Spider on My Tongue (6 page)

I held a large red umbrella over us which, because there was no wind, and the rain fell straight down, protected us.

I said to her, for the very first time, "Do you know that I love you, Phyllis?"

"My guess would be," she said, "that you love me a lot," and glanced my way with a small, open-mouthed smile.

"Quite a lot, indeed," I said.

"Indeed," she said.

A yellow cab zipped past and its driver laid on the horn for a couple of seconds, clearly for Phyllis's sake. "Asshole!" I yelled.

"He likes me," she said, as if in admonishment. "Everybody likes me. They like the way I look. They like the way I walk. They have nasty fantasies about me in the moment after they've seen me. They want me." She was very matter of fact about it, as if she were talking about her pies or shoes. "Abner, they want to get me down on my back and pump me up with their stuff."

I wanted to say, "Phyllis, why are you talking like this? I've just told you I love you, for God's sake!" but, instead, I said, "Yes, I understand."

She glanced at me again, with a wider smile, clearly amused. "No you don't. You can't."

"You're right," I said. "I don't understand."

"Yes, Abner, I know," she said.

~ * ~

Let me tell you about
you
!

First of all,
you
want only to survive. You'll do anything to survive. You'll even slit your wrists or gargle with Drano or play Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded (because "survival" means more, at last, than simply drawing breath, feeling hungry or being able to take a piss). You'll even withdraw into the small and corrupt universe that exists somewhere between your spleen and kidneys, or concoct fantastic and comforting
otherlife
out of ancient insinuation, fable and stories told by the very imaginative and intellectually suspect.

You
want to see in color, have a full tummy, engage often in incredible sex, enjoy your bowel movements, live without pain.

You
see your face only rarely (compared to those around you, who see it quite a lot), and that's okay because faces reveal too many secrets.

After all,
you
have secrets you're very afraid will outlive your gray matter, your cartilage, your mortal appetites.

~ * ~

I have many items in my little house whose origins escape me. For instance, a large gray herringbone couch with stains on the arms: I have no idea how it came to be here. When I arrived (I'm not sure how long ago) the house boasted only a bright red club chair, a 50's-era blue-linoleum-top dining table and chairs, and a copper alarm clock. But I arrived home one day from the little village where I buy my food and found the gray herringbone couch in the living room.
It has to be some kind of gift,
I
told myself, but there was no note attached ("Happy Birthday, Abner," for instance, because it was my birthday, or, "Thought you could use this, Abner," or, "It looked like something you'd like," which it was, and is).

And the framed photographs in the hallway. Eight of them, four on each wall. They arrived anonymously and mysteriously about a year after I got here (which would be perhaps three years ago; perhaps more, though not less). Each is a portrait of someone I don't know. Three men, five women, all in their thirties and forties, all their poses different. One man is in front of what appears to be a theatre—I can see the bottom of what looks like a marquee above him as he stands before a set of wide double doors, each with a circular window: he wears a black tuxedo; his hands are on his hips and his legs are slightly apart. He wears a small moustache and he's grinning. His hair is dark and cut short. It's an exquisite photograph because the man, who appears to be no more than five and a half feet tall (judging by the double doors) looks strong, attractive and masculine. The crisp dark shadows—cast by his body—reveal that the sun was a bit past its apex when the picture was taken. I have named the man "Allway." I don't know why.

When I've eaten, and walked a bit in the dim woods (which gives me some blessed time away from the crowd of strangers with whom I share my house), I may show you the other photographs.

~ * ~

I do not reread this narrative. Perhaps I should. It would allow me to correct mistakes, but I'm not at all sure that what I might see, in my rereading, as mistakes aren't simply mis-directions, or re-directions, or rethinking. Mistakes aren't important. We dwell on them, regret them, get maudlin about them, write long, overwrought letters to former lovers about them.

And, as I think about it, now, I'd say there are no mistakes, really, only facts that no longer fit what passes, in any given new moment, for reality, memories that have become obtuse, fuzzy, or uninteresting, dramas and melodramas that have run their course.

Her eyes
popped
open and rolled upward in their sockets.

I heard a long low rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.

But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her as
I
have loved no one else.

And that's why
I
came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close for what might have been hours, until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise coming from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech:

"You won't like it out there, Abner."

—“A Manhattan Ghost Story"

Wondrous Phyllis of the
Otherlife
always ate with nasty enthusiasm, as if she would never eat again. I said to her, once, over dinner at a restaurant in Soho called
Tiny Thai,
"Phyllis, I think you've got rice all over your face."

She grinned at me through a forkful of Moo Shu pork ("Chopsticks," she said once, "are for socialites and assholes!"): "Rice?" she said. "Abner, I can eat more than you." She cocked her head fetchingly. "Want to give me a try?"

Her milk-chocolate skin was without blemish (during our first months together), and it dressed an incredible body she displayed and used as well as any dancer, so she attracted stares from both men and women.

She enjoyed these stares.

"Look at them, Abner," she said more than once. "The fools want what they can't have." Then she laughed a little and added, "But we're all fools. You and me and the man in the moon—the living and the dead and everyone in between." I had little idea what she was talking about; I thought she was merely being poetic.

She also said, on more than one occasion, "Wouldn't he be fucking surprised if I jumped on his head and swallowed him whole?" which I thought was funny, though I didn't understand it, at the time, in those first unforgettable few months.

May, June, July, a little bit of August. So long ago. Decades ago, I think, though I'm not sure if I'd be right or wrong.

"I'd swallow him whole and he wouldn't even know it," she said. "What a
life
this is!" which I didn't understand, either. I understood so damned little, then, and she knew it.

Perhaps I understand even less, now, in this little house in the dim woods. But maybe that's stupid. How could I understand less after so long? I'd have to be a damned fool.

Maybe I am a damned fool. Of course I am. Phyllis said so, and she was never wrong (in those first few unforgettable months).

And this dense fog of departed humanity that surrounds me in this little house in the dim woods is made up of fools, too, because they tell themselves their stuck here, but they aren't, and they know it (I believe), and they won't do anything about it because, shit, they're in a place they recognize—not my little house in the dim woods (How could they recognize
that?),
but the Earth itself, where they spilled from their mothers, grew into confused adults, then had lives of pain and joy and disappointment, enjoyed too little sex, or not enough, growled at the neighborhood kids, pet their little dogs, made chicken soup when influenza struck.

Sometimes, in my little house, I scream at them, "You're
not stuck
here, Goddammit! So go away!" And they grumble and groan and moan and make their bizarre noises, burp, and devise non-sequiturs
(“My knee is bleeding! Look at my knee!”
and,
"Maxwell has a silver hammer,"
and,
"Get thee behind me, sputum!”
and,
"My asshole has legs in it!”)
but mostly they seem, in their
oddly intrusive way, to ignore me, as if I am not much more to them than elevator music.

~ * ~

Another portrait shows only the face—which hugs the frame—of a woman with wild red hair who's looking seductively at the camera, even though she's sticking her tongue out. The woman's cheeks are very thin and a thick blue vein is prominent in her forehead. Her tight skin is as lacking in color as the belly of a fish and her nose is straight and very narrow. I've named this woman Irene Chutter, which sounds, I know, like the name of a fat woman. I've named her Irene Chutter after a woman I knew in Bangor, when I was quite young—barely into my teens—who always looked out her window at me as I walked home from school. Sometimes she smiled, or smiled and waved, and I always smiled and waved back, because I'd been taught to be polite. Late in my thirteenth year, she appeared at her front door and invited me in, said she had pies; "I have good pies, young man. You like pies, don't you?"

"Yes, Ma'am, I do," I said.

And I went in.

~ * ~

Not long ago, I said to the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary, "Sam, do I have a face?" and I got no answer after a few moments, so I repeated the question; "Sam, do I have a
face?"
I waited a moment, and added, "I mean, to you. Do you see my face, or am I as nondescript
to you
as you are to me?" and still I got no answer, so I took a step forward, toward the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary (which stood at the window it had stood at for days; beyond that window, the late afternoon sun cast shards of bright yellow light onto the forest floor), and I reached out for him, for the shadow I supposed was Sam Feary, and felt, from behind, a strong hand on my shoulder: I froze. A voice no more substantial than air said, "Be careful, my friend. That is
not
what you think it is."

I inhaled deeply, held it.

The voice said, "Breathe, you fool."

I breathed.

The strong hand tightened its grip. I winced.

The voice said, "I don't have a lot of time, so listen. Not long ago, you believed in something you called love. It's possible you still believe in it, more's the pity. And you believed in passion, too. You believed it was a part of love." I heard a quick, hollow chuckle, then: "What a wonderful thing--passion. So full of
heat!
And that's something we don't have much of over here, my friend. Heat, I mean. Just remember, though—remember this; it only requires a change in temperature to make
steam
into
ice."

The strong hand lifted from my shoulder.

I wheeled about, screamed something stupid, saw ragged, bare arms reaching desperately for me.

And I stumbled backward, toward the window, toward the shadow there, stopped myself.

Dappled sunlight had flooded the room in those few moments, and a crowd of brightly lit faces stared at me from above the ragged, bare arms. A few mouths moved, as if to speak. A few eyes blinked, though as slowly as a toad.

Then the sunlight faded all at once and the faces were gone.

~ * ~

But, dammit, goddamnit, that's
not
the way things happen here! It's not at all the way things happen here—sunlight on spectral faces, ragged bare arms reaching. That doesn't happen here—it can't happen here.