. V - 1 I ISHI was certain she hadn’t heard him. She stretched, opened her eyes, and blinked at his studio apartment, visible beyond the bamboo screen around the bed. “Nice place.” He scanned the room. Despite her comment, he grew warm, queasy. He had scattered red and yellow pillows in careful disarray, hung a trailing purple velvet plant in a green pot, but they appeared garish in the fogged morning light. On the bedside table stood a clear plastic bubble. It contained a blue bird with a clock instead of a chest, which perched on a silvery branch. It was also a music box. The clock, ran slow. He kept it to amuse his daughter, and because his vague, widowed mother had sent it to him for Christmas from half a continent away. Shelly examined it, and giggled. He cursed himself for keeping it, cursed his mother’s taste. Her other presents included a set of corn skewers decorated with busty females carved from corn husks. “Fantastic," Shelly said. She switched on the music box, which played, ‘The Sound of Music.’ The bird’s beak opened as if the song came from deep inside it. Shelly clapped her hands together and laughed. Scott shut his eyes. The air smelled canned, though he had turned the air conditioner off weeks ago. Its hum sounded too much like the breathing of an alien presence. The bed smelled of sex. He opened his eyes, saw Shelly sniff, and the back of his neck prickled. “You should get some new records.” She sprang out of bed without sign of self-consciousness, and wiggled into tight black jeans studded with brass along the thighs, and a metallic knit shirt with an artful rip in one shoulder. Humbly, he agreed that his collection of Beatles, Dylan, Cream and Muddy Waters was out of date. “What should I get?” “Get what you like.” She whipped his hairbrush through her short, dyed hair, which crackled, and leaped out around her face. He offered to drive her home. Outside, he perceived a change in the world. An unseen bird twittered, and his blood pulsed at the purity of the sound. The bougainvillea that climbed the pink stucco wall of his building, which he had hardly noticed in the two years he’d lived there, glittered with a deep magenta beauty so intense it could have been painted on, still wet. A hummingbird hovered before the purple-and-scarlet bells of a fuchsia. He imagined himself hovering before the possibility of joy. He strode to his Honda, to open the door for her, but she had already slipped inside it. She directed him to a brown- shingled boarding house half-sunk into its foundation. He stopped the car, and she bounded out with an unfathomable smile. Scott and Shelly met at the college, though neither was either student or teacher. Just turned forty, Scott felt at ease on the large campus, anonymous, especially on weekends, when high school students, old hippies, tourists, and street entertainers swelled the crowd. The day they met, Scott sat on the edge of a round pool a fountain cascaded into, and watched a Labrador splash through it with joyous yelps, its coat burnished to a blueblack glow. “Dogs know more than people do about having fun,” he said aloud. The woman reading a newspaper near him on the pool’sedge could respond if she wanted, but he hadn’t spoken loud enough to force acknowledgement or snub. He waited. She flipped a page, and he sighed. People surged past, most with young, blurred faces that made them appear to move in another dimension. A man in a 18 Clinton St. Quarterly— Spring, 1987 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1987 19 long, linty overcoat shrieked that God’s fury would hurl down on them that very day. Two guitar players, a graying one who picked out an old Dylan tune, and one with a mohawk, tried to drown each other out. The mohawked one hit his guitar with a chain of keys that dangled over his torn shirt. Scott winced at the clunk, at the boy’s twisted features, and reflected on the lack of joy in life. A tall, thin girl ran past, laughing, in the wake of the wet Labrador. Her bouncy stride and high, trilling laugh drew him, much as did the giggly energy of the small daughter he saw on Sundays. He straightened his broad shoulders, and shifted closer to the outer rim of the pool. The Labrador circled, blundered back into the fountain, soaking Scott’s jeans. The girl skidded to a stop, panting. Her small, high breasts jerked under a black t-shirt, which sported two holes that revealed her ribs, and the slogan Protect the Right to Arm Bears. “Sorry,” she said. “He gets excited.” Scott inspected her mop of dyed orange-and-green hair. "Why’d you do that to your hair?” She tossed her head with a cryptic smile. “So people like you’d ask that.” Scott groped for something, anything, to say that might keep her focused on him. “It makes you look like a giddy kid.” She tilted her head, and studied him the way he had once seen a robin study his daughter after she’d thrown it a stale pizza crust. “Maybe that’s what I am.” Her smile disturbed him. It suggested she had traveled farther beyond innocence than he; or perhaps offered a complicity to deny this was true. It’s only a smile, he thought, and said “You have a nice laugh.” She grinned, an open, happy expression impossible to misinterpret, but then strolled away. The Labrador barked at her from beside a pretzel stand. She sauntered to the dog, turned, and waved. On the strength of the wave, Scott came back the next day. He found her watching a man in white shirt and pants painted with large pink polka dots. The man folded and unfolded a pink polka- dotted sheet with an air of performing a marvelous trick. Scott and Shelly exchanged names. She said she worked in a boutique a block away. He bought her an orange juice, would have asked her out, but feared she’d laugh at him. The following day, he bought lunch from a gangly boy who made tofuburgers. He looked for Shelly, didn’t see her. Someone tapped his shoulder. He jumped and Shelly laughed. “Surprised you, huh? I don’t know why—you were looking for me.” He choked down the tofuburger. Afraid to admit she was right, unable to lie, he chewed for several seconds after he’d swallowed the last of the rubbery, spiced tofu. While she chattered about a dress she’d just sold, he nodded gravely. He felt old and dull beside her. At five-thirty the next day, he crossed Telegraph, and paced the length of Sproul Plaza, waiting for six. Again, he didn’t see her until she touched his shoulder, and again, he started. “You’re awful jumpy,” she said. Her grin added, And we both know why. To ease his discomfort, he treated her with the indulgence his ex-wife frowned on when he used it on their daughter. He called their meetings dates, but Shelly gazed at him from lucid gray eyes as if he’d spoken in tongues. The fifth time they met, she said, “You want to make it with me. Why don’t you ask?” Throat too dry for speech, he leaned forward on the top step of the student union building, and clutched at his bony knees. “Do you live near here?” she asked. He nodded. She rose, danced down the steps, and waited with her hands on her hips, like a mother about to scold a balky toddler. Waking in the morning to find her beside him, he jolted up on one elbow in a throb of panic. He considered himself passably attractive, but knew that in repose, his long jaw lent his face a melancholy cast; his hair had thinned on top and receded from his foreI LLUSTRATION BY GENE HE CONSIDERED HIMSELF PASSABLY ATTRACTIVE, BUT KNEW THAT HIS LONG JAW LENT HIS FACE A MELANCHOLY CAST; HIS HAIR HAD THINNED ON TOP, AND RECEDED FROM HIS FOREHEAD LIKE AN ERODING BEACH. head like an eroding beach. He gaped at her, glad her eyes remained shut. She could be an exotic bird he had trapped by accident. He ached to ask if she’d enjoyed his lovemaking, but rejected all the words that expressed the question as banal, pathetic. He settled for, “You look lovely in the morning.” Neither the adjective nor the formal tone came naturally to him, but he released a breath with a sense of having negotiated a perilous passage, until she yawned. Instantly, he GENTRY MC MAHON He wiped a damp palm on his beige slacks, and thrust his head out the open window. “Shall I call you." “If you want.” < He withdrew into the car like a turtle. She had sounded more offhand than he’d hoped, but he knew he’d call. He owned a small store near the college, which sold airbeds, futons, brocade and velvet spreads, chrome-and-glass lamps and tables. Outside it, on the pavement, someone C an d ac e Bie n e m an
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