90
(Don’t look for my heart anymore; the beasts*
have eaten it. )
Baudelaire
*
He was a subtle piece of slime, big open pores, hair hanging
over his thick lip onto his teeth, faintly green. He smiled. I
sat. Oh yes, and I smiled. Tentatively. Quietly. Eyes slanted
down, then up quickly, then away, then down, nothing elaborate. Just a series of sorrowful gestures that scream female.
Gray was in the air, a thick paste. It was a filter over
everything or just under my eyelids. The small table was too
dirty, rings of wet stuck to it, and the floor had wet mud on it
that all the people had dragged in before they sat down to
chatter. I picked this place because I had thought it was clean.
I went there almost every day, escaping the cold of my desolate
apartment. Now the tabletop was sordid and I could smell
decay, a faint acrid cadaver smell.
The rain outside was subtle and strange, not pouring down
in sheets but just hanging, solid, in thin static veils of wet
suspended in the air, soaking through without the distracting
noise of falling hard. The air seemed empty, and then another
sliver of wet that went from the cement on the sidewalk right
up into the sky would hit your whole body, at once, and one
walked or died.
I had nothing to keep the rain off me, just regular cotton
clothes, the gnarled old denim of my time and age, with holes,
frayed not for effect but because they were old and tired, and
what he saw when he saw me registered in those ugly eyes
hanging over those open pores. Her, It, She, in color, 3-D,
fearsome feminista, ballbuster, woman who talks mean, queer
arrogant piece. But also: something from Fellini, precisely a
mountain of thigh, precisely. I could see the mountain of thigh
hanging in the dead center of his eyes, and the slight drip of
saliva. Of course, he was very nice.
* the stupids
91
Coffee came, and cigarettes piled up, ashtray after ashtray,
two waitresses with huge red lips and short skirts running back
and forth emptying them, and the smell of the smoke got into
my fingers and into my hair and on my clothes and the rain
outside even began to carry it off when it was too much for
the room we were in. The empty packs were crumpled, and I
began pulling apart the filters, strand by strand, and rolling
