A Short Erotic Tale From A Nail Salon

The Butterfly House
Pacific Grove, CA

I'm so behind.










I'd had the shiny red gel polish on my nails for over two weeks, found myself curling my fingers under so I couldn't see it. Garish. I'm not a manicured hand kind of person, prefer to use clippers, the blunt. I have large hands, but they're not ungainly. My fingers are long and not too wrinkled. They are dexterous and strong. I feel too self-conscious with polish on them. Gel polish lasts for weeks, but you have to go back to have it removed or risk something dire like your nails peeling off. I can't believe I'm writing about this. It's a process to get the gel polish off, and I was getting impatient as the manicurist dropped acetone on my fingers and wrapped each nail in foil, then scraped the color off and repeated, over and over. There were three of us lined up at the table across from three manicurists. The lady to my immediate left was an Orthodox Jew. She wore a pleated navy skirt, a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a crew-neck sweater, pale panty hose and flat shoes. She was in her early twenties, yet had a wedding band on her slender finger. She had beautiful eyes with dark long lashes and white skin. The manicurist was buffing her nails, but before each new task, the Orthodox woman asked, What's that for? She exclaimed sweetly over my own red nails, wondered what the process was like and whether she should try it. I told her that I'd done it for a party and enjoyed it for about a week. It doesn't chip, I told her, but I'm sort of creeped out by it now. I told her that sitting for an hour getting it removed was not something I'd probably do again. The lady to the Orthodox woman's left was slumped in her chair, her long black hair scraggly and draped over her shoulder. She had blown up lips, bare of make-up, and they looked painful. Her white face looked like it hurt, and I couldn't tell if she was twenty or fifty years old. She tapped at her phone with whatever hand was free, her nails bitten down to the quick. She groaned every now and then, said she was tired and hung over.  It was late afternoon, the light from the west flooding the room. The sun was going down and, for some, it was apparently time to get ready. For what? I wondered. The manicurist attached what looked to be two-inch plastic nails to the tips of the hung-over lady's fingers, filed them to a point, painted them gray. The two of them then huddled over the woman's phone to look at what I assumed were photos of hands and nails, and then the manicurist brought out a little box of glitter and jewels, proceeded to pick them up with a tiny pair of tweezers and apply them to the lady's daggers. Meanwhile, my own manicurist unwrapped the foil from my finger, lifted the acetone-soaked cotton pad from my fingernail and began scraping the last bits of red still adhering. The Orthodox woman moaned when her manicurist poured lotion on her forearms, stood up and began massaging them. Your skin soft, the manicurist said to the woman. O, you have good hands, the woman said, and she sighed. She had clearly never had her arms massaged in quite that way, I imagined. I smiled at her. The woman at the end waved her glittery gray talons at her manicurist, remarked that on her date the previous night, one had broken in half and fallen off. I wondered briefly if she were a porn star. I felt distracted. I glanced at the woman on my left who was getting another application of lotion on her other forearm, and when the manicurist began her slow kneading of the young woman's white skin, I saw her eyes flutter and roll up and backward. I almost groaned for her but looked down instead at my own hands resting in those of the manicurist, a fine red powder falling from them, each fingernail now naked.




Here's some French love poetry by Andree Chedid:

Preuves de l'amour

Gisement de désirs
Eperon du souffle



L'amour



Recouvre la fêlure
Soulève nos sols


Tisonne nos cendres
Estompe nos voûtes obscures.



Here's the translation:

Proofs of Love

Stratum of desires
Spur of the breath



Love


Recovers the crack
Raises our earths

Stirs our ashes
Blurs our dark vaults.

Anticipation: Magical Realism

 Just one glance at her face was enough for Maria to know that no amount of pleading would move that maniac in coveralls who was called Herculina because of her uncommon strength. She was in charge of difficult cases, and two inmates had been strangled to death by her polar bear arm skilled in the art of killing by mistake.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

from "I Only Came to Use the Phone"

in Strange Pilgrims

Skilled in the art of killing by mistake. How delicious is that, particularly those of you -- us -- who loathe the world of medicine for reasonable and unreasonable reasons.

.

The Chronicles of Ape and Iris

Grandma Ida Mae and Grandfather Charles Haddad
Brooklyn

Iris and Ape, Ape and Iris. They'd been arguing all morning. You're killing my soul, Ape said, even as he methodically folded the empty cardboard box that the computer had come in. He tried to lift it by himself, crouched bare-chested, stood up with a grunt, sweat beading on his forehead, glasses slipping down his nose, and walked away toward his office. The room, despite its size, was unbearably hot. There'd been no rain for months, the sun hung in the sky every damn day, a pale, inexorable disc. Iris needed air. She pushed on the window at the back that they never opened. They lived in a rough neighborhood. She had large hands, strong hands, that kneaded dough, were nimble. She'd scored high on a career test back in high school for finger dexterity. The window was stuck, either painted shut or swollen from water and shrunken from sun too many times. She banged on the wood a few times, used the base of her palms to shove upward, felt it give and then the whole thing came down, the glass punched out, shards of it slicing into her palm, the joint of her middle finger dark with blood. Later, a thin white scar marked the crease of that finger and the inside fold of her wrist, but that day she stood with her palms upward, surprised at the blood, the glint of the glass, her brute strength.

Shooting into the light

That time we lived in the old evangelical church with the full-immersion baptismal font right in the middle of the living room. Was there a painting on it, some fake tile or the rivers of Babylon? The altar was a kitchen, but we rarely cooked, and the only thing I remember is a microwave dinging when your spinach from the can warmed through, a pale slice of cheese melted on top. I think there was an old television, but we didn't have cable, and besides for Jeopardy and Star Trek, it was never turned on. The front doors -- it was a church -- opened to a vestibule and off that was an office where your shuffle was silenced by fake fur on the floor and all four walls. Or was it brown shag carpeting? You took your spinach in there and wrote on some giant early computer. It's funny, but I don't remember the bathroom at all. I think it was off the closet which was big for closets. I lined up my business clothes along the back wall, my pumps below. The bedroom was right there, to the left, the bed a boat where we drifted in and out with the tides. The back door, too. I think it was off  the bathroom that I can't remember, and just across the cement path, where those Laotians with the beautiful babies lived in a concrete outer house, the smells of something cooking that didn't seem right.

Lorrie Moore, again

Lorrie Moore has a new collection of short stories out called Bark, and I headed down to the Los Angeles Central Library to hear her read tonight. You might remember the last time I went to hear her, when her novel came out ten years after I had discovered her in the New Yorker and how I had a wonderful encounter with her when I asked her a simple question after she read and then conversed with Michael Silverblatt -- but just now I searched and searched and couldn't find the post, so now I'm thinking that I never wrote about it. Oh. I don't feel like doing so right now-- just take my word that we had an encounter. That she spoke to me, directly, and blew me away. I did write a post last August called Group Therapy that does a reasonable job explaining just how much this writer means to me, so you can read that if you'd like.

So, it's been fifteen years since Moore published a collection of short stories, and I've just begun delving in. I'm a reader who keeps an anticipated book sitting by my bedside for weeks as a sort of tantalizing confection that I need to put off before devouring.  Bark is like that, so I read one story at a time and then put it down. It's a ritual.Tonight she read one of the new short stories in her beautiful, melodious voice and then conversed a bit with the playwright Brighde Mullins. It was an amazing short story, filled with her mordant wit and keen observation and then the tenderest of endings. God, I love a good short story. The conversation between the two writers was a bit slow, but I didn't care. Like David Sedaris, Lorrie Moore is someone who I honestly believe would be my friend if she only knew me.

Maggie pushed open the kitchen door, the only light the blue flame of the burner on the stove where Celia stood, her long, greasy hair down her back, her skin white. She turned from the pots, the pots crusted over, said He's upstairs and she nodded her head toward the other door, into the room with the Freudian chaise, the mandolins, an apple core rotting on the green baize of the pool table, the spindle trees tapping on glass from the wind. The stairs at the foot of the Freudian couch (Celia called it a daybed) were steep and narrow, Maggie's shoes, light, made barely a creak. The third from the top, her knee poised in air, a throaty laugh like a wisp of cartoon smoke wafted out and around, Maggie's nose twitched, she was an animal light on her feet her knee in the air, hair on the back of her neck gone stiff. He was there naked in shadow, his own knee raised, the laugh like smoke over his shoulder from the cave behind him. Maggie waved her hand in front of her eye, the smoke curled around her finger. She put her knee down. I guess I'll come back, she whispered and turned and fled down the stairs past the Freudian bed, the baize and the rot, through the kitchen and Celia who stood at the stove, her black hair like oil, nodded, out the door.

Shhhhh.

I don't feel too much like talking. I'm mulling, not musing. There's emptiness and cups spilling over. There are candles, flames, extinguished by fingers, pssst and then a slow burn. There's falling -- by a door so it can't be opened (a boy must leap it in fifteen years) and in love.




A man walked into his therapist's waiting room each Tuesday morning and shared it with Maggie who was there waiting for her son to be fixed. Should I tell him that it's not me that is seeing someone? she wondered. The man was slight, lithe. He sat lightly in the incongruous chair across from her. She sat on the faux brocade divan. Baroque music played discreetly. It might have been Vienna. On the third or fourth week, he moved from the chair to the divan and sat beside her. It was then that it started, a hand on her thigh, their heads tilted, perfectly perfectly quiet.

Missionary Times

This is not a conversation.

She drove the same ways under the same skies, preferred the alone times to those when everything was filled up, the seats with bodies, the air with talk.  There's no sky like a blanket under which to sleep. There is no desolation in driving because only then was she free to think of him.

She drove up and sat in front of Maggie's house, turned off the ignition. She needed to be held. The rosebushes that lined the walkway were sprouting buds, pink, tight, wound to a point. Maggie's house was dark, the drapes drawn and when she rang the bell, no one answered.

The Stuff of Tragedy

When I drove by, I noticed a chorus of gods and goddesses outside of the Launderland Coin Laundry this morning, a couple of Renaissance men and a monk or two. They had come marching south, down Vermont Avenue, disgruntled by the dry air, the crackling wind, the voices discontent. Rich people lack empathy, a wise man noted. Not to mention their difficulty getting through the eye of a needle. David flexed his muscles, held on to his stone. Venus took her hand off her mons and flicked back her hair. Donuts were passed hand to hand. The cars rushed by, their inhabitants intent on misery.


Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he's in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake
No matter what.

People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself

-- the Chorus, from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

Lalalalalalalalala

A Short Short Story

They stood on the steps of the old library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the fall of  her sophomore year. They were on the top step, having emerged from the stacks blinking, blinded in the day's light. Her backpack was heavy on her back. She was wearing a Mexican-inspired red ruffled skirt with desert boots, an ensemble that she imagined bohemian in otherwise preppy 1982. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she felt his dry palm through the thin cotton of her shirt. The same bumps on her skin rose at his touch as do when she stepped into sunlight. The bare skin receives warmth and then, shocked, feels a chill, the goosebumps, then the warmth spreads to the tips of the fingers. A sun sneeze. His hand lay there, on her shoulder, so that she couldn't move.

She heard his voice, low, in her ear, a whisper. If we lived in Cro-Magnon times, he said, you would never have survived. I would be the wild cat that ate you up.

The steps under her feet were hard, wide and shallow. She was stuck under his hand and couldn't open her mouth. She felt his fingers on her throat, cool and dry. Blinded, she saw spots, little black dots and at the bottom of the steps, the world, bare and primitive, stripped.

Musical Accompaniment:

Post Easter Melancholy, Robert Burton and Language, Really Great Literature

This post is dedicated to my comrades in epilepsy arms but might amuse anyone

Much of today was spent like this:

I guess there's something to be said for staying in one's pajamas nearly all day, reading two collections of short stories -- one by George Saunders and the other by Jamie Quatro -- and allowing both of my sons to play video games all day and to somewhat neglect my daughter. Both books were so fantastic that I was nearly yanked out of my Easter Sunday melancholy, but not quite. I'm feeling obsessed by the Quatro book in particular and am sorry that I finished it. I won't tell you what the short stories are about but think infidelity, sex, religion, the south, Flannery O'Connor weirdness and you'll have some idea. It might be my Every Five Years Or So Book.**

Speaking of literature, I got this email and thought to make it just one post, titled The Bastardization of Language.

Reader, why?

I suppose the definition of literature might include those writings of scientific or medical interest, but the literature on pediatric antiepileptic drugs? To be read on Easter Sunday when in a state of melancholy? Speaking of melancholy, even Robert Burton, the esteemed writer of the seventeenth century titled his tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. That was in 1621. 

If Robert Burton were to have written a book about pediatric anti-epileptic drugs, I figure he'd title it something like The Anatomy of Hell, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Side Effectes, False Prognostickes, and Never a Cure for the Epilepsies. In One Thousand Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, The Braine Opened and Fucked Up.




**I read pretty voraciously -- sometimes up to fifty books a year, not counting poetry and The New Yorker, but it's only every five years or so that I read a novel that knocks me out. The last one I can remember doing so was Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, and that was in late 2009, so it's a little early to be counting it, but I Want to Show You More might be a contender.

Iris and the Guitarist

The old Station Inn, Nashville, TN

He lived in a dingy room in a dark corner of Nashville, Tennessee, and when Iris looked back, she realized that she'd acted inappropriately in a colossal fashion. She had found herself revelling with him under frayed sheets on a bed without a headboard in a room with one window that looked out onto a bare tree whose branches reached up into an iron-gray winter sky.