Emily I can force the sentence to work. I think of her sharp cadences, the way she bites the ends off words as if snapping celery stalks in two. Or the time she tickled me senseless in the middle of her sister’s wedding and I had to pretend I was drunk just to weather the embarrassment. Or this: the smooth, spoon-tight feel of her stomach against my lips, the miraculous tangle of her blond hair.
So. I try again.
When I see you, my heart rises like a flitting hum
Now I am truly hopeless. The repetition of “rises” and “rose” knifes through all alternatives and I am convinced I should have been a plumber, a dentist, a shoeshine boy. Words that should layer themselves into patterns — strike passion in the heart — become ugly and cold. The dead weight of cliche has given me a headache.
At dusk, I ask the Director for a day off. He gives it to me, orders me to do nothing but walk around the city, perhaps take in a ball game in the old historical section, perhaps a Voss Bender exhibit at theTeelMemorialArt Museum.
IV
I spend my day off contemplating my palm with my girlfriend Emily Brosewiser, she of the aforementioned blond hair, the succulent lips, the tactile smile, the moist charm. (My comparisons become so fecund I think I would rather love a fruit or vegetable.) We sit on a lichen-encrusted bench at the San Matador Park, my arm around her shoulders, and watch the mallards siphoning through the pond scum for food. The gasoline-green grass scent and the heat of the summer sun make me sleepy. The park seems cluttered with dwarfs: litter picker-uppers armed with their steely harpoons; lobotomy patients from the nearby hospital, their stares as direct as a lover’s; burly hunchbacked fellows going over the lawn with gleaming red lawnmowers. They distract me — errant punctuation scattered across a pristine page.
Emily sees them only as clowns and myself as sick. “Sick, sick, sick.” How can I disagree? She smells so clean and her hair shines like spun gold.
“They were always there before, Nicholas, and you never noticed them. Why should they matter now?
Don’t pick at that.” She slaps my hand and my palm thrums with pain. “Why must you obsess over it so?
Here we are with a day off and you cannot leave it alone.”
Emily works for an ad agency. She designs sentences that sell perfection to the consumer public. Before I ever met Emily, I saw her work on billboards at the outskirts of town: “Buy Skuttles: We Expect No Rebuttals” and “Someday You Are Gonna Die: In the Meantime, Buy and Buy — at the Coriander Mall.”
At the bottom, in small print, the billboards read: “Ads by Emily.” At the time, I was girlfriendless so I called up the billboard makers, tracked down the ad agency, and asked her out. She liked my collection of erotic sentences and my manual dexterity. I liked the gossamer line of hair that runs down her forearms, the curves of her breasts with their tiny pink nipples.
But her sentences have become passe to me, too crude and manipulative. How can I expect more from her, given the nature of the business?
So I say, “Yes, dear,” and sigh and examine my palm. She is always reasonable. Always right. But I am not sure she understands me. I wonder what she would think about my memory of the arc of sky above with night coming down and the sea rustling on the shore. She did not argue when I insisted on separate apartments.
The circle on my palm has gone from pink to white and the way the wrinkle lines careen into one another, the scars like tiny fractures, fascinates me.
Emily giggles. “Nicholas, you are so perfectly silly sitting there with that bemused look on your face.
Anyone would think you’d just had a miscarriage.”
I wonder if there is something wrong with our relationship; it seems as blank as my life as an orphan.
Besides, “miscarriage” is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the look on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through, but still…
We return to our separate apartments. All I can think about are dwarfs, hunchbacks, cripples. I sleep and dream of dwarfs, deformed and malicious, with sinister slits for smiles. But when I wake, I have the most curious of thoughts. I remember the weight of the dwarf woman’s body against my side as she stuck the sliver into my palm. I remember the smell of her: sweet and sharp, like honeysuckle; the feel of her hand, the fingers lithe and slender; her body beneath the clothes, the way parts do not match and could never match, and yet have unity.
V
A most peculiar assignment lies on my desk the next morning, so peculiar that I forget my damaged palm. I am to write a sentence about a dwarf. The Director has left a note that I am to complete this sentence ASAP. He has also left me photographs, a series of newspaper articles, and photocopies from a diary. The lead paragraph of the top newspaper article, a sensational bit of work, reads: David “Midge” Jones, 27, a 4-foot-5 dwarf, lived for attention, whether he ate fire at a carnival, walked barefoot on glass for spectators, or allowed himself to be hurled across a room for a dwarf-throwing contest. Jones yearned for the spotlight. Sunday, he died in the dark. He drank himself to death. Tests showed his blood alcohol level at.43, or four times the level at which a motorist would be charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.
I pick up the glossy color print atop the pile of documentation. It shows Jones at the carnival, the film overexposed, his eyes forming red dots against the curling half-smile of his mouth. At either side stand flashy showgirls with tinsel-adorned bikini tops crammed against his face. Jones stares into the camera lens, but the showgirls stare at Jones as though he were some carnival god. The light on the photograph breaks around his curly brown hair, but not his body, as if a spotlight had been trained on him. He stands on a wooden box, his arms around the showgirls.
The film’s speed is not nearly fast enough to catch the ferris wheel seats spinning crazily behind him, so that light spills into the dazzle of showgirl tinsel, showgirl cleavage. Behind the ferris wheel, blurry sand dunes roll, and beyond that, in the valley between dunes, the sea, like a squinting eye.
The photograph has a sordid quality to it. When I look closer, I see the sheen of sweat on Jones’s face, his flushed complexion. Sand clings to his gnarled arms and his forehead. The lines of his eyes, nose, and mouth seem charcoal pencil rough: a first, hurried sketch.
I turn the photograph over. In the upper right hand corner someone has written:
Jones is a brutish man. I want nothing to do with him. Yet I must write a sentence about him for a client I will never meet. I must capture David Jones in a single sentence.
I read the rest of the article, piecemeal.
In his most controversial job, Jones ignored criticism, strapped on a modified dog harness, and allowed burly men to hurl him across a room in a highly publicized dwarf-throwing contest at the King’s Head Pub.
“I’m a welder, which can be dangerous. But welders are frequently laid off, so I also work in a circus. I eat fire, I walk on broken glass with bare feet. I climb a ladder made of swords, I lie on a bed of nails and have tall people stand on me. This job is easy compared to what I usually do.”
I spend many hours trying to form a sentence, while sweat drips down my neck despite the slow swish of fans. I work through lunch, distracted only by a dwarf juggler (plying his trade with six knives and a baby) who has wrested the traffic circle away from a group of guildless mimes and town players.
I begin simply.
The dwarf’s life was tragic.
No.
