Private Showings: A Novel [excerpt]

The face of a card of a headless woman in hand meets the body of a saint cut off at the head.

The meeting comes to view at a distance of several feet from a metal bench at the side of a pool in a city park to the holy figure in stone standing guard over the water, over floating green buds that have fallen from trees in the bloom of spring.  No reason appears for this meeting here.  Other than missing their heads from their necks, the saint and the woman have little in common:  He wears the robes of a medieval churchman and cradles his head in his upraised palms directly above the pool, while she stands naked in a slouching pose with her head nowhere in sight on the card.  Still, the two find themselves paired at this small, calm square set on a hill overlooking a crowded district of a city, as the sunlight of what had been a clear April day drifts into a glow ascending from the electric lights that flicker alive together in the streets and windows far below.

Legend recounts that centuries ago, after the saint had been tortured and beheaded in martyrdom for his beliefs, his headless body walked the streets for miles in a miraculous impulse.  Eventually, the body arrived at this location and this pool, where the hands washed the blood clean off the head they had carried, before the body continued on to where it would finally fall to rest a few miles from here.

In the comparison at hand, the state of the woman on the card suggests no such legend attached to her figure.  Three words printed beneath the soles of her feet offer no clues to either her name, her story, or why she now joins the saint in this city at dusk.  Her card has simply come up here, as if it had just been dealt off the deck in a game of chance and mystery.

The card now rises so the top of the neck of the woman appears to wear the head of the saint¾at least, to the naked

Walking Montmartre

I¾first name, X, middle name, X, last name, X¾suddenly recognize your name, much like men give to pleasures: to jewels, to candies, to spices, to scents.

To elements of weather.

An element of weather becomes your name.  A long slip of spring mist like a ribbon pulled from a Maypole wafts between the cabinets of internment for the bodies of poets, artists, and respected citizens, and now settles around a fresh tablet for epitaphs in an obscure, corner plot.  The mist holds its ground.  I, XXX, now watch it twist around the tablet like a ghost of dead ivy, and grip the stone with an embrace of markings.

By this name, I know you.  I would never have known you by any other name than this name that lives for me.  What the world saw as a stage name, I now see as a name of honour, among the names of notable figures in a cemetery in this strange city where I find myself.  A familiar name in this city with an unfamiliar language.

I excite myself, as your name has always excited me.  So I steady myself by drinking deeply from a flask of this inspired champagne native to the country of this city, in a toast to your true name.  I sense that your name has come to me as a sign that I will soon view you here:  What else could it mean?  But as I lower my flask, your name vanishes into the evening spring air, touched with light rain.

No matter.  Your name lighting on what is this milestone to me says that I am finally on the right path in this lifelong search of mine, starting in these fields of darkling memories that lay so close to neon skylines, in this city of love and light.

So I turn from the cemetery and stroll unhurried, solemnly (as I have all night) toward the boulevard of pleasure that I seek.  Between the long nameless slips of spring mist before me, I see as my guideposts the parallel rows of trees planted along a gravel meridian in the middle of the boulevard, for the clumps of green buds on the limbs bring out the signs in neon around the vicinity as if they are bearing a new invention in fruit.  The words give direction to me, offering to show me the lights.  And they show me a host of lights.  Emblazoned on buildings and shops of entertainment and amusement, the lights write themselves into more letters, more words in flowing, antique script that loop and coil over the traffic of visitors and funseekers on the dynamic sidewalks of this boulevard of pleasure.  The words never stop flashing out to me, to sketch themselves in reflections on the windows along the boulevard, and to repeat their carnal messages, so full of promise.  In these words, my path into the lights becomes as clear to me as the glow of the candlelight to the moth in timeworn stories of romance—only the flame of my destination glows coldly in the light from galvanic rods and tubes that rule over the sidewalks like nocturnal rainbows barely fastened to earth, from ceiling lamps that cast their off-white glow on the zinc bars and wall mirrors of the all-night cafes, and I feel myself as immersed as the moth would feel if the candlelight had suddenly turned to an amber snare before it could burn.  I stand still.  I am held mesmerized by a beacon in electric red, an artificial windmill whose shining vanes studded with tiny bulbs cut smoothly and mechanically above my head through the slips of night mist that brought your name to me.

The vanes move without noise, without the grinding of gears, or the creaking of axles and shafts.  I still stand still.  I have lost myself in this windmill that moves windlessly.

A woman pants in screams, and shatters the spell of the windmill on me.  Is that you, calling to me?  No, this woman is in a song that surges on the beats of a bass and drums, joining at the heart of a thudding pulse; synthetic strings pull away from the heart in a spiraling crescendo, and now they sweep back down as the backing rhapsody to a monotonic chorus that chants in one stiff voice, “Love.  On the Beat.  Love.  On.  The Beat.”  The song comes out of speakers from the nearby cafes on the boulevard, and from the shops that display tiers of cheap radios and portable stereo music systems in show windows full of white light¾all tuned to the same station with the song of the hour.  The resonant, throaty voice of a man now speaks to the chant with a recitation in the language of this city that I cannot understand, but which sounds to me¾in its lowing, near whisper¾like a raw, Latinate incantation toward the use of lust.  A saxophone wails, and the woman’s voice breaks into shrieks.  “Love.  On the Beat,” echoes on.  “Love.  Love.  Love.  On.  The.  Beat.”

The song grabs me, spinning me backwards in a dance that mimics the walk of the groups of visitors who mingle with the locals on the sidewalks.  This international community appears to wrap me into its body as if I am entering a New Orleans funeral parade: My head lolls on my shoulders in time to the song that keeps me to the beat of the night; my face becomes a wide-mouthed, grinning mask; and my body flows with champagne like a transfusion of sparkling young blood into me.  I grin openly at the Greek and Tunisian shopkeepers waiting in booths along the street to serve up sandwiches of thick rolls and spiced meats to the tourists and funseekers who surround me.  In a rush, a group of chattering Japanese tourists pass by me, and wave and point and aim their expensive cameras at the turning vanes of the electric red windmill that I have just left behind; they surprise me, so that I lose my step here, and now I walk straight into these portable clothes racks where I am hung up, caught in a row of black and brown leather bomber jackets that cling to me in body and musky smell.  Wrestling with these jackets in front of rows of open-air stalls, I begin to feel as if I, XXX, am as much on display as the gimcrack watches and souvenir trinkets and strands of gold-plated jewelry and even more of those radios and stereos that keep playing “Love, On the Beat.  Love.  On The Beat” all at the same time, incessantly.  Finally, I manage to push myself out of this heavy leather tangle, and I stumble out into the sidewalk again, trying to regain my sense of direction along with this group of plodding German hausfrau and their sodden husbands who have congregated around me, and who argue like gaggles of geese clucking and squawking about where they should fly to next.

I slow down, to let the Germans go ahead.  I have found my direction, there, down a well-worn sidestreet that a crowd of dead-drunk Americans has just entered.  I hear their loud laughter and vulgar words erupting from the sides of their big mouths¾the same words that you would revive and enliven with the spark due to them, until they were no longer bitter and ugly and violent oaths from doltish louts such as these.  Their lurching bodies disappear into a patch of mist skimming just above street level, so I follow along with the sound of the voices.  Now I discover the doors of two tiny bars, bearing signs with the names of Aphrodite and Cleopatre, written in the neon antique script common to the signs of this district.  Each bar contains only one square window no larger than the screen of a portable television set, and they glow softly with a light that appears to me like tufts of red cotton.  I peer into the window of the bar named Aphrodite.  A woman inside notices me and smiles and continues to look at me as she sips her drink and lounges in the velvety interior tinged with red and blue bulbs from shaded desk lamps set on the bartop.  She sips her drink, her eyes stay on me, she places the drink carefully on the bartop, and she smiles at me exactly as she did before.  I am tempted to enter and sit with her in the light, and share the champagne I carry with me...but I now feel weak with that thought. …

I am thinking of how I might become sickened by my contact with her:  How she would just take me inside and hurry me along to make room for her next visitor¾leaving me with what I do not know.  And so she brings you¾the only hostess I want this evening¾to mind again.  You were always there for me, and you allowed me control of the length of our time together.  You never sickened me in any of my viewings of you, no, you were cleanly removed from such embarrassing and fatal consequences.  You knew¾and you still know¾how to use lust, and it is only natural that you should call me to this city of our destination.  As I look at how near I am to this woman in the light of the bar (practically feeling her against me, with her smile in my eyes) my thoughts return to how you are truly due the offer ahead that I bear for you along these streets, this night.

So I, XXX, turn away from the bars, and return to the main boulevard.  To these pools of men and women in the mist and light rain, and directly into the crowds of spring.  I slide my hand into the right side pocket of my clean, stylish English raincoat that I purchased especially for this occasion, find the flask of champagne that has carried me through this night … and I instantly catch sight of that grandiose white marble church up there, set on high atop a bluff overlooking the pleasure district, there, at the end of the street to my right.  Those ivory spires, the gaudy flourishes of stonework, the supreme reach of the floodlit walls bring to my mind a celestial cake that has been baked and frosted in heaven for a holiest of holy matrimony.  “I do,” I whisper at the sight.  I drink a toast to it, whispering again, “I do.”

And, of course, I, XXX, know that the “I” in the “I do” is the “I” of XXX.

That was too good.  The fizz of the champagne on the roof of my mouth, and my whisper of “I do” together feel like your kiss on my lips and your tongue in my mouth.  I drink yet another toast, I say “I do” and I do the “I do” over and over again, and I smile to myself: I could as well be a gutter bum babbling answers to the cheap wine in his belly that speaks to his thoughts as I utter the words:  “I do, I do, I do.”

There is something even more telling in the sight of this church and the flavor of the champagne together that brings another whisper to my lips: “In Vino Veritas, I do” I repeat. ”In Vino Veritas, I do.  In Vino Veritas, I do.  In Vino Veritas, I do. In Vino Veritas, I do.”

Yes, they do sound sweet together, this Latinate incantation along with the positive affirmation.  I can practically taste them, and I close my eyes in satisfaction at the sparkle on my tongue, when I do.

Opening my eyes, I walk a few steps farther.  I sip from the flask.  In the middle of the crowd, I close my eyes, and I whisper, “In Vino Veritas, I do.”

I sip once more from the flask.  I stop.  The people in the crowd jostle me, but I still keep my eyes closed to the effervescent taste; and I whisper, “I do.  In Vino Veritas.  I do.”

I walk several steps, even farther.  The champagne and the words on my tongue have gone to my head: Still, I continue to walk.  “In Vino Veritas,” I whisper.  “I do.”

With eyes closed, I still walk.  But now I stumble a bit, and knock into some nonentity in the crowd, who pushes me forward into the mass of arms and shoulders and curses me, I think, in the language of this city.  It sounds like “In Vino Veritas,” so I whisper again, “In Vino Veritas, I do I do.”

I feel like I have left my head behind me with that last shove, so I stop to steady myself.  Now I close my eyes.  “I do, I do, I do,” I still whisper.  And I drink from the flask.  “In Vino Veritas,” I whisper. I open my eyes

TO SEX NON STOP

The wide-spanning entrance opens out in the shape of a great, pink Valentine’s Day heart to the sidewalk.  Neon-limned cupids are posed back to back on top of the heart, with one of each riding the hump that curves toward the cusp, with expressions on their faces like those on yelping cowboys kicking spurs into crazy horses.  Their bows that stay drawn shoot flickering, neon arrows down the wall of the heart in a circuit of bulbs, tripping on each bulb into silver light until they meet at the bottom, where they point to a series of steps leading into the emporium.  A placard at the entrance states in the English I, XXX, can read, as well as in several other languages, what waits for me inside:

OUR LADY FOR ALL YOUR SEX NEEDS

Certainly, there must be more than one lady in a place like SEX NON STOP.  I just have to laugh at that misspelling ... but it is as if the placard had been set up to speak only to me; and I do need only one lady.

And, sure enough, I find you here.

A life-sized, cardboard figure of you stands next to the placard.  A sign beneath your feet reads: THE DO ME GIRL.  Your lightsome body cast in a wisp of a gown split at the thigh, your full mouth in a glossy red, lipstick pout; your eyes holding a shine like beads of neon, your flaming red hair running down over your shoulders and breasts appear to me like a monument to the discovery of heat from fire¾and especially with that sign of red light over your head, a stamp of letters that spell out:

XXX

As they say, we were always meant for each other.

Excitedly, I hurry to the ticket booth next to the heart of the entrance.  The smallest man I have ever seen waits for me here.  He has a hunchbacked body with a block of a head, with a ledge of a beetle-browed forehead jutting out over his face of rheumy eyes and flabby lips.  I approach him.  He regards me sourly, clears his throat, and sniffs as I go through the pockets of my raincoat to search for notes in this foreign currency that baffles me, drunk as I am with the thrill of seeing you, and with this champagne as heady as the thought of watching you use your lust.  But now I believe that I have finally found a bill, and I hand it over to the small man ... but he is eyeing the bill curiously and furrowing his eyebrows.

He starts talking rapidly to me.  I try to make out his words.  “Ce,” something, “nay, nay ... paw,” oh, I hear that word, “exact!” he finishes, emphatically. “Paw...” again, “Duh,” and now “too” from those gross lips.  I shrug to indicate to the small man that I do not understand him, except for that one word, “exact.”  He snorts again.  Instead of the money, he holds up to my face a special card that I usually carry at all times these days on my person.  The fleshy nude woman on the card, I know her well: those generous breasts, the ample buttocks, the ridiculous posture that thrusts her belly out so her arms dangle alongside her fat thighs.  I could never understand what was so funny about the broad caricature on this card, now staring me in the face.

But the small man certainly seems to understand.  He laughs heartily at the card.  “Par-fay, par-fay,” the keeper of the ticket booth to you giggles.  “Dirty French postcard, we. Feelthy, feelthy.”  Humoring him, I smile and pat at the pockets of my raincoat, to indicate that I am searching for the money to pay for entrance.  I pull out the right bill this time, and I wave it to him.  He shakes his head exactly three times, smacks his lips as he gathers up my card, and places it in the chest pocket of his shirt.  He jabs his thumb down on a button before him, and the buzzing sound of a clogged bell rattles from the black padded door in the middle of the big Valentine’s Heart next to him.  “On-tray, on-tray,” he shouts to me.  “Go Ahead!”

I am befuddled.  Go in without paying?  I look around confusedly, hoping no one else is watching this scene.  “Go.  A.  Head!” he repeats, sternly, and jabs down harder on the button, again and again, so that I must obey and stumble through the black padded door, to a landing at the top of the concrete stairs.

I take these stairs.  They are winding down into this narrow gray corridor with white streaks and splotches on walls covered in flaking paint.  I step into an expansive basement room with a ceiling of exposed industrial pipes and tubes.  Under a stale fluorescent light, the room smells of deep earth and of stagnant water stuck in old plumbing.  I notice three doors along the wall in front of me.  Each door has a sign:  Boy/Boy, Boy/Girl, Girl/Girl.  A patron passes out of one of the doors; he wears a serious face, and he knits his hands together intensely as if he were fretting over a lost set of keys.  He mutters aloud what sounds like “Moan, Do, Moan, Do, Moan, Do,” and he scurries down to another door, and enters.  For some reason, seeing this man makes me want to whisper “In Vino Veritas, I do, I do,” again, so, I do.

I, XXX, now go through the door labeled Girl/Girl.

I find myself inside a cramped, dank screening room with several rows of seats, their spring-loaded bottoms cocked up like alligator jaw clips.  On a dais at the end of the aisle, a big cube of a television throws out a field of static that sprays the room with blinks and ripples of light.  I look around the Girl/Girl room.  No one else is in here yet to disturb my vigil in honour of you.  I choose to sit in the front row, right next to the aisle.  I slouch down into a seat, pressing the bottom down with the weight of my backside.

Looking into the square glass that is alive with static before me, I become bored.  I remove a rolled-up copy of an adult comic book I had purchased at the airport when I arrived.  I open the magazine to the page where one of the frames contains a drawing of a female ghost (lightsome body, gown split at the thigh, filaments of red hair) hovering over the graveyards in a cemetery.  A circle of mourners brandish torches to her with flames that play across her blank eyes like the spirits of sight long gone.  Taut and muscular, the men in this circle are zipped up in leather jumpsuits that are as black as the bars of the cemetery gate, and each wears a pair of mirrored, wraparound sunglasses, all focused on and duplicating the image of the ghost above.  They chant Latinate words to the apparition that I cannot translate: something like “a more,” “a more.”

Wearily, I sigh.  I roll the comic book up, stick it into the right side pocket of my raincoat, and return to the static, return to saying, under my breath, “In Vino Veritas, I do, In Vino Veritas, I do.”

As I say “I do” one last time, the static vanishes from the screen.  I hear the whining of the video machine unreeling the tape.  A title appears on the television:

GIRLS DO GIRLS

The title fades off, and I now see the word

STARRING

and your name, the screen name that I always view you under, faithfully, because you are always more than happy to bring lust to use with slickened coats of sweat, your body glowing from the heat rising off the sand on the beach where you stage your most moving acts I saw when we first met.  I heard your groaning sighs even through the sounds of the waves from the ocean behind you.  The sun tanned the bodies of you and your celebrants, then shined through the venetian blinds of the beachhouse where you mounted your circus of an orgy.  On beds with silken sheets, in steaming whirlpools, on black-and-silver carpets you joined together in every way I could hope to imagine.  You never disappointed me, or cheated me, in your performance of sheer physical grace.  You shared yourself with your celebrants—becoming one in the same.  I now reach past the rolled-up comic book in the pocket of the raincoat for the flask of champagne.  I swallow a mouthful.  I sense that you will visit me here in body, soon, as I could never visit your gravesite on the plains of the prairie back in the country of my birth, though my mind would still see snow frozen into a brittle shell of white ice that stretches across the plains, into the horizon on the distance.  The same color as the ice, the headstone I see blends into the white ground, so it does not stand out from the other monuments in the cemetery, in your hometown—the final marker that memorializes how you never did rate highly in this town, compared to how I know you: This headstone I see does not carry your real name—the name much like men give to assorted pleasures: to jewels, to candies, to spices, to scents.  To elements of weather.  This name of yours evoked a beautiful and dramatic element of weather that, for me, stilly defies those vile names coming out of loud, big mouths that stank worse than the names from the book of their God: “harlot,” say, or, “slattern.”  Hating the sight of your body that lived in the use of lust, your tormentors might as well have chiseled their names for you on the bullet in the chamber of the gun with the muzzle you would taste in your mouth, a cold and bitter metallic flavor on your tongue and lips that once felt the moist and the warm.  As their God listened to their prayers, so you listened to these names they gave you as you pulled the trigger of the gun so they would burn straight through you.  In self-martyrdom, you offered up your head

with a beautiful, air-blown cascade of brown hair.  Now, the camera shows me her lean, tall body, sheathed in a black leather bra holding her globed breasts firm, and black latex slacks drawn snug over her narrow hips and long legs that cross with her leaning forward toward the focus of the eye of the camera.  She introduces herself as the hostess of this video ceremony dedicated your memory.  Waving her hands with sculpted red fingernails to accent her points about your famous beauty and your lust that comes to use, she speaks of you in the voice of pillow talk, in the present, as if you had never died.  Her sly grin, her winks touch me deeply inside, as if a slice of the sun that graced your body on your beach scenes were warming me against the chill of this sanctum down in SEX NON STOP.

The hostess now leaves the screen.  White letters on a black backdrop announce a title:

NUN TOO SOON

Here, you are shown sitting alone in a wooden chair-desk in the middle of a rank of identical, empty chair-desks in a deserted classroom inside a school.  Your face is lowered into your arms, folded together upon the small polished ledge that serves as a desk, fastened onto the side of the chair.  The tresses of red hair that I, XXX, usually see around your face have been gathered up for this scene into a knot of a bun, topping your bowed head.  Your uniform has you in a starched white blouse, a loose plaid skirt, white knee socks over your legs and down into your feet, in pitch-black shoes with a polish to them.  You are sniffling as if you are crying.  I am touched to hear you this way.