Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Page 17

  But she couldn’t.

  Downtown in Kresge’s he bought a bottle of Revlon bubble bath, two giant-size Yardley lavender bath soaps, a tortoise shell comb, and a back brush for stray pimples. He had to try four drugstores before he was able to find oils and salt, and then only after he’d cornered and confused the teenage salesgirl. She had Jean Harlow hair and was lost behind cardboard displays of nail polish, dentifrice, chewing gum, and hairnets. Violet by a mossy stone. “Bath oil,” he repeated, pushing the baseball cap down over his eyes, flirting, leaning forward with his elbows in a counter of Tums and other reliefs for the rigors of acid indigestion. “Oil for the bath, if you dig.” Her platinum hair shimmered in pharmaceutical fluorescence, her lips glowed with the color of ionized muscatel grapes.

  “I heard y’inna first place, but what do you mean, like Nivea for in case y’skin dries out, or what’s she want it for, anyway?”

  “What’s who want it for, baby?”

  “Y’mother, whoever y’get it for.”

  Gnossos seeing his problem, thinking a moment, then crooking his finger to motion her closer, winking. The girl looked around, leaned forward with an uncertain frown, a lump under her lip where she was rolling her tongue. “It’s for me,” he murmured.

  The tongue went back into place. “What are y’kidding?”

  “To make me lovable is why.”

  “What? Hehe.” The girl looking for an ally.

  “Velvety to the touch, man, smooth; you dig smooth?”

  “Now look. Hehe.”

  “Ancient custom is all, balm for warrior, makes you good to feel, right?”

  “Oh go on.”

  “You got any?”

  “Hehe. What?”

  “Bath oil, man.”

  “That you put right in the water?”

  “You get the picture.”

  “I’ll ask the manager.” The girl skipped off, ears deaf to her doom, and talked to an old bone of a man in wire glasses at the soda fountain. See her in a year, straddling some pump-jockey in the front seat of a ’46 Ford, knocked up. Watching Gunsmoke in their underwear, cans of Black Label, cross-eyed kid screaming in a smelly crib. Ech. Immunity not granted to all. Be Christian, help her.

  She came back with a small carton and handed him a bottle of highly viscous, umber-colored Charles of the Ritz bath oil.

  “Two,” he said, getting the silver dollars ready. “Don’t wrap them, I’ve got a thing,” pointing at the rucksack, taking both bottles, then handing one back.

  “What are y’doing? Y’just paid for that.”

  “I know, man. It’s for you.”

  “What?”

  “To make you smooth. Lovable.”

  “Oh go on. Hehe.”

  “You’re one of God’s chosen creatures, baby, I can tell. Do you know who I am?”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m the Holy Ghost. Maybe look you up sometime, who knows, give you a ride in my Maserati. You dig Maserati?”

  “What are y’kidding?” rolling her tongue under her lip, twisting a strand of shimmering hair, suddenly winking at him. Hey nonny no.

  By the time he shouldered his way through the apartment door, the rucksack was bulging with cosmetics and foods. More vine leaves, unpolished brown rice, marinated olives, ground round, fertilized eggs, organic lemons, tarragon, bay leaves, garlic, Spanish onions, okra, resin wine, cruets of orange extract, and a new side. Heffalump, Drew Youngblood, and Juan Carlos Rosenbloom were lounging around the pad, drinking Dairy Queens out of wax cups, half listening to a Brubeck. “Gaaa,” gasped Gnossos, “Dairy Queens.”

  “Just opened today,” said Youngblood, who stood and helped with the rucksack. An onion had already wobbled over the floor. Rosenbloom, sucking his straw, peering over the strawberry froth, said, “Delicious. We dong get them in Maracaibo.”

  Gnossos picked up the onion and pointed at the record player. “And burn that Brubump crap, man, I’ve got new sounds. What are you doing, starting a Mickey Mouse club or what?” He handed the side to Heff, who took it and wandered over to the spindle, reading the notes. “Who’s Mose Allison?”

  “Trust me,” from Gnossos, trying Rosenbloom’s froth with a finger.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Not so loud, man.”

  “An’ I don’t dig names like Mose, Paps. It’s Uncle Tomming.”

  “He’s white, baby, don’t lose your cool. And put on side one, thing called New Ground.” Heff grunting as Gnossos walked into the kitchen to unpack his rucksack. But while he was putting away the fertilized eggs he remembered he had failed to inform the troops of the day’s revelation. He sucked in his constipated stomach, sighed, and returned to the living room, where they all sat studying the cover photograph of Back Country Suite. “Ahem,” he said. He was standing perfectly still, a hand on his head, waiting for silence. They put down their Dairy Queens and looked at him.

  “Just thought I’d pass the word, babies, before legend distorts the fact. The voice of the turtle is in the air? Hey ring-a-ding-ding, and like that? Well, this spring has the blessing of the gods. The Daughters of Night are banished, zippo-bang, no more. Pappadopoulis, in fact,” he lowered his voice and raised a hushing finger like Toscanini, “is in love.” He said it again to confound any possible error. “Love. Dig it.”

  Boom went the percussion of New Ground, boom fell the silence in the room, down went the Dairy Queens, and up went their eyes to look at the place where Gnossos had been but was no longer, since with the cathartic announcement he had felt an unmistakable, long-absent urge in his lower intestines and gone in a flash to the bathroom, where he had barely sat down before his bowels found their exquisite relief.

  One hour after this extraordinary visceral event all the dust had settled, and Youngblood had finally completed a fist of anxious phonecalls. He had been attempting to incite diplomatically polite insurrection among the faculty. Rosenbloom was on the Navajo rug, wearing a new red and yellow rodeo shirt, tight white Levis, and jodhpurs, tracing diagrams from his volume of Clausewitz: strategic deployment, tactical flanking maneuvers, logistical supply techniques. Heffalump was curled in the fetal position on the butterfly chair in his blue-striped French sailor’s jersey, faded jeans, and heelless bucks, making notes for their twice-weekly anthropomorphic word game. Gnossos was flying back and forth across the apartment with indomitable energy, wielding brooms, dustmops, vacuum cleaners, oil rags, Lysol, Oakite, and Mr. Clean. “Up up,” he’d chatter if a body got in his way, flicking a section of cheesecloth or chamois, polishing, cleansing, rubbing, wiping. “You’re going to get ulcers,” warned Heff, “hives or something.” Then to Youngblood, who was drawing a line through one of the names on his list, “You nearly finished, man?”

  Youngblood nodded, tapping the sheet with a pencil, “It’s really picking up, you know? Philosophy, English, architecture, all with some kind of commitment. Government’s giving us a little trouble at the emeritus level but I think they’ll go.”

  “We smash him, crack,” said Rosenbloom, dropping an ink blot in the eye of the university President, whose picture was on the front page of the Sun. The man had announced the coming demolition of another old campus building. The paper had appeared under the door after the usual mysterious, gentle rapping at dawn. “Up up,” said Gnossos, gliding past with the vacuum cleaner, eagle eye on the lookout for nail parings, dustballs, hairpins, and Oreo creme sandwich crumbs.

  “Is there anything left to drink around here?” asked Heff by way of distraction. But Christian Pappadopoulis foxed him and flew to the icebox without breaking his stride, returning a six-pack of Ballantine ale and a church key with a synthetic ruby on the handle. “No stains, you guys, no spilling, little taut-ship action.”

  “Hey wow,” said Heff, “where’d this compulsive house-cleaning come out of?”

  “Order from chaos, babies. Art, if you dig.”

  In time a bloodshot, disheveled Fitzgore wandered in, followed eventually by Agneau, who
carried his fraternity newsletter under his arm. But Gnossos managed to gather up all the fetid vine leaves, lichee nuts, lemon peels, and sordid bits of ugly from the kitchen, and he stacked them in a huge polyethylene bag, which had once contained Fitzgore’s suit, while everyone else began work on a new six-pack. He slung the bag over his shoulder, turned up the final band of Back Country Suite, and went outside to find the landlord’s garbage cans. While there, he paused for some time, sniffing at the new fragrance of warmth on the southerly wind.

  When he returned, whistling arpeggios with Mose Allison, the large living room was mysteriously empty. He stepped out on the front porch but there was no sign of them. Youngblood’s Anglia and Fitzgore’s Impala were still parked in front.

  But inside, he detected whispers from the bathroom. He tiptoed carefully across the freshly waxed kitchen tiles. Everyone was gathered in a semicircle around the commode, peering down. Their mouths were open. Heffalump and Youngblood held drinks, Agneau and Fitzgore leaned on each other, and Rosenbloom scratched his rump.

  “Man,” from Heffalump finally, putting his beer on the sink. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “What is it?” asked Gnossos, suddenly uncomfortable.

  They all turned their heads from the commode and gazed at him, lips still parted. “Ech,” said Fitzgore.

  Gnossos nudged his way between them, peering down. When he glanced up, they were all waiting for his reaction. Then he looked again.

  Floating in the water was the largest turd he had ever seen in his life.

  Ever.

  “Mine?” he asked, a finger at his heart.

  They all nodded in sympathy.

  “Bullshit,” he protested, “I refuse it. It’s somebody else’s.”

  “Nobody’s been here, man.”

  “You just came in to piss, Heff, it was you.”

  “No,” said Agneau softly. “He saw it and screamed. When you were outside.”

  “But I flushed it.”

  “It’s too big. Won’t go through.”

  “Hell it won’t,” said Gnossos, reaching for the handle.

  “No no,” protested Youngblood and Rosenbloom together. “Save it.”

  “We can have it cast, man,” said Heff.

  Gnossos reached again, but they stopped him. “Hey, let go, goddammit, that thing’s been trying to creep into the ground for months. You can’t leave it there. Have the gods down on you in the night. Monsoons.”

  “Casting,” said Youngblood respectfully. “The perfect solution, really. Just look at it.”

  Gnossos stared down again. As he did, a small eddying current in the water lolled it over on its side. It was astonishingly well formed, here and there a minuscule design. Cuneiform of the bowels. Secret cellular knowledge etched by the insides, trying to tell us something.

  “It is sort of splendid,” he admitted slyly, and lunged for the handle. But they stopped him again, Rosenbloom blocking the front of the pot.

  “What is this, anyway? If it’s mine I can do what I want with it.”

  “It belongs to the people,” said Heff solemnly, gazing down.

  “Like any other work of art,” added Youngblood, agreeing. “You no longer have the right to destroy it. I’m sorry.”

  “How do we lift it out?” asked Heff.

  “Ech,” said Fitzgore.

  “Nobody else gets it!” yelled Gnossos at the ceiling.

  “One of those shirtbags,” suggested Agneau, “those plastic things.”

  “Anybody got some rubber gloves?” asked Youngblood.

  Fitzgore went out reluctantly and returned with a plastic shirtbag, Heff coming up with an ebony salad fork and spoon.

  “Hey,” said Fitzgore, protesting, “my mother sent me those.”

  “For art,” said Rosenbloom, rubbing his tiny, hairy hands together. Heff handed him the salad set and he knelt next to the bowel, implements poised.

  “I want it left alone! Do I have to bust heads?”

  “Shh,” said Heffalump gently. “A little Satyagraha, please.” He also knelt, spreading the top of the bag. “This is a very delicate operation.” Then, to Rosenbloom. “Maybe we should put a little water in first, keep it fresh and all.”

  “Ugh,” said Fitzgore, but he was grinning, fascinated.

  Rosenbloom lifted six spoonfuls of water from the commode into the plastic bag. Heffalump tested for watertightness and signaled to proceed. Gnossos gazed spectatorially, like an anaesthetized catatonic. Rosenbloom tested different methods of execution, settling finally on a chopstick-pincer arrangement, spoon below, fork on top.

  “Won’t it break?” asked Agneau.

  “Scotch tapes,” said Rosenbloom, “hold the worl’ together. She look pretty, how you call him, stolid.”

  “Solid,” corrected Fitzgore, hands over his eyes, peeking between the fingers.

  “Thas the one,” said Rosenbloom, making contact, lifting the gargantuan object free, raising it perilously high, one end dangling over the spoon, straining, but showing no signs of fracture.

  “Man,” said Heffalump. “Just look at it.”

  “Oh, the bloody indignity! Tidal waves, earthquakes, solar eclipses!”

  Delicately Rosenbloom lifted the flexible object over the plastic bag as Heff arranged the opening. It fell with a wet plop and shoved out the sides of the bag.

  Gnossos stared, unbelieving. “I disown it. It’s not mine. Must have floated up from downtown. It belongs to Fat Fred or somebody.”

  They filed out of the bathroom one at a time, Gnossos glancing at each static face, Judases all, failing to know me, making off with their cargo. “Wait,” he called. “A boon. Grant me a boon, you guys.”

  “A what?” asked Heff, wheeling. “What the hell did you call me?”

  “No, man, a boon, a favor.”

  “Certainly,” from Agneau.

  “When you’re finished, you have to bury it, okay?”

  “With full honors,” said Youngblood.

  “Militaring funerals,” said Rosenbloom, still holding the ebony fork and spoon. “Let’s do it.”

  They all marched through the living room in step, and out the front door. Fitzgore did an about-face on the porch and returned wearily, still looking exhausted, to his bed. Gnossos heard the cars start and drive off but he refused to go to the window. Fitzgore avoided his menacing eyes.

  “Butchers,” he hissed. “Maniacs.” And returned to the bathroom, where he looked at the empty toilet bowl. It seemed there was nothing more to do. Remembering Kristin, he turned the hot water on in the tub and compulsively emptied every bottle of oil and salt into the billowing steam. The fumes impregnated each nook of the apartment with the sugary odor of nectar and honeydew. Sweet perfumes for the flesh, drive away the demons.

  Provided they’re ready to go.

  10

  Two nautical hours in the oceangoing tub, half emptying then refilling the water, turning the tap when the temperature fell below a critical level; the periscoping tool a thermometer. He watched it absently, foreshortened as it was by the plane of soapy liquid, some new genus of lily pad, a blind, muscular fish, single hollow eye socket hidden under catholicized skin. On the final filling he added the blue cosmetic crystals of Prince Matchabelli bubble bath, aerating the multiplied froth with his knees, using the periscope to lift a weightless clump of sixty or seventy spheres. He slipped on Fitzgore’s skin-diving goggles and descended, looking for treasure, a tiny Poseidon or Aphrodite clip-clopping along in the microcosm. All gods and muses tiny, the length of a thumbnail or smaller; primitives wrong to make them monumental. Find them in peanut butter jars, under bottlecap cork slices.

  He caught sight of an unlikely movement and plunged forward to examine a cluster of partially dissolved crystals. He had to wipe the fog from the goggles in order to see. But instead of Hermes he found the reflection of Fitzgore, immaculately dressed, distorted like a fat man in a sideshow looking glass. “God, Paps, you’re not still in the goddamn
ed tub?”

  “No, as it happens I’m not.”

  “What are you doing, anyway?”

  “Man, how come you guys have such a talent for slipping worms in the image?”

  “Worms?”

  “Later, Gore, I’m busy.”

  Fitzgore nodded, straightening his tie in the mirror. “That girl’s coming over, isn’t she, that one in the knee-socks, what’s her name?”

  “Why don’t you flee, man, before you get some bath oil on your nice John Lewton suit?”

  “Brooks Brothers, Paps, please. Only wanted to know ’cause I can hang around D.U. or someplace after house meeting.”

  “That would be kind of you, yes. Unless of course you plan to fall by and watch, take seconds.”

  “Speaking of which, you don’t know anything about Pamela and Mojo, do you?”

  “Will you get out of here?”

  Fitzgore shrugging, looking as if he might have something more to say, then dabbing after-shave lotion under his ears and leaving with a diabolical, “Have fun.” Gnossos slid into the froth to be alone, submerged his head, and looked up at the glittering underside of the surface. He talked out loud into the bubbly liquid, his mouth flooding with perfume: How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

  By five-thirty he was out of the tub and she had not come. His stomach was warm with the discomforting incalescence of anxiety. He sang nonsense lyrics to himself and jumped around the apartment with an oil rag, dabbing at already spotless ashtrays, mantels, hunting horns, record jackets, rucksack buckles, window sills, door handles, pots and pans, and the ominous Blacknesse painting. The dolma lay simmering in an exotic sauce on the stove, wine chilled in the baby refrigerator, olives waiting on one of Fitzgore’s Wedgwood plates. Chunks of seasoned lamb were impaled on coathanger skewers, marinating, ready for the flame.

  He tried Mose Allison but lost patience and turned him off in favor of the Hohner F, which wouldn’t work. The C note had been blown out during his morning walk. Man, still the same day. Cycles of the sun the wrong way to measure time. Crusting of the cells was how, little vessels aging, collapsing at the temples, inching you along without your say.