Nocturnes

Once Upon a Type

I knew that I had grown up when I finally stopped dreaming about you.

When I was a kid my parents had tried telling me that you weren’t real.  They even took me to a therapist to have my head shrinked, but he only gave me some candy to nibble on and chucked me under the chin — “Only one at bedtime sweetheart, but keep that fairy dust in your eyes or you’ll become an old sucker just like me.”

But I knew even then that you were real. And once when I was 13 you even proved it to me so that I had to wear a turtleneck to school for a whole week.

But then you came by less and less.  “Love you Wendy,” a stray foot doing a dance of epilepsy against the window’s edge.  “See you real soon.”

And then you didn’t come at all.

Until that final time.  I knew it was you when I heard the sling shot of a pebble and the outline of your frame — its echo — against my windowpane.  I let you in. I always did, even when I sighed and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, fumbling for the pill box with the sewing thimble that I kept under my pillow just in case that damn shadow of yours decided to show up.

You laughed and your laugh was different. “Oh Wendy, that dark side of mine won’t be bothering us anymore. I ditched him awhile back — he was nothing but trouble for me.”

Peter, how beautiful you had once been. Even on my fifteenth birthday when you took me to my first goth night at Neverland and left me to dance with that tweaked out Twinkie fairy bitch I had understood.  We both liked how you glistened iridescently with his dust.  That with just one sprinkle you would turn you into the magic boy, offering up parlor tricks for a dollar. I watched you levitate spoons, throw cards on tabletops in bold wager. And then, into my lap, where they became spades. Your pockets sang with the steal of gold coins, the sweat of my palms.

I couldn’t see you but I knew that this time you weren’t pacing, already suffocating in my bedroom with one ear cocked for the siren call of a lost boy’s transmission as he circled my block, waiting for you.  I knew that this time it was really bad.

“Peter, uh, how are you?…Are you okay? Are you… hooked again?”

We both knew what that meant — butterfly-fine brows would knit tightly together to make a point, punctuated by the crack of a beloved doll’s twisting neck.

Instead you just smiled.  Really smiled.

“Wendy, the Captain’s out of commission.  Cleaned up his act real good.  He and my dad are actually tight now.  They even got me this sweet deal in Williamsburg for a loft space.  I have to share it with my brothers, but hey, it’s only until college —”

“Dad? You don’t have a dad, Peter Lost!  Your mom and dad were like Bonnie and Clyde and they both died in some murder-suicide thing at the Chelsea Hotel when you were a kid!  I tried to tell my parents so that they would adopt you and you could stay here with me but you well, you remember how that went; after that I was gone for a long time.  Well, you know, you  remember —”

You turned on the lamp, drowning out the nightlight that had once commanded battalions of puppet shadows across your face late into the night while you popped my candy and told bedtime stories. The light healed the purple bruises under your eyelids and tamed the dancing onyx of your eyes into a puppy-dog amber.  Your cheeks had filled into two symmetrical stains of rose.

‘Uh, Wendy, how long are you planning on staying your parents for?”

“What do you mean, Peter? I live here. I’ve always lived here — except for when I haven’t (giggle) but there really hasn’t been a trip away since the last time I saw you.”

“Oh Wendy, I am so truly sorry.”

You took me into your arms.  I searched furtively for the concave of your ribcage but you didn’t break the embrace and anyway, it was no longer there.

“Don’t cry, Wendy, I’m going to help you.  You’re so beautiful.”

“Oh Peter, you have gone truly mad!”  I threw the window open, ready to walk the plank if I had to in order to dive into the whole, wide world.  The wind was confetti rich with fairy dust.

“Love you Peter.  See you real soon.”

And just like that, I was gone.

Sketching in Crayon

A model gets on the 4 train at 59th.  Her feet are flat plains in shoes that don’t give an inch, her hair is pulled from off her face into an effortless chignon. She flips through her portfolio, chewing a finger eagerly as she takes in the show — the nymphet, the siren, the sun-streaked smile of Abercrombie & Fitch.

Three white women in their mid-20s shift their weight back and forth on tan pumps.  They wear dark moles on pasty arms and sensible knee length skirts. On Wednesdays they have manicures with sheer nail polish done by interchangeable Asian women who cut the cuticles too close at the cue of a ringing purse.

The Asian women greet them politely but can’t remember their names; they all leave the same tip and wear engagement rings without a wedding band.

A sulky faced exotic with black-pea eyes popping out in liquid kohl sits down next to the model. The exotic’s nails are presumably a dark, vampy red.

Out of the corner of their eyes the white women are watching the men watching the exotic study the model as she walks off the train, where all of them then drop out of this story all-together.

Madame X - A Bar Review Post-Mortem

“But I just don’t understand why you don’t want to paint me anymore,” wailed Madame X to John Singer Sargent.

“You are no longer new,” Sargent replied, as matter of fact as a brush stroke.  “I told you to stop with the slip of your dress strap.  That alabaster shoulder, Amelie, was everything.”

“You weren’t the only one who wanted me.  I am…I am the It-Girl!”

“Mrs. Gautreau.  Amelie.  Your face is as pale as your arms are plump. You are no longer twenty-three if you ever were a day.  And you eat — red meat.”

Madame X looked around one last time at the fading red couches of her once famed boudoir, arching an alopecia-thinned brow at the imprint of a spectral lover (John - Jacques - Jonathan — and Catherine) who had lingered on the pale neck before leading Madame’s frail hand out to the garden to smoke French Resistance cigarettes and talk of all the fine things in the world.

“You can have the place if you still want it,” said Singer Sargent. ” But you should reconsider those portraits —they’re just so obvious, although the one in the unitard who looks like a yogi may do. You may also want to consider adding a few organic wines, and maybe a starter salad, if you even want to try and attract new clientele.”

Starter salads? Rabbit food? Madame grimaced.

“And most importantly, the smoke is bothering the neighbors.”

Madame X didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t except to kiss Singer Sargent tenderly on the nape and quietly pull the door shut and the heavy drapery down behind him.

She pulled down her black gown too — slowly tugging at the straps as the artist had first taught her — until her nude body shivered in a full-length gilded mirror.

She had never noticed how her paleness — accented by a light amber down — had lacked tautness, elasticity.  Her grace had always been in the suggestion of movement rather than in the still-life’s perfection.  Even in The Painting the grip of the hand gave the lie to the cool profile as the gaze — straight-ahead — dreamed of raptures in crooked side-streets.

But her clients had never minded.  She had not changed.

Madame X took the revolver (it was in the yellow envelope all along in the conservatory) and stroked its muzzle against a belly fragrant with steak and wine.

“Now what would the neighbors think of that picture!”

The old Madame laughed, clucking a Bordeaux-stained tongue to ivory teeth.

“I guess I’ll have to put out an ad in all of those Bridge and Tunnel rags tomorrow,” she said with a bit of her old flounce, opening up the garden doors and striking up a match.

Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me. Sybil.

“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.“  - Vladimir Nabokov, The Vane Sisters

A Ghost Story Out of Season

1.

The house at the end of the world was like a sad wedding cake in lavender stucco, but for years, the ghost whispered, it had reigned over the lavish seaside community, dignified in forest green.

When I first came you singled me out, told me stories.  You showed me where you had undressed Marilyn Monroe, who had made love to you in the servants’ entrance because she had wanted to get her elbows dirty.

You had worn fancy clothes that wrinkled almost immediately around your frame.  You threw parties.  You had been handsome and messy before people knew that handsome and messy were fashionable.  Your lips, like my father’s, would have tasted of tobacco.

When the other man died the procession of SUVs rounded the driveway like a funeral dirge. “Are they finally coming to say goodbye to me?” You laughed, and I could almost make out the wry, undercurl of your lip.

I didn’t have the heart to tell you that no, it was for someone else, someone who didn’t mean nearly what you do to me.

But you knew that anyway.  You always did.

2.

They say that the widow Anne is still a beautiful woman and that her daughter Katharine is equally ugly. Mother, with what they call the classic if not quite ageless face; daughter, blooming features held captive by X disease in utero, the photonegative. Side by side they stand lithe and squat, chiseled and receding, hipbones and baby fat coming forth to meet the mourners —

—The dummies to my ventriloquist.

The middle-aged men are already flirting with the ugly daughter’s pretty friends as their wives speak with Anne, who, already itching her way out of mourning, tells them:

“At least Richard passed in his sleep. Did you know that back in the 50’s a semi-famous writer lived here? One night he threw a party and left the door open for the guests to find him.  And they found him — hanging.  Right there.”

She points to the servants’ staircase where ingénues had stepped down one by one like silent stars with white, trembling faces and lips like crescent moons. Faces pale but with the knowledge of how to camouflage into the darkness of whatever alcove, attic, closet — and finally, to disappear.

Anne found your instruments pretty soon after they had bought the house. She didn’t know how to play so she used your baby grand as an altar for her photos: Anne, young and not as beautiful with the dead husband, Katharine at a good angle in glamour shot makeup, plaintively ugly again in her first communion.

Each face is embalmed in white lacquer and gazes out from behind clear glass for the Viewing.  People in party dresses come to pay respects while idling away on lost music notes. The symphony, always there, passing.

That night we run around the house like mad to finally play with all of your instruments, to caress the servants with faces white, like silent stars.

3.

Mother served blueberry pancakes in the early morning and then we played ping-pong on the lawn because it was cool but felt like spring.  Mother soon rushed us back inside the house because it was spring but felt cool.

I am standing back because my leaving will lock you back up inside Friday night wakes– the catches inside hollow throats — smiles frozen in mine and my mother’s pictures.

I go back to sleep instead.  It was, as you know, the only way to find you.