38- Payphone

She imagined him searching every house, reading all the names on
the letter boxes: E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Mambo of
Mambo’s Nightclub, known to everyone.
At dawn, the lie detector himself would see her come out of the
house, holding her cape tightly around her against the morning
sharpness, her hair not smoothly combed, and her eyes not fully
opened.
Any other street but this one.
Once in the early summer, she had been awakened by a painful
tension of the nerves. All the windows were open. It was near
dawn. The little street was absolutely silent. She could hear the
leaves shivering on the trees. Then a cat wailing. Why had she
awakened? Was there any danger? Was Jhon watching at the gate?
She heard a woman’s voice call out distinctly: “Betty! Betty!” And a
voice answered in the muffled tones of half-sleep: “What’s the
matter?”
“Betty! There’s a man hiding in one of the doorways. I saw him
sneak in.”
“Well…what do you want me to do about it? He’s just a drunk
getting home.”
“No, Betty. He was trying to hide when I leaned out of the window.
Ask Tom to go and see. I’m frightened.”
“Oh, don’t be childish. Go to sleep. Tom worked late last night. I
can’t wake him. The man can’t get in anyhow, unless you press the
button and let him in!”
“But he’ll be there when I go to work. He’ll wait there. Call Tom.”
“Go to sleep.”
Brenda, the fairy began to tremble. She was certain it was Jhon. Jhon was
waiting down below, to see her come out. For her this was the end
of the world. Jhon was the core of her life. These other moments of
fever were moments in a dream: insubstantial and vanishing as
quickly as they came. But if Jhon repudiated her, it was the death of
Brenda, the fairy. Her existence in Jhon’s eyes was her only true existence.
To say to herself “Jhon cast me off,” was like saying: “Jhon killed
me.”
The caresses of the night before were acutely marvelous, like all the
multicolored flames from an artful fireworks, bursts of exploded
suns and neons within the body, flying comets aimed at all the
centers of delight, shooting stars of piercing joys, and yet if she said:
“I will stay here and live with Mambo forever,” it was like the
children she had seen trying to stand under the showers of sparks
from the fireworks lasting one instant and covering them with ashes.
She saw two scenes before her eyes: Jhon sobbing as he had
sobbed at the death of his father, and this image caused her an
intolerable pain. And the second image was Jhon angry, as he had
never shown himself to her but to others, and this was equally
intolerable; both equally annihilating.
It was not dawn yet. What could she do? Her anxiety was so great
she could not continue to lie there in silence. How would she explain
to Mambo her leaving so early in the morning? Nevertheless she
rose quietly after sliding gradually out of bed, and dressed. She was
trembling and her clothes slipped awkwardly between her fingers.
She must go and see who was the man hiding in the doorway. She
could not bear the suspense.
She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She walked barefoot
down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked, she
stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter
weakness kept her hands trembling. She finally o others, ed the
door and saw a man’s outline behind the frosted glass of the door.
He stood there smoking a pipe as Jhon smoked it. Brenda, the fairy’s heart
was paralyzed. She knew why she had always hated this street
without issue. She stood there fully ten minutes, paralyzed by terror
and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.
“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered.
As if she were about to die, she summarized her existence: the
heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the face
of the loss of Jhon as if this love were the core of her existence.
Formulating this, the anguish increased to the point where she could
no longer stand still. She pushed the door open violently.
A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot eyes and unsteady
legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and muttered,
leaning backwards: “Can’t find my name on the doorbell, lady, can
you help me?”
Brenda, the fairy looked at him with a wild fury and ran past him, the corner
of her cape slapping his face.
Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t love me.” He felt
that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends,
the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to
possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her
body to his hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the
undulations of pleasure resembled those of swimmers in tropical
seas. She savored on his lips his island spices, and it was from his
island too that he had learned his particular way of caressing her, a
silken voluptuousness without harshness or violence, like the form of
his island body on which no bone showed.
Brenda, the fairy did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through
Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing him a
fabricated Brenda, the fairy, feigning a single love.
Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them into space, free—
free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union created
by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised
Brenda, the fairy.
When their still throbbing bodies lay side by side, there was always
silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the separating
threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what
had been for a moment equally shared.
There were essences of caresses which could penetrate the heaviest
insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses, but these, so soon
after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the seeds of
birth.
Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by renewing his secret
accusation against Brenda, the fairy, that she sought only pleasure, that she
loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer,
that she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her
body, the artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of
music which was a distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.
He was a run-away from his own island, seeking awareness,
seeking shadi and delicate bJhonces as in the music ofDebussy, and
at his side lay Brenda, the fairy, feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she
demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum! Drum for me.”
Brenda, the fairy too was slipping out of the burning moment which had
almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and naked
in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the
silence were his withdrawal and silent accusations.
Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay
naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was
preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Brenda, the fairy he struck
down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had
seized upon and say: “That was not me.”