Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  “I guess I should stop beating around the bush,” Steven said. The cleaved maraschino cherry of the evocative garnish paused for a minute on his tongue before disappearing down his windpipe, past that small triangle of downy hair, very light tan and descending lazily to a point, that I’d seen the first night I’d arrived in this humid and heaving city. It was hard to concentrate in here.

  “Go ahead.”

  He sighed and dropped his fork to the plate in resignation. What could this be, that he wanted from me? Some sort of pseudo-fatherly advice, some locker room talk? He was past, way past, the age of worrying about hairy palms or going blind. Pittsburgh had an aggressive program that made condoms more available at school than exam answers, so he wasn’t going to slip me a twenty and wait outside the drugstore while I debated whether his teenaged paramour—some geeky science girl at the lab? a high school flame whose parents hadn’t dragged her to Europe or something?—would prefer something Ribbed for Her Pleasure. “It’s about girls,” he said finally.

  “What can I help you with?”

  “Well,” he said. “When you—how did you—O.K., you and my sister are—”

  Bing Bing Bing is the sound my heart makes when I see you babe. Bing Bing Bing don’t you know that we really got it made. When you walked into my life, I felt my heart sing. Everywhere I go I hear Bing Bing Bing.

  “Yes?” I said finally.

  “How did you approach my sister?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you first—well, when you began thinking romantically—do you know what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying how did I make my first move on your Cyn?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell when someone is interested in you? There’s this person. I wish I could get inside her—”

  “Would this be your first time?” I asked.

  “What?” Steven’s head followed the arc of the fan around the room. “What? What was I—oh. No. I wish I could get inside her mind, just to know if she’s interested. Because it’s sort of a delicate situation. I mean, if it turns out Cynthia isn’t interested, then—”

  “Cyn?”

  “What? Well, I didn’t want to tell you who she is, but yes.”

  “What?” The castaway, adrift in the wild sea of Cyn’s family, approaches an island only to find that it’s the slick back of a terrible sea serpent.

  “Her name is Cynthia.”

  “Like your sister Cynthia?”

  “Well, sure.” He blinked, laser-quick. “I mean, let’s pretend it’s my sister, because it’s as good a situation—a hypothetical situation—as any. I mean, it would be a delicate situation if I wanted to approach my sister, because if she wasn’t interested it would be awkward, you know? That’s my situation. That’s what I’m talking about. Hypothetically, of course.”

  “Hypothetically? Hypothetically let’s say you want my advice on how to approach your sister?”

  “Well, Cynthia—let’s just talk about this situation for now.”

  I struggled to find some facet of this conversation I could face, and talk to. “That would be incest.”

  “There’s a better word for it,” Steven said, licking his lips. “My father and I were just talking—what was the word?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I couldn’t believe how easily I know what you’re talking about could come from my mouth. “Forget the word.”

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he said.

  “Forget the word. Forget your tongue, Steven. Surely you can understand that it’s difficult to discuss this situation. Whoever you have a crush on, it’s not going to be like incest.”

  “Well, not if you think of it like that: Incest. But all behavior exists within a social and cultural context. I mean, it’s like what I told you about entropy. 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.”

  “You said that already.” Though the second time around he sings it differently.

  “Yes, I know, but this time I mean it in reference to—I wish I could think of the phrase my father used.”

  I sighed, scarcely audible over the growing T.U.D. “Intergenerational sex.”

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” he said. “If you think of intergenerational sex within the context of entropy, it doesn’t seem horrible but the natural consequences of scientific progress. I mean, it’s like what happened with the gold. Entropy is increasing, resulting in that S-gold I told you about. Think of an S-family. S-father. S-mother. S-sister. S-dog, even.”

  “Interspecies sex?”

  “Well, not in my case,” Steven grinned. “But that probably isn’t so far off, entropically speaking. But within the family—why not? It was individual molecules reacting within the element of gold that produced S-gold—why not a family whose molecules would react with one another, and produce an S-family?”

  “That’s about the worst science I ever heard,” I said, attempting to sound lighthearted. The flutes try the same thing.

  He frowned, and I could see in the cross wrinkles around his mouth a genetic history. The same frown when the doctor- father—the S-father, maybe—was reminded of the ceramic leg, buried in that poor girl, snapping in two. “So you’re not going to help me with Cynthia?”

  “We are speaking hypothetically, right?”

  Steven blinked. “Sure,” he said.

  “I mean, you really have a crush on somebody else named Cynthia, who isn’t your family member but in some other difficult situation, some other social and cultural context, right?”

  “Well, sort of,” he said. “It’s like that book you’re reading there. When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother . If you can’t be friends, maybe—”

  “Mimi gave me this book,” I said, pulling my hands away from it like it might have rabies. “She was saying something similar about it.”

  “My mother Mimi?”

  “Yes.”

  “She lets you call her that?”

  “She asked me to call her that. What’s wrong with that? Cyn and I are—”

  “It’s just strange. She’s always hated her name. She hates to hear it. She’s always regretted being named something even a little unusual. She says it’s easier to go through life with the simplest, most invisible thing that people can call you. She always said she hoped I’d forgive her for naming me something unusual.”

  “Steven isn’t unusual,” I said.

  “It’s Stephen,” he said. “With a P-H.”

  “Stephen?”

  Stephen smiled. “As in phony.”

  The horizon shifted, in front of my eyes, like a set being lifted to reveal a bare stage where anything can happen next. I knew nothing. I’d been living in a house for more than half a summer and around me the molecules were shifting to an S-house, an S-half of an S-summer. My assumptions were no longer viable. I was as far from knowing what was going on as the soon-to-be-rejected suitor in one of Mozart’s little marriage operas, lollygagging around with gay little vocalizations before the entrance of the fickle woman. I muttered something and left Stephen at the table, stumbled into the bathroom where the last chords of the act reverberate in the tiny, stained tiles. “Your’re stupid,” said a graffito in the last stall, and I didn’t have any idea whether the misspelling was an accident or on purpose, some scientific joke. Maybe everything was a scientific joke. Maybe everything was my dirty mind, stained like old porcelain and held in my panicked, sweaty hands, encased in my thick skull. As in the changing rooms back at Camp Shalom I felt the ghosts of masturbation around me, the sudden erections of high-school boys throwing their lab coats open and their shorts down to beat around the bush, their S-sisters moaning in the meters of their minds. But I didn’t know if that was real. It could be hypothetical. It could be nothing, nothing but
my own dirty mind and the erection I found, born of it, when my hands stopped clutching my brain and moved lower. Your’re stupid, I thought to myself, panting from panic and imagination, my hands moving to lower my shorts, dipping and sagging over my skin like a slow curtain.

  [The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

  The Board of Directors raised eyebrows to the rafters that spring when they announced that the Pittsburgh Summer Opera Season would consist entirely of anti-semitic operas. The Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts, it was said at the press conference held the first day Cyn and I sixty-nined, was the first American opera company to host such a season, perhaps the first opera company in the entire non-fascist world.

  This assertion wasn’t strictly true. Just before I embarked upon this terrifying and sexy summer, a senior at Mather College was pounding out a thesis for his degree in anthropology which studied a small high-minded group of bigots who stopped patronizing the opera, ballet and symphony in Jackson, Mississippi, because they felt the aesthetic morals were getting soft on Communism, Catholicism and interracial marriage. This was back in maybe 1950. Withdrawing all donations, these fine upstanding folk formed the Concerned League of Art and Nature and it doesn’t take a Talmudic scholar to figure out that’s C-L-A-N. Clan like Ku Klux except with a C because these folks thought it was more subtle that way. They also thought it was more subtle to put on one season of original operas, music and theatrical presentations with titles like Symphony of the Nigger Problem and The Interbreeding Daughter. They put them on in a church with costumes sewn by the wives/sopranos.

  The Mather senior, like all Mather seniors, was given a special carrel in Wigglesworth Library—everyone called it The Wig—in which to analyze this sour little sip from the melting pot. Every night he’d go to the carrel and work on the thesis for a couple of hours, then let his printer spew the draft as he went out, leaned against the brass statue of Michael Wigglesworth and smoked cigarettes with other the-sisers. When there were two more butts at the feet of the Puritan he’d go back and proofread. Then he’d type his mistakes back into the little screens that made the corridor of carrels an eerie aquarium blue. And then, before he left, he’d rip the draft in half and stack the little half-sheets of paper next to the pay phones, so people could jot down numbers on the back of “Cornel East said in his Matters of Race [check this!] that the Klan’s interest in gaining credibility through the annals of high culture is an interesting contrast to more earthy forms of self-recognition in urban black communities, such as [find out what that album is that Andrew listens to].”

  If you were breathing heavily in the little telephone cubicle, if you were exhaling in strict time, if you were panting on the phone, these little draft fragments would curl up and skim around like leaves in a breeze. The blank side would flicker with the typed side. You wouldn’t think that you could read it, there as it flickered. You wouldn’t think enough of it could catch your eye, and you wouldn’t think there was room for it in your head, because most of your brain would be consumed by the voice on the phone. Cyn was telling me everything she would do to me if I came to her room right then, instead of writing my paper. She thought I was in the main lobby of The Wig, where a row of pay phones was always busy; she thought she was exciting me somewhere where I had to play it cool. I let her think that, let her excite herself exciting me. But I didn’t have to play it cool. The aquarium was closed—the anthros must have been out smoking near the statue of Michael Wigglesworth in front of the library—so I could listen to her with my legs spread, touching myself through a pair of denim shorts I’d wear constantly when Cyn and I worked together at Camp Shalom in Pittsburgh a month later. I could listen to her as the half-sheets of someone’s thesis draft, thoughtfully stacked for jotting down phone numbers, curled and drifted with my own sharp breath. It was occuring to me, as my breath grew sharper, that I could go to my flaky professor Ted Steele and get an incomplete. I wouldn’t have to write the paper until later, so right now I could walk across the heaving late-May lawns of Mather and have Cyn make good on her promises. You wouldn’t think that you could think all this and still read a few stray paragraphs of an anthropology thesis with any comprehension, or that you’d forget all about it as you hung up the phone, already incomplete, and lurched across campus with your erection tugging at you impatiently.

  But you would be wrong, because I remembered it. By July the city was papered in advertisements showing a caricatured Jewish face—an old man with a large puffy nose and narrow slitted eyes—captioned KNOW YOUR ENEMY. When Stan told me that Pittsburgh was the first American opera company to host such a season a bell inside my head went bing, bing, bing. I remembered something about Jackson, something about an interbreeding daughter. But I didn’t say anything, because it wouldn’t hold any water. Nobody remembers something they read on the back of a half-sheet of scrap paper while having phone sex in a library named after one of America’s earliest poets, Michael Wigglesworth. It sounds like you’re making it up. It sounds like you spent too much time at the Benedrum Center for the Performing Arts and the season’s opera plots seeped into your dirty mind, particularly when the operas are things like Die Juden, where the Aryan daughter is seduced by Pinchas, a dashing Jewish boy, marries him despite her father’s pleas, suspects him of having another lover and in Act IV discovers him in the arms of his yenta-soprano mother and stabs him repeatedly, killing him as violently as possible. Everybody dies. Or like Rachel and the Rabbi, where the conniving Rabbi Ben convinces Rachel to refuse the handsome tenor suitor, not because he’s Christian but because Ben wants her for himself. You could make something up out of that. Your dirty mind could make something true. Or like Alma, where the daughter of the Grand Inquisitor is kidnapped by not one but two rabbis only to be rescued by the Spanish Army, angry, cross-wielding and singing in Italian. The opera company put them on, of course, for irony. Not like Jackson at all. They put them on so people would be aware that anti-semitic operas were in fact composed as late as 1965 (the experimental Lox!, performed on a smaller stage).

  They didn’t put them on because they were true. They didn’t put them on because these stories were true stories, not at all. If you thought they were true, then there was probably something wrong with you, not with the lovely family who took you in all summer long, the generous doctor, the propsmistress who let you call her by her first name even though you were still in college and she didn’t even like her first name, the brother who didn’t want to discuss anything like that, but wanted to discuss something else, something perfectly innocent, or maybe never invited you to lunch at all. You could have made that up, too—as if the Physics Department would have its own special cafeteria, as if they’d make scientific geniuses eat in a windowless room at the height of summer. You couldn’t tell anybody these stories—they’d think you were making them up. The Golem was the flagship of the summer season, and everybody knows that’s not a true story—a good Christian woman who marries a Jew in an act of self-hatred, changing everything about herself, changing her name to suit him, while meanwhile he is secretly building a horrible monster. Spurned by Christian society—“We spurn you!” the choral number goes—she struggles to escape her husband’s clutches with the help of a sympathetic priest. Enraged, the husband arouses his long-awaited golem as the leitmotif noted in criticism as “The Unknown Dread,” abbreviated T.U.D., reaches a thunderous volume. A towering figure of clay destroys the soprano whom the Jew calls “The Loose Woman”—everybody knows that’s not a true story. Everybody knows a story couldn’t end that way no matter how dirty your mind is, and not to dismiss the subject as easily as all that but the audience must get back to its seats for the third act.

  Act III, scene one

  It’s exhausting to think about, but if you drive around a neighborhood—try it yourself, but first put some decent clothes on so nobody will think you’re a child molester looking for the one child in America who hasn�
��t been told never to get into a stranger’s car, and best of luck to you—in every house there’s a family of people remembering clearly and obsessively what the other people have said and forgotten. You’ll show a fingerpainting to your father, and he’ll say, “That’s nice. Go wash up for dinner,” and your hopes of becoming an artist will join your daily grime in the drain, despite the hundreds of other fingerpaintings he’s celebrated in minute detail, magneted to the galley of the refrigerator. Your mother will let something carelessly slide about your sister which will become a Doric column in your mind, the central piece in the Temple of Sibling Opinion. “I hate olives,” your brother will say once, and you’ll never give him any even though he loves them, he just hated that one. “My daughter is attractive,” somebody will say, and they won’t mean it one-tenth as much as you do. There in the dining room behind the fancy-paned glass and those stickers touting an advanced burglar alarm system, families are investigative reporters. They write down their favorite things and quote them, out of context, all childhood long and through all the dinner parties of adulthood: at college gatherings with cheap red wine and stir-fries, over the exquisite grilled fish of early marriage, then with the carpools all I had time to do was throw together this casserole, hope you like it, and mixed into the pureed peas of the home where you sit on the porch and stare moodily at the shuffleboard courts. Drive around the neighborhood, you dirty old man—Frost Road, Hemingway Way, Byron Circle—and see the houses quivering as the wrong words stick. The fire-tools shiver in their little jars. The lid of the wooden box from Indonesia rattles at the corners. The plastic slipcover on the flowered couch crackles as Rabbi Tsouris (basso profundo) settles on it. I’m sorry: cue music, it should have been going already.