TWO

PETE MAGNUS ANNOUNCED A SCHEME TO BROKER THE SITE of an Arizona nursing home to a strip-mining outfit. Overnight he shifted into high gear. He brought his work home with him and spent the mornings talking on his cordless phone while Estée brewed coffee and toasted bread. Between calls he stuffed his mouth and confided in her his workaday trials.

“Marsha, right, this woman that works for me? She’s irritating the hell out of me. She’s doing this primal scream therapy, she chants a lot and she has this altar set up in her filing cabinet. Her husband won’t let her do it at home so she’s doing it at the office, and I mean she locks the door and shit but there I am on the speakerphone and through the wall she’s chanting oogala boogala.”

“Primal scream?” asked Estée, pouring orange juice.

“You don’t do the scream right away, you have to work up to it. She’s been in this therapy for a year or something, she still hasn’t worked up to the scream, all she does is fucking chant. Come in at the wrong time and she’s cross-legged in front of the filing cabinet with her eyes closed going oogala boogala schmoogala doogala.”

“Eggs?”

“Awright, take ’em off your hands. Gonna think big from now on, Esty. Been playing it safe but now I’m going big, big, big. What’s that asshole’s number, my asshole broker, guy’s got a corncob up his ass. Steve? Strategy here, I wanna off-load all the blue-chip, total liquidation as soon as it’s up say three-eighths on the Argentine ITT, a quarter with the Coca-Cola. Esty, hand me the half-and-half wouldja?”

She left the kitchen, taking her toast into the living room to eat in front of Joan Lunden’s “Good Morning” face. Padding into the hall where her closet was to look for a pair of underwear, she burrowed in the dirty clothes hamper and, scrabbling through the soiled mass of Pete Magnus’s king-size sheets, found a fifty-dollar bill in his pants. She pocketed it slyly.

Sitting on the side of his bed, Pete donned lozenged socks while holding the receiver couched between his jaw and collarbone.

“What are you talking about, buying-selling like crazy, make a big fat fucking commission, what do you even care if I crap on myself? But I won’t, Steve, I won’t I gotta feeling. Steve, you’re lucky I don’t take my business to a deep discount house, trade at two cents a share, save myself your goddamn fat-cat cut,” and he waved a shoe at Estée, bidding her to forage for its mate in the pile on the floor. “What do you mean I don’t know, capital gains bullshit, turn it over, but listen I gotta go. That’s why I said three, I figured in the IRS levy, at this point I just need liquid, whaddaya think, no, I gotta go, catch ya later Steve,” and he hung up and joined Estée in scrounging around for the shoe.

“Seizing the fuckin day,” he told her. “Been lying in wait, all these assets sitting there, I mean shit I’m taking risks, gonna go for broke, why stay small? You ever hear that song by that purple midget Prince, you know Ronnie’s got a bomb we could all die any day, you seen my Filofax?” and then, while in the background she tore his Porsche calendar off the wall of her bedroom, he was dialing again. “I tolja already when we signed the leaseback deal it was—the lease runs out in July, so what I think we gotta sell the property, gotta crazy offer from this company in Tulsa, keep it quiet obviously,” and she crumpled the calendar into a waste can, opened desk drawers and scanned their contents. The stack of magazines pertaining to his apartment, named Penthouse, she removed. Flipping through one she saw its subject matter was not real estate. “What are you telling me, give me this grandmother shit? No, if it was my grandmother I’d go honey, time to move on. What two hundred seniors? Give me this Golden Age crap. Move ’em out! Outside Tucson there it’s geriatric heaven, they got your dude ranches look like the Taj Ma-fuckin-hal, there’s a godzillion nursing homes, it’s like a Disneyland for dialysis machines. Please, relocation’s not gonna kill ’em.”

“Pete?” she asked, walking into his bedroom. He was rubbing a Mennen Speed Stick on his armpits. “I’m cleaning my room. Do you need these magazines?”

“Christ,” he said, and dropped them in a corner.

“Onanism is healthy,” recited Estée. “It’s really the best way. When you’re older I will show you the devices.”

“What?” he asked, distracted, but before she could repeat Betty’s dictum he had knotted his tie and was on his way out.

He upped his rate of acquisition of native art, bringing home a despoiled icon almost every day: now a Fon iron statue, now a Baule figurine; Monday a Makishi dancer costume, Tuesday a Dukduk mask. Pete was on a spending quest. He bought luxury foodstuffs wholesale, storing cartons of capers and anchovy paste in the broom closet, crates of Belgian chocolate in the bathroom. In a flurry of extravagance he purchased a huge truck on jacked-up wheels, which he equipped with a booming stereo system. “I’ll teach you to drive Esty, get around on your own.” He no longer troubled himself to turn off faucets, burners, or fans; water ran constantly, sometimes from multiple taps at once while Estée went around shutting them off. He often switched on the heater to counteract the effects of the air conditioner. The laundry went unwashed until Estée put it in the washing machine. He left cartons of milk going sour on the counter, broken beer bottles on the kitchen linoleum.

She told herself that, being an unpaying guest, she could set no conditions to her tenancy, and it was natural that, while he was trying to get big, mundane events were beneath him. The world was now, he told Estée, his oyster. Apparently he was a pearl, swimming in gray mollusk muscle. A pearl did not concern itself with its oyster, though the oyster built itself around the pearl.

Pete Magnus’s burgeoning mass was filling the finite space of the apartment. If she was uncomfortable with overlap she would have to shrink to accommodate, contract as he expanded. To this end she did not respond to his displays and was stiff and unforthcoming in mixed company. She avoided Stew and company. The form her shrinking took was covert: she kept exchanges to a minimum, made no demands, and receded quietly under verbal assault. Her situation, she assumed, was of brief duration, peopled by temporary characters and governed by arbitrary rules. Bearing with it was less a function of stoicism than of cost-effectiveness. She had to acclimatize. Advances were incremental: the real grew at her sides in the shape of new wings, vestigial and membranous. She loitered in public places, waiting to learn. It would happen by accretion, like geology. But Pete Magnus was not a patient man.

“What you gotta have, Esty, is people skills,” he urged. “You gotta be able to make people do what you want. You’re not gonna learn that at the library Esty. I mean you’re a good-looking girl, you could be a model or something. You just gotta know how to work it. Keep it in mind Esty. When you get up in the morning, say to yourself: people skills. Aims, goals, and objectives. Interaction. You’re too quiet Esty. What people like most about me is, why I sell so many houses is, I can talk Esty. I have what you call conversational flair. Take it from me. Every morning I get up, I take a look in the mirror, and I go, Pete, today is going to be a great day. And why? Because I got aims, I got goals, I got objectives.”

She schooled herself in Magnus appreciation. She conjugated verbs on his behalf: like, likes, likability. I like Pete. Pete is neat.

Tiring of boring old Nigerian bronzes, Pende masks, and Sri Lankan disease-devil faces, he brought home the pièce de résistance one Friday night. He announced a celebration, with delivery food to come. He had an electrician wire a light into the wall and bolted a custom-made stand to the living room floor. It was Plexiglas outfitted with a small refrigeration unit in the base. As Pete bustled through these excited preliminaries, Estée reclined on the couch reading the Times. Keep an eye on personal finances this month. Pete lit candles and brought out a bottle of wine. Take-out Indian arrived. They ate it off the crate.

He adopted his proud-father look, presiding over the meal in kingly fashion. He fed samosas into his maw with relish, smeared chutney on garlic nan, and orated. Paging through People, he said, “She got that stuff injected in her lips, collagen or whatever. Makes them puff out. Would you look at that pink shirt? I’m sorry, but that man is a faggot.”

She drank glass after glass, until Pete opened a second bottle. She was pleasantly buoyant. A homey glow infused the carved ebony lingam, the frog mask from Bali, and the spear-holding demon with brotherly warmth. “Nothing is as hard,” she mused, “as it looks.”

“Hell yeah,” said Pete Magnus. In the dim light the sunlamp-tanned orb of his face shone as if polished: he was a gleaming cherub, a round and sated doll. “In veeno very tass, right?”

“Not exactly veritas,” she said, but he stood and swept the white boxes of food off the crate with a flourish. He hefted a hammer and pried two nails from either side of the crate, dropped the hammer on the couch, and lifted the lid. Estée, still seated on the rug, peered over the edge and saw only white Styrofoam peanuts.

“And now,” said Pete Magnus, “for our feature presentation. Straight from Papua New Guinea.”

He dug slowly into the peanuts until he’d cleared enough away to grab both sides of a smaller box, which he extracted. He set it on top of the peanuts and opened it, pulling out a wad of waxy tissue paper the size of a softball. This he held gently on the palm of one hand as he tiptoed to the display platform, where he placed it.

“C’mere,” he whispered, and beckoned to Estée. She went to stand beside him. “For your viewing pleasure, exclusive contraband from one of the last man-eating tribes known to the modern world,” he announced, and carefully peeled off the paper.

It took her a minute to get it. The object was slightly larger than an avocado, wrinkled like a prune and almost as dark, a mahogany tinge to it. She leaned closer: on the top she could make out strands of coarse black thread peppered with a little gray. It was riddled with craters, indentations, and bulges. A faint, sweet odor when she inhaled. The upper half shriveled, marked with two small crumbling dabs of red paint near the front, seemingly ancient. On either side, crusty flaps.

Pete Magnus stood back and she moved around to look at it straight on. Two puckered slits in front: eyes. The crusty flaps therefore ears, the threads hairs. A shrunken head. In the center of the face, a caved-in blister, no doubt referred to in happier times as a nose. It had been divested of its cranium, of teeth, bones, apparently of cartilage too; nothing remained to it but some distant descendant of skin.

“Wanted one of these things forever, you have no idea how impossible it is to get one,” said Pete Magnus. “Is it awesome! Jesus.”

“Maybe it’s not real?” she offered.

“Not real, are you kidding?” snapped Pete Magnus. “What I paid for this, it better fuckin be real. This guy I talked to deals with the Indonesian government, coupla guys in customs there you got a few bribes, deal with the copper-ore trucks coming through from Papua, drivers have contact with people, I could tell you some stories. Problems I had. Started looking four years ago, that’s how long. Persistence, Esty. Dee-termination.”

“I’d like some more wine,” said Estée, and headed back to the couch. Pete Magnus fiddled with the stand, closed the glass case, and bolted it at the back. He turned a dial beneath the cooling unit till it hummed.

“See you can’t take shit from these guys, you set your price you keep callin, keep with it and it’s gonna take awhile then bingo! you’re home free. There’s museums that would cut off their dicks for this thing, pardon my French, Esty, but it’s true. They’d kill for one of these little heads. Can’t blame them, it’s an actual human head! This is the head of an actual person. Gives ya chills, huh?”

“An actual person,” she repeated, nodding as she swallowed, tracing a listless finger along the label Appellation Bordeaux Contrôlée. Behind her shoulder the wizened head was making its mutilated presence felt. It was blind, it was dead, but it was staring.

“I own it! I own it!” burst out Pete Magnus, and strutted crowing and preening into the kitchen, whence he bore another bottle of wine. He uncorked it saying, “Toast to the head, gotta get a name for it Esty. People come over, freak ’em out. Introduce it, go, This is my grandfather, Peter Magnus the First! Or like, This is the head of George Washington. Be hilarious.” He poured the wine.

“Very funny,” she concurred.

“To the head,” said Pete Magnus, and drank.

Lounging on the sofa, they gazed at the TV screen. Soldiers shot farmers with rifles as they ran from their burning straw huts. Pete channel-surfed. Rwanda, MTV. Correct male pattern baldness. The bottle was half empty; she went to her room and put on her pyjamas. When she got back to the living room, Pete had removed his shirt.

“I’m tense, could you rub my neck Esty?”

He laid his head in her lap while she massaged his shoulders. It was unstrenuous. Objects were not separate, every piece was contiguous, and the wine had made her teeth grainy. These grainy teeth, connected to her spine and to the bony digits of her fingers, connected thereby also to the fatty sinews of Pete Magnus flesh. His carpet led seamlessly into the wall, chairs coalesced, her sock feet resting on the coffee table blended into a coaster and crumpled napkin. Thatched roofs caved in, men tumbled under rifle fire. A greeting card from elsewhere, but in code, like everything. There were no borders between the false time of the television and the time in the living room. The screen touched the air and its emissions entered her lungs and her brain through her retina. Particles from the shrunken head, invisible to the naked eye, spun like dust motes in the space she occupied. They drifted onto the 2-D bodies of slain tribal children, thin arms splayed on jungle foliage. Time used itself up, spun itself out.

The lips of Pete attached themselves to the crook of her arm, where a vein sprang to prominence. He applied suction, a drooling vacuum. She tried to ignore it: something unnamed was holding her attention. An old man, held in cradling arms like a baby. She had seen it somewhere. Hoisting himself up from her lap, gaining leverage, Pete Magnus osmosed into her shoulders and neck, his head bent. His mouth scoured the surfaces. He investigated new terrain with the sole sensory organ of his face, the mouth that ate, tactile and instinctive. His ancestors had foraged for kill on the plains before their cellular phones were installed, but he would deny it to the hilt. History was too bad. He could have stayed carefree, foraging for termites with long blades of grass, picking fleas from his brothers, and then, as the sun set over Tanzania, retiring to his leafy nest to sleep.

It was ludicrous, but she relaxed and sank into inertia. Pete Magnus burrowed past her garments, hair falling over his eyes. She couldn’t reach her wine glass, but no sooner regretted this than abandoned the effort. He was muttering something, the words were dispensable. Intent on his labor, he wasn’t looking at her face. This was a relief; the details of his features in sweating urgency were ugly like an insult. Instead she encountered his hair, a blurry silver sheen that smelled of Pert.

Over the crest of the hair, an indistinct foreground, the shrunken head stood out in vibrant sharp outlines against the wall. She focused on the head and then unfocused, and could discern separate strands in the Magnus coiffure. She was increasingly sick to her stomach, and Pete Magnus’s activity, the strain and impact, weighed heavy. “You’re so hot, I always wanted to do it since I met you,” breathed Pete Magnus. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”

“It’s not good,” she whispered, absent. Her teeth were soft against her tongue.

“You got your period, am I right? Put a rubber on anyway. Got one right here. Come prepared, like a Boy Scout, wait a second, sometimes you put these things on, it goes down. There.” She had seen the Trojans, the Stimula Vibra Ribbed and LifeStyles, in the drugstore, beside spermicidal jelly and Today sponges in boxes decorated with pink blooming flowers. If only Betty had known! She, Estée, would have been contracepted. Betty might be walking even now, walking, running, dancing through fields of flowering pink Today sponges, her legs mobile and lithe, her arms strong. He fumbled with it, rolled it down over the familiar protrusion, and was back, panting. She felt disoriented, sick, and closed her eyes to quell the dizziness.

“My turn,” said Larry the bodybuilder, his thick fist churning next to her face. She pulled away and was crawling, Pete Magnus behind her on all fours with lipstick in the shape of a face on his stomach. “My turn,” said Larry, beating on her neck as she tried to escape across the carpet.

“No,” she whispered, kicking at him and losing balance, scraping her chin on the floor. She saw the window up ahead, but Larry was fast, fast and heavy. His polished biceps clutched her around the stomach. “It’s not my fault, go away,” she squeaked, but he was riding her back. She was a beast of burden. Her knees burned as she dragged them both to the window, put her hands up on the sill, and looked out. Instead of the lights of Hollywood she was met by the old man’s grinning face. Specimen 7 breathed tapioca and chocolate into her nostrils and pushed his hoary gray tongue down her throat. She fell back into the room, where Larry’s bulk melted beneath her back and the old man, his blue hospital robe gaping open, was astride her from the front.

“Don’t, you thief,” she said as he mauled her chest. “Get off!” Applause from the cheap seats: Larry was clapping on the other side of the room. The old man tried to pry her legs apart with liver-spotted hands, but she slipped out of his grasp. He ran around in circles cackling, a toy winding down, and then tottered back to the window and climbed out. She lay gasping for relief, but the room was still populated; on the sidelines swam blurred faces. In surged Jesus freaks, swooping down on her with rod and staff. They pinned her arms back. “Ugly b-bbug,” said Ron. Behind them mothmen battled with guns, and guinea pig soldiers played patty-cake in their bunkers. She was legless, bedridden, cocooned. The Jesus freaks were pushed off her, protesting as they went, but she hummed “Ave Maria” in her head to ward them off, falling back on old custom, and the crowds dissipated.

Instead of Pete Magnus it was the head. Water rushed in her ears, the ocean sound of a shell. “You are a seed pod,” said the head, and grinned toothless, its mouth spreading and splitting. “Betty, a man needs a son.” The head and the demon with his spear and tufted anklets were on her, they were fathers and sons and dead ghosts and they had her now. She remembered Helen and was gripped with panic, cold, a ball of hard ice in her stomach.

“Yes! Yes!” said Pete Magnus, but she pushed him off. “What, Esty, what the hell?” he whinnied, his organ dangling in the air in a yellow tube sock.

She struggled to her feet, holding her stomach, and ran naked into the bathroom, where she shut herself in, breathing fast and hard. She ran water in the tub and swallowed aspirin. When she settled down in the hot water a flower of blood blossomed, crimson against the white porcelain beneath her, and faded. She had guarded against it, but then forgotten. Now it was set in stone. Somewhere someone was laughing.

Pete Magnus had invited them in. He had made an expatriate of the shrunken head, shipped it over forests and oceans. He had adopted it for his private zoo, but it did not wish to be kept. They were locked in together. It would hurt her more than it hurt him. Such was the law of fathers.