Thirteen Phantasms (10 page)

“Bath herbs,” she said. “They have a medicinal effect. Did you know that lemongrass and ginseng are aphrodisiacs?”

He shook his head. “No, are they? In tea, do you mean? What is this, some sort of Oriental bathtub gin?”

“After a fashion. You don’t drink it though. Glass of wine?”

“Thanks,” he said, relieved. She handed him an already-full glass that she’d had waiting. The bottle on ice hadn’t been touched. She was planning to liquor him up, wash some of the starch out of him. He pointed at the tub. “How about those lumps?”

“Rose hips,” she said. “And the flowers are lavender and shredded hibiscus. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Very colorful.” Obediently, he forced himself to think about the tub full of floating vegetation. It ought to have been an erotic notion. Maybe the wine would help. He picked up an apple core that lay on the sink counter and dangled it over the tub, dropping it like a bomb into a cluster of lavender leaves.

“What was that?” Nona asked.

“Apple core.”

“Why on earth?” It bobbed to the surface and she plucked it out, shaking it off over the sink. She opened the cupboard door and tossed it into the trash can.

“I thought it was part of the mix. Sorry.”

“It was my afternoon snack. I’ve been working up here for two and a half hours.”

This was meant to sting. She’d been slaving over a hot tub, and he wanders in off the street and starts throwing apple cores around. “Honestly,” he said, looking around as if to appreciate the spent time. “I thought it went into the stew.” The bathroom had been scrubbed clean. The blue tile shined in the lamplight. She’d even polished the faucets and replaced the old shower curtain with a new curtain made of transparent plastic. Nona must have exchanged the two lightbulbs for one of lower wattage, too, because the place was dim and moody.

“Give it a try,” she said, in a gentle but general sort of tone that took in the whole bathroom, the whole effort.

He leaned over and kissed her. She was doing what she could; what more could he ask? Fewer herbs in the bathwater, maybe. She slipped past him and started down the stairs, then stopped and looked back in. “I’m afraid that to do this right you’ll have to be all comfy in the bath, with the board set up. I’ll slide in under it after serving us both. Be a dear, won’t you?”

He winked at her, and as soon as she was gone, he drank off the rest of the wine in his glass. He looked around for an open bottle, but there wasn’t any, nor was there any bottle opener, so he couldn’t have a go yet at the bottle on ice. Just as well. He’d be staggering in an hour if he kept at it. He was already feeling a pleasant, sleepy-cheerful rush from the wine. Must be his empty stomach. That would teach him to feed his lunch to bugs. He wondered idly how Moe and Clyde were getting on as he undressed, walking out into the bedroom to toss the clothes onto the chair. Then he went back in and eased into the bathwater, ignoring the floating herbs and appreciating the heat. This was really tip-top, a hot bath was.

He heard her footsteps coming up the stairs. “Bring the corkscrew?” he asked.

“Pocket of my robe,” she said, stepping into the bathroom and turning so that he could fish it out of her pocket. She held a vast tray full of stuff that he couldn’t quite glimpse, and which she set on the sink counter before going back out. There was a chicken there—he knew that much from the magazine—but it was hidden under a silver dome.

He reached back and pulled the wine out of the ice bucket. She’d bought a vintage chardonnay from a suspiciously French-sounding winery in Monterey. After opening the bottle and pouring a taste into the glass, he made a show of swishing it in his mouth, of doing things right. It tasted of grapefruit and charcoal.

Leaning against the counter was a piece of enameled plywood with strips of wood tacked onto the ends to keep it from sliding off the curved rim of the tub and into the bathwater. She’d clearly been planning this extravaganza for weeks. He pulled the board across the tub, almost up against his chest, settling back against the faucet to give Nona the comfortable end.

She came back in, carrying a silver plate, which she laid on the board in front of him. Then, carefully, she set the tray full of food next to it before slipping out of her robe, grabbing up her wineglass, and climbing into the water. She looked happy, as if things were finally coming together.

“Oysters?” he asked, nodding at the silver plate. “What happened to the shells?” The oysters were heaped there, a couple of dozen of them, damned in by a wall of lemon wedges.

“I shucked them all. Less debris this way, isn’t there?”

She picked up an oyster and laid it out onto her palm, giving it a good hard look. Ted did too. Somehow this whole bathtub dinner business seemed very carefully choreographed, and he was determined to play his part with the oysters and to play it heroically. The soft and flabby oyster lay there in his hand, glistening like—what?—folds of. … He poked at it idly with his finger but then Nona raised her eyebrow at him. He smiled at her, not knowing what to say.

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 top, 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.