Read by Silas Hawkins
Elsie opens the refrigerator. Opens the vegetable crisper. Closes it. Opens the other crisper, where we keep fruit. Closes it.
I say, “He was more elderly than I imagined.”
Elsie re-opens the first crisper and pulls out an old bag of pre-mixed salad greens, old enough that brown juices have gathered in a bottom corner of the plastic.
I say, “I had never seen him. A salt and pepper beard, right? Trimmed. Looks like a nickel-and-dime Sigmund Freud, no bigger than a tobacco store Indian.”
Elsie opens the bin with a stomp of her right foot, swinging the round steel mouth wide. With the bag of dead salad makings between her thumb and forefinger, Elsie lets it drop, wrinkling her nose, which then begins to twitch and flutter. She sneezes.
I say, “That’s all I’ll divulge. I saw him. Several times since. So odd. At first, I thought he must live in our building.”
Elsie removes her nail file from her purse and places it on our new Carrara marble counter and spins it with the tip of her red lacquered index finger. Is she warning me away from the subject?
I say, “He’s nice enough, don’t get me wrong. Oh, he is a real gentleman. He gave me his card.” I pull it from the breast pocket of my blazer. It’s almost in tatters because I’d played a game on the train home seeing how many times I could fold it. Someone once told me that it was impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than eight times. I am nothing if not a competitive man.
I read to her from the card: “Intuitive to the Stars.”
Elsie snatches it from my hand and I guess that sets me off. I grab her hair as she turns from me and wheel her around and bend her neck back like I am Bela Lugosi or something. I understand the power of knives, and Elsie, being a gourmet cook, has many lined up from which to choose. A vegetable knife is all it’ll take, I think.
When I let her go, she stares at me, snorting, her eyes wild like an Arabian horse frightened, pawing sawdust in a circus ring. She purses her mouth, tight-lipped as if her refusal to speak might wound me, but I’ve heard more than enough from her.
I say, “I liked Kotchery,” soothingly, hiding the horsewhip. I say, “In fact, I liked the word ‘intuitive’ so much I looked him up on the net. Quite a collection of stars, his clients: George Hamilton, Carrie Fisher, Bobby Goldsboro. ‘Let me realign your emotional vertebrae! Put the spine back in your spirit!’ I liked that. Clever, I admit. ‘Spine in your spirit.’”
Elsie slumps onto one of the designer bar stool kitchen chairs at the prep island. I explain how I stopped Kotchery after I saw him leaving the building for maybe the 14th time, just as I came home, last week. I had started to anticipate his appearances in the lobby or popping out an elevator, a comforting rare streaking comet. Sometimes I held the door for him as he exited in a scurry. Other times, I’d see him turning a corner just as I approached. No matter where, he was always leaving just as I arrived. The fun had to stop.
I tell my tale.
“It was 3:30 pm on a partly cloudy April afternoon. A few mothers with strollers on West End Avenue; some Orthodox Jewish families on their way to temple for Passover. A Chinese food delivery man with someone’s late lunch, I guessed. Kotchery was waiting for the light to change.
“I said, ‘You look awfully familiar. Are we neighbours?’
“He avoided my gaze and so I knew instantly. Or should I say, intuitively. Everything blurred when he smiled. I saw how beautifully his capped teeth were set, tight one against the other.”
I sit on the stool next to her, put a reassuring hand on her knee. “Oh, Elsie. He’s a night grinder, I’m sure. He contains subconscious strata of stress, cavern pools of aggression. He’s probably broken bathroom cabinet mirrors, slamming them with a rage that he doesn’t recognize in himself.”
“After I’ve stopped him, he introduces himself. ‘I’m Kotchery Jericho, and I don’t believe we’ve met. Intuitive to the Stars. You probably recognize me from the Today Show last week,’ he says.
“I say, ‘No, actually, I never watch television before 10 pm because it’s generally too childish. I believe you’re more familiar than that.’
“Well, I never forget a client,” he assures me. “Maybe Oprah back in December?”
“I shake my head, partly to clear my thoughts. He starts to stride away. I call out and ask for his card. He pirouettes and presents a card from his breast pocket to me with a little curtsy, a bow. A fucking little Japanese bow.
“That’s when I recognized his cologne. Armani Code. He must have practically bathed in it because it wafts straight into my nostrils. It’s a scent I don’t have the ego to wear myself, and always mentally categorize it, like a BMW 750i, as a product only a true douche-bag would own.”
Elsie spills her purse onto the counter, perhaps looking for her pocket mace, which I removed before she left for work this morning.
I continue. “I was sure I smelled Armani Code last Thursday in our hall bathroom, but I dismissed the incident as an olfactory hallucination. But my nose wasn’t deceiving me, was it, Elsie?”
As I detail to Elsie these very elementary conclusions regarding the nature of this snake charmer’s visits to our building, to our very apartment, now based not solely on intuition but also on our physical encounter and exchange on the corner, she stands up and backs up by the wall-mounted phone. Her shoulder hits it and the receiver falls. She puts her finger to her mouth, shushing me like Marian the librarian, only her mallard duck teary eyes go dark, surrounded by cascading black-grey Susan Sontag hair.
I start nodding. I know it is going to be all right. She starts nodding slowly, too. So we both know. We both know something but don’t yet understand the nature of our knowledge.
The phone softly sputters an arpeggio of beeps. Then, “There seems to be a receiver off the hook. Please hang up and try again.”
“Don’t you think,” I say to Elsie, “don’t you think in this cellular digital age, they’d change that message since there are no longer ‘hooks’ on phones and so few receivers?”
Elsie’s eyes brim with tears. So sad, I think, so maudlin. The phone commences a new cycle of pathetic quaking and bleating. I remove my jacket very deliberately and fold it in on itself, as if I was placing it on the backseat of our Saab before driving off to a funeral or retirement party. I lay it on the kitchen table, now dappled with buttery sun from the lengthening afternoon.
I walk carefully to the phone as if not to wake some imaginary baby and replace the receiver in its cradle. Elsie and I are then toe to toe and I can smell the dew of her tears on her breath. We’d finally arrived on the ritual altar of matrimonial hara-kiri.
I say, “I have done nothing but love you for these entire eleven years.”
Elsie starts shaking her head from side to side. No, no, no. Like when I tried to speak to her late at night when she was working on a brief. Her starched white blouse is pooching out of the waistband of her navy pencil skirt.
I say, “Eleven years. Every Saturday morning, I brought you a box of Krispy Kremes. I swept the leaves and bird guano from our little Juliet balcony, our only window to the natural world. I bought you one-cent stamps to make your old ones whole; then bought more two-cent stamps when the price rose again. I helped birth your stray feral cat’s kittens, with whom I in no way wanted to share this apartment.”
Elsie is turning red, as if she was holding her breath. In fact, she is holding her breath, determined and stubborn, a kid in a car driving past the endless blur of Woodlawn Cemetery.
I sidle to the stove, our spanking new Viking stove that never worked properly and on which we rarely cooked. We have a microwave, you see.
I say, “Would you like some tea as we take turns calling our lawyers?”
She says nothing.
I say, “Well, I would like tea. Making tea will be my attempt to act like a civilized beast when I really would rather just act a beast and rip your bloody heart out and eat it.”
I take an Ohio blue tip and swipe it hard across the flint on the side of the box. My hand shakes. The match bursts into flame and I lower it to the burner under the tea kettle. At that moment, Elsie’s breath gives out and a veritable gale of air blows out my match. Like hail before a tornado, that exhalation lights a fire under her diaphragm, and she wails and sobs, accuses me of emotional blackmail and stolidity—yes, she says “stolidity,” which I’m not certain is even a word—accused me of a lot of other nonsense. Hysterics.
Hamlet would say: Oh, this too, too stolid flesh.
I watch the smoke curling away from the blackened match tip. After ripping a square of paper towel from the roll on the wall, I think of saying something sour like, “It’s time to wipe up the mess you’ve made.” I think of punching her in the gut. Instead, I just hand her the piece of Bounty to wipe the mucus from her face. Clearly, I am not the monster in this marriage.
I reach into the box for another match. It’s true isn’t it: you can’t make tea without lighting a fire, without setting water a-boil? Elsie honks her nose into the paper towel while I light the imbecilic burner. I pull a mug down and rummage for a pouch of orchid oolong. Why aren’t there proper rites to relieve emotional stress? Has the whole history of human psychological and emotional development been distilled to such a sordid moment as this? There should be some sort of tea ceremony for bloody betrayal. Is this the best humankind can do?
To my left, the knives lie neatly scabbarded in their butcher-block. To my right, the cleavers and meat pulverizers hibernate in the drawer.
I say, “We control our destinies, Elsie.”
As if on cue, the whistle of the tea kettle whines for mercy and the second I cut the flame, it gurgles quiet.
I say, “Elsie, dear. So you know, I’ve changed the locks. These new ones must be opened from the inside. With a key. In order to exit. There is only one key. It is in my pocket. So please don’t think of trying to run off. We have much to settle.”
I see Elsie’s colour rise up her neck. Her eyes search for something to throw.
“The good news?” I say, “My intuition tells me that personal matters, all matters really, will be settled rather shortly.”
(c) John Istel, 2017
John Istel has parked cars, acted in 26 USA states, bartended in Times Square, and written about the arts for The Atlantic, Elle, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. His poetry and fiction have been published widely. He lives in Brooklyn, curates Word Cabaret’s reading series, and never lies.
Silas Hawkins continues the family voiceover tradition (he is the son of Peter 'Dalek' Hawkins & Rosemary 'Emergency Ward 10' Miller). Favourite voice credits: Summerton Mill, Latin Music USA & podcasts for The Register. Agents: [email protected] / [email protected]. www.silashawkins.com
Comments