Thirteen Phantasms

by James P. Blaylock

  It struck him suddenly that oysters were reputed aphrodisiacs, too. He was literally covered with sexual stimulants. He was swimming in them, eating them, studying them. He popped the creature into his mouth and let it slither down his throat, then reached immediately for his glass, which was empty. There was a lid over one of the dishes on the tray—probably the tofu stuff. He wondered if there was one of the oddball mushrooms inside, still whole, and draped across the top of the whole mess. He wouldn’t be able to bear it. “Wine?” he asked, pouring it into their glasses.

  “To us,” she said, holding her glass aloft. He clinked the glasses together and drank, bolting another oyster and then drinking again. Conversation dwindled. “Run a little more hot,” Nona said. She sighed complacently and sank deeper into the aromatic water.

  He edged forward, turning on the hot water tap floating herbs swirled past, forced toward Nona’s end of the tub. He pushed farther forward, up against the board, partly dislodging the Fitzall-Sizes plug beneath him. There was a murmur of slowly draining water, and it occurred to him that the plumbing would quite likely suffer for their extravagant bath. He edged the plug this way and that way until the murmuring stopped, and then shut off the tap before his rear end was parboiled. He felt a certain relief, as if he had completed a nice piece of work, and done it well. The wine was giving him a sense of proportion, of satisfaction, and the steamy bath was relaxing him into a pleasant sort of pudding. “I love the taste of these,” he said. “Like pier pilings.”

  She gave him a look.

  “No, I’m serious. Like the ocean—salty and cold. It’s what people ought to mean when they talk about ‘natural food.’ What’s under the dome?”

  “Herbed chicken, baked with raisins and almonds. Middle Eastern dish.”

  “Mmm. Sounds all right. More wine?”

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  He poured more for himself, realizing that very soon he would have to answer for it—not with drunkenness, but with a trip downstairs to the second bathroom. Right now it was out of the question. Nona’s foot shifted, running up along the inside of his leg. She was looking at him. He looked back and wiggled his toes against her flanks, meaning to be seductive but making a poor job of it.

  “We’re too damned rushed all the time,” she said. “That can’t be healthy. It ties us up in knots.”

  “This is untying me,” he said truthfully.

  “Is it?” She brightened. “Good. It was supposed to. The idea is to manufacture a total sensory bath. Not just the tub, but the herbs, the music, the food. All the senses massaged. It’s the idea of the wholeness of true relaxation.”

  “Wholeness.” That was one of the modern words, one of the sort he couldn’t stand.

  “Could you save the smarmy look for some other time?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t looking smarmy. I meant to agree with you. I haven’t been this relaxed in weeks. I just don’t. … Sometimes it spoils things to talk about them, that’s all.”

  She would like that; he was being open and honest.

  “How will we get to the bottom of things if we don’t talk about them?” she asked. “Bottling them up won’t help. You bottle too much up.” He was silent. “I don’t mean to get on your case. I’m offering this in the way of constructive criticism. No, that’s the wrong word. It isn’t criticism at all. But you’re bottling right now, aren’t you?”

  “Bottling,” he said. “I like that better than wholeness. It’s not sanctioned jargon though, is it? It can’t be. It’s too good a word. Bottling. Bottle, bottle, bottle. Sounds like the name of a shabby moron in a Dickens novel.”

  After a moment he said, “Now what? I was just being silly. It was a compliment, really.” She said nothing. “Now who’s bottling?” he asked.

  Her face had a distant, saddened look on it, the look of a mother who’d just got evidence that her favorite son had been arrested breaking into a house. He picked up the wine, even though their glasses weren’t empty. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little beat, that’s all. Bottle?”

  She smiled. “Just a little,” she said.

  He filled her glass then filled his own, leaving a couple of inches of wine in the bottom of the bottle. He didn’t like the idea of empty bottles. There was something finished and sad seeming about them, the notion, perhaps, that the party had ended. “I’m wondering about that chicken,” he said.

  “What are you wondering?”

  “Whether it was stewed in the same herbs we’re stewing in.”

  She pulled the dome off, and there the thing sat, sprinkled with sweet-smelling herbs and ground spices. Spilling out of it were nuts and raisins. The whole thing had been cut into pieces and then reassembled. Nona could cook; he would admit that freely.

  He ran more hot water while Nona dished chicken, spooning the tofu mix onto the side of the plate. He took the whole mess from her and instantly forked up a slice of the suggestive mushroom. There was no room here for half measures. He had to tear into the loathsome heart of the dish to get over his antipathy to it. Who was that Watergate conspirator who had eaten rats to overcome his fear of the creatures? He loved politics and politicians when they carried on like that. It was fun to imagine what sorts of things they got into when they were alone—eating rats, dressing in their wives’ clothes, plotting to wreck the leaf blower in their neighbor’s garage. The rat-eating man was considered a sort of paragon now. His rat nonsense was reminiscent of Clyde and Moe, except that Ted’s own methods tended to civilize people and bugs both; the rat-eating approach was a reversion to savagery.

  “Like the mushrooms?” Nona asked.

  “Yes,” he lied. “Are these the … you know—dick mushrooms?” He smiled at her.

  She put her fork down and stared at him.

  “You know, the phallic things. The picture in the magazine. Where do you buy a thing like that?”

  “Ranch market. They aren’t cheap, either.”

  “Well you’ve got to admit what they look like. I didn’t make that up, did I?”

  She rolled her eyes at him comically. What he said must have been okay—maybe because it was overtly sexual. Sexual banter was good, even if it stemmed from mushrooms. Stems, phalluses—he struggled to turn the words into something clever. He gave it up and wiggled his toes against her again, giving her what he hoped was a tantalizing look, the look of a man worked over by aphrodisiac mushrooms.

  She smiled back at him and leaned forward, running her hand up his leg, and suddenly the whole idea of the bath, of Nona lounging there in the heated water, shifted and settled in, moving down out of his head and into his midsection. She paused long enough to find her wineglass on the floor, and he shifted pleasurably beneath the plywood, knocking the edge of it with his knee. A chicken leg plopped off the plate into the bathwater, an oil slick blossoming around it like a ring around the moon.

  Surreptitiously he palmed it and buried it under his thigh. Nona wouldn’t see it there. When she was involved with something else he would drop it over the side. He wouldn’t let her know it was in the water, though; that much was certain. Not after the apple core. And there was something about oily, cooked chicken in the bathwater that would spoil the romance of the whole endeavor.

  Nona bent across the plywood, shoving up against it, sliding toward him. He bent across too, to kiss her. The sight of her breasts lying heavily on the board next to the remains of the food nearly drove him wild. He breathed hard, unable to do anything with his hands above the water except to paw her shoulders. Their dinner table had lost its usefulness. He grappled it out of the way, lifting it up and across, plates and dishes and all, laying it on the bath mat. The chicken tumbled off its plate and onto the floor tiles, but it didn’t matter.

  The water in the tub was almost opaque—dyed a pale red-green from the herbs, many of which had gotten soggy and sunk to the bottom. As the two of them moved around in the tub, squeaking into impossible positions, flower petals rose off the bottom, swirled to the t
op, and sank again. Nona slid her fingers along his leg, and he sank backward, cursing the faucet under his breath when it gouged him between the shoulder blades. She looked at him almost lizardlike, from under her lashes, seeming to imply that his little libido problem had been blown to smithereens, and that it had been her doing. He could be clever if he chose. He could make jokes. But being a mere man, full of animal passions, he would fall, if only a woman knew where to push.

  She stopped. Her piano-playing fingers were still.

  He half-sat up, starting to speak, abruptly horrified. She shoved against his chest with her left hand, shaking her head slowly, mouth half-open, her hand tugging softly at the chicken leg. He could feel it moving under his thigh. He flexed the muscle in his leg, pinning it there. What kind of horrible joke would she think he meant by it? What kind of psychotic …

  She gave it a good yank, nearly going over backward—not with the force of the pull but with the shock of the gristly skin having come off in her hand. She jerked it up out of the water, gaping at it and throwing it at the same moment, rising half-out of the tub like a dripping Venus. She was incapable of speech, but her face was easy enough to read. This was like the apple core in the bathtub, only a million times worse. He tried to stand up himself to reason with her. But the act was beyond reason. Any further attempts at playing the dutiful, lustful husband were useless, a filthy charade. He waved the chicken leg bone, trying to think of something funny to say, trying to smile, but realizing at the same time that a smile would cement things in the worst way. He ditched the chicken bone in the water again.

  “Honestly,” he said, thinking that he’d heard himself say that more than once tonight. “I didn’t mean. … It was working, damn it!”

  “What was working? I don’t know what you had in mind—a childish joke or something worse. But it’s ruined now. The evening is ruined. Shut up for once. Don’t tell me what you meant. Not now.”

  Then she was gone along with her bathrobe. He sat silently until the bathwater cooled down; then he got out and toweled off, trying to rub the stuck-on herbs away. He picked the chicken up off the tiles and then drained the bath until it clogged, cleaned out the mess of stuff that had jammed up the drain, and so on until the tub was empty. Then he sponged it out, piled up the dishes, ice bucket, and bottle and took the whole mess downstairs.

  For fifteen minutes he lay on the couch, with dark unfocused thoughts washing through his mind in the usual pattern. First he cursed the whole notion of dinner in the bathtub, of advice out of magazines, of unnatural mushrooms, of Nona’s not giving him a chance to explain himself. He’d been misunderstood. She had jumped to conclusions, which was just like her.

  Soon all of that faded. It occurred to him that senseless or not, her recipe had very nearly worked. It had worked. And it wasn’t so long out of his mind that he’d cooled off. Just thinking about it now was enough to fire him up. There must be something he could do to set things right. An apology was the first thing.

  He tiptoed upstairs. She lay sleeping, completely relaxed. He stood still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the semidarkness. It was warm in the bedroom, and she was half out of the covers. Her breasts pushed at the thin fabric of her nightgown as she breathed, and he found himself sorting shadows from flesh, not thinking, filled with loss and desire.

  She deserved more than that. She deserved more than him abandoning her and then staggering upstairs an hour later in order to paw her when what she wanted to do was sleep. He’d had his chance, and had screwed up.

  He turned around and went quietly back downstairs, drifting into the kitchen. He passed the flower arrangement on the table. The flowers were fresh and smelled wonderful. Nona had probably loved them, and him for sending them. It was the sort of thing husbands and lovers did. He hadn’t given her much of a chance to say so, though.

  The moon shone through the window in front of the house. He went out through the door, onto the porch, where the night was still and cool. His hand slipped and the screen door banged shut. He held his breath, listening. Crickets chirped. Two night birds called to each other from the trees across the street. He pulled his bathrobe tight, wishing he had worn his slippers. There was just the hint of a misty chill in the air, and he could smell damp concrete and vegetation.

  A junebug thumped against the screen door, almost next to his ear, and he ducked away in surprise. It lay there on the ground, next to the welcome mat, kicking its spindly little legs and revolving topsy-turvy on its back. He expected it to fly off, but it didn’t, and he found himself thinking up and discarding names for it and wondering what kind of a creature it was that waited for good weather in order to fling itself futilely at window screens.

  He knelt next to it. The beast made a frightful buzz, trying to scare him off, maybe. He poked at it with his index finger, and it grabbed his fingertip and clung there, quieting itself, seeming to sense that it was in a safe harbor at last. He picked it up and turned his hand over, and it crawled a couple of paces up toward his knuckle, holding on. He wondered idly what he’d do with the thing.

  “What’s happening, Lyle?” he asked it, thinking up the name on the spot. The bug wouldn’t speak to him. “Do you need a house?” he said. “Someplace to live?” He looked around for an empty flowerpot.

  The porch light blinked on just then, dim and yellow. Nona stood behind the screen. She was rumpled from sleep and she looked curiously at him standing there in his bare feet, apparently talking to a bug. The silent night lay like an ocean between them, as if each of them spoke in a tongue that the other couldn’t begin to understand.

  Perhaps because she mistook his silence for sullenness, she turned around and walked away toward the stairs, and he was left alone, holding the junebug, for which he had found it so easy to feel compassion.

  “Wait!” he shouted. He wouldn’t let her get away, not this time. He flicked his finger toward the lawn, and the bug flew off dizzily into the night. He hurried across the living room to where Nona waited for him at the foot of the stairs, holding the basket of purple flowers.

  Nets of Silver and Gold

  My wife and I were traveling along the Normandy coast when we met John Kendal in St. Malo. It was in a hotel café—the name of the place escapes me. He sat before a tremendous plate of periwinkles, all heaped into a little seashell monument. With a long needle he poked at the things, removing the gray lump inside each and piling it neatly on the opposite side of the plate. He worked at it for the space of half an hour, and in that time I had no idea it was my old childhood friend Kendal who sat there.

  So intent and delicate were his movements that he gave the impression of someone suspicious that one of the periwinkles held a tremendous pearl, which would, at any moment, come rolling out of the mouth of a dark little shell on his plate.

  It wasn’t until he paused for a moment to sip his wine that I looked at his face and knew who he was. People change a great deal over the years, but Kendal, somehow, hadn’t. His hair was longer and wilder, and he was twenty years older than I remembered him, but that’s all. His antics with the periwinkles made perfect sense.

  Seeing him there laboring over the shells reminded me of our first meeting, forty years earlier when we were both boys. On the day after I’d moved into the neighborhood I came across him lying on the street, peering down through one of the nickel-sized holes in an iron manhole cover, watching the rippling water that ran along below the street and reflected a long cylinder of sunlight that shone through the opposite hole. He told me right off that he did most of his water gazing on partly cloudy and windy days when the passing shadows would suddenly darken and obscure the water below and he could see nothing at all. He’d wait there, gazing down into utter darkness, until without any warning the clouds would pass and the diamond glint of sunlight would reappear, sparkling on the running water.

  It was all a very romantic notion, and I took to practicing the art myself, although not nearly as often as did Kendal, and always vaguely
fearful that I’d be run down in the road by a passing car. He had no such fears. The sunlit waters implied vague and wonderful promise to him that I sometimes felt but never fully understood.

  And here he was eating periwinkles in St. Malo. He was living there. I haven’t any idea how he paid his rent or bought his periwinkles and wine. It didn’t seem to matter. Nor did it surprise him that we’d met by wild coincidence, twenty years and six thousand miles distant from our last meeting in California. We hadn’t even communicated in the intervening years.

  As we sat into the evening and talked, I was struck by the idea that he’d become eccentric. Then it occurred to me that he’d been eccentric at eight years old when he’d spent his free time peering through manhole covers. What he’d become, I can’t for the life of me say. My wife, who sees things more clearly than I do, understood immediately, even as she watched him manipulate his periwinkles, that he was slightly off center. Not the sort who goes raging about the streets with an axe, but the sort who doesn’t even acknowledge the street, who looks right through it, who inhabits some distant shifting world.

  That isn’t to say that my wife disliked him. He won her sympathies at once by carrying on about the sunsets at St. Malo, sunsets which, for two days running, we had missed because I hadn’t had the energy to walk from the railway hotel to the old city. He could see them, he said, from his window, which overlooked the sea wall and the scores of rocky little islands and light towers that stretched out into the ocean along the coast there. It was spectacular, the sun sinking like a ball of wet fire into a sea turned orange. It seemed to set purely for the amusement of the city of St. Malo. He had the notion that if he could find just the right sort of rowboat—the wooden shoe of Winken, Blinken, and Nod or the pea-green boat of the Owl and the Pussycat—he could catch the sun as it set and follow it into the depths of the sea.