FILM: King and Queen

The Last King of Scotland
The Queen







Whitaker as Amin,
and Mirren as Elisabeth II

By Steve Vineberg

As Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker gives one of the most immense performances I’ve ever seen. Everything about him, from his frame to his belly laugh and the way his emotions erupt across the broad map of his face, seems larger than life.

Most of the actors who have given memorable portrayals of real-life personalities in recent years (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, and others) have taken an intimate approach, building their characters psychologically, but this movie isn’t especially interested in Amin’s background and Whitaker doesn’t pause to take us through his motivation. He understands Amin as a man of enormous appetites and feelings, a figure dominating a canvas. The canvas, of course, is Uganda, the leadership of which he seized from chief minister Milton Obote in a military coup in 1971 that was enthusiastically applauded by the population. Amin was a populist icon, a demagogue—one of those charismatic men who manage mysteriously to persuade his people that he’s one of them while indisputably towering above them. He was also a monster who managed to slaughter 300,000 of his people before the Tanzanians finally drove him out of Uganda in 1979 after capturing Kampala, its capital city.

The man who gave himself, among other titles, “His Excellency for Life” and “Lord of the All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea” is a role for an actor of majestic expressiveness, and that describes Whitaker. He should have become a movie star nearly 20 years ago, when Clint Eastwood cast him as Charlie Parker in Bird, but it was a terrible movie and though he was on screen for mostly all of its nearly three-hour running time, the role was oddly underwritten. But the character performances he gave in some of the smaller films that followed A Rage in Harlem, Johnny Handsome, and especially Downtown were distinguished for their unusual emotional intensity. He’s shown up in dozens of pictures since, as well as TV series (earlier this year he shot half a dozen episodes of The Shield, and he was first-rate in a guest appearance on last week’s episode of ER), but The Last King of Scotland may mark the first time he’s made it onto most moviegoers’ radar.

Whitaker’s Amin is at the heart of the movie, but he’s not its protagonist. That’s Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), the Scottish medical-school graduate with an adventurous spirit who winds up in Uganda because he closes his eyes and spins a globe, vowing to travel wherever his finger points. Garrigan lands a job at a rural clinic, working with a British doctor (Adam Kotz) and his attractive wife Sarah (Gillian Anderson, luminous in a brief role), and arriving just as Amin is taking over the country. Young, romantic, and impatient, with more than a little bravado of his own, and very much a product of his insurrectionary time, Nicholas is entranced by Amin’s charisma and taken in by his grass-roots appeal. He admires him for his stated aim to raise the standard of living for Ugandans, and for his disdain for the British, who are, in Nicholas’s mind, a race of stuffy, constipated, racist bureaucrats. He convinces Sarah—whom he’s been attempting to court in her husband’s temporary absence—to go out to see Amin address the locals in their area, and cheers along with them. (Sarah is more circumspect.) When Amin’s car hits a cow on the road on his way back to Kampala, Nicholas finds himself pressed into service to treat Amin's injured hand, and his efficiency makes a favorable impression on the leader. So does Nicholas's daring: When the bellowing of the struck cow grows unbearable, Nicholas grabs Amin’s own gun and plugs the suffering animal on the spot. It’s a wonder Amin’s soldiers don’t shoot him for disarming their general, but Amin is so struck by Garrigan’s nerve that he calls on him again and then offers him a post as his private physician.

The movie, which was adapted by Jeremy Brock, Peter Morgan, and Joe Penhall from Giles Foden’s novel, is a loss-of-innocence story, and through its first act it’s just about perfect. The director, Kevin McDonald, takes his time settling in; he lets the vivid, overheated colors of the landscape seep into your skin (the marvelous cinematography is by Anthony Dod Mantle) while the pace of life in the African countryside takes hold. He and McAvoy (who played the faun, Mr. Tumnus, in last year’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) get Nicholas’s youthful impetuousness, his sexual energy, his leftist zeal; you see exactly how he’s taken in by Amin’s comradely warmth, his robust humor, his generosity, his trust, and his insistence on treating Nicholas, almost immediately, as a confidant. (And he’s certainly not pure enough to resist the thrill of being in the constant company of a celebrity, and one who doesn’t mind throwing such gifts his way as a sexy new car.)

The movie is so wonderful at first that when it goes bad you experience the drop-off as an almost physical disappointment. That happens around the time Nicholas realizes that the man he’s put his faith in is killing off hundreds of perceived enemies—and, in that Macbeth-like way of tyrants, sooner or later he sees almost everyone as an enemy. As Garrigan becomes implicated in Amin’s paranoia and violence, the script becomes melodramatic, shifting from event to event so quickly it feels truncated. Meanwhile McDonald abandons his wide, inclusive visual style for a lot of close-ups and fast, jagged editing, and dispatches his leisurely storytelling for hype. The movie becomes lurid, garish. When Nicholas falls into a romance with one of Amin’s wives, Kay (the superb Kerry Washington), McDonald shoots their love scene with a distracted feverishness; he forgets to depict its sensuality and to underscore the lovers' feelings.

What holds it together is Forest Whitaker—the way he drenches himself in Amin's every emotional color, letting it soak the air around him, yet moving from one to the other with terrifying rapidity and completeness. Even though it’s impossible to watch a dramatization of Amin’s rule now without a consciousness of what a bloody dictator he was—and even though the pierce of Whitaker’s gaze when Garrigan seizes his gun is enough to make a viewer wary (you think, God, testosterone can blind a young man)—you can’t help being as amused as Nicholas by his earthy humor and as mesmerized by the warm immediacy of his presence. It takes a long time for Nicholas to believe fully that he’s in the employ of a monster, and by the time he does he finds that Amin’s fatherly affection has enclosed him like a vise. And then when he turns on Nicholas, the force of his fury feels like an earthquake. It’s truly a great performance.

________________

Peter Morgan gets the sole writing credit on The Queen, which Stephen Frears directed, but unlike The Last King of Scotland it contains scarcely a false note.

This movie, which focuses on the royal family of England in the days following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997, is a genuine surprise. You might expect a juicy satirical comedy that takes shots at the uptight royals for their treatment of the princess and their long, conspicuous silence in the wake of her death. What you don’t expect is a sensitive, compassionate portrait of Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren). The movie isn’t a snow job, either—Frears and Morgan don’t pretend that Elizabeth and Prince Philip (James Cromwell) feel more charity toward Diana than they would be likely to toward a woman who had no compunction about airing their son’s dirty laundry. But though Philip comes across as a snob and a clod—a characterization that doesn’t seem out of line—Elizabeth turns out to be an intelligent, contemplative, and complex figure (just as she did in Alan Bennett’s marvelous 1991 television drama A Question of Attribution, where she was played by Prunella Scales), and the filmmakers use her to address the subject of what it means to be English and a monarch at the end of the millennium. The Queen is the sort of movie you could imagine David Lean making if he were still alive.

In the early scenes, Elizabeth’s reticence to have a public response to Diana’s death or to leave the Windsor estate in rural Balmoral for Buckingham Palace, where she can be in the public eye and close to the widespread mourning for the princess, comes across as obstinacy and even pique. She and Philip appear irritated by the effusion of sentiment over Diana—especially Philip, who’s constantly rolling his eyes at the media blitz. And our reflex exasperation at the queen’s refusal to add to the general air of grief is fueled by our sense that some combination of her own dislike of Diana and a naturally withholding temperament makes her incapable of extending any sympathy to Charles (Alex Jennings), who, whatever his mixed feelings about his ex-wife, is clearly devastated by the news. We probably view her much as does Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), who has only recently become prime minister. (The movie begins with his election in early summer and then leaps ahead to the car crash a few months later.) As the Windsors stay out of London and out of camera range, as they decline to fly the British flag at half-mast above Buckingham Palace, Blair asks his staff, “Can no one save these royals from themselves?” and urges Elizabeth to reconsider how their conduct is alienating the British people.

But the filmmakers linger with the Windsors at Balmoral, and little by little we come to see how little the media excoriation and popular resentment of Elizabeth capture her essence. Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory) makes cracks about the royals luxuriating on their 40,000-acre country estate, and yes, the landscape of Balmoral is beauteous (especially as shot by the aptly named Affonso Beato). But the Windsors aren’t luxuriant people, exactly, though they ride and hunt and do many of the things that the English aristocracy has done for centuries. Their no-nonsense efficiency as they handle the day-to-day details of the grounds, the way Elizabeth supervises meals and takes Blair’s calls (reluctantly) in the middle of tea, her exchanges with her mother (Sylvia Syms) all have a very 1940s wartime air. Angry about how she's being told to act over Diana's death, the queen accidentally drives her car into a highland stream and gets mired there. She has to call the groundsman to rescue her, then reminds him that she was a mechanic during the war.

This bit of information makes us smile—not only because of its incongruousness but also because we can just see it. And I think this identification of Elizabeth with the Blitz helps open her up to us. To the wartime world, the Windsors—Elizabeth and her mother and her father, King George—represented all the old Victorian English virtues: dignity, politesse, resoluteness, stick-to-it-iveness, pragmatism, hard work and, through it all, an unstinting stoicism. When you see how those values were romanticized in the tearjerkers of the 1940s, it’s easy to find them wearying and impossible. There are so many reasons to find fault with England in the final decades of the empire that our immediate reaction to those values—especially as Americans—may be to make fun of them. But as a code of conduct to meet the challenges of the Second World War, they’re rather impressive. Elizabeth took the throne as the empire was disintegrating, so there has always been a natural tension between this icon of an anachronistic monarchy and the age over which she has—officially, at least—reigned. But you can’t blame her for remaining true to her nature, her family and the royal tradition. And that’s where The Queen comes down—as does (surprising even himself) Tony Blair.

Helen Mirren’s brash, earthy Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO movie earlier this year lacked nuance, though the problem was probably mostly in the script’s conception of the character. By contrast, she gives a delicately layered performance as Elizabeth II that ranks with the most brilliant work she’s ever done. She manages to play a woman who staunchly keeps her own counsel, but provides just enough of a window into the queen's feelings to allow us to comprehend her behavior. That is, she illuminates a mystery without solving it. Mirren makes us feel the dilemma of a ruler who suddenly finds that because the restrained behavior she models is no longer resonant with her people, her continued adherence to it diverges, as she never thought it would, from a carefully inculcated, lifelong commitment to serving that people. (To her astonishment, her subjects have no reticence about crying in front of the camera as they talk about why they idolized Diana.)

When, with no alternative, she finally breaks down and makes an appearance with Philip in London and walks past the flowers and memorials from the many who adored Diana, she sees that some of the messages express anger at the royal family, viewing them as Diana’s enemies. “You were too good for them,” these notes say, and “They destroyed your life.” Mirren shows how wounded Elizabeth is by these furious darts without ever lowering the character’s expertly arranged façade. Sheen, Syms, Roger Allam as the Queen’s private secretary, Robin Janvrin, and especially Jennings (a multiple Olivier Award winner who is not as well known to American audiences) are superb, and Cromwell and McCrory contribute their technically finesse in less subtle roles. But Mirren is staggering.

She plays her best scene with a stag the queen encounters in the hills of Balmoral. Philip has been taking their grandsons hunting as a way to distract them in their grief, and he’s reported back to her about a towering stag, the most magnificent seen in those parts in years. Then one day, alone and without warning, she comes across it and is profoundly stirred by the spectacle. It’s clear that we’re meant to see the creature as an emblem of Elizabeth—regal, improbable, out of its time—and that she herself recognizes a kinship with it. Later comes a scene that answers this one—hearing that the guest of a local lord has brought the stag down, she goes to see the animal’s body. That echoing scene is probably unnecessary, and the only level on which it works is the symbolic one (which is to say that it doesn’t work at all). But the earlier episode in which she views it alive, implicitly claiming the landscape as its own, is breathtaking.

Perhaps Elizabeth II is not a queen to evoke grandeur, but Mirren unquestionably is.

FILM: Fool's Gold

By Steve Vineberg

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed runs for two and a half hours but it moves like lightning. The visual style is unusually restrained for Scorsese, but he’s brought all his editing know-how to bear on the William Monahan screenplay, which transcribes the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. That ingenious little movie, which was directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, featured Andy Lau and Tony Leung as secret adversaries—Lau, a cop with a covert connection to the mob and Chan, an undercover cop pretending to be a mobster. In The Departed, which Monahan and Scorsese have relocated to Boston, Matt Damon plays Colin Sullivan, whom mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) has planted in the police force. And Leonardo DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, whom Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his right-hand man, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), have placed high among Costello’s confidants, his identity unknown to anyone else—including Sullivan’s supervisor, Ellerby (Alec Baldwin), who is seeking to bring down Costello. The Departed is slick and exciting. But it’s dross.

Scorsese stages the picture like a raucous, violent vaudeville show, alternating a handful of big acts. Some focus on the working of Costello’s little empire, where he makes mordant jokes while his wry, ironic lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone), provides the muscle. When Costigan, fresh from a rigged expulsion from the force and a rigged jail sentence and a brief career peddling dope with his not-too-bright cousin (Kevin Corrigan), is admitted into Costello’s inner circle, his struggle to retain some sense of his own identity—like Johnny Depp’s character in Donnie Brasco and Ken Wahl’s on the TV series Wiseguy—plays against the eruptive, macho exchanges between Nicholson’s Costello and his aides, none of whom—except for French—he trusts entirely.

Every now and then Costello holds clandestine meetings with Colin, whose fealty he won when Colin was a bright schoolboy. Colin has known Costello for long enough—and has risen high enough in the ranks of the police—that he feels brave enough to call him down when he thinks Costello’s being unreasonable. (His trump card, of course, is that he’s been very efficient at keeping Costello out of jail.) Meanwhile Billy, increasingly feeling the squeeze and certain that Costello has his own mole in the force, sneaks his own rendezvous, with Queenan and Dignam.

Then there are the police-precinct sessions where Sullivan, thinking fast to keep Costello in the clear, whips up schemes to bring his opposite number out into the open and challenges the opposition of higher-ups like Dignam, who thinks he’s a callous careerist and doesn’t like him. There are no quiet scenes: Even the tête-à-têtes between Sullivan and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), the police counselor he romances and moves in with, are composed of machine-gun banter. Queenan and Dignam send Billy to see Madolyn professionally, and he gets under her skin. (Their first encounter, which ends with him asking her out for coffee, is so stylized and overheated it doesn’t make much sense.) The plot, like that of Infernal Affairs, is built, of course, on the ironic juxtaposition of the two young men, the protagonist (Billy) and the antagonist (Colin)—both cops with South Boston connections (in Billy’s case, only on his dad’s side; his mother’s people, as Dignam never tires of pointing out, are lace-curtain Irish), both linked to Costello and to Madolyn, both moles engaged in a pursuit of escalating intensity to uncover each other’s identity.

Scorsese dashes from one story to the next, with so much kinetic skill in the cutting (supervised by Scorsese’s pet collaborator, the master editor Thelma Schoonmaker) that you may not notice that the scenes he’s positioned next to each other usually don’t match up but only give the illusion of operating in contrast to one another. The way Scorsese creates fireworks with the editing to cover the faulty construction in the script are a showman’s trick, just as the restless, thrusting camera in GoodFellas faked you into thinking the picture was moving forward. (It didn’t—it lacked a dynamic protagonist.) And though Scorsese foregrounds it and dispatches it with speed and volubility, much of the dialogue is pure show-biz.

As a realistic vision of police procedure and the underworld, the movie doesn’t scan—especially the scenes built around Costello and French. Nicholson can’t possibly believe in what he’s doing here; it’s even less grounded in emotional realism than his Batman performance as the Joker. And you can’t believe anyone would sign up to march under this man’s command. Winstone, with his hoarse voice and held-in-check line readings, is almost as theatrical. Watching some of this movie—like Colin’s courtship of Madolyn, where he sweeps her off her feet—you may feel the way I do at a good production of a David Mamet play: pleasurably scammed but scammed nonetheless.

The Departed is a big-budget prestige picture that’s high on finesse and low on substance. Take a gander at Infernal Affairs and you can see the difference almost immediately. The two main characters are equally matched: Chan is a good cop fighting to resist the temptations of mob life while Lau is a crook disguised as a cop who, day by day, feels more acutely the pull of the moral, above-board life. The woman he lives with is trying to write a story but conflicted over whether her hero is a good guy or a bad guy; the man lying next to her in bed is a real-life embodiment of the same dilemma.

The extreme choices Colin Sullivan makes in the last act of The Departed seem motivated entirely by ambition (Dignam sizes him up correctly), whereas Lau’s—though, in plot terms, they’re the same choices—emerge from a moral struggle. Monahan’s idea to eliminate the woman writer and have the police shrink involved with both men is a device that makes the two men seem like alter egos, whereas the way Lau is written in Infernal Affairs really makes them doubles. And though it’s 40 minutes longer than its source, The Departed has no room for the kind of understated, poignant details that knock you out in Infernal Affairs—like the moment when a funeral parade for one of Chan’s supervisors (one of the few men who know his true identity) passes by and Chan, watching from a deserted alley, lifts his hand in private salute. Or the scene where Chan runs into an old girlfriend in the street he hasn’t seen for some years. She has a little girl in hand, and when Chan asks the kid’s age she deducts a year so he won’t know the child is his. (The filmmakers don’t clue us in until after Chan has taken his leave of them: The little girl corrects her mother, who answers with a laugh, “I always forget.”)

The Departed comes closest to some kind of substance in DiCaprio’s nervous, besieged performance, which is as good as Depp’s in Donnie Brasco, and in Sheen’s depiction of a police captain whose dedication to his men meets the ultimate test. Damon is clever and personable, but Mark Wahlberg shows him up, effortlessly, simply by being the thing—a South Boston working-class kid—Damon is working his ass off to impersonate. And maybe it isn’t all that simple: Playing yourself never is, and the truth is that Wahlberg has turned himself into a good young actor in recent years, proving that what he pulled off in Three Kings was no fluke. When Three Kings’ director, David O. Russell, tapped him again for a part in I ♥ Huckabees, Wahlberg was the only member of the celebrity ensemble who managed to maintain the existential-screwball style and still suggest a real human being.

The only shortcoming in his performance in The Departed is beyond his control: his aggressive, spewing character doesn’t make any more sense—at least, he didn’t to me—than one of Mamet’s verbally diarrhetic salesmen or petty crooks. I could buy Dignam’s abuse of Costigan in the early stages of Costigan’s training as an undercover agent (he’s playing bad cop to Queenan’s good cop), even if I secretly kept hoping Costigan would paste him one. But once Billy’s been under for six months and delivering steadily and worried about cracking under the pressure, Dignam’s refusal to lay off him for 30 seconds seemed so counterintuitive (and counterproductive) that I just assumed he kept up the stream of ad hominem insults because Monahan was bent on making their scenes colorful and entertaining.

Well, they are, and so is the movie. But there’s less to it than meets the eye.


Steve Vineberg teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and film at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of three books: High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005), No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade (1992), and Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for Best Book in Drama, 1991). He writes regularly on movies and theater for The Boston Phoenix, The Threepenny Review, The Christian Century and The Perfect Vision, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pakn Treger, The Oxford American, Sight and Sound, American Film, Film Quarterly, and other publications.


Photo: DiCaprio, Winstone, and Nicholson in The Departed

Four Poems

Back from Costa Rica

In the blur of day atop duty,
back where roads are as reliable as C-Span,
a minute's Monteverde delight is as hard to
scope as a skittish Tico quetzal.

But you, my stand-fresh papaya, will—
even here in the fickle northern reaches—
be my lasting exotic hunger,
body-surfing on the waves of heart's murmur,
blasting beneath my lusts' reef.

Even if I can't wake to humid heat
and watch the fan overhead inscribe my dawn's early grin,
then argue with a hostile, transplanted
Hungarian slave to the Edenic inn he grew
from the sandy slopes of Manuel Antonio,
and turn to you and kiss your eyes
and taste your eggs rancheros—
even so, I spot your diving, soaring joy and patience with this,
life's great, grotesque, teeming and unstoppable canopy.

Reunion

How can I tell you
that you were right about so many things,
but that being right doesn't mean anything for us now?

How can I tell you
that in the jaundiced light of a dinner candle,
you still have that Renaissance look
I would dream about when I was not with you?

How can I tell you,
when I know it is not fair,
that the hurt I did you
means less to me than the hurt
that was later done me
by the woman I came to love after you?

How can I tell you
what you already know—
that you riddle people savagely
with your trigger-happy quickness?

How can I tell you
that I'd love to kiss you,
but then would leave you
in a coffee shop
by Flatbush station
as I did before—

because you'd bludgeoned me
with your doubts and your unhappy aloofness,
and because I see in your shape-shifting eyes
that you'd do it again?

Two-Part Inventions

When we banished our love, what did we do?
It was necessary erasure,
a practical sadism toward our collective memory,
our bitterness itself a brave ode to what we thought
would be our bloodless, insensate futures apart.

But somewhere did we compile the rest?
The way you grinned and said "fuck you"
when you lost a tennis point;
your sweated shorts, bra, undies and tank
outlined in the steam on the tiles of the bathroom floor
as you showered after a run;
your happy fists and sighs and arched back
in synaptic triumph above me the first time we made love.

For you, now, it's all
like an ungainly extra place setting
at the table of your reconstructed life,
for a guest who will not show, libido's Elijah,
irrelevant in the freedom you've found
in the Promised Land of a new man.

But for me, what we had
is a tempered chronicle of minute pacts,
embroidered ecstacies by which I measure
the stitching of my dreams,
an archive of potential, a tomb of impetuosity.
You've given me no incentive to forget,
only pain to postmark reminiscence.

Remember, in New York, our balcony table
at America on 18th Street?
The tendriled seaweed wrap of sushi in that
baking, paint-chipped submarine of a Japanese place
after you'd moved to L.A.?
Syrup soda drinks amid the
smutty, cartooned walls of the Onyx cafe?

Remember arm-wrestling,
how you cried
when once I criticized the way you kissed,
and how I cried because you wouldn't stop crying?
Remember listening to Sade and the Doors and Brahms
and drawing each other?
Remember playing different hands—
side by side at the tinny upright—
of "Two-Part Inventions"?

Memory taunts memory.
You were there too.
I'll testify. I'll rat. I'll boast.
What we were, and that I still love it,
will be the old neighborhood you shudder to visit.
There will come a time of mourning for you, too.
And when you mourn, you'll mine
that sweet and buried savage smile
that, in me, you left behind.

Kalorama

A truck leaves a sheen of oil on the wet pavement,
and it glows, undermining the day's monotone.
Multi-colored, it is the paisley spectral veneer
of a mother of pearl brooch.

On the 18th Street strip,
Ethiopian and Italian and Thai and French
and Salvadoran and Vietnamese and Cuban
waft across to Café Riche, where the pea-coated
scholars bite biscotti, browse through
threadbare hardcovers on the sill by the
cold rain-striped window, waiting for lattés.

On Biltmore, the mailwoman and the UPS man
sift package, slick, and statement
at condos, studying the coded shrines of
opened letter box cages and rows of buzzer buttons.
The file tape of old tenants never fully peels—
flat letters to raised letters,
the brail of lost traces and untoward forwardings,
supers their scribes.

On Columbia, the blasters spray salsa
from stands with stuffed animals, flowers, and ties.
By Blockbuster and Safeway, testosterone pupils huddle
and gawk at Bugle Boy babes and scared old women, bent,
pushing their carts through the loud, heavy air.

Lycra runners cross Ellington Bridge
and in Rock Creek take in deep
the exhaust of commuters dodging darters from the entry ramps.
Or they snake through the circles,
jogging in place
to the Peruvian pipe bands at the Don't Walks,
peeking at a marquee: Best Foreign Film.

Linzertorte at Kramerbooks.
De Beauvoir milk instead of cream?
Meeting some people.
Martini at Tomate.
Got quarter 'thing t'eat?

- Alexander C. Kafka

Three Poems for Surrealists

After Salvador Dali

The Great Masturbator, her face to the tiles,
seeks the floral majesty beneath the floating man-boy loins
pressing soft cloth containment,
the air redolent with the blood of scissor-cut chicken,
sweeter than honey.

We watched the rocky shoals of Cadaques from our little window—
the ocean mists our entreaties.

I loved myself one day and felt so bad
I knocked out one of my own teeth.
We'll hang the tooth from a string in our next villa,
and watch, around it, the crystallization of our hunger.

Our hearts are drawers,
our heads stems,
our brains petals,
our bodies beached,
our unions, masses evolving.

Dali and Gala, as Photographed by Cecil Beaton in 1938

Come to me, my head-dressed, Chanel-sheathed,
shining-busted vixen.
Slide your sandal-suited pieds by the klieg lights.
I've doffed my mask and laid sword's tip to parquayed floor.
My wrists crossed in submission,
one leg tucked beneath me on the stool,
I'm casual, like a Barrymore—
tweedy elegance before the couple in the clouds,
but ready, too, to spring at you,
lest you lose control and
take the role of fight-mistress.

Two Damp White Loads
(in memory of Marcel Duchamp, whom I don't remember)

We still have two damp white
loads down there.
The damn dryer's
stuck the quarters
won't go in the little
slot machine not
slot machine you
know what I mean.

Were we glacial and feature
less, un-clothed, polished to a high sheen,
this sort of situation wouldn't arise.

Were we
efficient as
your blessed
soda fountains
far less
friction we'd endure.
We've
come not
far.

Put varnish atop
the dust—mundane
cemented.
Nothing's
invented.

For
word
march.

Flush
left
flush.
Right.

- Alexander C. Kafka

FICTION: Responsibility

By Alexander C. Kafka

There were a few men, mostly lawyers. Gary's professional connections, his acquaintances from Yale and the law review. Now they were in his or other government agencies, or federal alums who'd gone to private firms.

But there were mostly other women there. Some of them lawyers, too. But overall, a more eclectic bunch. The preponderance of women was embarrassing, thought Joana. But it also figured. He was the kind of man who related best to women, who dated them once or twice, then built a friendship out of talking about dating, organizing mass outings that were sexless not just in fact but in feeling.

"Hey," a typical message would say. "This is Gary. Long time no see. Listen. A bunch of us are getting together Saturday at Glen Echo for ballroom dancing and it would be great if you could join us. Bring someone or come alone. Either way. No need to call me, but lemme know if you need a ride or something. We'll meet at the entry to the Spanish Ballroom around nine.”

The chemistry wasn't right, women would say about him, but he's a really nice guy. "I don't know why—he’s not bad looking," they'd report. "But I'm just not that attracted to him." Maybe they could fix him up with a friend, they'd say.

So, Joana mused, looking around the room. Here they were, assembled. The starters from when Gary first moved to D.C. The friends they set him up with after their own tepid date or two. The friends' friends. A little convention of professional women in their late twenties through mid-forties. A few now with boyfriends. A recently acquired husband or two.

Everyone was tense and earnest, gathered in the dim living room. The sofa, the chairs, the floor all covered with FOG—Friends of Gary—making self-consciously casual chitchat, waiting for a few stragglers. The host, Arnold, welcomed each guest with a sober smile. "Glad you could make it. Just put the food over there on the table. There're sodas in the fridge."

Finally, the group settled down and Arnold introduced his sister, Laura, an obese woman rabbi from Pittsburgh who'd been planning to come to town anyway to see her new niece and offered to sort of get things rolling, Arnold said. He asked a man in a wheelchair to turn off the little air conditioning unit so everyone could hear. That made the room even closer, the air that much thinner. Joana felt that she would suffocate.

"Why don't we get started?" Rabbi Laura said, squinting through thick glasses, brushing alarming clumps of hair off of her front, a displaced dining room chair creaking beneath her bulk. How nice would a dress have to be to look nice on this woman? Hard to imagine, Joana thought, edgily eyeing the smock-like outfit, the acres of blue denim. She knew better than to talk about it, but ugly things, ugly people, made her physically ill. It was a true hardship. Not the kind people felt sorry for you about, but nonetheless real. Like bad allergies or an ulcer.

"I didn't know Gary," said Rabbi Laura. "But if so many friends took time on a beautiful Saturday afternoon to pay tribute to him, he must have been a remarkable man." The rabbi sighed a lot between sentences, a kind of stagy, emotional sigh, somewhere between spirituality and asthma. It gave Joana the willies. She wondered if she were the only one.

Her own absurdly reform congregation, growing up in Potomac, had put a higher premium on guitar sing-alongs than sermons or prayers. Lots of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer." Every now and then a half-baked "original drama by the children." And even these artsy agendas were an annual phenomenon around the High Holidays. Weekly services were for fanatics, she'd been sure.

Sunday school in Rockville had been a joke, an excuse to flirt and discuss TV shows and eat bagels with cream cheese. A chance to compare the fits of everyone's new jeans and blouses or the gaudiness of their mazuzas. When every now and again a hapless teacher actually tried to impart knowledge—the Hebrew alphabet, a Bible story—the efforts would be met with surly stares, muttered conversation, passed notes, and even stupored heads on crooked arms, faces down on the plastic, wood-grain, fold-up tables beneath the overbearing fluorescent lights.

To her parents' quiet, head-shaking dismay, Joana had declined the bat mitzvah. Some of her friends memorized their torah readings phonetically, approximating the thin, Oriental melodies they'd heard a thousand times on their tapes. But what was the point, chanting this gibberish? Becoming a woman? She thought not. She wasn't sure then how that would happen, but she knew a bat mitzvah wouldn't do the trick. She didn't want to be tutored for a year by some glum, cagey Israeli University of Maryland grad student while her friends went out for track. It seemed so medieval and cultish. Religion—any religion, but her own most of all—made her skittish. And listening to this awful woman rabbi was close to unbearable.

"When someone dies," the rabbi said, "particularly when they die in the manner Gary did, there are many emotions." Sigh. "There is sadness." Sigh. "There is frustration." Sigh. "There is anger." Sigh.

Joana wanted to giggle. In order not to, she concentrated on her San Tropez panties beneath the cooling sheen of her short, black sundress. The breezy feel of the frail, delicate silk at her crotch. The waxy string sides, more naked than nakedness. The delicious pull of the back—not thong, but sensuously narrow. She closed her eyes and hoped the others would think it was regret and sorrow.

Since her late teens, she'd reveled in owning lingerie. Through college and her master's and the years since, her tastes had become more costumey and erotic. She didn't wear it always. She had the Hanes, the Fruit of the Loom, the Jockey, for everyday. Just now and then, when she needed its emotional, visceral reinforcement to shore up her confidence or take her to sweeter places. During exams or job interviews. Waiting in line at the motor vehicle department. Accompanying her sister Maureen on errands.

But the lingerie was particularly vital when contemplating death. It had gotten Joana through her grandparents' funerals—a teddy with lace at the midriff for grandma Bess, red Moulin Rouge culottes with a matching camisole for grandpa Hal. Tastefully concealed, mind you, beneath proper dresses knee-length or longer. Her mom's passing was particularly difficult. Mrs. Schuler had died relatively young of multiple sclerosis when Joana was a senior at Tufts. For that, a tarty purple French-cut bikini bottom framed by garters and thigh-high stockings, and topped with a semi-transparent bustier.

As their bodies were lowered into the ground, Joana had indulged in wild sexual fantasies involving the outlandish outfits, several men, and feathered masks. She'd felt awful about it, but also blessed that she had this strange mental apparatus. The bodies meant nothing to her. She'd loved them all when they were living and in her reserved but sincere way, she'd let them know that. But the corpses had nothing in common with the living people who'd shared their features, and she was unable and unwilling to cry for them. The mourners would offer her condolences, then, as if embarrassed to mention it, tell her how strangely beautiful she looked. How she had a lovely glow even at such a sad time. How strong she was. They didn't realize.

But Gary she'd known only casually. Besides, it was hot. So today, the simple pastel blue panties, made in Italy and delivered Federal Express by catalogue from a boutique in Toronto, were her only escape from the dour here and now. She pictured their minute waves and folds, their sheen and delicate effervescence as she twirled gently around in front of the closet mirror.

"Sometimes when words aren't adequate," Rabbi Laura said between the obnoxious sighs, music can help us to contain … and to confront … our conflicting emotions. If you'll all focus on the candle and the bowl of water on the coffee table … I thought we could start off by singing a negun, just a melody with no words."

With that, the rabbi started la-la-ing in a hoarse, slightly hammy alto. The group hummed along, with a few bold la-la-ers taking the lead, the loudest of them—a man with sweat soaking through his Oxford shirt—utterly off-key. If he'd tried, he couldn't have been more distant from the cloying tune. It was an actual tritone away, a hoarse, hideous organum, almost wailing, as if from some crazed monk. Joana stared at him and shuddered.

Then they went around the room introducing themselves and saying how they knew Gary. Sure enough, the few men knew him professionally and not terribly well. And the women—a teacher, a stock broker, a TV news producer, an ad firm account manager, two attorneys, a dentist, a general surgeon, a restaurant manager and Joana—had either dated him, fixed him up with other women, been fixed up with him by other women or otherwise counseled him on his love life. They chuckled uncomfortably at this farcical element of the gathering, for it was too striking and too absurd to simply ignore.

This was a morbid social house of cards built on the hollow ego of a lonely man, Joana thought. And now it had collapsed into this ungainly pile of strained emoting. She wished herself elsewhere. God was it hot. The backs of her knees felt sticky and a little raw against the sofa's stale-smelling, rough upholstery.

Joana knew—all these women knew, they must have—that they were just the tip of the iceberg. At the thought, she shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. There were so many others, she was sure. (This time she didn't care if anyone noticed her, but if they did, they likely thought she was overcome with grief, appealing quietly to the heavens.) Cindy, for instance. Cindy, the banker friend who'd gone out with Gary and suggested that he call Joana, wasn't in the group. Had she not been told? Had she washed her hands of him? Joana hadn't thought to call her, figuring that the secretary who somehow had Joana's number would certainly have let Cindy know. And she was just one, Joana was positive, of coutnless missing links in this romantic Ponzi scheme. Surely there were other Cindy's. Lots of them. Even if they weren't on a readily apparent phone or e-mail list. Gary had taken in all womankind.

Some of the women recognized each other from the group outings—the karaoke sings at Japanomatic or the get-togethers at Twister Alley in Wheaton to dance to the Prairie Pals. "You're Jessica, right? We met at Bob's Billiards that night. Good to see you again." Then a resigned stare. "But I wish it were under better circumstances." That was a typical variation on the afternoon's mantra.

At least Joana had escaped those vapid group get-togethers despite Gary's best efforts to snare her. If she weren't his date, he wanted her as one of his outing groupies. But she hadn't succumbed to more than that one awful evening with him. She didn't become, she thought with relief, part of his now-abandoned, nomadic, platonic harem. She didn't need him, like so many others seemed to, just to say, come Fridays and Saturdays, that she had some place to go. She went where she wanted. She always had. More often than not, she preferred to be alone. When she wanted company, she wanted it to be finite and stimulating.

No one here knew her beyond her brief introduction, and now, especially, she was glad she'd said so little about herself. "I'm Joana. I went out with Gary once, and when I heard, well, it seemed like such a waste. I had to be here, I guess." She'd really told them nothing. She was a stranger. Anonymous. And that, she now saw plainly, was for the best.

Rabbi Laura suggested that anyone who wanted to speak say something they remembered or thought or felt about Gary. Her brother, Arnold, the host, read a passage from Bertram Russell that in its own windy way seemed to say you shouldn't feel guilty if everyone finds you totally unapproachable and distant and can't confide in you. The wording was a little baroque, but Joana liked the sentiment. Bertram wouldn't be here, she thought to herself.

The woman in advertising showed a video of a local news broadcast in which she and Gary were interviewed at Umbria Restaurant’s grape-stomping festival. Gary had invited Joana to the grape stomping, the restaurant's annual promotional gimmick, but she’d begged out with some feeble excuse. Watching the video, she was glad she had. It made her sad to watch. The group Gary had organized, the uneasy, fixed smiles on their faces as he sang the aria with the hired tenor. Gary knew the aria well. That was impressive. But there was something brash and off-kilter about his joyless spontaneity. It was that void beyond his work and noise and exhibitionism that had made Joana cringe on their one date—to Blues Alley in Georgetown. And it unsettled her again now watching him on the staticky, faded videotape of the schmaltzy opera performance at the dowdy Italian restaurant.

The dentist said she'd once counseled Gary about a personal ad he'd placed in City Paper. It was all wrong, she'd told him. "You'll never get a date with this thing," she said. "Let me rewrite it." She did, the dentist recounted with a straight face obviously destined for a punchline. Whatever the story’s kicker was, Joana knew she wouldn't find it funny because the tale seemed pathetic and sordid to her. She was humiliated she’d gone out even once with this desperate man who sought mates in the newspaper, and she was now sorry her conscience had compelled her to come to this morbid gathering.

The respondents to the revised ad, the dentist said, smiling with a hopeless mirth Joana didn't like, were an incarcerated woman and another who was in her late fifties and lived on an Eastern Shore farm with her ancient, ailing parents. The woman in her fifties emphasized that she was still a virgin, still waiting for her soul mate.

Gary struck up a long-lasting correspondence with both these women. “That's just the way he was,” the dentist said. But then he ran the ad he'd written and gotten "just dozens of dates," she beamed. “All great women.” Great women like these, Joana thought, looking around and feeling a little light-headed. Great women like me, sucked into this helpless man's vacuum of emotion.

The stock broker remembered how fond Gary was of brownies. How he was, in fact, a brownie connoisseur. When he bought, it was only from Tivoli. But the ones he made were even better, she said. She'd once glanced in his refrigerator and seen eight tubs of sour cream. That, she said, was his secret. "I guess I can reveal it now," she said, then laughed, then broke into sobs and someone handed her a box of Kleenex.

A couple talked about how Gary had sung "Mac the Knife" at their wedding. And not only that, they'd said, but it was the best rendition of "Mac the Knife" they'd ever heard. Better than Sinatra. That's funny, said another couple. He'd done the same thing at their wedding.

When the restaurant manager had been between jobs the summer before, she said, there was suddenly a flurry of outing messages from Gary. Sing-along nights at Mr. Henry’s. Alvin Ailey at the Kennedy Center. A Myrna Loy festival at the American Film Institute. She’d felt so lost that summer and Gary steered his social-life raft her way, she said. When she found a new job, the invitations just as quickly, and just as subtly, ebbed.

The remembrance was meant to show how profoundly generous and tactful Gary was. But, Joana thought to herself, looking down at her sleek leather-strapped espadrilles, Gary probably figured, with Sharon insecure and jobless, he might actually have a chance of bagging her.

Joana had fled Gary after just a goodnight kiss that one chilly October night. Gary had blabbed on and on about be-bop and what a brilliant bassist Ron Abner was, and how Reuben Blake, a local pianist, should have become rich and famous instead of being sidelined by a stroke. Gary made a point of going up to the players between sets and shaking their hands and asking about various D.C. jazz musicians he had heard and what were they up to now and where could he find this or that hard-to-find album. How the vinyls somehow seemed to have a soul the digital versions couldn't touch, and was that his imagination or did it have to do with the remixing? On and on.

Even the players, after a while, seemed to realize the talk had no real personality behind it. That it was like radio chat. Filler. White noise. Gary really did seem to know a lot about jazz, but it was knowledge in pure crystal form, undiluted, undigested and indigestible. Show-offy smarts. Despite it, he didn't really seem to find anything affirming in the music, and the players seemed to figure that out after a few minutes. The evening had left her cold and she’d been anxious to get away from him. When she'd gotten home, she had to decompress, take a bath, channel surf, and she'd felt, for no particular reason, like crying.

But though many of the women around her were balling away now, Joana couldn't have summoned tears if she'd tried. The stories, the recollections, kept coming. They were torture to Joana and she couldn’t understand why the group was putting itself through this. For whom? For what? What did it solve? Who would it help? Was it really solace to them, these acquaintances who'd known so little about Gary? Is that what they were crying about? That they'd been oblivious to his sorrow? That he'd been oblivious to so much, camouflaged by his bland extroversion and whirlwind of activity? These shallow recollections explained nothing, resolved nothing.

Were they crying, as Rabbi Laura suggested, because they would have been there for him if only he'd asked, if only he'd leaned on them, if only they'd known? Joana wasn't at all sure that was true. Gary was tiresome enough when being friendly and energetic. Imagine if he'd been a morose whiner as well as a fake.

He was so very meticulous, was a recurring theme. The neatest desk in the office. Never even a folderless file on his computer. He was meticulous even in doing himself in. Not only had he left the letters in his pockets—one to family, one to friends—and the will. But he’d left the vaccination records of his two cats, Romulus and Remus, stacked neatly on the dining table of his tidy little one-bedroom Roslyn apartment. He’d even left instructions on how often to change their flea collars, and when the next change was due. A note on the best combination of dry-to-canned food for the sake of their urinary tracts.

The strange thing, said a colleague named Matt, who seemed to have known Gary just a tad better than the others did, was that Gary had also made plans for the months ahead. Tickets to Wolf Trap and a local Democratic fund-raiser. Reservations—non-refundable—for a Chicago trip in the fall for his grandmother’s 90th birthday. Maybe it showed he’d had doubts about whether he’d really go through with it. Or maybe he’d decided absolutely to kill himself, but only after he’d decided absolutely that he had to hear Chaka Khan one last time. Then, maybe, he'd listened to “Through the Fire” on his stereo and figured that was good enough.

Or maybe the tickets and reservations were a lawyerly contingency plan in case there were some logistical problem—an unexpected relocation while his office was sprayed for bugs. Something like that. Maybe he just wanted it to go well, had rehearsed it down to the suit and tie and shoes he’d wear, gone over it again and again in his mind like “Mac the Knife.” And maybe if some chaotic chance event were going to interfere with this last flawless performance, Gary would have to postpone it and would want to sit at a table with a Kennedy and go to Chicago to toast his grandmother before he’d have another chance. Maybe he just didn’t want to be bored between suicide attempts, thought Joana. Maybe it was worth the money in his tight budget to keep himself entertained in case he had to live a little longer.

But it was all maybes. The speculation was a curse he'd left behind. The note to the friends explained nothing and offered no real comfort. It said he'd hidden his troubles and his pain too well, and that they shouldn't feel guilty for not realizing how despondent he'd become. But of course in denying their guilt, he'd assumed it would be guilt they felt. And the denial itself was an inducement and indictment. Like saying don't think about a pink dinosaur with heart-shaped spots all over it. The note was the penultimate fuck you, Joana realized. A lawyerly jab to the gut disguised as a final considerate gesture. Penultimate to the final fuck you. The fuck you to end all fuck you’s. The mother of all fuck you’s. The lunchtime swan dive from the roof of the Federal Trade Commission. In the midst of this posthumous lovefest, she felt the purest hatred. A hatred so unpolluted it gave her a sudden strength as she looked around at these silly women. They didn't even seem human to her, they were so misguided, so illogical.

To wrap things up, Rabbi Laura sighed some more and talked about the Jewish belief in hereafters. It was a common misconception, the hideous, loud woman explained, that Jews didn't believe in an afterlife. Perhaps not a heaven or a hell, she said. But they do believe—they have, since ancient times—that one learns some lessons in a lifetime, but misses others. And that in another lifetime, the person comes back and fills in those gaps. Again and again. Through time, through an infinite seminar of lives in different circumstances, he or she learns more and more of what makes up the whole of an ideal. The person, in his or her many incarnations, may never quite reach the ideal, but coming closer and closer, it is in the striving that the transcendence of the human spirit is manifest, the rabbi said pompously. We call this the rotation of souls, she said. And, she concluded, "It's clear that in this lifetime the lesson Gary learned so beautifully was how to give, and that what he'll have to work on next time is how to take."

With that, the rabbi lead the group in the negun again and the impromptu ceremony was over. After a few moments of awkward silence, people sidled over to the dining room table and loaded paper plates with pasta salads and squash soufflé and desserts.

"Wasn't he Greek? Wasn't he Greek Orthodox?" Joana asked the dentist. He'd gone on and on about it at Monte Carlo over their London broil before the jazz club. Not that Joana had particularly given a shit, but he was like that, fleshing out the random details of his life like a politician in a Barbara Walters interview. Get to know the Gary behind the Gary. Seemingly flustered and fueled by Joana's silences—she hadn't meant to be rude, but she was never chatty—he'd told her about Father Dmitri and the old youth group and how he still kept up with all of them.

"Technically. But he was really an agnostic. He was pretty adamant about that."

"Either way ..." Joana shrugged the implied question, looking over at Rabbi Laura.

"I think Arnold felt it was important that there be some structure to this," the dentist said. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. These things are universal."

What things? What are you talking about? Joana wondered. But she let it drop. "Why wasn't anyone from the family here?" she asked.

"They're coming in for the formal service at the FTC on Tuesday ... Did it really bother you that it was a rabbi?"

"No, I guess not," Joana said. Duh. Of course it bothered her. He was Greek Orthodox. It was ridiculous. But what was the point in arguing about it? Who really cared?

Joana looked at the food. She was hungry from the hour on the elliptical she'd substituted for lunch, but she couldn't touch it. It looked too rich. Poisoned. She had to get out of there. She said a quick goodbyethankyou to Arnold and fled to her petite convertible. She drove quickly from the depressing little Takoma Park house to her Biltmore Street apartment in Kalorama. She realized she'd left the Tupperware with the salad at Arnold's. Fuck it, she thought. That was one house she'd never go back to. And she hoped she'd never run into any of those people again.


She peed and brushed her teeth and splashed cold water on her face. She had some left-over pad Thai and sat down at her drafting table. It was a project for the symphony—a good, steady client for four years straight. She’d hooked up with them through Maureen, who was a third-stand cellist. Joana felt gleeful having something concrete and sensible to think about after the maddening waste of an afternoon. Lots of elements to work with. She fiddled with the brochure layout, trying different schemes for having the maestro peer out paternally over the inherently dull grid of the season schedule. Hmm, she thought, Yo-Yo Ma’s playing the Elgar. Maureen would like that. It was one of her favorite pieces, and Ma was her hero. He’d done the Dvorak the year before and Maureen had raved and run off to B&N to buy his latest recordings. The best soloists reinvigorate a symphony, she told Joana. And with Ma, there’s no bullshit. He’s a pro—humble and easygoing. That, of course, was also a pretty fair description of Maureen herself.

Joana sometimes hated to be with her little sister because of the air of disorderliness and hazard that clung to her. There were always crumbs and near misses at crosswalks. The stick didn’t seem to help. She didn’t think Maureen ever learned to use it right or something. Then there was Kaiser, who was adorable and dutiful. But even Maureen, despite her loyalty to him, was tempted to ask if he couldn’t be replaced with a dog that smelled better. The vets never knew quite what to make of it, but it really seemed that there might be something seriously wrong with his GI tract.

But though she girded her strength for visits and errands with Maureen, and often found her unrealistic and scatterbrained and hopelessly naïve, Joana also worshipped her and relied on her, easily as much as Maureen needed her. If their roles had been switched—if it had been Joana whose corneas inexplicably and suddenly peeled themselves off of her eyes like poor-quality shrink wrap—would she have fared a fraction as well? Hell no. She would have lost it. She would have become psychotic, taken to drugs or something. Sat in her room and gotten fat and refused to bathe until she forced her family to commit her to some kind of institution. No, she wouldn’t have continued at Peabody and incrementally adapted the way Maureen had. She certainly wouldn’t have become even wiser, even more mature, more compassionate, because of it. If it had been her instead of Maureen, she would have become terribly bitter. That it might some day happen to her, too, was her very worst nightmare. When that happened in the chronic bad dreams, she shot up in bed, the sheets soaked with sweat, shivering and sobbing.

Joana arranged and rearranged the iconic variables of the symphony brochure, played with color charts to find something resonant with the previous seasons’ schedules but with just a few refreshing distinctions. Comparing shades of salmon and flesh tones on the oversized screen, she suddenly remembered that Gary had different color eyes. One was brown, one a pale hazel. Weird the way these things come back to you, she thought. He’d been so physically awkward that night in Georgetown. Self-conscious, it seemed, about his posture, blushing when she’d happened to look over at him while he was chewing some ice cubes at the club. She didn’t give a shit if he chewed ice cubes. She’d just happened to look over at him, that was all. He ever so tentatively took her hand when he kissed her on the cheek before putting her in the Liberty cab.

What had he wanted from her? What had he wanted from anyone? Sex? Company? A listener? An audience? None of those seemed to be the right answer, though they were all true. There was no right answer, she supposed. And when he’d realized that was the right answer—that no one had anything he wanted—he’d killed himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to take. It’s that he was dissatisfied with the selection. It was the ultimate selfishness. Joana shook her head, pulled up a drafting program, and started playing with proportions.

After about an hour and a half, the cavernous two-bedroom apartment—rent control, a real prize—seemed unbearably still, the light the sad smoot-filtered low voltage of late summer dusk. She rested her eyes a moment and leaned back in the high, lumbar-support chair, then got up, brushed her hair, and walked the couple blocks to Soleil in Adams Morgan.

She ordered a scotch old-fashioned at the sleek bar, and cherished the numbing, earth-bound slowness it delivered, losing herself in the textured acid groove coming over the speakers. She basked in the powerful air conditioning. And she admired the smart, flattering lighting, the cutaway walls and expansive mirrors.

A woman sat next to her on the only empty stool and ordered a Pernod. Joana watched the clear liqueur turn its milky, pale yellow as the bartender added water to the woman’s tall glass. She wondered if the yellow were one she could use. How would you produce its density? She’d have to try to mix it on her Chameleon program.

“That filtered?” the other woman asked the bartender. “The water, I mean. Do you filter it?” The city had lead in its pipes. It had been in the news a lot.

“Don’t worry,” the bartender said. “It’s Poland Spring.”

“Great,” said the woman. “Thanks. Pretty, isn’t it?” She’d turned to Joana, who hadn’t meant to stare.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a graphic designer, and I was just thinking about that color, if I could use it for a project I’m working on. Just spacing out.”

“No problem.” The woman sipped her drink contentedly. “You’re waiting for someone?”

“No. … You?”

“No. … But if you were waiting for someone,” the woman said, “who would it be?”

It was a very weird question, and the woman must have known it, because she laughed awkwardly, self-consciously, and played with the rim of her glass and looked down at her parachute-panted knees. Joana didn’t know what to say. Was it just nonsense nervous conversation, the way hyperactive boys with nothing to say blurt out, “How now brown cow”?

“Um …”

“It would be a man or a woman, is what I mean,” the woman said.

Oh. “It would—uh—it would be a man. I’m flattered, though.” And she was. “Sorry.”

“No. No, I’m sorry,” said the other woman, who, without even finishing the other two-thirds of her drink, laid down a ten-dollar note. She looked over for change at the bartender but he was helping someone else. Flustered, the woman just left the ten there, gathered her little pocketbook from the floor and walked out, muttering, “My mistake.”

Maybe the woman had seen Joana looking around and thought she was, well, looking around. Joana sucked a cube, chuckled to herself, paid, and left. Eighteenth was teeming with the juvenile crowd. Eighties bubble-gum pop throbbed from Déja New across the car-clogged street, and grinding dance bass riffs pulsed from Vistas. Near the the three-way intersection with Columbia and Adams Mill, every narrow bar had a different beat—reggae, conjunto, jazz lite, blues. She withdrew some cash at the ATM and figured she’d go get a video when she passed Viva Cuba at its new location. The grand opening crowds of several months ago had disappeared. The doorman, nicely dressed in a svelte, tangoey black suit, eyed her appreciatively—a flirt too open to be objectionable—and said, for her, no cover. She smirked and kept walking. Then stopped and turned back. Why not?

Inside, she checked out the different floors. She had another drink in the third-story café. It was nice. Quiet Spanish guitar music, with interesting, teasingly sensuous photos lining the walls. She found a little round table a couple had just left, and sat on the high stool enjoying a sangria. Three men—preppy, young, and nice-looking—talked law school at the next table. One caught her eye, and his was caught in turn. Relaxed, undaunted, he asked her if she wanted to join them, and she did. Brent, Harry, and Scott were their names. While Brent and Harry seemed jerky and aggressive in a warmed-over adolescent way, Scott, who’d asked her over, seemed straightforward and pleasant. Final year at GW, he said. They were celebrating the end of their treacherous summer internships. Did she want another?

“Just water, please.”

“I’m sorry. They’re really not bad guys. They’re just fidgety or something tonight,” Scott apologized after his buddies had grudgingly been shooed away by him. He had a gentle squinty confidence about him. He was tall, and dressed nicely in Send slacks and a soft, maroon, short-sleeve polo that flattered his relaxed, broad frame. There was a little weekend stubble and fatigue that only accentuated his studenty youth and energy. She was very attracted to him.

“They want to get laid,” she said, enjoying the shock value.

“Well, yeah,” he nodded, taking her in. “I suppose they do.”

He looked bewildered and thrilled as Joana led him wordlessly downstairs to the salsa dance floor. It was crowded, but in a cheerful, celebratory way. Not pushy. Lots of excuse-me’s as the intermingled yuppies and workadays, Hispanic, black, Asian, and white, carried Coronas to their dates. Scott moved with an easy grace. And Joana knew that as he watched her own happy, angular gyrations, he was falling under her spell. She had a look of fun-overcoming-skepticism that captivated men and had since she was a girl. Pale with her thick, black page-boy cut, toned, with a cutely contained lankiness, she well knew her looks’ quiet, potent authority. And she could tell, as the DJ navigated the giddy crowd through its pressurized contortions, that Scott was cataloguing the breadth of his budding infatuation with her. She enjoyed his breathless, helpless scanning of her, as reflexive and natural as gooseflesh in cold.

“Will you walk me home, please?”

“Sure,” he nodded. The drinks had hit her, and the quick walk felt like slow motion. She’d stepped into the anti-matter of anticipated pleasure, feeling it grainily part before her and close again behind her in the humid night. And she hoped Scott felt it too. It was what she most liked to share in life.

At her lobby, she took his unsure hand, looked him over with a moment’s strange conscientiousness, as though she’d quiz herself later, then kissed him deliciously.

“Are you scared of me?” she asked without smiling, then smiled.

“I just didn’t expect this,” he said, and she was glad he didn’t pretend that he had. “Did you?” he asked.

“I did. And then I didn’t. And then I did again.” She grinned and looked down at their hot, joined hands.

He laughed a quiet laugh, shook his head, and they rose in the ancient, caged elevator.

Inside, she made them decaf cappuccinos—good, frothy and strong with traces of cocoa and cinnamon on top.

“These yours?” he said, looking over the vanity wall of framed posters, brochures, and ads she’d done. She nodded. “They’re … I don’t know much about what to look for. But they’re striking,” he said.

“That’s what to look for.” She joined him and studied him the way he did the wall. “Sometimes people look for too much.”

He bit his tongue in order not to say she, too, was striking. It would have sounded awful, and contrived. But it was true. Bird-limbed and coyly suspicious and hungry looking, her weight on one sharp hip, cupping the oversized Williams and Sonoma mug, blinking, basking in its homey warmth. She was something else. It was a great apartment, too, he thought. So big. Nice and dry and cool.

“You like Ella?” she said. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella.” She looked, for an instant, soft and reaching. But it vanished almost as quickly, displaced again by that unpredictable willfulness, that nameless edge that taunted and provoked him.

“I’ve only heard her a little, I think,” he said. “That sounds fine.”

They danced and kissed and she felt his excitement. At that, he pulled away a little, but she pulled him back. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s nice. Me too.” That made him shiver, and that made her glad. Their bodies settled together and rocked to and fro to Ella’s cooing.

“Whoa.” She started undressing him. Every time is different, she thought happily. Every time recapitulates the blushing time. She felt very, very light.

“No, please,” she said. “Not yet. Just you first, OK?” Awkward and painfully exposed, he’d squirmed and wanted to slip off the straps of her dress, but she hadn’t let him. She kissed his chest and his stomach and his thighs, and from her purse on the futon sofa she pulled out some condoms.

“You checkin’ me out down there?” He sounded a little resentful. “…Hey, what’s the deal? Why not just give me a complete physical?”

“Don’t be offended,” she said. “I like to look at you.” It was true, and it was a lie. He was offended, until he forgot to be. She kissed him again and caressed his face and then did slide out of the little, black dress, which fell to the wood floor as quietly and lightly as a rose petal. She let him tug off the panties and watched the vein in his neck throb. And she helped him with the condom. The she opened another of the square packages.

“Two?”

“Don’t worry.” Narrowed eyes. A temptress grin. “You’ll still feel it.”

Double-wrapped, he pulled her toward him and her mouth toward his. They kissed for a tender, weightless spell. Then she turned her back to him and kneeled on the futon-sofa, her hands on its back. Scott reached around and rubbed her tentatively. She smiled.

“How much do you know about female anatomy?” she asked.

He pulled back a little. “Well, I thought quite a bit. But if you’re asking, maybe not.” He was hurt. “I’m not proud. Show me.”

She was glad he wasn’t proud. And she showed him. “It helps if you pull this back a little, gently, like that. Mmmm. Yeah. Like that.”

Again, he chose to forget the offense he’d taken, captivated by her long neck, the mild sweep of her back graduating supply to the taut underneath. He mapped them with one hand as she moved against the fingers of his other.

She braced her knees broadly, reached beneath herself and guided him.


In the morning, Joana was unfazed by his watch alarm. He had a tennis date and no number to cancel it. She looked content and sweetly ruffled, makeupless and robe-wrapped, and they had delicious brioche from Rise Bakery with Café Busto from the Americana Grocery. As they sipped and stared, the phone rang. Joana pursed her lips in a fun, knowing way and didn’t answer.

The machine came on. It was an unaccompanied cello playing “Happy Birthday.” Scott started to ask, of course but Joana put her finger to her lips. It was a family tradition, one her mom had started when they were little girls. Early morning, weekday or weekend regardless. For the rest of them, it was singing. Her Dad would call soon from Geneva and croak the tune in his own wonderful, artless way. But for Maureen, it was playing, and beautiful, sonorous playing at that. The last notes echoed from the machine’s peewee speaker through the big room. Maureen didn’t say anything. But then that wasn’t uncharacteristic. Played and hung up, leaving just the whir of the dutiful, oscillating fan by the TV. Joana savored the moment.

“I didn’t know it was your birthday.”

“How could you?” Joana said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“How old are you?”

“Older than you.”

“Hmm.” Scott gulped the rest of the cup and chugged the orange juice from its little teardrop-base glass. “Well, many happy returns.”

On his way out, he said, “I’ll call you.”

“Please don’t.” She knew it was like a sword thrust, but meant it and knew it would go easiest if the thrust was steady and straight.

“I don’t understand. … Did I say something? Did I do something?”

He looked at her, wounded, his face flushing. She didn’t want that. She couldn’t prevent it.

“No,” she said. “You were fine. You were wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for being with me.”

“'Thank you for being with me?’ That’s it? So … I’m not going to see you again?” He looked incredulous, his forehead creased. He waited to find out she was kidding.

She shrugged an I’m-sorry shrug, and they stood there awkwardly.

With a grim little exhaled laugh, he finally looked away from her, then got into the elevator, letting the quaint cage door slide shut after him with a decisive clang. She watched his slow, mechanical descent, his averted eyes and stonily fixed expression as he disappeared beneath the edge of the worn stone flooring where it met the shaft.

She went back inside her apartment and finished off her coffee. She opened the French doors to the little balcony. She sat in the sturdy Ikea chair she always left there. In the girding, close heat, the Post on her lap, she pushed back against the brick. Braced, she wrapped her toes around the iron railing, and read.


Original photo of woman is by Sacha Leclair.

FICTION: The Slippery Slope

By Jen Michalski

The first time Jimmy Pinnick spoke to Dina was at the municipal fields. It was the day after a moderately sized winter storm, and the neighborhood kids of all ages had collected, like ants on a drip of ice cream, to scrape every last inch of snow off the steep hill enclosing the baseball diamond like a half bowl. Just as Dina pushed off on her old wooden sled down the narrow track of hill, Mindy Cohen and Albert Damascus flanking her on either side, Jimmy, who did not have a sled, jumped in front of her, sliding down the hill on his stomach to impress April Weingarter, who had giggled her way along the top of the slippery slope all afternoon, more interested in how her hair looked underneath her pink woolen cap than flying down the rooty hill.

Of course, the waxed runners of Dina’s sled posed far less resistance to the snow-topped hill than Jimmy’s jacket and corduroy pants, and so she caught up and ran him over in no time, sending him tumbling off to the side like a balled-up spider, much to the others’ delight.

“You do that again, and I’ll beat the living piss out of you,” Jimmy warned Dina at the bottom of the hill, out of her older brother, Jude’s, earshot. Although protecting Dina was the last thing Jude would do normally, the excuse to throttle Jimmy might just this once render him sympathetic to her plight.

Dina murmured an apology to Jimmy, who had already limped off, clawing his way back up the hill. Although winter was her favorite season, and sledding one of her favorite activities, after her encounter with Jimmy she packed up her things and walked the two blocks home, where she sat in the den and watched reruns of The Monkees until Jude came home.

“Why’d you leave so early?” He plopped down next to her with a box of Oreos and changed the channel to BMX racing. “I thought you were going to tell Mom I peed on Tommy’s sled.”

“I was just cold,” she shrugged, standing up to leave. It was an easy lie, although the feelings it cloaked were more complicated. Something had changed in her when Jimmy had so thoughtlessly jumped in front of her, all to impress April Weingarter, although what that change was, Dina was not sure. Even though Jimmy’s banged-up body was the result of his own stupidity, Dina didn’t feel overly upset that he blamed it on her. After all, this sort of flawed reasoning existed on the playground long before Jimmy claimed champion of it. Instead, something else seemed suddenly shattered, in the same way that Jimmy’s right leg, fortunately, was not. Of course, being 12 and not privy to the world’s cosmic secrets, Dina decided instead that she was entrapped in a more recognizable but equally complicated emotion: She was in love.

She had been aware, of course, of Jimmy’s jagged blonde bangs, along with his pointy chin and blue eyes, for several years, back to when Jude and Jimmy were still friends, even, but she had never really thought of the swollen pang in her chest until he spoke to her at the fields. In addressing her, she decided, Jimmy acknowledged her existence and, indirectly, her love, allowing it to blossom, like the way it happened in her teenage romance novels. The girls in those stories seemingly never knew they were in love with someone until it bit them in the face. Certainly her meeting on the hill with Jimmy was, however humiliating, a start.

But how did one nurture such love? In the five months since the sledding incident, Dina observed from afar the nuances of Jimmy Pinnick’s life, the way he brought nothing with him to school, not even a pencil, the way he sat at the back of the bus and smoked with the window open, even during the most torrential of storms, the way the bus driver, a septic-looking woman named Ms. Wanda whose face seemed to collapse into itself when she was angry, bawled out Jimmy for smoking, throwing spitballs, and having his feet up on the seat in front of him. Some days Ms. Wanda even refused to open the bus door when Jimmy was alone on his stop in the morning, to which he merely shrugged, lit a cigarette, and walked away.

Dina knew that Jimmy was in a universe far from the other boys she had encountered thus far, although she was not at a point in her maturity to decide whether that was a good or bad thing. Jimmy drank beer with his older brother Tim on the weekends and played bass in Tim’s metal band. Jude said Tim’s band sucked ass, but Dina figured he was just jealous. Jimmy had been held back a grade at school and, at 15, was taller and tougher than other boys in his classes. He wore his Wrangler jeans tight and a hooded sweatshirt underneath his jean jacket during winter instead of the lumpy, puffy parkas her mother had bought her and Jude at Sears.

“Your bike is better than Jude’s,” Dina said haltingly to Jimmy in the parking lot outside the High’s, where she had come to purchase the latest teen magazine. “You’d better believe it,” he answered, jumping off the heavily scraped frame and leaning it up against the storefront. “Stay here and watch my bike. If anyone tries to steal it, knock hard on the glass.”

Dina sat on the concrete next to the bike, flipping through her magazine and examining the prepubescent boys, soft as grapes, while she heard the mute slapping of console buttons and blips from the Asteroids videogame stationed in the store. Forty-five minutes later Jimmy returned, chomping hard a wad of gum from the packet of Big League Chew he had purchased.

"Anybody try to steal my bike?” He asked her, rubbing his flat, slightly emaciated stomach through his yellow motorcross shirt. She shook her head. Jimmy pointed to his bike. “This is a Mongoose. You know how much it costs?”

She studied the mud-splattered black aluminum frame and tried to think of an adequate figure, but she didn’t even know how much her Huffy cost.

“It cost three-hundred dollars,” he answered without waiting for her estimate. “This is a real BMX bike.”

She nodded, feeling the glossy cover of her magazine cling to her palm like wax. She imagined one of the smiling, airbrushed faces from the cover coming off onto her hand like a decal. She watched Jimmy straddle his bike and do a couple of slow wheelies in the parking lot.

“What’s your lard-ass brother Jude doing?” he asked.

“Listening to KISS albums in the basement,” she answered, deciding honesty was the quickest way to Jimmy’s heart.

“Oh yeah?” He considered this information, making tight figure eights on the asphalt. She studied the thick blond hairs on his legs, knowing that soon they would become darker and curlier like her father’s and that hair would grow in his crotch and in his armpits, and that if he really liked her, according to Mindy Cohen, he would pee himself while he slept.

“Tell him KISS sucks,” Jimmy said finally, his comeback completely formed. “AC/DC is where it’s at.”

“Yeah, KISS sucks,” Dina agreed, although she was more frightened of them and their devil worship than she was musically critical.

“Hey, you’re all right,” Jimmy conceded as he pointed his bike home. “For a fat, ugly chick.”


“You’ve just got a little baby fat,” Dina’s mother responded as she stacked tubs of ice cream into the freezer: Rocky Road for Jude, Butter Pecan for their father, and Strawberry for Dina. “What, you worried about some boy?”

“No,” Dina answered. “It’s just … well, Jude is fat, and Daddy is fat, and I think I’m fat, too.”

“You’re too young to date or diet,” Dina’s mother answered, slumping heavily into a kitchen chair and lighting a cigarette. Her mouth hollowed out like a fish as she inhaled in the dim evening light. It was a mouth that did not attend school plays, in which Dina was always chosen for the chorus or some other inconsequential role. Likewise, it did not attend Jude’s baseball games at the municipal fields, Jude who had a home-run swing but a lack of hustle. “You think you’re fat, go outside and play or something. If you see your brother, tell him he can’t go to the movies tonight. He’s grounded.”

Dina went up to the school where the other girls hung around the sandlot and watched the boys play basketball on the neighboring courts. She had never been fully comfortable talking about real boys. Unlike the boys in her teen magazines, the boys at the municipal fields sweated and cracked gum and said mean things about girls’ body parts and pulled their shirts over their necks on the sidelines of the basketball court, their flat, unmuscular chests punctuated by dime-sized nipples. She made her way tentatively to the monkey bars on the sandlot, where Leah and Mindy and April sat atop them, cracking gum and sharing a can of Sunkist soda.

“Hey Dina,” Leah Hanson, the lesser member and most sympathetic to outsiders like Dina, acknowledged her. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Dina shrugged, and then turned her attention to the boys playing basketball. It was the same bunch of boys, Leah’s brother Scott and Dickie Herman and some others, who played sports all year round and knew Thurman Munson’s career batting average better than they knew the dates of their moms’ birthdays. “What’re you up to?”

“Watching the boys,” Leah laughed, a little embarrassed at the obviousness and simplicity of it. “You coming up?”

“If you can,” April snickered, fiddling in her purse and emerging with a container of nail polish. Dina scrambled up using all of her resources and breathed heavily next to Leah, who offered her a square of gum.

“Scott had a total hard-on in health class the other day,” Mindy giggled as Scott missed a lay-up.

“Eeeh, shut up, he’s my brother!” Leah shook her head.

“He totally did,” April concurred. “He didn’t even get up when the bell rang.”

Out of the corner of her eye Dina glimpsed Jimmy Pinnick heading across the field over to the trail, a long, snaking wooded path that opened out by the creek. In the summertime high school kids smoked pot and hung their feet in the clear water, blasting metal from a boombox and drinking. Dina and Jude were forbidden to walk the trail, although Jude had often boasted to Dina of his exploits, mostly involving firecrackers and dangerous-looking snakes.

Dina had never been interested in the trail. None of her friends were cool enough to enter the trail unaccompanied by someone learned in its wares. They preferred instead to hang out at the duckpin bowling lanes and ogle the tall, angular boys who wore Rush and Yes t-shirts and named their bowling teams after Dungeons and Dragons characters. But if she went to the trail, perhaps with Jude, she could talk to Jimmy. Maybe she could forge a truce between Jude and Jimmy, for which they’d be eternally grateful to her. Boys like Jude and Jimmy couldn’t stay apart long; their interests were common, their enemies commoner.

“What does Jimmy do down at the trail?” Dina asked the girls, who had retired to painting their nails with the bubblegum-colored metallic polish.

“What do you mean?” Mindy scrunched her nose.

“What doesn’t he do?” April laughed. “Probably smokes dope or something.”

“Do you like Jimmy?” Leah asked, twisting to get a view of the trail. “I think he’s kind of a fox.”

“He’s so stupid,” April dismissed, eyeing her handiwork.

“What, you like geeks?” Mindy challenged her.


“No. It’s just that he’s real stupid. He even misspelled my name on this note he gave me once.”

“When did he give you a note?” Leah asked excitedly, cracking her gum. “How come you never told us about it?”

“Cause she’s a liar,” Mindy answered.

“No I am not, you little dumb whore. At least guys like me. They all think you’re a big-mouthed Jew.”

“Fuck you, you twat.”

“Hey, hey,” Leah interceded. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Dina likes Jimmy, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Dina shrugged. “He’s okay.”

“Well, don’t worry; he’d never like you,” April answered. “Believe me, he’s had a crush on me for years. Not that I’d ever give him a chance.”

“But if you don’t like him, why can’t Dina go after him?” Leah asked.

“Well, look at her.” April gestured dismissively toward Dina. “She doesn’t even wear makeup.”

“I never said I liked him. Jesus.” Dina jumped down from the monkey bars, wincing as she landed most of her weight on one ankle. “I gotta get home for dinner. I’ll see you guys later.”

“Yeah, it’s not like she’d ever miss a meal,” Dina heard April say, loud enough for her to hear. She glanced back at the trail. If she dated Jimmy, she could go down to the trail and hang out, doing whatever it was the cool kids did, while April and Mindy were left to look from afar at the boys playing basketball. She’d invite Leah back to the trail with them, of course. Maybe Jimmy had a friend for her.

“No fucking way,” Jude replied from his stomach in the den, where he was playing Space Invaders on his Atari game console. “No way you’re coming with me to the trail.”

“But I could follow you,” Dina muttered, eating only the cream centers of her Oreo cookies in an attempt to stave off weight gain.

“Yeah, and I’d pummel you.”

“Then I’d tell Mom and Dad, and they’d pummel you.”

“Mom and Dad won’t know about me going down the trail, ‘cause you’re not going to tell them,” he said and, without removing his eyes from the television screen, punched her hard on the shoulder with his free hand. She gasped and lurched back, her face hot with tears. “If that hurts, think of what it’s going to feel like if Mom and Dad find out about me and the trail.”

“I don’t care what you do,” she cried. “You can’t keep me from going down there.”

“You’re not going with me,” he said again, without emphasis, his attention fixated on a little purple blob that scrolled across the top of the screen. It was supposed to be a space ship, but Dina thought it looked like a jelly sandwich. “I don’t care if you go by yourself.”

“Why aren’t you and Jimmy friends anymore?” Dina asked, pressing together the widowed Oreo halves and putting them back in the plastic tray.

“He stole my Swiss army knife, that one I got at the farmer’s market.” Jude yawned, scrambling up to sit crosslegged while waiting for the next level of Space Invaders to begin. He grabbed some Oreos and shoved them into his mouth. “He better hope I don’t get it back from him or I’ll carve him up like a turkey.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“You wanna bet?” He made a face. “Jesus, what’s wrong with these Oreos?”


Dina waited on the steps at the south end of the high school. She had been waiting there every Saturday afternoon since she first spotted Jimmy heading into the woods a few weeks back. Although she had no interest in ballet or tap, she had told her mom that she was sitting in on the dance classes that met at the cafeteria from two to four. From her semi-secluded view on the south-end steps, she could monitor who entered the trail. Sometimes, she had heard, teachers from the high school would use this very same scouting position to nab students trying to cut classes or smoke pot during study hall.

Dina had stolen two cigarettes from the pack of Winstons her father kept in the garage so that she could offer Jimmy one and they could smoke. She had practiced for hours holding the cigarette, flicking pretend ashes, drawing on the filter until it got soggy. Jimmy would see how cool she was, how she was more than just Jude’s sister. They could talk about the AC/DC album, Back in Black, the lyrics of which she had memorized by heart. When she dated Jimmy, she would be able to taunt them, April and Mindy, and roll her eyes as she and Jimmy walked the halls of school.

It was close to four. Dina decided to go down the trail a little ways before she went home, to make sure Jimmy wasn’t there. She crept slowly into the thick underbrush. Her perceptions of woods were less formed by teenage slasher films, which she wasn’t allowed to see, and more by the hot, discomfort of overnight camps when she was a Brownie. The earth had pushed up against her fat as she tried to sleep while bugs whistled and gossiped long past when 7-year-old girls were allowed. There were no showers, and she always smelled like sweat and bug spray and mothballs in her sleeping bag.

Dina was about 50 feet into the brush when she saw two figures off to her right, where a small clearing of flattened weeds and grass had been established, possibly by trail goers, over the years, taking a leak. Dina crouched down behind a thick bush and managed to make out the color of Jimmy’s green satin dragon jacket, like the kind they sold at the farmer’s market along with Jude’s army knife. The jacket bobbed up and down with great frequency and intensity. She slowly moved further right for a less-obstructed view. Jimmy’s body smothered something under him; judging by its wriggling, Dina deduced it was a girl.

Jimmy’s pants hung around his knees, his soft, white behind exposed with every other thrust. She could not tell if he had hair there in front, but she knew what he was doing, since she’d walked in on her parents every now and then on Saturday mornings until her father put a lock on the bedroom door. It was an activity she had not thought about she and Jimmy doing; even though other girls in gym class had spoken of doing it with their boyfriends. Those girls, everyone knew, were sluts and were kicked to the bottom of the school hierarchy, even lower than plump girls like Dina. At the very most, she thought perhaps she would touch it. Going all the way scared Dina, particularly since she hadn’t even crossed the most tertiary of dating thresholds, namely having a boyfriend and kissing him.

The girl with Jimmy, she did not want to go all the way, either, judging by her pleas to leave her alone, to stop, her muffled cries under Jimmy’s hand on her mouth. Dina felt hot and cold and sick, the way she felt when she learned her grandmother died and when she got caught stealing some Bottle Caps candy from the High’s. Jimmy’s frame shot up straight as he shrugged back into his pants. She hugged the earth as he looked around and, satisfied, made his way quickly back through the trail. Dina thought of going to the girl, although she was not sure what she would do, or even to whom her allegiance was. Part of her wanted to follow Jimmy, to offer him cigarettes, her company. They could both put the incident behind them and concentrate on the more mundane rituals of holding hands, movies, Skateland.

Suddenly April appeared in the brush, running her fingers through her hair as she hurried down the trail, dabbing at her eyes. Dina let out an audible gasp, which went unheard by the retreating April. Dina wondered if April had seduced Jimmy into the woods or if it was the other way around. Were they now an item? Dina waded through the fractured maze of tree limbs, feeling them whip and nick her face. She came upon the clearing where Jimmy and April had been a few moments before, the sprouts of grass and fallen branches crushed under the vague indention of a person’s back. Dina sat in the sacred spot, still warm, and lit one of the Winstons, arching her head the way she had seen her mother do, and inhaling. Somehow, she botched the nuances of this activity and coughed so vehemently that all birds in the vicinity flew away.


At school April and Jimmy talked at their lockers and sat on the bus together. Everyone agreed they were an item, although Dina felt a change had come over April. She didn’t hang out with Mindy and Leah as often, although those two chalked it up to time spent with Jimmy. Dina snuck glances at her during classes, across the cafeteria tables where Mindy and Leah talked and giggled, a silent April wedged between. April’s eyes seemed to be staring sadly at something or someone whose presence was not immediately known to Dina.

When Jimmy pinned April between himself and her locker between classes, April had smiled and kidded, but she always seemed to be in motion, a cat scurrying out of the reach of some overzealous and slightly dangerous child. However, Dina did not feel sorry for April or inordinately curious about her unhappiness. After all, it was April who now commanded Jimmy Pinnick’s attention, got to wear his green dragon jacket, smoked cigarettes after school with Jimmy’s friends. And April had not let her forget it, shooting leering grins in Dina’s direction whenever she noticed Dina eyeing her.

“He brought flowers to her house,” Leah said as they sat on the monkey bars watching the boys play basketball.

“What kind?” Mindy drilled, picking at a scab on her knee.

“I don’t know. She says he showed up at her door one day with flowers and asked her to go to Skateland.”

“Jimmy go to Skateland?” Mindy chortled. “That’s a new one.”

“What, are you jealous?” Leah asked her.

“Well, let’s ask Dina, since she likes him.” Mindy turned to Dina. “What do you think? Think April’s full of shit?”

“He didn’t bring her flowers,” Dina mumbled, noting the slight widening of Mindy’s eyes. Dina then looked at Leah, who looked away at the boys playing basketball.

“How do you know?” Mindy coaxed her, touching her arm.

“He fucked her on the trail,” she blurted, her grip on the monkey bars relaxing.

“Oh my god,” Mindy laughed. “Holy shit.”

“How could you know that?” Leah said skeptically. She scrunched her face and looked into the shared Sunkist can as if it were a magic 8-ball.

“Because I saw them.”

“You were on the trail?” Leah questioned.

“Yeah,” Dina answered. “My mom told me to get Jude, that he was in trouble, and I thought he went down the trail. But then I got in there and saw them, Jimmy and April.”

“What day was it?”

“A couple of weeks ago.” Dina shrugged.

“Come on, Leah, why would Dina lie about it?” Mindy smirked. “I always knew Miss High-and-Mighty would spread her legs the first chance she got.”

“I can show you the spot where they did it,” Dina added hopefully. “Come on.”

Dina led them expertly through the trail to the open area. There were no clues to Jimmy and April’s earlier presence, only generic trash like cigarette butts and Tastykake wrappers, beer cans, although nothing about the location argued against the act of conjugal relations taking place. Leah and Mindy stood at the spot in silence, imagining the events as Dina detailed the blur of images that had come that day to her through the trees. Dina realized that she no longer loved Jimmy, if she had. She hoped this realization was the source of the hollowness she now felt, anyway.

As they emerged from the woods, giggling about Dickie Herman’s pants splitting in gym class, they saw April waiting casually at the monkey bars. Although Dina could not read April’s expression from the distance, she could already discern April’s nervousness, the plates of social power underneath April shifting.

“What’s going on?” April addressed them, hitching her thumbs in belt loops of her Jordache jeans. She was taller and slightly curvier than the other girls in class, and Dina could see why Jimmy liked her. “What were you guys doing on the trail?”

“Nothing,” Mindy shrugged and, as she was the newly appointed leader of the group, Dina and Leah deferred to her strategy. “Just hanging out. Why aren’t you with Jimmy?”

“He’s riding bikes somewhere.” April shrugged. “Besides, I don’t have to hang around him if I don’t want. We’re not married or anything.”

“Oh, but you may as well be,” Mindy snickered, putting her right index finger through the “o” of her left index finger and thumb.

“What are you talking about?” April reddened, clutching her purse closer. Mindy shrugged and, in one elongated motion, was first on top of the monkey bars. Leah grudgingly followed; Dina eagerly.
“Well, I’m going to go with my mom to the mall. We’re going to get manicures,” April said, looking at her nails.

“Be sure to buy some condoms,” Mindy muttered, her mouth obscured by the Sunkist can.

“Yeah, well, see you later,” April answered and strode away, slightly hunched over, as if she were ill.
“Slut,” Mindy said and giggled. “Do you guys want to go to my house and do our own manicures?”

As Dina followed Mindy and Leah down off the monkey bars, she imagined the pure, exhilarating feeling of sledding down the white dusted bowl of the hill at the municipal fields, the effortless, throttling run that had ended uneventfully time and time again. Until Jimmy last winter. And what about this winter? She knew that Mindy Cohen would be the one at the top of the hill, holding court instead of sledding beside her. And where would April be? Dina? Mindy and Leah crossed the street ahead of Dina. She thought briefly of going home and curling up by the television, eating whole, delicious Oreos. Somehow, she did not have the stomach for it anymore. She dashed across the street, without looking, afraid of falling too far behind.


Jen Michalski is editor in chief of JMWW. She lives in Baltimore. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Split Shot, Ink Pot, Failbetter, Unlikely Stories 2.0, Apt, The Swamp, Fiction Warehouse, Lily, Gold Dust Magazine, Thieves Jargon, Litvision, SubtleTea, 13th Warrior Review, The Harrow, Conte Online, and Scrivener's Pen. You can read more about her and JMWW in a Baltimore City Paper article at http://www.citypaper.com/arts/default.asp.

Marriage Metamorphoses

Marriage Metamorphoses

Waiting in the fragmented night—
trivialities crawling at me ghoulishly,
hard and software, midi connections
activated ports channeling my worry—
at my console, inconsolable.

But that my baby’s comin’ home.
Late. She’s always late.
Makes me wait for her
inscrutable “Who’s he?” look.
Sweet, like a momma’s “Who’s that?” greeting
to an infant that knows no names.
The look that lets me know we remerge.

Impossibly, we do
each day, anew.
Amid my temper’s voyages
something real and crystal,
delicate and strong.

“I do,” I’ll say in half a year.
But “I have. I did.”
Those she’ll also hear,
because she sees this
strange creation of our
blustering hearts—
stumbled on, stumbling on
and lovely—
forming like lava cooling to
a majestic, bizarre
silhouette island
that is us,
in a sea of islands
that are the many we.

I’ll stomp and break the glass
because we’re an ancient people
—or so I read—
and know it—transparently—reforms.

- Alexander C. Kafka