The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (23 page)

Nothing he did could stop it. At football practice someone hit him so hard that he fell down and broke an expensive cap he’d had made in New York by Leonard Bernstein’s dentist. When they had to run wind-sprints at the end of the day, years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes drove hot, cruel spikes through his chest. He didn’t give a damn if all the others were twenty and thirty yards ahead of him every time. All he wanted in the world was to blink awake and find himself in bed beside Peggy, under the marvellous
Daunendecke
they had bought in Zurich a few years ago while on a business trip.

What was worse, the team he practised with wasn’t even the varsity or JV: it was intramural football—the team made up of every dufus, bookworm, weirdo and zonk in the school. He had recognized the faces almost immediately: Dave Miller who kept a rat in his room, never took a bath, and scored eight hundred on the High Level Physics Achievement Test. Tom Connolly, who thought the greatest human being who ever lived was Savanarola, and Woody Barr who did nothing but read magazines about guns and was a member of the American Nazi party.

These were his teammates, the ones who raced way ahead of him in everything now, hit the tackling dummies like war arrows, and smirked together when he collapsed on the field after getting a monstrous stitch in his side.

Luckily the coach was Rummelhardt, the Latin and Greek teacher who coached only because every teacher had to coach something. He brought his miniature collie, Orestes, to every practice. When he saw Louis lagging, he kept saying things like, “Oh just run, Kent! Don’t be such a poop!”

In the locker room afterwards, the few teammates who actually took showers looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. They knew how low they were on the school’s status pole. For someone to be worse than them was hard to believe. Only Doug Prouty, famous in the school because he was five feet tall, came over and asked Kent if he wanted to go up to his room after and look at old copies of
Model Railroader.

While he was slowly dressing, the varsity team came in, laughing and exhausted and beautiful. Again, he knew the faces instantly, but particularly that of Grey Harris.

At eighteen, Harris was almost frighteningly perfect. He had so much going for him that people stood in stupefied awe. He was friendly, brilliant, handsome and athletic. Everything he did turned to gold, and what’s more, he did it so effortlessly. You had to stand back and shield your eyes from the glare of his everything.

Harris came down the row of lockers and placed his scarred helmet on the wooden bench between them. Louis looked at him out of the corner of his eye and remembered how jealous he had been of the boy years ago. Surprisingly, Harris turned to him and began to speak in a low voice.

“Look, Kent, the word is out on you these days. You know what I mean?” He reached down to undo one of his shoelaces. “Haller came up to me after class and told me to talk to you. As far as I’m concerned, you can do whatever the hell you want. The only thing is, if you get another detention you’re suspended, right? That means the Debate Team is out of luck. Both of us know all this stuff is a big crock of bull, and if I had your guts or nuttiness I’d be skipping more classes than you. But that’s not the point. You’re the best debater we’ve got. There’s no way on earth we’re going to make it as a team into the finals if you’re not there with us, OK?”

Louis looked at Harris and nodded. He was very touched. They needed him! Grey Harris actually said he and the others on the team needed him.

Harris smiled warmly. “Yeah? You’ll be a good boy for a little while? Fabulous! Thanks a lot, man. That’s great.” He went back to unlacing his cleats.

A moment later Harris’s magic wore off and Louis realized he had been feeling guilty about letting the guys on the Debate Team down!

“This is crazy!”

Harris looked over and smiled angelically. “What is?”

“You! This! I don’t care about the goddamned Debate Team! I’m thirty-two years old!” He bounded up and ran for the door.

It had gone much too far. The dream had pulled him too close and was smothering reality out of him. A dream was all right so long as it remained finite, but this one gave no indication of ending soon. In the meantime, it had increased its mental bear-hug on him. He had to do something, and fast.

“Hel-lo?” His daughter’s voice was there, recognizable and real. He stood in the phone booth in Frankfurt Hall and looked at the million years of student graffiti written on the walls.

“Hi, Baby, it’s Daddy! It’s Daddy, Baby!”

“Hi, Dah-dy. Mommy, it’s Dah-dy.” A loud thump gave him another foothold back in the real world: he knew his daughter had dropped the telephone receiver on the table, an act he had scolded her for again and again. But now the painfully amplified sound made his heart and hopes sprout wings.

“Louis? Hello, darling. How’s school?”

“Peg! Peg, it’s me!”

“I know, sweetie. Don’t you think I know your voice, silly?”

He laughed along with her a moment. Until he realized what she had said—how was school?

“Peg, you know?”

“Know? Know what? How did you do on your calculus test?”

Little bombs of fear and ice began exploding all through the insides of his body. “Peg, I’m back in school! They think I’m eighteen years old!”

“Louis, honey, I’m really tired. The baby’s been a big pain today and I just don’t have it in me. Are you coming home this weekend or not? Did you get a weekend pass?”

He said nothing.

“Louis, are you not telling me something?” Her voice grew hard and cold as a rock in winter. “Did you flunk your calculus test?”

He heard her voice repeating the question, very loud and abrasively, as he gently put the receiver back on its cradle. He leaned against the booth and looked again at the words gouged and carved in brutal permanence on the wall facing him. Schmalz, Powell, Grazioso. Names in the back of the alumni magazine. Bank vice-presidents. Researchers. Failures. Successes. Bigshots and small-fry. He even recognized the name of someone he knew who was dead.

The bell that had plagued him every day of his new life here broke his reverie and warned him it was time for evening study hall. He would go to the library. Seniors had that privilege. Even seniors on detention. He would go to the library and look at the magazines and be scared. Finally, when the world was within an inch of closing in on him completely, he would go back in the stacks and start looking for books on the Debate Team’s topic for the competition: “Capital Punishment—A Step Forward or a Step Back?”

Y
OU DON’T KNOW ME,
but you will—soon. Give me an hour to introduce myself if you would. Less, if you’re a fast reader. I imagine you’re a fast reader. You read fast because you’re a no-nonsense woman. Get up to change channels manually on the television (despite having a little gizmo box to do it for you), know where your scissors are, as well as everything else in your desk. Fresh underwear every morning. Let me guess—white? With perhaps a pair of expensive black sexy ones in a drawer for special occasions? Am I right? I bet I am.

I thought of you today in a restaurant. Wondered if you would react the way that waitress did. You see, she was bustling by and dropped a water glass. It crashed on the floor, pieces flying everywhere. But she pretended nothing had happened! Kept going, even though she knew it’d fallen. Didn’t stop when it crashed, didn’t clean it up. Minutes went by! Huge shards of glass lying in the middle of the floor for anyone to step on and she leaves them there. She didn’t want it to happen, so when it did she just acted as if it hadn’t. For a while her little silly planet could orbit around a sun that wasn’t there ... Anyway, I wondered if you’d act the same way when your turn came. Act like nothing was happening, despite crazy calls in the middle of the night or blood in your handbag, chewed gum warm on your pillow, things like that. Ignore it, leave the splinters on the floor and walk barefoot across them until glass is ground so deep into your feet that ...

I’ll call her Toni. That wasn’t her name, but I love women who end their names with “i”, as if it were exotic and Italian, rather than stupid and about as cute as a bum’s asshole.

My Toni was a plain-looking woman who, with a bit of taste and money, had made herself into a nice-looking woman. Her nose was too small and her forehead too high to help out the roundness of the rest of her face. When she made love, that round came up and became more childlike and interesting. That’s probably why she wished for a larger nose. To put a real feature on her otherwise nothing-special face.

I knew that face so well because I studied it through my binoculars for months before doing anything. They’re not especially strong glasses—7 x 21; the kind you’d use at the opera to look down some fat singer’s throat—but they do the job.

I discovered Toni in her apartment the night I bought them. Calmly scanning the building across the street, lo and behold there she was, one floor lower. I could look right in through her transparently white curtains and watch her watching television. Naked! Really, she was naked the very first time I saw her. Little breasts, little hips ... Adorable. Every man’s dream—a naked woman he can spy on and charge his lonely nights. The nudity didn’t excite me but rather made me like her a lot. At home this woman did just what she wanted—watched TV naked in January with a cup of cocoa in one hand and the other stuck under her bum. Sometimes I’d turn on my television and try to guess what she was watching. News in the nude? Did she strip for her favourite talk shows? Get down to the essentials when she knew Mel Gibson was on so she could pretend to show him what she had.

It seemed like she enjoyed being naked all the time. I particularly liked watching her walk from room to room, so often restless late in the night with nothing to do and the morning creeping up on her the moment when she’d have to put the clothes back on and go back out into the world to whatever job waited. I guessed she was a business woman from the taste and expense of objects in her apartment, or the ones I could see. There’s only so much you can see from the one dimension of your two windows. I’d often spend whole evenings in the dark, walking slowly back and forth from window one to window two, watching Toni live her evenings away. She had a fake antique spinning wheel in one corner, a comfortable-looking couch with an unforgivable floral pattern. The back of her television was almost against the window, so I sometimes fantasized she was watching me from her easy chair and not Channel Two.

One night when she wasn’t home I took out my pistol and fired several shots through her window. Not from my apartment, of course. No, I went up on the roof of the building next door and did it, so if the police came and checked they’d think it was just another lunatic taking target practice at innocent windows. I never asked her about it later, but am sure that came to her mind when the other events started happening.

Everything was spontaneous. I didn’t decide I wanted to sleep with her until I saw her in the corner market one morning buying grapefruit. Suddenly the idea of sitting across the breakfast table, eating grapefruit with this woman, seemed a wonderful, fulfilling idea. For the first time I wanted her very much. So I moved in the same directions as her through the market, letting her catch glimpses, know I was looking at her. At the checkout counter she stood in front of me, as planned. When she put down her grapefruit I groaned and said I wished I’d picked that one and not the ugly small thing I had in my basket. This didn’t endear me to the grocer but made Toni smile and we began to talk. That was it. We walked out of the market together and into each other’s lives.

The first time I was ever in her place I went to the window, looked out, and waved at my home. Hello there!

That was also the first time we ever made love. Borrrrrring. Who would have thought that someone who loved to be naked would turn out to be so dull in bed? She thought moving her hips a little and mouse squeaks at the end was
La Dolce Vita.
She told me I was the only man she’d ever slept with who made no sound or move when he came. Then jokingly asked if I
had
come. I said, “Yes.” Her smile fell and she said, “Oh”, as if she’d walked into a room that was off limits. She had.

So the first thing I taught her was how to make love and she became good at it but that wasn’t enough. In bed, in conversation, in life, my Toni-lover wasn’t nearly as interesting as my Toni through binoculars. Looking through them, I could imagine anything. In her bed, or eating what she cooked, hearing what she said, no matter how interesting, was only so much and not more. There wasn’t anything to imagine. How often I fled her house, her arms, her dreams, and rushed back to my place where I’d grab up my glasses and cock at the same time and watch her, naked, emptying the ashtray I’d just filled, taking off the album we’d danced to before going into the bedroom an hour before.

On her birthday, I did something that bound her to me forever. As a child, her favourite story had been
Peter Pan,
and jokingly she told me she often wished Peter Pan would come now and take her off to Never-Never Land. I rented a big green elf costume and, that night, with the help of a thick rope I’d used years before when I did mountain climbing, lowered myself off the top of her roof, in costume naturally, and tapped on her window. I’m here! I’ve come for you, Toni! When you wish upon a star ...

That’s how I got my nickname. When she opened the window and I swung in, she embraced me and asked if I hadn’t been scared out there, thirty storeys up. I said no, just a little tired from all the manoeuvring.

“Oh, my wonderful Tired Angel. I love you!”

After that, I could have put a leash around her neck and told her to heel.

Instead I started calling her. There is an art to that kind of telephone call which is much like the art of making a perfect soufflé. Without the best ingredients the thing never rises. You can always tell someone over the phone you’re going to kill them, but that is cheap eggs. Triple-A jumbo eggs is sending a funeral director to Toni’s door to talk to the “bereaved” about “the recently deceased”. Only the deceased in this case is the same as the bereaved. Imagine the consternation of the funeral director. Better, imagine Toni’s fear. I called ten times a day. I told her I knew the maker of her best bra, the colour of her bathroom. I told her I was in love with her. That I hated her. Et cetera.