Viz. Bonnie laughs only with; Carlina was so conceived and constituted as to laugh only at.
E.g. Representative Laughter-Scenario: B. F. Tagus:
Envision dinner party—B. F. Tagus filling her self-imposed quota of one family anecdote that will ‘tickle’ our guests: “And Joshua gets his piece of pie from the waiter, and his eyes are getting bigger and bigger’ (uncanny imitation here) ‘he looks at it, and he says to me, he whispers when the waiter’s left he says Momma, why Momma there’s ice cream on this pie, and I say but Joshua, the waiter asked you if you wanted your pie a la mode honey and you said yes; and Joshua looks at me he’s about to cry almost the poor love and he says A la mode? Momma I thought he said pie all alone. Is… what… he… thought… he…’ (hand to mouth, eyes frighteningly wide, unaffected, shoulders moving up and down in sync, laughter full of love, good will, etc.).
Vs. Representative Laughter-Scenario: C. R-Cruz:
‘Len, Len, what is different between beer nuts and deer nuts. I hear this in a club on the Loop’ (The Loooop.) ‘Beer nuts are fifty cents and yet deer nuts are just under a… buck!’ (Becoming here crumpled, other, helpless in the grip of the nasty (grip of the nasty).)
Not to mention an utterly deadly accent, a fellation of each syllable through the auto-lubricated portal that is at once a deep garden and a tall jagged city. A planet.
‘OH LENITO I WILL EEET YOU!’
(Congress, by the way, has revealed itself here to be a loud and exquisitely goy affair—cries from Carlina and accessory of a desperation only partly channeled; mad twined scrabble of a search for something key hidden at a system of bodies’ center.)
And so ungodly precise about it all:
‘Len, Len, how many of the girls known as Jewish American Princesses are needed for the screwing in of a light bulb?’
‘Princesses?’
‘Answer is two of them I heard. One to call a Daddy and one to buy the Tab!’ contorting into wherever she sits. (Wicked. There is a wickedness in the corners here, and it is good. see below. (though I must say I found that particular joke offensive.))
Further,
MIKEY AND LOUIS
“So what’s the point of even calling him, then?”
“Advice, Tagus. He’s older. He’s been around. He’s been there. He can put the thing in some perspective for you.”
“He’s a pecker in situations like Carlina and me, is the thing. He talks down to me when I let him know I want advice.”
“He saw how you were treating her good and how she was acting like it was going to last.”
“It wasn’t like I wanted it to last forever or anything.”
“Len’s a smart guy, Mikey.”
“It’s just if I’m going to stop sleeping with somebody I want it to be my decision to stop it, is all. Or to at least talk about it first.”
“He’ll understand, probably. You said he met her. He’ll tell you to not sweat it.”
“I really think I’d rather hit somebody.”
“Tagus.”
“Line’s busy anyway.”
“Have a beer. At least it means they’re home.”
“Maybe I should just go ahead and call Carlina.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’m predicting right now he’ll be a pecker about it.”
LEN
I have told the cinnamon girl how I will never be forgiven for this. Never. How by the time you reach a certain history and situation you’re bound up with people, part of a larger thing. How the whole constellation becomes as liquid, and any agitation ripples. She asked me who it was who first said never say never. I told her it must have been someone alone.
She is silk in a bed of mail-order satin. Complete and seamless, an egg of sexual muscle. My motions atop her are dislocated, frantic, my lone interstice a trans-cultural spice of encouragement I smell with my spine. As, inside it, I go, I cry out to a god whose absence I have never felt so keenly.
She wears Catholic medals, a jingle all their own. I have apologized for invoking god’s name at such a moment. She touches my hip. There are no atheists in foxy holes. She laughs into my chest; I feel her eyes’ squeeze.
She is wrong for me.
LABOV
I have arranged Mrs. Tagus’s chair so that she is able to use my wall-telephone on the wall of my kitchen to talk to Lenny, her son, without having to stand—which in her conditions, at a time like this, with family and stomach trouble, standing would not be good. She is on the phone with Lenny. There is much bravery here as Mrs. Tagus listens without crying to things Lenny is saying on the wall-telephone. My heart is going out. I love Mrs. Tagus like a man friend loves a woman friend. She is my last true and old friend in this world except for old Schoenweiss the dentist who is too deaf now to converse about weather with even. As I drink my own tea and I look at Mrs. Tagus in her fine and well made coat and fine old wool dress with some small section of slip showing over heavy dark stockings and then the soft white shoes with the thick rubber soles, for her arches, which fell, her thick eyeglasses for her eyes and still mostly dark hair in color under a beaver hat which it breaks my heart to be remembering her late Arnold Tagus wearing just that hat to Bears football games with me, in the cold of old autumns, I know, inside, I love Mrs. Tagus, who I called Greta to her face while I helped her to the chair I arranged under the wall-telephone and strongly urged her, as a friend I said, to make for the sake of her stomach the telephone call that could maybe clear up some of the total misunderstanding. I am a dry and yellow snarling animal who loves another animal.
There is by my wall-telephone a large and wide section of flowered wallpaper, from the wall of my kitchen, which has been peeling since Jimmy Carter (try talking to my landlord about anything), and it is curving over Mrs. Tagus’s hat and head like a wave of cornflower-blue water, with flowers. I do not like the way it appears to curve over Greta Tagus.
Anger from me at her Lenny, however? This I could not manage even if I could understand quite this trouble which keeps Mrs. Tagus crumpled over her stomach under my telephone. Lenny Tagus is a nice boy. This is a thing I know. I know the Lenny Tagus who put himself through a college, with a doctorate even, and all the time was helping the finances of Arnold and Greta Tagus when Arnold Tagus’s office got bought by State Farm and he got put on commission only, which if you ask anybody is what killed him. The Lenny who would have helped also put Mikey through a college if Mike had not received the scholarship in college football to the Illini of the University of Illinois, but dropped out when it was revealed how he had never learned enough about reading, and went instead to work for the Softball Department of the Chicago Park District, where he is doing a fine and solid job, although anybody could see how winters would be slow, in terms of softball business.
The Lenny Tagus who calls his mother, Mrs. Tagus, twice a week, like my clock, “just to talk,” is the excuse, except really to always let his mother know how she’s loved by him and not forgotten alone in her and Arnold’s quite old cold apartment. Not to mention how Mrs. Tagus, often myself in addition, gets invited into Lenny’s home and family for such a dinner cooked by Bonnie Tagus! Once a month or more. Josh Tagus and Saul Tagus and little Becky Tagus in pajamas with pajama-feet attached, yawning over milk in plastic mugs with cartoons on their sides. Lenny smoothing their fine thin child’s hair and reading to them from Gibran or Novalis under a soft lamp. You know from warmth? There is warmth in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Tagus.
“So I should meet this person?” Mrs. Tagus is questioning under the wave of wallpaper into my phone. “Us and Mike and Bonnie and this person should just sit down and talk like old friends?” She broaches to Lenny the possibility that his mind is maybe temporarily out of order, maybe from stress and tension from middle age. She respectfully mentions just so he’ll know that she can hear Becky, and also it sounds like Bonnie, crying in Lenny’s telephone’s background. She expresses disbelieving shock, plus all-new and severe stomach trouble, at
Lenny’s revealing that a certain girl who was not Bonnie was right there, he said, now, in his and Bonnie’s master bedroom, under a sheet, with Lenny, and that Bonnie: when Lenny last saw her she was in the spray-cleaner closet of the utility room, crying.
The Len Tagus with a crewcut and Bermuda shorts with black socks who mowed the building’s lawns when the super was under the weather from gin, to save the Tagus family a little rent. Who I remember refused to let Mike (Mike is four years younger but at ten even he already had inches and pounds over Lenny, over everybody—Mike may be five years younger, it’s four or five) who would not let Mike fight a fight on his behalf when wicked boys broke Lenny’s French horn and kicked him in the back with shoes as he lay on the ground of the schoolyard and left yellow bruises I can still with my eyes closed see on the back of young Lenny Tagus, who wouldn’t let Mikey know who to fight.
The Lenny who did my wife Mrs. Labov’s shopping for months when God knows he had work of his own and plenty of it to do in school for his degree and doctorate, when Mrs. Labov’s phlebitis got extreme and I had to be at the shop tailoring and the elevator in the building was broken and the landlord, even during Kennedy and Johnson he was trying to get us out, he took criminal time in getting to repairs, and Sandra would give Len a list.
Mrs. Tagus is telling Lenny on the phone to just hold it right there. That she has things to tell him, as a mother. There is the fortitude of the person who carries around stomach trouble every day in her voice’s tone. The cold of my kitchen makes for a pain in my hands and I put them under my arms, under my lined coat, like Arnold Tagus’s old coat, that I made.
LENNY
As I spoke and listened to my mother, envisioning her hand at either her stomach or her eyes, the two physical loci of any of the troubles she gathers to her person and holds like shiny prizes, Mr. Labov doubtless at his black teapot, baggy old pants accumulating at his ankles and sagging to reveal the northern climes of his bottom (god I feel pathos for people whose pants sag to reveal parts of their bottom), envisioning him clucking and casting, from a cloak of tea steam, glances at my mother, at the phone, my mother no doubt leaning for support against the lurid peeling wall of Labov’s prehistoric kitchen; and as I reviewed the letter, undoubtedly couched somewhere on the person of my mother, the letter a doomed exercise in disinformation I could not even finish before sending it from me, rabid with a desire that things be somehow just known, that it be out, the waiting over and trauma-starter’s gun’s sharp crack—
—I found myself raw and palsied with the urge, in mid-conversation—the conversation consisted as usual chiefly of pauses, the wire’s special communication of the sound of distance, electric and lonely—the urge… to explain. To explain. And as I urged my mother to come to my home, to help the edible girl and me extract Bonnie from a darkness of brooms rags and Lysol, and to hash this all out, we five, together—I found rising in my hickied throat the gorged temptation to explain, excuse, exhypothesize, extinguish in and for myself the truth, the flat unattractive and uninteresting truth that came concrete for me via nothing other than a small and shakily faint line written in quick pencil over the southernmost urinal in the men’s room of my office’s floor at University, the line simply
no more mr. nice guy
amid the crude tangle of genitalia that surrounded its eye-level run.…
Instead, in electromagnetic communication with my flesh, amid the sounds of Becky and Bonnie and the burble and chuckle of Carlina’s bare coffee back bent before a bong hidden somewhere on the femininely held side of the Tagus bed; on the phone, instead, I found roiling out of me a torrent of misdirections, like releases of bureaucratic flatus, calculations derived from an ageless child’s axioms about what his mother wishes to hear, arguments twirling off the base clause that Bonnie and I Are Just Not Right For Each Other Any More Mom, that We’ve Grown Apart, with Nothing But The Kids To Hold Us Together, and Is That Fair To Of All People The Kids?
Which mr. nice guy knows is manipulative, empty, and testamentally wicked.
Though there was an episode, too unbeveled to have been a dream, in which one wee-houred morning, last last year, Bonnie and I both half-awoke. In sync. In this bed. Half-awoke, sat up, and looked at each other’s thick outlines in the green glow of the alarm’s digital spears; we looked at each other, first with recognition, then a synchronized shock: looked shocked at these each others and shouted, in unison, ‘WHAT?’ and fell on our pillows and back to a puffy sleep. Compared notes at breakfast and both came away shaken.
This Mom understands, this sort of unified moment’s revelation of separateness; it’s marriage trouble as opposed to person trouble, troughs in the ebbing and flowing sinal flux that attends all long-term life-term emotional intercourse. She says,
‘Every marriage gets its ups and its downs, or else it’s not a marriage. You I need to tell about the years me and your late father?’
Yes Mom.
But, see, also no.
I could respond honestly with the kind of interior paralysis that also attends any sustained intersection of two people’s everyday stuffed-together practical concerns, and how this restricts the breath of a man. The way Bonnie’s conversation condenses each and every evening around issues. The cost of re-covering the love seats in the family room. The quality of market x’s cut of meat y. The persistent and mysterious psoriatic rash on Josh’s penis that is causing him to scratch in a way that simply cannot go on.
Vs. this partner, who is in best and worst ways still a child: either sulking, overcome, silent, screaming Yes (Sí! Yes! [God!]); or offering on her Sears sofa, to a tie-loosened teacher pummeled into catatonia by the day’s round with the near-Soviet bureaucracy that is this university’s German Department, offering to me a cool twittered river of such irrelevant and so priceless insights as ‘I hate my hair today; I hate it’ (how can one hate one’s hair?); or ‘I notice on the television last night that the nose of Karl Malden resemble the scrotum of a man, no?’ (Yes); or ‘Fahck you man is not funny I get my period in my god damn pair of white jeans at the right there checkout line at Jewel’; or ‘Will Mike beat you when he finds out’ (were it only that simple); or ‘I never love anybody ever’; ‘You want me to feel sorry for your wife who you don’t love anymore’ (were it only).
Yes Mrs. Tagus weary of navigation, exigency, routineschmerz, mid-life angst rendered. A unit of cinnamon milk, on fire with love for no one ever, vs. exhaustively tested loyalty, hard-headed realism, compassion, momentum, a woman the color and odor of Noxzema for all time.
Vs. vs. vs. : the reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
Because I just tire of being well. Of being good. Maybe I’m just tired of not knowing where in me the millennial expectations of a constellation leave off, where my own will hangs its beaver hat. I wish a little well-hung corner. I wish to be willful. I will it. It is not one bit more complicated than no more mr. n. g.
That’s no more mr. l. s.
Then no more bullshit, if I can send even myself only halves.
If only Bonnie’d stop scratching at the closet door.
LABOV
“A good boy Lenny,” Mrs. Tagus says truthfully to my phone. “You’re a good man, and we love you, Bonnie and Mikey and I. Even Mr. Labov,” she looks my way and the bravery which has held on so long in Mrs. Tagus’s case gives up, and Mrs. Tagus weeps, weeping like you can imagine whole nations weeping, and I turn away, for respect. I put my aching hands with arthritis under my arms in my coat and look across the fire escape across the courtyard of my building at the window my window faces, which has a shade down which has never recently come up. The shade has been down since the Viet Nam era and I do not know who lives in the apartment. I notice how there’s no more talking and Mrs. Tagus behind me has hung the wall-telephone up on the wall by the piece of wallpaper that curves. She is weeping like a nation, her eyes squeezed tightly from the pain of such stomach trouble I don’t even want to imagi
ne. I go to Mrs. Tagus.
MIKEY AND LOUIS
“Mikey, all I said is where, is all I said.”
“.…”
“If I get grabbed and I have to go somewhere in such a hurry I like to know where I’m goin’, is all.”
“.…”
“You won’t say where you’re going, you can at least tell me why that brake light on the dash stays on all the time like that.”
“The brake light?”
“In the dash here. Long as I can remember that thing never goes off. You got brake trouble, I can give you some names of places.”
“It’s a thing in the dash’s guts. It’s the connection. It never goes out. Ever since I got it. It’s kind of like an eternal flame to me by now.”
“Never goes out?”
“And it ain’t the brakes, either.”
“That’d probably give me the creeps a little bit.”
“I don’t know. I think I like it. I think I think it’s reassuring a little, somehow.”
LEN
Though even the novice alone can see quickly that a life conducted, temporarily or no, as a simple renunciation of value becomes at best something occluded and at worst something empty: a life of waiting for the will-be-never. Sitting in passive acceptance of (not judgment on) the happening and ending of things.
I will wait for the arrival of those whose orbits I’ve decayed. I will wait through the publicness of the thing—the collective countenance, the conferring, recriminating, protestations of loyalty, betrayal, consequence. And then that too will end. The hurt will take the harmed away. My constellation will be outside my ken.
Girl With Curious Hair Page 22
