk to touch my wrist, an impossibly awkward gesture as if to say Here is your past in this place, determined to touch you, and I said Em đẹp nhu nàng tiên—you are beautiful as a fairy princess, an old-fashioned compliment she’d never heard from any man, much less an American—and then later she was at my door and we touched lips and we held each other and she whispered softly Tròi oi, a summoning of God, but familiarly, as if God were a lover passing unaware on the other side of the street, and now as we hold even closer to each other there is a sudden quieting in me: tròi oi, since I was first in this city, thirty-six years, four wives, a father, a hundred thousand special moments of the body, my Saigon have all passed: let me kiss her again now, for I am distracted, and I do, and a woman’s lips move against mine speaking their own secret language, which, after all the years of my life, I still yearn to understand
MISS X
all I have of him are some photos the size of my palm, my father, he smiles into the sunlight that half closes his eyes, he smiles for the daughter he will never see, and I have a flag, red with a yellow star, carefully folded, and I have stories of his bravery for his country, and there is a certain kind of ghost who comes with irony, who comes in an unexpected form to whisper that it is all right to laugh and to be in a body for a while, and this man I hold now called me something a man would call his daughter and I believe his smile and his hands and I am not yet a ghost so I touched him to begin and I touch him some more and he speaks in a father’s voice and I will hold him even closer though once he could have pulled the trigger himself
KEVIN SMITH
38, advertising executive
JULIA HANSON
36, art gallery manager
in her Manhattan apartment, October 16, 2007
KEVIN
our words—only an hour ago, in a coffee shop in the West Village, each of us alone at a table, and then an accidental synchronicity of glances over the Times and then her hesitation—for it was her decision to make—and then her yes, I’ll rise and come to you—our words still run through my head like reefer smoke, smoothing things over, blurring what our bodies remembered of the last time You look good I said So do you she said Are you still she began and I interrupted No I said too sharply and I knew she wanted more and I said Another man and she laughed, but gently, Perhaps it was with the man who just left me she said and we looked into each other’s eyes and we knew we were both burned down, we were both rubble, and I move now inside her and she splays her hands hard on my back and when we are done, when I can find my breath, my voice, I will say I’m sorry
JULIA
a thing that was gone all this time, a small thing, now that it has returned I understand how badly I missed it, the thumb edge of his right hand, how as he begins to move inside me he always strokes my hair with that edge of his hand, for a long while, and I turn my face a little in that direction I want to kiss his hand and I imagine these past few years unwinding—I unweep, I unpretend I am in love, I undeceive myself, I unfuck, I unmeet a man I force myself to care for, and I go all the way back to us, to my husband and me, we undivorce, we unfall, we unburn, the world we knew unchanges—but this is a small thing, his familiar hand upon my hair, and I know that even on a bright clear morning something terrible can fly in your window, but until then I will kiss his hand and we will try once more
SANTA CLAUS
471, philanthropist
INGEBIRGITTA
826, elf
in a back room of Santa’s workshop, North Pole, January 2008
SANTA
well well well ho ho ho I am a naughty boy no doubt about it, but she understands, my overstuffed Christmas turkey of a Mrs. Claus, with her hair bunned up tight, the color of Stockholm street slush, and I’m happy to put a lump of coal in my own stocking for the sake of this sweet elf’s hair unfurled and floating all about us, filling the room, covering us over, the undulant red of the bottom fringe of an auroral curtain At least she’s an older woman my plump pudding of a Mrs. Claus says, and it’s sad really how she can take comfort from that technicality, for this is our two hundred fifty-second January, my elf and I, and she still looks as young as Barbie, and after my wild night of plunging into chimneys and clothes-drier vents and pussy-cat doors and keyholes I must—even if only from the sympathetic magic of it—fly through the dark passage of my elf and give her gifts You need to unwind my bloated-to-bursting goose of a Mrs. Claus says I’ll just bake some cookies and I am dashing and dancing and cometing and vixening but my Christmas wish once again is that I could just do this and stop thinking about my wife
INGEBIRGITTA
he’s been in too many human houses: he is so like them now, he is so distracted, he is indeed so like a bowl full of jelly, where has my good Father Christmas gone, before he got this jolly image and before he got his livestock and his fan mail and his four million Google hits—twice as many as the Easter Bunny, he loves to say—but if only you knew, my dear, how often I think I’d prefer the bunny—though you are a kindly one and you are a merry one and you are a droll one, these are trivial things to me, I am an elf, I am of forest duff and I am of tree-bark dew and I am of quaking top-leaves and I am always of this trembling yearning body and I can dance a man to death, but you are managed now and you are spun and, worst of all, you think too much, and all I really want from you, dear Santa, is a Dirty Decadence 12-Speed Rabbit-Wand Double-Dip Flex-O-Pulse Vibrator
THE
COUPLES
ADAM, 7, first man
EVE, 7, first woman
the first day after the new moon of the fourth month of the eighth year after Creation
ZEUS, 982, King of the Gods
LEDA, 20, Queen of Sparta
1215 BC
HELEN, 25, Queen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus
PARIS, 22, Prince of Troy
1194 BC
HELEN, 35, Princess of Troy
MENELAUS, 42, King of Sparta
1184 BC
MARY MAGDALENE, 24, prostitute
TIBERIUS AURELIUS GAVROS, 22, Roman soldier
AD 28
CLEOPATRA VII, 28, Queen of Egypt
MARCUS ANTONIUS, 42, member of Rome’s ruling triumvirate
AD 41
ATTILA, 47, Khan of the Huns
ILDICO, 17, his twelfth wife
AD 453
IZUMI SHIKIBU, 29, lady of the court
PRINCE ATSUMICHI, 31, husband of Princess Atsumichi
1003
LUCREZIA BORGIA, 21, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia
ALFONSO D’ESTE, 25, her husband, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara
1502
HENRY VIII, 44, King of England
ANNE BOLEYN, 34, Queen of England
1535
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 29, poet and pla
ywright
HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, 20, courtier and literary patron
1593
COTTON MATHER, 56, clergyman and author
LYDIA LEE MATHER, 45, his third wife
1719
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, 31, composer
NANCY STORACE, 21, soprano
1787
LOUIS XVI, 23, King of France
Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen, known in France as
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