Licorice Read online

  The one who makes me forget that I’m civilized.

  “Oh,” Gail said, and then said only that his name seemed to be Joe and that although he did not appear to live in the building, or to know anybody who did, he ate lunch on that couch every once in a while. Later when we left with her cassette, he was gone. The couch, when I reached out to stroke it, still held traces of his incredible body heat.

  “So THIS must be the All New You,” I say to Gail when I find her swinging to and fro on our porch swing, her bare toes flexing and unflexing as they push against the rim of our geranium pot. On her lap is a spread of postcards depicting scenes of quaint landmarks, which after a minute I recognize as those of our town; the windmill on Route 58 on a day when the leaves of the corn stalks glistened with moisture, and another of the Chinese Missionary Memorial Archway on a day when the flower beds bloomed and there was nobody hanging out smoking, and another of the corner where the giant oak died leaving only a circle of international flags that on the day of the photograph balanced majestically on stiff, wide currents of air. Day to day, we hardly notice these things at all; they don’t look important, they only blend in with the scenery. But the postcards look like photos from a boring history text. Gail is probably writing on the backs of them, “Now you can see why I had to get away from this place. Not too hip.”

  No longer limp, Gail’s hair makes a spongy afro dotted here and there with corkscrew tendrils, and her clothing, although of similar but creamier browns and beiges, highlights her amazing green eyes and her new, amazing sexiness. The green eyes, too, are new (contact lenses) and I can no longer remember what color they used to be. Neither can my other acquaintances who knew her. Later on, we’ll speak of Gail with awe because of all of the sex she’s been having. “She doesn’t use rubbers,” we’ll say to each other breathlessly as if she’s parachuting without a back-up chute or rock climbing without rope. “Did you hear about the guy from Haiti?” we’ll ask, and each of us will have, and will try to duplicate with the palms of two hands the precise length of his penis as demonstrated by Gail, and then the circumference which she indicated with her thumbs and index fingers.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say involuntarily. And then, “Don’t you ever think about AIDS?”

  “No,” says Gail.

  She tells a story about a date she had with a man who wined and dined her one night after which they nearly made it on the dock outside the restaurant. When they rushed back to his apartment, a friend of his was there from out of town and, as Gail puts it, somehow she ended up in bed with the friend instead, in the spare room.

  “Not real pleasant for the guy who took you out,” I comment.

  “He was kind of pissed off, I guess,” says Gail. “I haven’t seen him since then.”

  “Have you seen the friend?”

  “No. He was from LA. I really missed him for a couple of days but then I met this actor in New York and we had an incredible weekend. We didn’t even go outside.”

  “What were you doing in New York?”

  “I was with this actor.”

  “But–”

  “Actually most of the guys I end up with are kind of old, in their forties. I’m thinking about maybe going out with some younger ones, because the old ones are so weird. All they do is worry about performance even though some of them really know what they’re doing, in fact some of them are absolutely stupendous, like there was this guy who could have written a book about it but still I had to tell him how great he was-like this Spanish guy I was seeing, I had to say ‘magnifico’ or else he’d get really unhappy-and then you have to get them to do it again and again so they know you really liked it.”

  “Sounds frustrating,” I say.

  “And I’ve also decided I definitely like the big ones better, although you can’t always tell beforehand. Anyway it’s okay to have a little variety once in a while. I act different, with different men. Don’t you?”

  “Well….”

  “Can I spend a couple of days here, Liz? I really love this house, I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Of course, as long as you wash some of the dishes.”

  “Come and see my portfolio.”

  What portfolio? I’m thinking. This is not the same Gail. This is not the Gail who, after George fell asleep on the bed beside her, pulled his book from his thumb and marked it with a feather so he’d know where he was in the morning. This is not the same Gail, who used to cover her mouth when she yawned. This Gail yawns with her body and soul. When it’s over, she uncurls her toes from my geranium pot and takes from her suitcase a slick leather portfolio that she carries into my house. We pass the study where Daniel is already working, bare-chested, at the computer.

  “He hasn’t changed a bit,” says Gail.

  “Well, it hasn’t been that long,” I say defensively.

  “Two years,” says Gail, who flopping down on the bed in the spare room, unzips the portfolio and reaches inside. Watching her gives me the shivers. I never thought a person could change this much. Around here people stay pretty much the same. Whole months go by, and you still recognize people when you walk down the street, and they still recognize you. It’s comforting. And I don’t know about this new Gail. She’s happier, for sure, but what’s this stuff she’s taking out of the portfolio? Photos, and sketches, and swatches of lace, and even a newspaper clipping or two; portraits of Gail, interviews with Gail, people talking about Gail. It seems she’s a sensation. Fashion design, but she works only on commission, transforming old wedding gowns into negligees, lingerie, and even men’s briefs.

  “Can I see your old wedding dress?” she asks me.

  I find it upstairs in its cedar-scented cleaner bag in Daniel’s closet. “It was my mother’s,” I tell her. On my mother it must have looked regal. On me, trimmed down to size, it resembled the finery of a doll. At the bottom of the bag is the excess satin, yards of it, rolled up in tissue paper.

  “Pajamas are the really big thing, these days. You know, loungewear,” Gail says, fingering the pleats of the bodice. It was a risque dress for my mother’s day: bare shoulders, the sleeves starting midway on the upper arm.

  “I’m not the loungewear type.”

  “Turkish pants, how ‘bout? A sash at the hips, a sash at each ankle. Real sensual.”

  “I’m not the type.”

  “You could be,” she says, flicking a hair off one of the sleeves. The satin is cream, with a watery sheen that in certain light makes rainbows, and the lace is pearl-studded. “Better than letting it hang in your closet, anyway.”

  “It was in Daniel’s closet, not mine.”

  “Or,” she goes on, “I could make some maternity shifts out of it. A lot of women are doing that.”

  “What the hell would I do with a maternity shift?”

  Gail smiles at me. “And that’s another thing. Men’s clothes. They can really get into the satin, once you make them feel, you know, that it’s not going to make them impotent or anything. But which would you like? The loungewear?”

  Shocked, I see she is already gripping a fancy pair of shears.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say, taking the dress from her lap. I clip the dress back on its hanger, lower it carefully into its plastic bag. As I fasten the bag with a bread tie, Gail cuts the air with the shears. She does this with great care and fastidiousness as if the air were made of lace, snipping delicate shapes that seem to fall to her lap when she’s done. Triangles. Hearts. Ribbons. Around the swish of the shears, we talk. After a while the computer stops whirring and the study light clicks off down the hall. Much later I go upstairs. Daniel has fallen asleep on our bed with his blue jeans on.

  OUR HALLWAYS and rooms, when Gail has passed through them, resemble those paintings meant to suggest a tantalizing proximity of human experience, those still-lifes composed of telltale items-the empty hanger trembling on a rod in a closet, the just-abandoned rocking chair, the book still arousingly open, its single page free-floating. We find record al
bums turning silently in empty rooms, two half-drained wine goblets perching on the arm of a disheveled couch, and the tv still on to a late late show while on the floor beside it Gail’s kicked-off sandals retain the narrow arches of her vanished feet. Then, in the hallway, a scrap of wedding gown lace that on closer inspection turns out to be an exquisitely stitched bikini panty, open-crotched, and in the bathroom at the edge of the sink, a contraceptive jelly applicator tube. Things like that. Once, we even find a man in a robe in our kitchen, spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread. I don’t know him, exactly, but he works for the local tree surgeon. Soho Trees. His brown hair is like feathers swinging over his shoulders, but you don’t always see that part of him. Ordinarily he’s up in a tree, suspended delicately among bleached-out limbs, in solitude and sunlight-dappled silence, while below the big truck whirs and chews, and the other, fatter, Soho men stand around waiting for the fruits of his labors, the shorn, leafless branches he keeps tossing down to them. He is splendid, graceful, inaccessible as an eagle. What did Gail do to get hold of such a creature? I wonder. Climb a tree?

  One night, having followed Gail’s trail to its end, I stand uncertainly at the guest room door, fingers outstretched for the knob. Daniel finds me and leads me away into the kitchen, kisses me, then turns for a cantaloupe melon that I understand we are to share on the porch swing in the dark as if this were one of the old days, the old familiar, patient nights, as if Gail weren’t in our guestroom making love to the Soho Tree Man, as if, just this morning, she hadn’t told me I was quaint. “It’s nice to have someone you can count on when you need a taste of good old-fashioned quaint domesticity,” she said, and kissed me gently on the cheek as if she didn’t know she may as well have punched me in the nose. I’m not quaint, I think now, as impatiently I unzip my skirt, slide out of it, grind up hotly against my husband. Daniel’s heartbeat stays relaxed, his whole body preoccupied, slicing the melon, scooping its hollows, tossing the fibrous, wet clumps in the sink and then turning on the water. He finds two plates, two spoons, one striped, woven dishtowel to be shared between us. I pull off my halter top, wrap it round his neck as if I mean to strangle him, and yank him onto the porch without the melon at all. Only then does he carry me down the porch steps and into the yard where our neighbor Nikki’s music hums softly to the grass and to each damp blossom of our sour cherry tree, like a ghost sniffing perfume. The yard is all weeds beneath my spread naked buttocks as Daniel crawls on top of me and tickles my nose with his flopping pony tail. Our lovemaking is familiar as breathing: gentle and soothing, moist, uncomplicated, lengthy. Even Gail’s flimsy guestroom curtains sleep at peace in the windows before we are done, yet still I watch with fresh longing as the moonlight climbs the chimney, filling it up. Daniel rises, goes into the house, brings the melon out onto the porch and eases onto the slats of the porch swing, naked, satisfied, the striped dishtowel unfolded on his lap.

  I open my legs to a breeze. Daniel’s spoon flashes as he eats.

  NOT MANY NIGHTS later I am lying in the tub when the telephone rings. But I try to ignore it. I am in the downstairs bathroom which I don’t often use but which I’ve chosen tonight for its residue of Gail; its candle, its glass jar of clear, amber bath beads. In the bath, Gail’s forgotten body sponge, and beneath the sink a bottle of Gail’s cheap wine, corked with a wad of pantyhose. The candle smells of musk, and the bath oil, too; it’s like soaking in hormones. I’ve poured a mug of wine. Through the screens I hear the strains of Nikki’s music: synthesized strings with some mild percussion.

  Is it possible that Daniel does not hear the phone?

  The last I saw Daniel, he was hunkered in the kitchen sucking home-made jewelweed nectar from a glass pipet in an attempt to regulate the sugar concentration. Gail left town yesterday having got what she was after, half an hour alone in her ex-lover George’s apartment. There she rifled through his girlfriend’s zippered clothing bags in search of antique wedding gowns. She found three, left the moth eaten one behind.

  When she left, she kissed my hairline and asked sexily, “How was this visit? Was it okay?”

  “Magnifico,” I said, and watched her breezy departure and remembered, the minute she drove away, the diaphragm she’d left hanging to dry on the shower nozzle and which I’d meant to point out to her while she was packing her bags.

  Apparently Daniel does not hear the phone, so I climb out myself and answer it, trailing slippery beads of water amid frothy white clumps of shampoo. It’s Danka, which I suppose I should have known, and which Daniel must have known all along. Who else calls while I’m taking a bath?

  “I am dying,” says Danka. “Tell me something to distract me.”

  Her way of saying, “What’s up?”

  I yawn, catch a ball of shampoo as it slips off my ear and flatten it into my palm. It’s eleven o’clock at night.

  “I was having a candlelight bath,” comes my response. “Daniel is sucking pipets and Nikki is playing Moon Songs on her synthesizer. She always plays those around bedtime, Danka, you know what I’m saying? Listen closely and you’ll hear them.”

  I prop the telephone receiver against the open, kitchen screen and slide down the hallway back to my bath where I finish drinking my wine, rinse off in the shower, towel dry, rub lotion into my knees and elbows before kneeling ceremoniously to blow out the flickering candle.

  Then I turn on the light and comb my hair.

  In the hallway I pause, listening for the angry, disconnected buzz of Danka’s telephone. But there is nothing, just an isolated circle of unflappable patience floating in the spell of Nikki’s music like a duck on a pond.

  At the phone I ask, “How do you like it?” and soften a bit as I flop onto the chair. After all, I’ve phoned Danka during her baths as well, although she takes hers at all hours of the day. She eats breakfast in there on a floating tray, and once dropped a cinnamon roll in the water.

  “Fantastic. But now tell me what is it you think you would like to do after your bath.”

  Around midnight, say.

  “Oh, I was thinking about going out for a little spin,” I answer sarcastically.

  “That is amazing! Do you know that that is exactly what I was hoping?”

  “I had this feeling.”

  “Naturally you did. You always do. Do you know you always know what I am thinking? Fantastic. When do you want me to come and get you?”

  “THAT WAS Thank You,” I say to Daniel in the kitchen. Bent over at the waist, I am batting my hair with a towel. Seen from upside down my husband more than ever resembles a drug dealer with his array of paraphernalia, his brown glass jars of assorted powders and concoctions, his slender scoops and measuring spoons and even, at his elbow, a plastic bag packed with syringes. He sits on a high stool at the counter, eyes riveted to the numbers on his Sartorious Balance. Soon he slides the glass door open again, taps the handle of the scoop, releases a gram or two of mercurium blue onto the circle of filter paper. No need for such painstaking exactitude, I’ve long suspected, but Daniel loves the little balance. How responsive it is; one breath, if its sliding glass door is not properly closed, is enough to send shivers along its dial. This is Daniel in a nutshell, this incremental striving toward perfect equilibrium. Now his hands hover tentatively over the scale, fingers spread like a conductor’s sustaining a note. Finally he turns to me and asks, “Isn’t it a little late to be going out? I mean, where are you going to go?”

  “She wants to spy on someone, I think, and if I want to stay her friend I have to go with her, because she doesn’t want to go alone. She needs a sounding board.”

  “And you do want to stay her friend?”

  Pause, but the car honks outside. Danka’s honk is like a strangled elephant; I have to soothe it before it wakes the neighbors. This happens, occassionally, all over town. It’s the women who go out driving or strolling, and the men who stay home, patient and, maybe, a little bit scared – scared of holding so tight that when the women get loose, they’ll st
ay that way. But Daniel feigns unconcern; he waves me away with a forceps, then turns and gently lifts the disk of filter paper off of the balance before sliding the dyes into a funnel. For a moment I watch him tapping the funnel, holding the beaker aloft.

  “Have fun,” he says. “Tell Thank You hello. Don’t forget your seatbelt, and don’t let her get you in trouble.”

  In trouble, I think, as I walk out the door. What constitutes trouble? Have I ever been in it? Danka has. But has she ever escaped? Trouble’s her style, her definition, her history. She is imprinted on it, she follows its crazy shape. Crazy, because it can’t contain itself. It’s too big, too overwhelming. We were sitting drinking coffee when she told me about it. That was the purpose of our meeting, I remember. “I think you would understand if I wanted to tell you about some of my troubles,” Danka had said when we first met each other, “How about coffee?” And we set the date and time. We met in the college cafeteria way past lunch hour on a brilliant day one November. Even the ivy had turned red and orange; sparrows clamored among it where it climbed past the windows. Still, inside, the room was dim as if submerged. A janitor was sweeping. He stood the chairs on the tabletops in organized rows, beginning at the far end but marching our way. Across the room sat a circle of librarians I recognized, but their words were inaudible; only the low notes carried. We heard the clatter of flatware from way in the back, and then a rush of steam before some lights flickered on near the door. Danka wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and high-heeled black clogs with pointed toes. At the theater the previous Saturday night, where we’d introduced ourselves, many people had worn black but still I’d noticed that Danka’s black was different. Hers was richer, more enveloping, scarier, somehow. During intermission, I was staring at her. She noticed, stared back at me and beckoned me close. We introduced ourselves, and then she led me outside. She drew a slender black filter from an evening purse, twisted a cigarette into its end and lit it with a pewter lighter.