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Her Name Is Kelly Larkon.Oct 07 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line This is my first foray into serious fiction and I would appreciate some "honest and unmerciful" advice.
Thank you.
"Hell, it's chilly in here." Wiley scrubbed his nose, a dribbling faucet. A tourniqet winter would soon arrive. His voice was a mouthful of cobwebs, his features chalk on a sidewalk. Wiley ate corn-on-the-cob plain and liked to have conversations with phone salespeople, but only if they were women. His nose was slightly off-center. Wiley had broken it in St. Paul's in London. They always paint these extravagant frescoes on the ceilings of cathedrals, he realized later on, of near-naked or totally-naked God and saints and putti because they want you to go in looking up, and spend all of your time looking up. It ensured reverence. And he had gone in looking up, and walked about looking up. And, sure enough, tripped over some guy a full head shorter than him also walking around and looking up. "I'm the girl," she said with a coal purr. "That's my line." Her words were dragonflies which went to perch in the ceiling-corners. Wiley studied his fingerprint whorls, mute maelstroms, then turned them over and considered the rinks of his fingernails. "They're a little long. Pass the clippers." "They're by your elbow. And don't say "little long," it's an oxymoron. Besides, you're a man, and there's no mixing little and long with you." She was a coathanger-slim, black-topped beauty, her skeet-round eyes a bolting blue. She had printed eyes and a cursive smile. Her look was the look of a caveman, long locked in ice. She enjoyed actors who were once musicians, and that conversations she had with people sounded like long passages from romance novels. She only wore pants or shorts that had many pockets. Most pants, she had noticed once, have only four pockets, not counting the secret pockets inside of the front ones. Four-pocket pants are for people who don't have much to fill them with. She appreciated that the manufacturers of many-pocketed pants assumed her life was so complex, it warranted a lot of pockets. And she felt obligated to fill every one. "The scissors, I mean. And why not long and little? I'm your little-headed and long-winded, five-year husband, and you're my long-suffering little woman." Silence a moment. In the distance, the retreating loud-bell thunder of big machs booming through the bellies of stormclouds. It had been gravel gush rain all morning. "The scissors were for the baby. Use the clippers." "They cut too close." "Would you like me to do it?" Her words were an ice-ringed planet. She was licking stamps, her tongue far-leaning over the balcony of her lower jaw and stickying stamp after stamp. The sun sent a snooping, hat-pin ray over her shoulder and into a corner. The sound of children clamoring over the sun-greased asphalt. And there was something terrible chasing through the labyrinth of the swollen blood vessels in her eyes. "Did you know that if you drop acid seven times in your life, ever, you're legally insane?" His voice was dusked with mild annoyance. "You've never dropped acid. Not once." "No, I know. But I wonder, you know? Are you sane until right after the last drop? And then, right after, not? Can you watch for it? See it coming? Can you watch for it and have it not come? A watched insanity never comes boiling up. Does it creep up on you, like ivy? Does it leap? Or is it a slow descent? "Do you know what'd be really wonderful? To drop acid six times, one a decade. And then, as you're on your deathbed, to drop that last one. They say the things you see right before you die are unbelievable." The clicking bill of the scissors. She looked at his bumbershoot-broad lips and grazing eyes, her muscle-heaped husband (Wiley always called them "musk-ls,") her features mood-muddied, her voice tingly and soft as a snare brush. "I think that we should take acid when we are old and don't care to hear each other anymore. Then we'll be old and mad, and it not our fault we can't understand each other. Did you know mad people go straight to heaven, no matter what they've done?" "But do acid mad people, hmmm?" His voice was a shower of violin bows across her tightly-strung nerves. "I remember I was nine once..." "I think we were all nice once, unless we're eight, or seven." "No, you didn't let me finish. I was nine, and we had this garden on the east corner of our house, where it would get the morning sun. It was just some cabbages, carrots, maybe a pumpkin planted in August." "That's a little late for pumpkins." "No, it was Tennessee. Tennessee gets a lot of rain, and pumpkins just drink it up. They get so fat, if you're a kid, you've got to hug them and walk with them kind of on your knees, too. Anyway, there was an orbweaver..." "What?" "A spider." "Sounds Indian." "Right. Well, there was an orbweaver in the back of the garden, on this trellis my mother had planted for a bit of climbing ivy. And most spiders, they're ugly. You can see why they prefer dark corners. But orbweavers, they're slender, and kind of lanky, if that's the word. Very beautiful. They belong in the sun. And you can get your nose centimetres close to one, and nothing. But if so much as an armhair brushes their web, then BAM! they nip you. "And it's kind of weird, because if you look at them the wrong way, or out of the corner of your eye, you could almost mistake one for some kind of funny-looking flower blossom. Something exotic. And you could have your hand in there, pulling weeds or something. One could bite you; and they do it so fast, then back to being a funny-looking flower blossom, that most people never know it was a spider that bit them. "And that's kind of what you remind me of sometimes. This funny-looking flower blossom that, for the quickest of moments, becomes this thing with fangs, but still beautiful. And BAM! and poison, and back to being this funny-looking blossom that loves C. S. Lewis, and can't open her mouth in public without swallowing a fly." "You've never felt safe around me, that's what you're saying?" "No, you misunderstood. A spider doesn't bite to be mean. It only bites because it feels threatened." "You feel you threaten me?" "Do I?" "Tell me, would you ever say to me, 'Such a big book for such a little head?'" "What's that?" "Something from a poem I read." "No, I'd say 'What a silly book for such a big head.' Your head is too big for books. It wasn't meant to hold someone else's memories. They're smaller, always." "What do you think I'm going to say to that?" "Bullsh!t to me is like blood to sharks: I can smell it miles off." Once he had set up beetle traps all over the yard, and she had looked in each one after he had gone to town. She had looked in at the hundreds piled on hundreds of shoe polished shells. And she had torn open each of the bags, the brown beetles streaming out like miniature asteroid belts. She had let him blame the neighbor's retriever. She looked out the window, then. She looked out at the cook-whites rainbow of the sky, the sun-panning clouds. The sun a matador's eye. She looked over the bush-bearded house back, to the down-sloping chin of the yard. She turned back to him. Wiley was balding, the top of his head like a just-puffed dandelion wig. Wiley was big and rough-skinned, and had always seemed to her like a biker's saddled fire-and-brimstone. Wiley had a tendency to try to out-mammoth other men, but with her he humped his back and squinched his shoulders. She never noticed. "The birds are splashing in the puddles on the pool tarp, again." "Shoo them away." "No, I like to watch them. They're like schoolchildren." "Then get my gun." "No!" "Not that. Just to scare them away." "Oh, please, no. You've got the wooden owl, that should be enough." "Which is the same color as the fence and has no scent." She hated him. It was a bald thought. Bald like those little, green men from Mars in the movies. And like the little, green, Mars men, the thought would again and again come for her in the middle of the night, and take her up. And when she returned, she would not know she had ever gone, but a feeling of uncertainty roosting deep inside her brain. The thought sends adrenaline drag-racing into her finger-tips and toe-tips, her head feeling like a horse's hoof. "Do you know I think about leaving you every day?" "Yes, in a way. I see you at seven each morning at the window. I don't know why, though." "It was because I didn't think it fair to find happiness so early in life." She turned her gaze to him, and he looked to her like a ghost seen from a far distance by a near-sighted person. "When you're older it may be too late, and I'll be gone. And if I'm old and acid mad, I won't be able to miss you. And what if you came and I was old and acid mad, and the day before, not? And you had missed me by a day?" "I would be relieved. I wouldn't have to tell you the long stories of my journeys. I hate to tell stories. I never tell them well." "I know. The first one." "And also..." "And also?" "I wouldn't have to tell you what a fool you were." "You would. Not that it would matter" For a moment, her tongue was held by bear trap silence. She thought about their cubicle marriage, her face grown gruesome behind an iron mask worn years; regarding life through a sewer grate. They had great talks, could talk for hours. That meant nothing. She could talk to people on the subway for hours. They never argued. Wiley never called her names. That was how she knew he never loved her. "It's time to go." "Yes, I know. Supper at nine." His voice was a mosquitoe in her ear, a sliver beneath her toenail, a tick head left in the skin. She pressed some bills into his left hand, with its neatly-pared nails. "For a nice meal, and tell her, 'No more motels.'" Their double-gaze was like two cars passing each other in the night with their high-beams on. She closed her eyes, heard the squeak of his toothbrush in the bathroom, the slam of the front door, the coughing car engine. The heavens doubled over and the planets puddled. She felt it all; the sunny sink of youth; the pirated peace of adulthood; the bubbled hope; her jousting fears, her tilting terrors; the pouring wrists of life; the back-of-the-mind, constant cricketing of worry. Her breath was the bungled breath of a still-born baby. She stared down a muzzle of memories with goldfish gaze. Wiley returned five minutes before nine, coat knotted about his waist to hide the stain on his right thigh. Why? The oven was still an old woman's womb and all the rooms empty. Outside, batches of late-season firebugs like chandeliers on the roam. Above a monocle moon, a skull-bone moon. Wiley took off his pants and stuffed them in the bedroom laundry hamper, changed into a bathrobe, and sat down in the living room tete-a-tete. Why had he done this? Why would he continue? Why did he always feel as though his mind were keeping secrets from him? The whole world always seemed to him like a roomful of Mona Lisas, like everybody had a secret they knew everyone else wanted to know and weren't telling. Wiley was the only one in the world who had no secrets, not even a secret lover. That made him feel lonely. Indeed, he felt like an attic ghost, a shadow at dusk, a roach in the last few seconds of the world. Wiley was a submarine coffin, everything dead inside. Or worse, everything shrivelled, like slugs after a salting. Dead was far better. Dead was hopeless. He looked out into nagging night, pulling at the cover over the armrest. He wanted to do something simple, and he wanted to do it for a long while. A thought, momentary, like a vapor trail across his mind: when the sun came, would he dissolve? Wiley would wait.  |
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