Five
A Voice Like Hot Apple Cider
To borrow from the holiday song,
it was over the cliffs and through the cypress, and across a field, over a
creek and through some ferns and groves – to Frosted Glass Man’s campsite we
went. The walk, while long, offered certain
pleasantries – like Frosty’s butt. He
led, I followed, and had ample opportunity to conduct a survey of his contours
and elevations. I eventually concluded
that, while a bit on the lean side, Frosty’s rear end possessed certain
aesthetic universals first reflected in the ancient Greek sculptures – what present-day motor magazines might call
“sporty lines.” (Hessie, on the other hand, would simply cry out, “Nice shelf!”
and laugh that witchy laugh.)
I found further sporty lines in
an unexpected place – Frosty’s campsite, which was lorded over by a burgundy
Nissan 300ZX two-seater with a hatchback and a T-top. Hardly the scratched-up, Deadhead-stickered
VW bus I’d visualized. I noticed that
the inside of the hatch was covered by a crocheted quilt of chocolate, blood
and black hexagons. The outdoor pantry
hutch was draped with a lovely earth-colored Russian silk wrap. Frosty nudged the wrap aside and asked if I’d
like some Turkish coffee.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d also like world peace, but...”
He pulled out an elegant little
pot, about six inches high, four across.
It was sky blue with silver flecks and a long handle the shape of a
dowel rod. He filled the pot from the
campsite water tap, dropped in two tablespoons of sugar, then fired up a
propane stove and set the pot atop the burner.
“I’m afraid all I have are
leftovers,” he said. “Some dolmas that
evaded consumption last night – you’d be surprised, by the way, how hard it is
to find good grape leaves this close to wine country. I also have some couscous, and stuffed
peppers – but you must be careful… I got a really spicy batch.”
He cultivated a smile that
exploded into an evil-scientist laugh.
I, meanwhile, was dumbfounded at the menu. Was he serious?
He raced to catch the pot, which
was boiling over.
“The trick,” he said, “is in the timing. You catch it right as it boils, and then you
pour out a cupful... into... whoops!”
He turned back to the hutch and found two tiny cups, demitasse-size, the
same burgundy as his car, with rims of gold.
“Okay. So,” he continued. “Now you pour off a cupful, return the rest
to the fire, put in zee hoy-tee, toy-tee caffe and a tiny... touch...
of cardamom. Then wait for it all
to boil back up.”
I felt like I was watching a
cooking show on public television, thinking, my oh my, if this buckaroo can be this delicate and attentive to two
little cups o’ coffee, what might he be like with other, more intimate matters?
(Shiver, shiver.)
The pot wasted little time before
it Fed-exed a brown froth to the top.
Frosty lifted it back up, poured in the previously boiled water from the
burgundy cup, then carefully doled out two modest servings of potent-looking
brown sludge.
“Be careful,” he admonished. “It’ll knock your eyelashes off. And you’ll look pretty stupid, walking around
with no eyelashes.”
I took a sip, savoring the
bitterness as it squealed along my tongue, then crunched a few stray grounds
between my teeth. Were I a dead battery,
I’d have been fully recharged. Frosty
grinned at my satisfaction. “The Turks…
they like a little soil in their coffee.
Which reminds me… when you’re done, save your grounds. Then I’ll perform some badass mojo voodoo for
you.”
With that, he ducked into a small
tent on the other side of the hutch to retrieve his “leftovers.” (I, meanwhile,
was conducting some logical calculations, wondering how often he had to
replenish the ice in his cooler.) He
reemerged with three plastic storage containers, forked the contents into a
shallow pan over the stove, threw in a sprinkling of water and covered it with
a lid.
A few minutes later I was
creeping up on the business end of a spicy red pepper as I examined Frosty’s
crow’s feet in the dying light. Frosty
noticed the growing darkness as well, interrupting his dolmas to light up a
stout vanilla-scented candle. Once he’d
cleared his plate, he took my empty coffee cup, swirled it around like bar dice
and turned it upside-down on my saucer.
“We have to let it sit for a few
minutes while the juices run down. But
there’s something else we can do while we wait.”
That sounded like a line to me,
but then Frosty scooted to the other end of the table, unzipped the bag of
glass he’d collected that afternoon and spread the pieces on the table. He sorted through them like a dominoes player
picking through tiles, then landed on a thin, heavily frosted piece of white
that curled in and out like an early-budding leaf. He held it up to the candlelight and ran a
finger over its smooth edges.
“This is from the neck of some
exotic, oddly shaped juice bottle, maybe an Orangina. Its final possessor was a professional man,
thirty-five, thirty-six years old. He
was on vacation with his wife. She’s a
few years younger… I’m thinking thirty-one, thirty-two.
“Now, due to certain deficiencies
in one of their reproductive systems – his, I’m guessing, slow sperm,
uninspired sperm, sperm without the right building permits – this couple has
been through a torturous three-year pursuit of impregnation by any means. Our hero is a patient, genteel young man,
carrier of a well-paid but powerless administrative job that has taught him the
value of sacrificing one’s pride in the interest of peace. These qualities have certainly come in
handy. But the clinically timed
intercourse, the demanding textbook positions, the drugs that make his wife fat
and cranky, all of these have been sliced and diced into a lovely Irish stew
simmering away in his stomach. He
doesn’t think these petty frustrations and vague irritations merit the
attention of a priest, psychologist or even a close friend. So he keeps his crockpot tightly
covered. And with each progressive rap
on his psyche the stew continues to boil until it resembles a thick Tex-Mex
chili.
“This vacation of theirs has come
in the late spring – May, perhaps – right after their latest disappointment at
the doctor’s office. His sperm have
mistaken her latest egg for a large, gelatinous television set and have
gathered around with their remote controls in hopes of finding a soft-core porn
channel. Given the lack of little
kiddies upon which to foist her disciplinary tendencies, his
beautiful-but-cranky young wife has focused her attentions on him, unlatching
his psychic suitcase and picking apart each sock, sweater and necktie. How can you eat those runny eggs? Do we really have to listen to the Eagles
again? I hate this road; all these
curves are making me nauseous. God,
these pills make me look like a fat pig!
“But he knows that her suffering
is far worse than his, and what’s more, he knows it’s all his fault, his sperm
now dawdling at her fallopian tubes, passing around a joint as they listen to
Pink Floyd records. And so he keeps his
complaints to himself, and the chili boils higher and higher in his stomach
until it becomes a torrid Cajun gumbo.
“The morning after their arrival
he wakes up early, leaves her snoozing in their hotel room and takes his
cayenne belly out for a walk along the cliffs.
He pauses at the very center of the clifftop to open a bottle of
Orangina and take a swallow, and when he looks out he finds a brilliant
morning, the sea stretching for miles to a sharp, cloud-stitched horizon. This infuriates him. How can this bright, limitless world exist
while his own universe is so narrow and dark?
The irritation bites at his temple, clutches his eyes. When it gets too
much he feels the weight of the bottle in his hand, takes a last swallow and
hurls it over the cliffs. The bottle
spells out a 50-foot arc and lands on the temple of a large boulder, sending
out a starburst of splinters, sparking yellow in the morning light.
“This is a man who has always
played by the rules, who has never done a destructive thing in his life, and
yet the sound of those shards tinkling through the rocks is like a set of wind
chimes constructed by the young Mozart.
For just a few seconds he feels really, really good. And he goes back to his hotel room, and he
kisses his wife awake. She smiles at
him, and in the way that young wives say such things when they are pleasantly
puzzled by their husbands’ affections, she says, ‘What?’
“And that is... from whence came... this piece of glass.”
Frosty took his curled leaf,
touched it to his lips and placed it on the table between us. His story had left me pleasantly mute, an
empty vessel. I contented myself by picking up his little icicle and angling
its waterslide curves toward the candlelight.
I imagined a bowlful of these, with milk, for breakfast. The story had the opposite effect on Frosty;
between that and the Turkish coffee, his wheels were spinning mightily. He proceeded quickly to his next trick.
“Your grounds should be about
ready,” he reported, lifting my cup and turning it upright. “They call this ‘reading one’s earth.’” He
scratched his chin, then aimed his pinky at the white ceramic skin inside the
cup. “This side you drank from – note
the lipstick stains – this side represents you, and your family, and this delta
running down from where you drank, very rich and strong, a veritable New
Orleans of tributaries. So that’s good,
but the rest, you see, a very solid line across the top, unnaturally straight,
with only two small breaks.
“Let’s back up here. The side opposite your lipstick, that’s
romance. This area near the handle,
that’s finance and logic. Opposite the handle,
that’s the life of the spirit. You’ll
note that you have two tracks here, one next to finance, heading in a jagged
diagonal line toward romance – suddenly cut off. The other is a fountain springing up from the
bottom, a straight line on the border of romance and the spirit, but, once
again, suddenly cut off. Two
half-rivers, no completion, no arrival.
You don’t appear to be going anywhere.”
He was getting much too close,
and the air around me was beginning to feel thin. My body sprung into action to give my heart a
worthy defense. I ruffled a hand into
the pocket of my windbreaker, clutched a fistful of glass and spilled it onto
my plate, like that guy with his voodoo bones in Moby Dick. A green piece the size of a quarter landed atop my last
remaining dolma, and that was good enough.
I picked it up and began spinning my tale.
“There was this teenage girl, a
freshman in high school – smart as a whip, pretty, confident – and she fell in
love with a senior boy. She became
enraptured by him, thought that he was the answer to every question in algebra class,
that his name was inscribed in the capillaries of each autumn leaf that fell in
the quad. They spent a year together,
became so comfortable with each other that they barely needed to talk. It was like they were there to fill each
other’s spaces, to give each other shelter from the harsh climates of
adolescence.
“Very suddenly, a month before
graduation, the boy came to her and said, I’m going to be leaving for college
in the fall, and you’ll be staying here for three more years, so I can’t be
with you anymore. And he told her
goodbye, kissed her sweetly, almost as if they would be seeing each other the
next day. But he never came back, and
then he graduated and was gone. It
wasn’t until a month later that she began to comprehend the depth of her loss.
“Her parents went away on a
week-long vacation. They left the girl
alone in the house because they knew she was very responsible and she’d take
care of things. Three nights after they
left, loneliness emanated through their home like heat from a woodstove, and
the girl amused herself with her father’s antique radio, the one with the
glowing green lights and funny German words.
While she was scanning the stations she happened on an old jazz tune
sung by a woman with a voice like hot apple cider. The voice seemed to wander around on its own,
wrapping around the melody like an old sweater.
When she got to the part where the two lovers said goodbye, the girl
heard the automatic sprinklers go on outside her house, and the faraway barking
of a dog, and she could feel a hole growing inside her body, a sense of
everything, all at once.
“The girl left the house and
wandered around the block until she came to a liquor store. There she talked a young man into buying her
a six-pack of malt liquor – the kind in the green wide-mouth bottles, the kind
you buy when you want to get drunk quickly.
She walked down to the beach, where she found an abandoned fire. She
threw some fresh driftwood on it, and started drinking.
“After three bottles, she looked
up to find the Milky Way streaming over the cliffs like a spray of foam, and it
was there that she located her sadness.
She pulled her sadness down on a tether, wrapped it around her shoulders
and began to cry warm, comfortable tears.
But it wasn’t for the love of the senior boy that she cried. It was because she had not really loved him
at all. She had merely been excited by
his nearness to adulthood, his growing confidence and deepening voice, his
oncoming escape into the big, wide world.
And she had really, really wanted to go to the senior prom.
“When she was done crying, the
girl emptied the rest of her fourth bottle into the sand and tossed it into the
fire. And then she cried again, but
these were not comfortable tears. These were jagged tears, tears that hurt her
eyes and burned her skin – and these were not for feeling, but for lack of
feeling; for love that had no purpose.
“Not knowing about these things,
she had failed to notice that the bottle had settled against a hot coal. After a while the bottle heated up and burst
into a hundred pieces. The girl felt her
heart stop, and then, as she caught her breath, she discovered that one of the
shards had struck her forearm, leaving a pencil-thick line of blood. She found this strangely pleasing, and prayed
that it would leave a small scar.”
I looked up very slowly, as if
recovering from hypnosis, found Frosty’s small, attentive eyes across the table
and lifted my green chip into the air between us. “This piece,” I said.
Frosty pounded the table and let
fly a thunderous “Hah!” as if he had just witnessed the invention of the
telephone. I smoothed out his smile with
a raised hand and a meaningful stare.
“Frosty,” I said. “Would you...
help me... feel something?”
Photo by MJV
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