Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  “That’s—” I said, and dragged my hands up my face like I was removing makeup. “That’s wrong,” I said finally.

  “Is it?” she said. “Think about it. Particularly sleeping with one’s son. The mother-son relationship, for thousands of years, has always been a problem. This book points it out perfectly—is it just a coincidence that the word ‘daughter’ is one letter removed from the word ‘laughter,’ and the word ‘son’ is one letter removed from the word ‘sob’?”

  “But those are just words,” I said. “‘Daughter’ and ‘son’ could have been any words.”

  “Could they have?” Mimi asked. “Here, read the book and then we can talk more about it if you’d like.” She held out the book to me.

  “I’m pretty busy,” I said. “I don’t really have time to read anything except for my paper.”

  “Write your paper on this,” she suggested quietly, and reached her arm out farther. She was holding When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother by the corner, and it sagged out of her hand like something about to spill. With a chime of resolution from the woodwinds, Joseph uprights the book.

  I put it safely in my hand, opened the cover and read the chapter headings as Mimi returned to her work. “Mother as Degrader.” “Mother as Critic.” “Mother as Martyr.” “Mother as Champion.” “This sounds like a cast list,” I said.

  “You can’t show him a cast list!” boomed the voice of a fat man (baritone) with stringy hair who walked into the Props Studio and shut the door behind him. On the back of the door was a poster I hadn’t noticed in these three weeks: KNOW YOUR ENEMY in black block letters, over a sneering line drawing of an old man’s face with a large puffy nose and narrow slitted eyes. Soon they’d be all over town.

  “Stan,” Mimi said with the patience of somebody who has a stupid boss, “I’m not showing him the cast list. I’m showing him a book I’m reading.”

  “The daggers done?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re in the dagger box.”

  “Chains?”

  “In the chain box.”

  “Fists?”

  “The clay hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “You ordered more clay?”

  “Yes, but it hasn’t come yet.”

  “Why in the world would you order more clay? Last week you ordered more clay and the week before that you ordered more clay. You must be careful with the clay, Mimi. We’ve gone over budget already and clay costs money.”

  “Not until they deliver it,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Remember, Stan, when you hired me you said I would have all the budgetary support I needed. You want clay fists, I need clay and lots of it. I don’t have to remind you about what happened last summer, do I?”

  “No,” Stan said quickly. He patted his coat pockets until his hand crinkled against something inside. With a smile of recognition he pulled out a bag of individually wrapped caramels, unwrapped one and threw it into his mouth. “I’m just concerned about the budget, is all.”

  “This season is going to be a smash,” she said.

  “What happened last season?” I said, gathering I was never to be introduced.

  “Who are you?” said Stan sternly. Until now.

  “Stan, this is my daughter’s boyfriend, Joseph. Joseph, this is Stan, the General Director for the summer season.”

  “Glad to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. For a second Stan looked at my hand and clutched the bag of caramels closer to his body. Then he realized I wanted to shake, not take, and he shook.

  “What happened last season?” I asked again, eager to keep him here rather than remaining alone with the Mother as Lover.

  The aria begins simply enough. “Well,” Stan said simply, “last season was the first summer opera season in Pittsburgh. We had a very small budget. We still do. All of Benedrum does. Pittsburgh is a dying city and there’s no money for the arts. They call this town the Emerald City, but the color of Pittsburgh is a bitter black. The great lumbering steel industry has left a dark powder on a brick that once photogenically matched the color of the people driven out of Duquesne incline and Monogahela Heights.” Bassoons bulge with bitterness.

  “But what happened last summer?”

  “Last summer we put on Faussy’s The Marble Statue, which has, of course, a big statue in the middle of it. The middle of the stage, I mean. During all four acts. We were supposed to borrow one from Denver Opera but we were outbid at the last minute by a Miami Aïda.”

  “Atlanta,” Mimi said.

  “Miami, Mimi,” Stan insisted. “You didn’t work here.”

  “In any case, the props department had to build a statue and they kept complaining that they didn’t have the budget. This was before Mimi worked here.”

  “This is why Mimi works here,” Mimi said.

  “They built the statue but they didn’t have any clay so they used papier-mâché, and they what-you-call-it, they did that thing to it to make it look like marble.”

  “Marbelizing,” Mimi and I said in unison, but at major thirds.

  “Marbeling, right. But it didn’t shine, and you know the aria that the Prince sings, Your eyes shine like the statue in the square. It had to shine. So they put shellac on it.” He looked at me significantly.

  The violins fill a pregnant pause with an eight-bar cadence before Joseph replies, “So?”

  “So?” Mimi says incredulously. “So, you can’t put shellac over marbelized papier-mâché. At least, not over whatever structure they had. It won’t hold.”

  “So it didn’t hold?”

  Stan shook his head. “Worse than that. It gave way when Mathilde was clinging to it in the finale. You know, Statue, give me your strength?”

  “I don’t know the opera.”

  Stan looked a little huffy. “Well, it’s very famous. Not that this town will ever do it again. ‘Statue, give me your strength!’ WHAM! The leg of the statue broke right in two, and the whole thing came apart and fell on Lucretia Allenza, who was singing Mathilde that summer. And she’s not a small woman.”

  “She’s fat,” Mimi said.

  Stan looked uncomfortable; he unpeeled another caramel. “I wouldn’t say fat.”

  “You wouldn’t?” Mimi said. “She’s a professional soprano, Stan. She’s as big as a house.”

  “The press had a field day,” Stan said. “I always thought it wasn’t coincidence that backlash is shellac spelled backwards.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  “Yes it is,” Stan said. Another caramel. “Think about it.”

  I thought about it. C-A-L—“It’s not.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t mean backwards. I mean, one of those scrambled word things, where you switch all the letters around and it makes it backlash. Acronyms?”

  “Anagrams,” Mimi and I said, with the same lilting melody of “marbelizing.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t think it’s an anagram, either,” I said, the letters swimming in my head like alphabet soup. And it isn’t. Even years later I try it, and the best I can get out of “shellac” is “she call,” which she doesn’t.

  “In any case,” Stan said, “that’s why Diva Allenza isn’t singing with the Pittsburgh Opera anytime soon, and that’s why we have a new propsmistress and a slightly larger budget. But even so the clay is overburdening us. I mean, why do you require so much clay, Mimi? The expense, the expense! Clay is always expensive, Mimi! Because clay comes from the earth, and there is a limited supply! Clay is the source of all life, Mimi! God breathed into the clay of the earth to create man—now you dare to order shipment after shipment of clay to create props! Unless you are hoarding the clay yourself for some nefarious purpose! Confess, propsmistress! Confess!” There, on the “fess” of that last “Confess!” is a high E flat—solid and strident like the French horns that back it up.

  “Sheesh,” Mimi said. “I’ll try to be more careful, Stan, but you know we want to make opera that people will remember.”

>   “That’s true,” Stan said. “I mean, once I heard some people talking in the lobby during intermission. They were talking about how they always attend the opera in the same clothes they wore to work that day, because by the time they go home and jump in the shower and change their clothes they’d either be late or they’d be on time but so stressed out they couldn’t really enjoy it. And frankly, if people are going to pay that much for tickets what’s the use if they’re not really going to enjoy it. So what these people did is they wore slightly dressier work clothes to work and went right to the theater, locking the briefcase in the trunk and sometimes even having time for a cocktail or something, but not dinner because they hated, these people, to wolf down dinner and rush to the theater. It’s so stressful. They might as well go home and shower and change if they want to be stressed out before the show even starts. That’s what they said,what’s-your-name—”

  “Joseph.”

  “—and I never forgot it. And I never forgot to repeat it. Because that’s our audience. That’s our audience, Joseph. Just regular working folk. We have to create opera for them that’s not just interesting but fascinating, mesmerizing. So that they transcend all the stress about whether to change or where to have dinner or parking or whatever, and really hear the music. That’s what opera’s for. Do you have any more of those candies?”

  “What candies?”

  “Weren’t you holding a little box of candies?”

  “No,” I said, holding up When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother. “It’s a book that Mrs. Glass—”

  “Who?” Mimi said sharply.

  “It’s a book that Mimi is lending me,” I said. I handed it to him. “Sorry it’s not candies.”

  “It’s O.K.,” he said. He looked at the spine. “Not your fault. When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother , huh? If you can’t be friends, what can you be? Eh?” He elbowed me and leaned in so I could see his caramel-coated teeth. From a dirty mouth comes a dirty joke.

  “Please, Stan,” Mimi said. “Your tight-budgeted propsmistress has to get to work.”

  “Anyway,” Stan said, “all I am trying to tell you, Joseph, is that we are really trying for maximum drama this summer.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  “That’s why we’re making a whole box of daggers. When Abigail stabs Pinchas at the end of Die Juden, we are having her stab him furiously and repeatedly. We don’t care if the dagger crumbles after each performance, so long as Pinchas dies a horrible death. That’s why we are paying for a whole box of daggers. We want Pinchas to die as violently as possible.”

  “As well he should,” Mimi said firmly as T.U.D. returns. “If I ever found out that my husband was sleeping with somebody else, I’d probably kill him and then go mad. The more violent the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

  If this were a novel, the presence of Cassius the dog, kept in the back room on the days when Mimi would jog with the dog around some of the prettier lakeside territory, would have had to be established by now. You couldn’t just have him howl and mention, in the same paragraph, that sometimes Mimi brought her big black labrador Cassius to work with her and kept him in the back room. But this isn’t a novel. This is an opera, where motivation can strike at any moment. One love letter and an engagement ring is thrown back at the tenor. One thrown ring and a woman can throw herself down the stairs. One thrown woman and war can break out and the gardener can reveal himself to be Zeus, in disguise. Or a woman, disguised as Zeus. Or somebody who came just a little too late to tell the woman not to throw herself down the stairs because he didn’t read the love letter after all. Or he did. Or when a dire prediction is made, a dog can howl offstage chilling the bones and lowering the curtain for a few minutes while the frantic stagehands carry the Props Studio away and lower the walls of the Carnegie Mellon Physics Department cafeteria. This is an opera, and you don’t need to know why the dog is there—you don’t need to know that the dog is there—you just need to know that when it howls it means that the remaining two and a half acts aren’t going to be happy.

  Act II, scene two

  A simple chord from the oboes spotlights me and my boredom as I wait in the Carnegie Mellon Physics Department cafeteria. Steven was fifteen minutes late. I’d already ordered a lemonade but wasn’t yet bored enough to read When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother , which I’d been dragging with me unopened for almost a week now. I was hot, hot and bored. I’d borrowed Cyn’s sputtering car, while she spent quality time with her father, to drive around the curves of the Color-Coded Wayfinder Signs with the windows down, until the university finally appeared in the horizon. Outside it was some triple digit of degrees and the cafeteria was windowless. It was three o’clock—three-fifteen, Steven was fifteen minutes late—so the lunch crowd, presumably, had returned to its experiments. The room was swathed in occasional coolness by a large rotating fan like those searchlights in prison break movies, that swing and swing and finally find the felon with his homemade knife at the throat of the warden’s daughter. Don’t shoot, boys—he’s not bluffing. Every time the fan hit my face it chilled my sweat and dimmed the radio. “Bing Bing Bing,” the sound my heart makes when I see you babe, turned to a dull white noise every ten bars or so. The orchestra, of course, doesn’t duplicate this. It just keeps playing.

  Steven finally arrived in a long white lab coat. Underneath, I hope, he was wearing shorts, but he looked like a flasher. I remembered seeing him without his shirt that first night I arrived on the set, and thanks to Mimi’s description I could picture the rest.

  “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Sorry I’m late. We had a problem with the gold.”

  “The gold what?” I asked.

  “Just gold,” he said, smiling faintly like somebody who’s working on experiments you can’t possibly understand. “We’re working with gold. Let me just grab some food and we can talk.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, trying to sound careless. I couldn’t imagine why Steven wanted me to come here. I looked down at my sweaty tumbler and saw through the swirling rind and sugar to the dull gloss of the wood of the table. It felt like a set.

  Steven brought his plastic food to the table and sat down across from me. He didn’t say anything so I didn’t say anything either, just kept sipping. The radio kept playing and the searchlight kept spinning. I was wishing this prisoner could escape. I couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted me to meet him for a late lunch, even when I said I couldn’t make it until after Goodbye. All summer long I hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to Steven directly and that was on purpose. Steven, at a distance, was a little desert island in Cyn’s wild sea of a family, the one who wasn’t interested in intergenerational sex but in whatever he had suddenly started babbling about in front of me now. Steven’s only aria is accompanied by a small, sputtering brass ensemble.

  “…and we strip the wire with a pair of pliers, just an ordinary pair of pliers, we just rip it down the wire and, of course, the very tip of the wire, the very very tip, is just one molecule in width. One measly molecule wide. So we take the laser I was talking about before, and Cyn—”

  “Cyn’s here?”

  “She is?” Steven’s head followed the arc of the fan around the room, a smile of surprise smeared on his mouth along with egg grease. “She’s not here. What was I—oh. No. Since the tip is only one molecule wide, the laser bounces off that one molecule and hits the gold. From the way it hits the gold, we read with this”—he stuttered for a term that a Mather liberal arts student could understand—“special meter thing. We can tell from the way it reflects off the wire’s one molecule, off the gold—we can tell exactly what the gold is shaped like. I mean, on a molecular level.”

  Cyn’s roommate had been a puckered little chemical girl whose only redeeming quality was her constant lab work, keeping her away at all hours so that it wasn’t too often that Cyn and I would make love just three feet from her snoring, pimply face, holding our hands over each other’s mouth
s to absorb our moans into our skin. I knew how to make small talk with science types. “So this whole new meter thing you’re building is based on ripping up a wire with pliers?”

  “Well, that’s how we get the wire to have a one-molecule width.”

  “But after you rip it, it could be any width.”

  “Not the very tip.”

  “Yes the very tip,” I insisted. “I mean, it could be two molecules, side by side.”

  He smirked. “Yes, actually it could. But that’s one of the founding fallacies of physics in the first place. Entropy is increasing. You know what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  He explained it anyway. “It means that systems are breaking down quicker and quicker through the power of chance. Reactions between disparate parts occur at faster and faster rates, and the way they change their surroundings forces us to abandon our previous assumptions at an astounding rate.” Metaphors in operas are always corny, always. “We’ve already experienced a problem with using gold, because they’ve just discovered a new type of gold. S-gold.”

  “S-gold?”

  “Yeah. They put—because—well, I won’t explain it all, but because it’s a different kind, sort of a different molecular—well, let’s say it’s a different species of gold. So we’re calling it S-gold for now. It’s—it’s pretty interesting.” His voice trailed off suddenly and he dropped the subject. I watched his fork prod at a flat little stack of garnish: half an orange slice, a piece of parsley and an inflamed nipple. As his fork pierced the nipple my eyes filled with memory like an allergic reaction. One of my fingers was poised over Cyn’s nipple, the nail sinking into it like a trick we taught our campers, months later, to make their mosquito bites stop itching momentarily. I could see her sex contracting in expectation while my own stretched toward her like a hungover arm, under the covers, toward the cursed, necessary bleating of the alarm clock. I poised myself over her—not our usual position—and moved my fingers from her breast to the bedcovers, for balance. With a sharp vocal—like a burst of brass when the forbidden lovers are discovered, later, in Act III Scene One—she grabbed my wrist like I was taking candy without asking, and returned it to her breast while I wobbled unsteadily between her legs. She met my eyes as she took my weight, and with a lurch she grabbed my other hand, and, looking at me from sharp bright slits, wrapped my sweaty fist around myself. She wanted to come this way, without me inside her, while she watched me stroke myself just inches from her poised sex. Teetering, wronghanded, frustrated and loud, I did it. This was the beginning of about a month’s hot interest in masturbation. For weeks afterward we would lie next to one another and stare at the blank tiles of the dormitory ceiling while in the periphery we could see the lustful and selfish movements of our own fingers between our own legs. “Keep your hands,” Cyn would pant, a horny cop, “where I can see them.” Starting in sensual silence and closing with desperate, heaving gasps, we’d make ourselves come without touching one another except for the trembling thunk of our hip bones as they shivered against one another, like silverware in a drawer in a kitchen in a house in an earthquake. But it was never as good as the first time. For all the unpeeling we did in the weeks that followed, we never completely recollected the raw afternoon where she collapsed under the throb of her swollen nipple while I stroked myself, kept stroking myself. Even after I came I kept stroking myself, wanting to give her more and more until my veins ached, strewing more of my ejaculate like pearls upon the forestry of her sex.