One word does it. She stretched the sentence like chewing gum out of her mouth, but it was just one word that put the champagne bubbles in his blood. As she released her barrette, her hair blossomed into a red-brown bell, drenching her bare shoulders.
–See you in there, lover.
That was it. Lover. The door to the bathroom closed lightly as the heated water chattered through the pipes, filling the tub. Rushing to the drain, it softly shushed the apartment. He swished the water music back in his head as he opened the cupboard and plucked a shot glass from the shelf and dialed the bottle cap. The glowing amber curved into the glass. He rattled the countertop seconds later when the glass came back empty. Trading shifts, his eyelids lowered and the corners of his mouth rose.
Thom pulled open the utility drawer and raked vigorously through its contents:
Thom sprang from the drawer. The music! But what would it be? He moved to a particle board cabinet and slid his finger across row after row of shinny jewel-boxes, as a pianist might to rub notes off of ivory keys. He slid a CD from the case and threw open the lid. He pried a disc from its bed but quickly refastened it and restored it to its cradle. Surely there must be something. Something… Something romantic, surely. Old and orchestral, requiring a bow and not a belch. No watered down Beatles songs, the same wet chords and patterns, and no titanic guitar solos. No octopodic drum-fills, please. He recalled a line his father once said:
The ear is the mouth to the soul.
Something that sounds better live. Something to bring the room to a glow. Something old.
Thom stood fully upright momentarily, listening to the shower pipes ring out faint music in the distance. He opened the cabinet door and withdrew tube after tube of half-used wrapping paper. Beyond the tubes, he inched out one of the milk crates of vinyl his father had given him. With the comportment of a wine connoisseur, he inspected his private provision, thumbing through the stack, trying to marry the music to the upcoming moment as though pairing the proper wine to a meal that comes into full being over a series of courses.
Buddy Holly
Too hick-upy.
The Everly Brothers
Too Siamese, tantric.
Bobby Vinton
The narcotic of nostalgia smokes your last cigarette.
Johnny Cash
More balls than a gangbang. This was a private affair.
Johnny Mathis
Close, so close.
He couldn’t hear the shower pipes rattling anymore. In a moment of pure mental departure, Thom pulled a record from the stack as though yanking the tablecloth from under a fully arranged dinner table. He stood stock-still, thinking seriously about unleashing what was before him. His father’s dark on-air lyricism ran from his tongue to his brain. He laughed a high-pitched squeak and felt his father there, on the tip of his tongue, about to put the needle to The Bard of All that is Base, The Troubadour of Titties, The Scop of Sleaze, hit ya between the knees, The Versifier, The Pudenda Pacifier, where’s the fire, The One the Only, you’ll never be lonely: Barry White.
Thom gently parted the cardboard album cover and pulled the hard wax from the sheath. But there had been a mistake along the way… his father, perhaps, or some other lucky arrangement had trickled down to this one perfect moment. He stared incredulously at the album in his hands. Light from above was ladled into the thin grooves and bathed the discus. He wiped a little dust from the lid and offered the record to the platter, excusing the needle from its pedestal. The thin concentric furrows, the fingerprints of the platter, spun wildly into a wobbly black convulsion. The needle descended like a giraffe’s great bowing head to kiss the ground. It was that one about God’s finger touching Adam’s, and so, too, life was given; and out of a pregnant primal crack and haunting hellion hiss came a slow unraveling silence, and out of the slow, heart-clattering silence emerged a squall of tinny strings and trickling piano keys flooding into Thom’s ears.
Someday, someway, you’ll realize you’ve been blind.
A small smile feathered his face as the red Mercury label spun hypnotically below his eyes.
Go on. Go on.
Until you reach the end of the line.
He curled back to kitchen, back to the utility drawer:
He discarded a booklet onto the floor trying to spark the candles. Another booklet of matches rose to the surface of the pile. Thom tore it open and paused. One bent, flaking match—and above the match was a series of numbers. His eyes slid over the surface of the train of numbers, and a thin smile trotted out across his face. He slowly waved the booklet through the air as though he had just missed winning a scratch‐off ticket by one number. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, his chest filling with a kind of cold comfort, knowing life was not going to be stirred up, even minutely. Now he was done.
It was her number.
It was her number, written by his own hand the night they met. That was his seven with the cross at the neck, and his looped two from before he’d decided a looped two was too feminine. And then later, standing in front of her couch, there was that first moment when she put her wet tongue to his mouth and how her breath seemed so panicked and electric, like a bug zapper, and how little he knew of her, and how moist and cool and warm it was at the same time, like a toaster in the bathtub, it all was suspended in rosemist, locked in the velvet vault of moisture and sweat, locked inside her torso which seemed to swirl below her waist when he got close to her. He longed deeply from the edges of his toenails to the crest of his crown to sting and sweat inside that exact moment again.
*
It was a delicious scene out of some forgotten ’80s movie. The backside of a nude in the shower, her outline clinging to the opaque shower curtain. A camera angle from inside and steam covering all the fun parts.
And then that glorious moment when she turns around.
The Shower Scene
–Hon?
No, no, say Bobby. Or Scotty. Some all-American Johnny football name that ends in y and can wear a horizontally striped shirt in good conscience and pull off jeans and a sport coat. But the scene ended as if formatted for television, edited for content and savagely refigured for the screen. Samantha turned; the valve and the sudsy clack and clang of pipes gave way to the faint music of the phonograph. The curtain slid open before the steam emptied out. Pale blue droplets of water clung to her breasts, which appeared bigger than he ever recalled. His vision sharpened.
It’s just a matter of time.
Of course, Brook Benton was right. He’d always be right.
–Could you hand me a towel?
–Right-o.
Thom watched as two long drops descended from below her red, showerglowing ears and rolled across her neck, between the aisle of her breasts; he tried to ignore the droplets rushing over the swell of her stomach that finally halted above her glistening patch of pubic hair.
He had looked too low for too long and shot back his glance to her awaiting stare. She positioned the towel against her center, slightly above the full slip of her nethers, and attended to the drying outpress of her stomach.
–Sorry.
Samantha contained her words, but her head shook back and forth as though part of the drying procedure. Her skin had been pelted red by the exceptionally powerful shower—one of the few perks of the apartment. Thom extended his open palm.
–Hey, I wanna show you something.
He seized her hand and pulled her through. Heat hit them before light. Dozens of tiny candles curled around the room like a smile notched into a pumpkin, and dancing teeth carved and stepped backward into the flesh of the darkness. A series of jittery shadows found their way onto Samantha’s shoulders and chest.
–It’s all for you, lover.
She didn’t say anything, just fell onto the bed and began coating her legs in lotion. He should have baited her with a little kiss. Kisses are like bridges—they freeze first.
A cold surge of air picked up and rattled the windows. In agreement, the candles swayed but did not surrender to the efforts of the wind to dement the moment. Thom shivered and tooled around the room for a smoke. He lit a cigarette off one of the fidgeting candles. Blood didn’t seem to reach his toes. He dragged on his cigarette as deep as he could and passed it to Samantha’s extended hand. Drowsily, she brought it to her mouth as her other hand slid up and down her white, tusky legs, rubbing in the lotion.
Thom sat down on the edge of the bed and folded his hands in his lap just as the moonlight poked in through the window. There, it was a giant pale octopus treading the sky, and in that moment, it seemed to be coming closer, to be dipping, dropping off the diving board in space, and swimming down through pushover velvet nothingness, gurgling a free‐fall million, and up the window. And then it would be all suctioncuppy spikes and strainerteethblood…
He shivered as a moist tongue bathed his ear.
Turning, he saw Samantha pull on her cigarette. She leaned back on the bed with her eyes closed, a bronzed nude bathed in candle light, no longer using the lotion on her legs.