CHAPTER 26
“A letter from your dad,” Belinda says. She hands me a white envelope from the bundle in her hand. My name is written in Dad’s print-writing penmanship. Half the letters are block formed while half are cursive, linked with obvious letter combinations: r and t, n and u. I’m reminded of Karen’s peculiar scrawl. Belinda paces the floor as I look for a chair. “You’ll crease your pants,” she says.
“Then I should bring them to the show on a hanger. I’ll be standing all night anyway. The car will be here in twenty minutes. Have a cocktail with me. Make us a drink, one to share.”
She retreats behind the kitchen island, where a bottle of gin and a retro pitcher with a real glass rod stand next to a jar of olives. Martini glasses and a sweating ice bucket complete the cast. We’ve been celebrating more, lately. Once I unburdened my conscience to her, told her what I’d been “up to” with Karen Kosek, there wasn’t even the hint of frost. The debriefing was surprisingly brief. White lies are harmless. I hadn’t slept with Karen K, which eliminated that king of lie. This made unloading to Belinda a pleasure. The bathroom episode stays hidden. My Mythos rejoiced, the ones in my mind trying to free each other like clever gods.
She listened, didn’t judge, took me at my word. Drama was for Gala and Salvador, she told me. “We aren’t there,” she said. It was nice of her to omit the “yet.”
Belinda drops the mass of letters on the island, many addressed to me c/o her and Mythic ARTS Management. Then she notices one officially labeled envelope with a cellophane window. “This is new,” she says, and uses a nail to wedge open one end. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“It’s from the Samuels.” I tell her the name means nothing to me. “The people we rented the house from in the Poconos? They’ve sent us a bill for their radio. They say our deposit didn’t cover its replacement.”
“It was a burglary. Don’t they have insurance?” I’m not angry. Just the same, when I hear Belinda sigh through her nose, I wonder aloud, “We’ll probably find the damned thing for fifty bucks at the downtown flea market.”
“Well, we don’t want them to sue us. Might get in the papers. Bad publicity.” She pouts, but lets the gin splash into a glass. I catch the sparkle from her engagement ring in the center of my eyes.
“Minus,” she says, her voice totally changed, dreamy. “Tell me something. What was it about Nemesis — you know, the day at the lake, you were going to tell me –”
“Oh, that. Yeah, yeah. It was sort of obscure. Did you know Nemesis was a female deity? It’s antithetical, really. I mean, we think of ‘a nemesis’ as masculine, perhaps because the idea of one’s adversary, or strife or vengeance, are masculine features of life. Maybe. War, to begin. War to end, too. I hadn’t thought to ask myself how I saw him until I read about her. Little do people know that Nemesis, a lesser deity in that whole lore, actually stood for the retribution of evil deeds.”
Belinda strikes a queer look.
I explain how this made sense to me. “She is the one myth goddess none of us can ever truly put aside as aged. That feature connects to my sculptures. Perhaps she is the link between past and future gods, or monotheism today, and what’s in store three thousand years ahead. On the other hand, teenage boys talk about looking like Adonis. That’s their connection to the pagan gods. They use the phrase ‘an Adonis’ ― which doesn’t really make sense. But that’s the nomenclature, these days. Neither does its built-in vanity make sense. Adonis is a myth, bestowed on the strong but stupid boys. Then I had this to wonder about: Do teenage girls use Aphrodite to describe their sense of beauty? I haven’t found it anywhere.”
“Teenage girls don’t think they’re beautiful, Minus,” Belinda says. “They worry about their weight when they’re skinny, and they worry about it more when they’re fat. Pimple creams and deodorant and bad hair days are their nemesis. If any body image can be thought of, a teenage girl can use it against herself. That may not be particularly philosophical of the ancient kind, but it sure describes ‘woman versus man’ in the late twentieth century. Give Athena breast cancer and it’ll make us all feel a little more positive about our thickening waistlines and sagging tits and the new wrinkles we find on our faces each morning.”
“Aphrodite in bandages,” I say. “There’s a thought. I’m not being facetious. But Nemesis isn’t beautiful. She’s plain, if anything, chaste, and subtly threatening. She looks at you with this macabre stare that suggests scrutiny and judgment. Not the goddess I want to fall for.”
Belinda laughs. “I’m glad for that.”
I tear open Dad’s letter. He begins his letters as he starts his phone conversations. The math is easier, written on the page, where I can play out the figuring in visual pencil that makes erasing easy. This is Dad’s third letter in two weeks. He’s lost his phone and the “Here I am, stupid!” locator buzzer, linking the base station to the handset, doesn’t work because the batteries in the phone are sapped. He can’t find the phone in the couch, or in the bathroom, or in the bedroom. He’s even looked in the refrigerator, twice!
The ice tinkles in the martini pitcher. Belinda is a stirrer, she’s discovered, and thinks it best to leave shaking to fictional characters. I read Dad’s lines quickly because the story has become familiar.
I fold the letter and return it to its envelope. I’m saving Dad’s letters. He’s written so few over the years, and once he buys a new phone I’ll miss them. I might do a mural, some day. Lately I’ve searched through trash and wind-blown papers, on the street and in Central Park. Discarded letters are amazingly fertile grounds for solicitude, enmity, ardor, sorrow, covetousness, greed, self-pity, and love.
I tell Belinda, “He now writes it plainly. He wants us to come to Chicago. His girlfriend dumped him.” Belinda looks at me over the olive jar. “Yes,” I say, “he used those words.”
Belinda pours out the martini, expelling a breathy “Huh” to punctuate a hidden thought. She hands the glass to me and we touch our lips to its opposite sides, and take a sip. Her tongue darts out and wipes the glass where a drop of gin has hung along the rim. She licks her lips lightly, the white of her eyes glistening, and she says, “So let’s move.”
I feel my foot tap the floorboards, the sound like our combined heartbeats as one waits for the other to speak. I lose count somewhere after forty. “Not now,” I think.
“I don’t mean tomorrow,” she says, and takes another sip, this one languorous, leaving a ginny vapor between us. She lets me drink the rest, and it’s a quaff. “You’ll know when our time is up, Minus.” Her hand retrieves the glass for a refill. “You’re an outsider here. We both are. We’re appointments in an otherwise overcrowded pastiche on modern life. All the great artists have been.”
I wonder if she’s only halfway right, or if this is manipulation in action. Leave NYC? I stand near the center of what millions of people believe is the Center of the Universe. Where else could I go? What else would take me so handily into its fleshy bosom? Tonight, all is mine. Tomorrow is the unknown, again. The id of i.
Mom would understand.
NYC bends against the reputation of being crusty. Littered streets match soot-dusted facades, tattooed storefronts, and bird-shat statues. The City’s people are foul-mouthed and brusque. Its political battles own to prizefight status. Newspapers wage war using 90-point headlines. Sharp-elbowed competition at the deli counter is a pastime. Legends all.
Step into a cab and you might need a foreign language in your pocket to get where you’re going. Get off at the wrong subway stop and you might not get home alive. Urban myths? We hold these truths to be self-evident.
The Big Apple. The Great White Way. 23 Skidoo! Take the A Train. The House that Ruth Built. Canyon of Heroes. The City that Never Sleeps. I ♥ New York. All the News That’s Fit to Print. Excelsior. In a New York minute. Give My Regards to Broadway. Gotham.
Such riddles are the cynosures of the city dweller’s streets, from Berlin to Bombay, Marra
kech to Murmansk, Gdynia to Grand Rapids, Tokyo to Tijuana.
One evening I said to Belinda’s mom, “We need the key to the cipher, the riddle of our own lives, otherwise everything is arbitrary.” It was something Dad had told me when I was a boy. Alice responded by crying into the telephone. The words seemed so innocuous to me, as a boy; less so as I was saying them into the telephone to someone I’d never met but whose daughter I loved. Dad had told me the saying had something (or everything) to do with the nature of art and words, but not of science. If this is true, then we know something unique about people, how different they are to each other.
A red carpet protects my feet. I think of moon dust footprints, and almost look behind me to find the impressions shadowing me, like a sinister twin. He wants this more than me, I sense. He would slit my throat for the chance. I want to look, although my fear of finding no memory in the plush fabric keeps my neck rigid. Belinda holds my hand, which feels even to me like a soggy sponge. She’s out front on the carpet by half a step. Her diamond ring digs into the knuckles of my index and middle fingers, where I have it fitted like a bolt. Our link keeps me walking, a tethered animal being led into the ring, frightened by the overture bracing it against its wont to wander from the runway’s center groove. The Mythos reach for me, arranged in the hall as sea-floor impressions of a shipwreck: keel and fo’c’s’le and ribs are all that lie visible. Atlas sits cross-legged atop the world he once carried — the globe has deflated, taking shape as a punctured beach ball — holding his withered hands folded across his narrow chest while that bold chin points at me. Are you ready for this? White lights blanch my sight. I squint, the pupils crowding out the color in my eyes. Strobe flashes capture the insecurity. My skin feels atomized. This effulgence is theater, dilution, the opaque body of a paper doll whose perforated loveliness is delivered by the transom winds of clapping hands and hot breath. You only get one chance. As mortality puts us in a grievous state, its antidote is arrival. This becomes our swaddling.
July 2009 – December 2011
Prague
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to those who helped make this project possible, and to others who made this project a pleasure. Many thanks to Calvin Rambler for his early comments on the manuscript and his editorial questions. I am indebted to John Mitchell and the Siren & Muse Publishing group for their professionalism and loyalty, but above all for their commitment to keeping “the book” alive. A special thanks goes to Lia Gallegos and her Sleepygirl Solutions graphic arts. Much love to my family for their undiminished support.
Also, and as with everything else she does, thank you, Asia, for your love & devotion — and for your steady encouragement to make story-writing my life’s work.
About the Author
Mark Beyer was born and raised in the Chicago area. He has taught fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago, been a book editor, and worked for many years as a journalist. He has won awards for short story writing (Columbia University Scholastic Competition, 1998) and news features (Florida Association of News Publications, 2004). Beyer lived in NYC for five years, during which time he came to know artists and the homeless, subjects of this novel. An artist himself, Beyer has worked in acrylics, oils, and watercolors. He’s currently working on a new novel, and blogs at https://www.bibliogrind.com.
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