High Fidelity:

Los Angeles, 1960

Robin Coste Lewis

ROBIN COSTE LEWIS, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and a Guggenheim Fellow.

They fuck for a Hi-Fi. A pine console

of photographic veneer inlaid with glittering

plastic. That was the deal. When he got home

she’d whined like a girl—always his signal

(or was it hers?) that she would be generous

if he gave in to the new electronic

appliance she wanted. That’s how stove-top

toast became a toaster; how the icebox

became a Frigidaire. As she goes to work

on top of him, she’s not thinking. Her body

is a Quad, a Klipsch, or the H.H.

Scott. She’s a Clairtone with a built-in Electro-Voice

speaker, and each button and knob—when tuned

or pushed—adjusts her sounds automatically.

In the time it takes to exhaust him,

she’s narrowed it down. Either she wants

the new McIntosh or a Magnavox

because there’s one down at the Goodwill,

slightly used. It has a record changer

that can play their seventy-eights

but still spin the new little forty-fives.

She is sweating in her new slip, the one

she got on her new peach-colored credit

card, downtown at the Sears & Roebuck’s.

He’s wearing his undershirt, one

of many she pressed over the weekend

with starch whisked quick

from flour and water. He’s done.

She’s proud. The boys sleep on

the sofa bed in the living

room. He lights two Pall Malls, passes

her the most lit. She takes a hit.

I know which one I want, she says.

He nuzzles his nose into his armpit.

Which one what? he asks, and rolls

over, chuckling.