Simon holds Melissa Castellanos in his arms for the last time.
He watches her sleep. She snores with heartbreaking delicacy.
Melissa is Simon’s favorite of all the Penelope St. girls. And has been for well on a year. He has enjoyed her in all four seasons. And now she will leave him.
Returning home, to some place where she is no longer an invisible commodity. Where she will be a citizen and not a whore.
Even Simon, for all his swaggering bluff virility, even he can never bring himself to call her that, to think of her that way. Though Melissa does, and too often to allow Simon the luxury of lying to himself that her apparent lack of bitterness, of irony, transmutes to anything even the hardiest reader-between-the-lines might construe as amusing, charming, touching.
Melissa is naked, except for Simon’s violet sunglasses and a pair of men’s bedroom slippers, bound round her small ankles with rubber bands to prevent their sliding off.
The poverty of Melissa’s room remains an eloquent design. Her narrow bed, like some great Egyptian scroll. Where Melissa and Simon, in all four seasons, have composed so many paragraphs in a script destined to fade. Paragraphs the content of which memory, as always, has already begun to conflate, to blur. Leaping the Eiffel Tower and landing at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun.
In the next room, separated by the thinnest membrane of slumside walls, Melissa’s neighbor has finally stopped crying. A half an hour earlier, while Simon and Melissa made love, they could have heard, had they chosen, the sound of some motormouth bagman beating up the hapless runaway, who’d had the temerity to ask to be released from her contract. The drudge of normal tragedy is now re-imposed.
A tea kettle hums, rattles, wails and is silenced.
A record player scratches into soft life.
Simon has come to learn it note for note. The rising roar of the hyperthrong, admiring lynchmob. And the lisped authoritarian voice:
-This isn’t rock and roll. This is genocide!
Simon nuzzles Melissa’s shoulder with his wet beard. He licks her armpit. Taste of onion, and sweat, and deodorant. His fingers move over the cool curves of her body, a body whose feel he would recognize even if struck blind.
-This is the only love that matters, Simon whispers into the sleeping girl’s ear.
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There are times, for Peter, when the streets seem studded with swimmers, dancers, bodies toned to a perfection which no earthly passion can hope to redeem or transcend. It had taken Mimi’s betrayal to bring him to his senses. To restore himself to physical, superficial grace. To quit drinking. And realize that he was bereft of everything but a tepid self-righteousness and the less-than-comforting achievement of having ‘pulled through’. Hollow man, as intact as emptiness allows.
Peter keeps pace with the chartreuse-chevelured punkette. A plain, even pretty child, whose made herself hideous in a bid to be popular with the vanity of fifteen year old trust-fund outcasts. Equally disfigured. And at a pretty penny for their angst-sopped pains. Her Walkman is turned up so loud that Peter can decipher the lyrical banalities at a good fifteen feet.
-Blindsided by love … goodness knows what I was thinking of … blindsided by love … I was looking down when it hit me from above …
Peter shadows Punkette. As Punkette, all-unknowingly, shadows Fiona, less than half a block up ahead. Peter assiduously avoids catching his reflection in the shop windows as they pass. He has made his choice. An amputation of options. Possibilities ruled ruthless out. Obsession hoists Revelation up the startled *!*
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Emma Glass sprawls nude upon her bed, amidst a squadron of stuffed animals, a half-dozen back issues of ‘Soldier of Fortune’ magazine.
She is a successful, dissatisfied woman. Which is as it should be. She has hitched her rickshaw to Jocko Pitt’s brill and Loki-like rep. For all his kinks, the perfect partner. Three months more and the promotion will be hers. And Jocko? A treat for the wolves in Internal Affairs. Emma aspires to the glass ceiling, where diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
On the radio Mendelssohn diddles the plangent minor ivories of his shrewd-eyed sister.
Emma rolls over on her stomach, soothes her burning face in Pyotr the Panda Bear’s plush thighs and insinuates her hand between her legs.
Jocko’s world is a permanent gray, his brief forays into faded pastel a mere tubercular flush. Emma panels her own world with black, red, gold, and the darkest of ministerial greens. Against such phaedrean nuance Emma’s nakedness is a lush godivan heartbeat, vulnerable only in the mind of the fool who might think he could take her, have her.
-Fuck me, Emma moans.
Pyotr’s fireproof fur is dewdropped and moist with kissing.
Emma’s equestrian backside has a hummed and moonlit life of its own, humping her straining, familiar fingers.
Blue eyes burn.
In the dresser mirror that oversees the bed, blue eyes watch unblinking.
Emma in pain is very beautiful.
-Yes, she whimpers, and it’s almost a question.
She arches. Thrusts. Trembles. Opens.
Emma tiptaps as though she were all alone.
In the mirror blue eyes purr and blaze.
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Centipede watches Churl sleeping.
Starlight pours in through the shattered window.
His body is frail, famished-looking.
Almost feminine.
But not quite.
There’s nothing androgynous about her brother’s silhouette.
It is as she remembers it.
In a state of Judgment Day arousal.
Churl sighs and opens his eyes.
Starlight cools to blue.
-Ah, he says, you’ve come back to me.
He seems not in the least surprised to find her here.
-Yes, dear, Centipede replies.
-Five years? Churl asks.
-Five years, yes. Were we nearing the limit?
-I’d wait five years more. And five years after that.
Centipede smiles.
Churl sits up.
The eye of his softening penis seems to wink at her.
-What are you calling yourself these days, Anisette? Churl asks.
Anisette pauses, gives profile to the paused moment.
-‘Centipede’!’ she guffaws.
Churl’s mouth frowns in purse but his eyes are a knowing lascivious twinkle.
-Then I shall call you … Anisette.
It is Churl’s turn to pause.
He shivers, shakes free of some weight, some memory.
He strokes himself, his head tilting as he speaks again.
-Show me?
Anisette takes a step closer to the foot of the bed.
Anisette lifts her skirt.
To just below her breasts.
Churl narrows his eyes upon the depilated and light-swollen mound.
A dark vertical pencil-stroke proclaims the beginning of her slit.
Crowned with the pearl her lips hide.
Around her navel the ourouboros tattoo.
Green and purple, stippled on the gold of her belly, lilac veins skinned like a sonatine of infection.
Churl crawls across the bed.
He kneels at the edge, his hands reaching for Anisette’s hips.
He draws her to him.
The tip of his tongue delves the ‘O’ of the caudalingual serpent.
Anisette lets her skirt flutter down, covering Churl’s head.
She rests her fingers on his shoulder blades.
His voice is a necessary nuzzle.
-Shall you strip, Anisette?
Anisette unclips the clasp at her waist.
The black skirt slips to the floor.
Her feet are tiny, milkwhite as they dainty free.
Churl’s mouth lifts from her skin.
She turns her back on him.
His fingers move in and out of light, guided by a nurse’s touch, delicate as lust.
Knot by rubber knot Churl unpicks the cool strangle of the corset.
Anisette stretches her arms at downwards right angles.
The corset tumbles loose and Anisette’s starlit nudity trembles, limps, and visibly sags.
Churl’s lips barely graze the base of her spine.
A sob foxes, dying in the back of his throat as he turns her round to face him again.
-Oh, Anisette. My poor darling. What have they done to you?
-Simply a bad case of autodefenestration, she says.
-but you go first, she continues, tell me everything that happened after I walked out into the rain on my way to the train station. Give me the long version of our short story. I so missed your voice these past years. I so missed your …
Anisette eases onto the bed.
Sitting nose to nuzzling nose, Anisette insinuates herself onto Churl’s lap.
Her legs go round his waist.
She wriggles her rump till nipples flatten nipples.
Then leans slightly back on one arm.
As relaxed as pain permits.
The fingers of her other hand are china glass in their encircling of Churl’s spectral norseman’s thing.
-Speak. Elucidate. Redeem.
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Dismayed beneath the chandelier the Monsignor lunches alone, annotating his journal between courses. His is a keen observation, as he had been often told.
Adelaide sits two tables over, watching the somber gentleman observing her. Not bad-looking for his age. Knows it too. Trim fingernails raptapping silver cigarette case. Can he read the hierarchy of sins behind her eyes, and if he can, she wonders, which one does he find the most pleasing?
In the first booth Osip sips at his beer, surreptitiously watches Adelaide a third of the time. His eyes move along the sneaky triangle: gentleman – chandelier – girl (lingering) – then back again and repeat.
Behind the bar Churl polishes and gazes, polishes and pauses, looks and empties, relishing his role of common denominator. Adelaide Querelle, florist shop cashier, amateur astrologist, sometime police informant, 20-dollar tart in her salad days. Osip Sterne: poor poet, naïve entrepreneur, loving father (weekends only). Monsignor Jeremy Cockpole, called ‘Jack the Pink Priest’ by flock and infidel alike. Churl dabs at his dry sherry, letting Osip catch his eye. Profane and honorable livelihood, dispersing anesthesia by the pint.
Pongo the cat stirs near Adelaide’s feet.
–Puss-puss, she soothes, more for the handsome gentleman’s benefit than Pongo’s, who blinks and yawns, pearl-blue claws briefly revealing the stubs of an orange paw.
The rain begins to fall less casually, inflicting itself from the gray hand-me-down sky. Life in this town, sighs Churl, enough to send us all off Clive Hall Bridge, pockets packed with drowning stones.
Stevie the barmaid clears away the Monsignor’s soup, setting before him a plate of anonymous fish, one end eroding under the weight of a mound of lurid tartar sauce. He makes inquiry as to the whereabouts of his side order of mushrooms and steamed carrots. Stevie smiles brighteyed, having forgotten. Oh it’ll be out in a moment, thanks very much, Mr. Weirdo, along with your third scotch and holy water. He nudges his journal carefully aside and turns with reverence to his fork.
Churl pours Osip a pint and swivels the label towards him. A few friendly words about the Mayor’s latest disaster. Osip chuckles, unsmiling, offers up the punchline.
-Our Lady of the Swastika. Makes one feel ashamed to live here.
Adelaide squirms in her seat, preparing to leave. Instead she lights a cigarette, orders another white wine and stares out the window at the rain. She offers her profile, free of charge. Let look who may. The bar grows dark, in sympathy with the weather, or like a bad film in which the hero is supposed to be going blind or waking from surgery. She doesn’t look up at Stevie’s approach, lost in the whisper of her nightly prayer: God, I wish something would happen.
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The closet of obsessions where Anisette is revisited.
Beauty made to seem piteous, in Anisette.
She manipulates their revelations, a magician’s sinister assistant. Her skull’s smooth danger beneath too soft a pallor of skin. Speckled holocaust of jewelry. Lucent garbage of fashion. A generation’s artistry fostered in gardens unlike those of Balbec, if no less pestilent with roses.
Anisette’s lips curl with the politesse of hypochondria, her demeanor that of an archangel encamped. In grand style at the Green Pavilion, beneath the Black Star of sexual pleasure.
Undetected in the cemetery of dreams and subhumans, panels retracted for the sake of finished stone, Anisette puts her fingers to their lips, bidding them take it like men.
Her childhood predates the Thirty Years War. Her adolescence prefigures the rise of the fascist plebs. She is embodied, like Eulenspiegel, King Lud, or Simon the Magician, in peculiar relation to air. She sins against the light, thrusts through towers.
Anisette is seized with an obsession: the expectation of repetition and the necessity of eventual catastrophic release. The tower shall serve, in its fall or victory, to disperse the abstract heavy perfume of Douve.
The locals are appalled. Their landmark affronted, made hideous and unique in this otherwise banal and pleasant kingdom.
Anisette will not be dissuaded.
Repeatedly, she fails.
Her dreams revolve within the tower’s silence.
She wakes with soot caked in her hair.
She sketches the tower on tablecloths, brings it up in conversation, relentlessly accords it stature as a work of pernicious art, object of scorn and oppressive desire.
The locals are suckered by obsession (although the outlying peasants, one or two priests, and the alcoholic surgeon, remain wary, unsure, plagued by infidelity and loneliness). The many seduce themselves, warming to the hue of revolt, the novelty, the niceness, even the destined crossroads?
They want a Leader.
Will Anisette be their mayor? their effeminate king? their pretty omphalos?
(No.)
Anisette selects the day of her assumption.
She passes through the crowd, dispensing blessings and souvenirs. (Fingernails, eyelashes, pillboxes beaded with her tears.) Strong men sink to kiss their puppetmaster’s hem.
She turns once and mounts the inner stairs. She rises through darkness, mice scattering her wake. Brittle air pinches her cheeks, her provocative mouth brushed by tongues of lutheran velvet.
She enters the final, the highest room. There is no passage to the sky. Nor maidenhead to rupture. Nor cowering creepy goatgod to assassinate. Three windows only. And in them air. She acknowledges each with a teaspoon of spit and steps into the last.
The freezing southeast wind lifts her wings, raises her inches from the sill, her eyes narrowing under its icy impatient hunger. Anisette laughs and peers over her shoulder:
-Tower, you’ve had it. I’m leaving.
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Churl licks the tears from Anisette’s cheeks.
-After tonight …, he says.
-No more sex, Anisette nods.
She gazes down into the narrow chasm of heat between their bellies. She rubs the swollen head of his cock against the cool flesh of her tattoo. And adds:
-….after tonight.
Churl and Anisette make up for lost time.
She licks his balls.
He guzzles her nipples.
She sucks his cock.
His tongue worms the pliant button of her quivered culip.
He receives a sweet reception.
Centipede and Churl lie naked in each other’s arms. Caressing, kissing each other’s scars. And laughing, laughing, laughing.
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From behind humid plate glass an abandoned spaniel eyes his garden, the leaves and plumed stalks of his playground hung glistening and heavy with rain.
Atactic.
That’s the word Gwenju would choose, would use. If he knew it. To best describe his mistress on her bicycle.
A fixed-income Dracula, a vision of pensioned terror, her scum-green sou’wester flowing backdrafted behind her.
When Gwendolyn needs to think she rides. Her idea of cyclic safety is to always get there first. She jeers at yellow lights, just daring them to blush her to a skidded stop. Pedestrians and motorists alike, all quake who spy her manic passings-by.
Belinda, devirginated after the gory fact, was not so lucky. No kindly gods looked down that fateful day.
The rain lashes Gwendolyn’s face, the ovals of her spectacles goggling to uselessness. Her swerves, her sudden increases in unbraked velocity prompted by sheer instinct. In her mind’s eye she sees the thrusting need of an anonymous lover. The head, capping an urgent erection, memorably plum-blue. Made doubly, darkly brilliant as she tips and dips it to the midshaft in a goblet of red wine. Scepter incarnadined, moments away from molten bursting. Gwendolyn’s inner pilgrimage ranges with the rain.
Offshore, underwater currents punctuate the sway of seaweed with stabs of leaping light.
Her tastes so Venetian.
As in the city.
As in the blinds.
Isole San Michele, where, having evaded the night watchman, the last ferry long since gone, her husband, that bastard, impregnates her at the foot of Diaghelev’s grotesque tomb.
Gwendolyn races downhill, her well-rehearsed thighs at tensile rest.
A dark imprisoned angel sings.
She is the first to admit that of the several dicta which form the core of her romantic logic by far the most important is the seemingly simpleminded aphorism: sexual love is knowledge. It follows, in her peripatetic considerations, that the instant in which forbidden knowledge begins to dribble down to mere stress relief, or the joking mutual assumptions the banality of which no degree of affection can unpastel, it follows that her heart will ache to be unharnessed once more. Free to plumb the tragicomedy of being lepidopterally human.
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(Postcard IV)
Color photograph, a publicity still from one or another festival obese with Euroweariness.
‘The Baby of Macon’, a film by Peter Greenaway.
The scene depicted is unblurred, capturing the friezelike freeze of one costume-dramaed moment in a 10-min. sequence that threatens to reel on for disturbing ever.
Behind a shadow-catching scrim, a stagy makeshift pallet.
Upon which is enacted the multiple violation, by the militia of Macon, of the young and treacherous mother of the eponymous, now-dead infant.
Her church-sanctioned punishment is to be literally fucked to death.
And in the foreground, separating You The Audience from It The Horror, 200-plus oversize, cardinal-red bowling pins.
One by one the phallic pins are tipped over, their parquet-rattling fall the signal that a new rape is complete.
Damnit A!
there can be but the one cripple,
an infernal distraction & less than 20
yards from my window! A coven of brats
skipping rope and belting out a rhyme
you may well remember. (We first heard it
on the eve of the Thirty Years War.)
Nix in der Grube,
du bist ein boser Bube,
wasch dir dein Beinchen
mit rotten Ziegelsteinchen!
How’s that?
Nixie in the slit,
you are a naughty shit,
whether to frown or smile,
legs rubbed red as tile!
Mumbly Peg