O Les Faux Jours
I sat with the Countess beneath the pink and violet striped
canopy of her cabana overlooking the dancers. With tarnished silver struzzi
cadenti, I jabbed at cubes of American cheese floating in the murky absinth of
a Deruta ware bowl as she worried her jewels. I remarked about the heat.
“Ah yes” she said. “It is a white hot day, like that one in
Cabeza de Lobo. Who can live?” She produced a silk fan painted with the sweet
Infant of Prague but rather than open it, she swatted a small dog that had been
sniffing her ankle. It belonged to someone who owed her a favor, she imparted
sotto voce. Fan or dog? Pointless to ask her.
A young and hairless man in a starved yellow Speedo was
introduced to us. “I’m from Lenox!” he proclaimed. The Countess had been about
to ignore him until his proclamation caused her to fill her lungs and empty
them slowly with a litany of landmarks from that region of her home state.
I said to both of them “I once had a cabin in Becket not far
from there. Do you know it?”
They spoke over each other with praise for that tiny mill town
deserted by industry. I therefore continued.
“We summered there. Every Sunday morning, my mother insisted
that the family drive into Becket proper to attend Mass at a shabby Catholic
Church named non-specifically for one of the Saints Thomas. Can you name some?”
They could. The Apostle, à Kempis, More. “On Donner and Dancer , Aquinas and
Vixen!” There was no holding their minds, so I continued to speak without
regard for their attention.
“I didn’t want to go to Church. I wanted to swim and fish and
find blueberries and murder snakes. And then one Sunday, I saw a boy in the pew
behind me. He had crystal blue eyes and shiny true black hair that fell over
his forehead. He was my age. We became lovers in our thirteenth year of age. In
a metal row boat from Sears. Sometimes there is God, but not often in church.”
The Countess gathered herself up and stood. I walked with her to
the balustrade where we looked down at the thousands of shirtless dancers
making a wavy aura of flesh about the pool. They looked up at the Countess and
cheered “Ave Imperatrix, we about to dance salute you.”
She spied a particularly muscular and deeply tanned Cuban who
raised his powerful arms to her. She leaned over the balustrade, fingering her
gas blue beads and crying out “My son! My son! He’s come back from the war!”
I handed her the last of the white roses. She tore it apart and
flung its petals over the crowd. “Horrid children. Following Sebastian down
every street.” She hissed.
“No where to run to, nowhere to hide” they chanted mercilessly.
“Flores para los muertos” muttered the Countess who seemed to
wobble a bit. “Les fleurs de mal” I added. “Fleur de sel” she responded,
returning to the bowl and splashing its liquid on her brow as she sat down and
recited
“Oh fons Bandusiae,
Splendidior vitro,
Dulce digne mero
Non sine floribus
Cras donaberis haedo
Cui frons turgida cornibus.”
“That’s all very well today while the blossom still clings to
the vine, Countess, but my daddy was a gambler down in Georgia. He wound up on
the wrong end of a gun and I was born in the back seat of a….”
“Don’t speak!” she interrupted. She held my hand and said “S’ils
sont des jours amers, il y ont de si doux. Helas, quel miel n’a jamais laisse
de degouts?”
I pulled away from her grasp and said “Yeah, well nobody knows
the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus.” But the Countess was
lost in some happy thought and crowed “O les Beaux Jours”. She repeated this
phrase louder and louder until I knew the moment had been reached, and I
slapped her to make her stop. She closed her eyes and I suspect she slept briefly.
When she opened her eyes, she claimed to have lost her ability
to see all colors except sepia.
Several feet away, the Lenocian salamander began to laugh even
while nothing was said. He had been accepting drinks from suitors. The Countess
and I became wary of his immediate future. I ventured “In the course of an
afternoon, one should visit a bar exactly as many times as one would visit
Cairo in one’s entire life.”
The Countess said “Hmph. Ved Napoli e mori.” And after a few
seconds, she faux-spit at some spot a few feet away and added “They’ll steal
the ring off your finger.”
“Imagine” she brightened, “If lightening should strike that
pool, on a clear day, when you can see for miles, nel blu depinto di blu.” She
summoned a tall Mexican in a white suit who fetched a pen and cocktail napkin,
and when he stooped to hand her these things, he pulled open his shirt for my
benefit and flashed me the wide smile of a dentist who has done time. The
Countess scribbled a few words in Russian, which, when read by the DJ, Roland
Belmares, stationed fifty feet away, elicited an obedient nod and a spontaneous
remix of Lou Christie.
The Countess rocked back and forth, singing “Again and again and
again”.
The boyfriend of the Mexican asked if I would be at Jackhammer later
in the evening for WHIP: A Leather Fantasy. I said that it was indeed my
fullest intention and that I had planned nothing else for my life beyond that
point. He said that he had once dressed as Jackie in leather and that his
boyfriend had loved it. I responded that the owner of a guest house in
Provincetown once dressed me as Jackie and put me in the back seat of his limo,
circling Commercial Street and stopping to proposition young men with me as
bait. I had no idea what to do with the ones who got in. Stay in character?
Remove the gloves? Show them the ketchup stains on the dress?
As we spoke of hats and men and places gone to seed, we did not
notice that the Countess, reaching for the only cloud in the brilliant sky, a
small confection shaped like Belize, had leaned too far over the balustrade.
The roar of the men below reached us too late as we turned to see the
red-lacquered undersides of her tiny sandals follow her over the ledge. We ran
to it, and looking down twenty feet, saw that she had landed squarely on the
Bacardi logo of the tent over the bar below. Claiming comfort, she waved away
our clamoring, and rested there with her kaftan splayed like the webery of a
flying squirrel. The sun went down. The boys ran into the night, and her
dismount was not recorded.
