August Evans: Enough

    Mark Linkous killed himself two days ago.  He sang about hammering out heroin cramps, humid creatures called painbirds, and the urge to sleep in a bed of apples.  I made out to “All Night Home” in front of my new boyfriend’s apartment, him taking my lips in a tender high-school way as Linkous’s melded slide guitars made a womb for us.  Snow pelted the windshield.  I didn’t know yet about the life growing inside me, which this new man had planted, and so we could still smooth each other in doe-eyed wonder, watch the soft and painful way the other unraveled.

    A few weeks later my new boyfriend and I saw Mark’s band live.  He loved the music and that I had turned him on to it.  We grasped for each other, uncaring of the public.  Though the whole time, I felt a bitter, acrid gaze on us from behind.  I didn’t need to turn around, I knew who was watching.  Recently, without explanation, I had left him.  He had first given me Mark’s music, and here I was with my new boyfriend at the show.  The gazing man gave me things like music, and a reasonable amount of attention.  Not the blind and stupid fervor to make a child. 

    When I found out I was pregnant, the gazing man found me crying on the front stoop of the building we shared, where we had fallen for each other as neighbors, me on the top floor, him below.  I had just come from the abortion clinic, where Catholics had doused me with holy water on the way in.  The nurse who ran the cold metal over my stomach found no sign of life.  If I was really pregnant, she said, it was still too small to kill.

    On the stoop the gazing man, being in medical school, told me if there was nothing to kill I wouldn’t be doubled over the way I was.  So, even though I had abandoned him for this dilemma, thicker than Mark’s poetry, he drove me to the hospital.

    We were in the waiting room for a long time.  When I came back from the bathroom, he confessed to having read my text messages while I was gone.  The new man had sent a series while I waited in the abortion clinic, good-intentioned fragments, meant to comfort—lyrics of Mark’s songs.  I told the gazing man I was sorry, and I could tell he was, too. 

    The hospital people called my name and I donned another gown, the gazing man respectfully facing the corner while I did it.  These doctors, too, couldn’t find a fetus.  When they took me in for a more sophisticated ultrasound, the technician talked to us like we were the authors of the situation.  The gazing man asked a lot of technical questions.  I said nothing, only watched the black spot floating on the screen above.  If left unchecked in a place too small for it, my fallopian tube, this growth would cause my death.  I was led to another room.  Damp cheek to operating room table, gown raised high behind, prick and fluid rush, methotrexate, like a tumor, ectopic child, shrunk.

   

    Both of these men left a long time ago.  But now that Mark is dead, his spectral music threads them, the doer and the gazer, again in meager union. 

    I pleasure in simple things now.  Like knowing what to expect; and music.  Yes, music is more than enough.


August Evans, a graduate of the University of Chicago MAPH program, teaches English and Humanities in Chicago. She is at work on a novel exploring the fragmentation of self in the age of cyber-identity crafting.

Elayne Clift: Shadows and Stars

It seems to me that the shadows are of supreme importance in perspective.     
-- Leonardo da Vinci

Key Largo is in a word, retro – a throwback to the 1950s. You might not realize it on a drive-through to Key West, but you get it if you stop overnight. You feel it staring at the African Queen, the actual boat in which Bogie and Hepburn made cinematic history. (The boat is unmistakable with its canopy and the boiler Bogey kept banging to keep her moving.) You sense it stopping in the late afternoon at the Caribbean Club where bearded guys with tattoos play pool and drink Coors surrounded by Bogie and Bacall pictures from the movie Key Largo. If this doesn't do it, try sun-downers at the Sheraton, a flamingo-pink pseudo-tropical getaway that shouts for pedal pushers and ruffled off-the-shoulder halter tops. Key Largo is definitely a 1950s kind of place.

We were in the mood for it when we pulled in for the night at The Blue Lagoon, post-war cottages nestled between the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Route 1. The guidebook billed it as a resort run by caring hosts who make mom-and-pop lodges worthy of your patronage. It was no resort, but it was pleasantly tropical. Driving into lush, overgrown gardens randomly surrounding the grounds with colorful bougainvillea and assorted orchid-like flowers was promising.

The woman on duty, Mary Beth, was friendly. But Lazlo, the proprietor, was hardly my idea of “Pop.” Deeply tanned, his Hawaiian shirt seductively open half-way down his chest, his square face chiseled as romance novels boast, he was remarkably handsome. His blue-gray eyes and equine nose were offset by a perfectly shaped mouth and straight, square teeth. Salt-and-pepper hair added to his good looks.

“Is this your daughter?” he asked my husband, as I approached Lazlo's pick up truck after we'd registered.

For a nanosecond I thought he was serious. Then I got angry: Lazlo had played with my ego and made me feel stupid. People named Lazlo, guys who had escaped Hungary in 1956, were supposed to be like Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, suave and chivalrous, not ridiculous or insulting.

Suddenly Mary Beth appeared. “I'm wearing your shirt,” she said, taunting Lazlo, cigarette in hand. “You put it in the give-away bag, but I got it out.” Then she said, “He was going to toss it and it's a perfectly good shirt.”

She drew on her cigarette, fingering Lazlo's blue denim shirt. “You wouldn't think he's my boss, the way I talk to him.”

Lazlo was telling my husband about his German neighbors. I don't know what triggered the conversation. Then, looking at me, he said, “You're Jewish, aren't you? You know what they did last April? They celebrated Hitler's birthday! Can you imagine!” He smiled conspiratorially. “Remarkable,” I said.

Mary Beth smiled at Lazlo as she drifted toward the office. She was clearly in love with him; her compulsions were such that she was incapable of hiding it.

The sun cast long shadows across the gardens. A chill permeated the air. I entered the cottage we had rented for the night. It was reminiscent of places my parents had rented on vacations before there were Holiday Inns. The kitchen had a porcelain table and two chairs in front of a window with Venetian blinds. Plastic flowers adorned the table. A tea towel hung from the refrigerator door. A coffeemaker and toaster sat on the Formica counter. In the bathroom, a paper mat with a map of Florida lay in front of a shower covered by a mildewing plastic curtain. Two skimpy towels hung from a towel bar above the toilet. Miniature Ponds soaps lay next to plastic cups covered in Saran Wrap. Yellowing wallpaper peeled away from the sink. In the main room, a television mounted on a shelf presided over a double bed made with overly laundered sheets. An open closet hosted naked wire hangers above a luggage rack. Two rattan chairs stared vacantly at each other across the room. Through screened jalousie windows, a breeze moved faded print curtains. I wondered if Bogie and Bacall had digs like this when they were filming.

I went to the office. Mary Beth was eating spaghetti from a Styrofoam container, watching TV. I fingered the brochures in a rack looking for a seafood restaurant.

“What can I do for ya?” she asked. She recommended Alabama Jack's, a vintage barge restaurant specializing in crab cakes, country-western music and clog dancing.

“Can you imagine Lazlo wanting to throw this shirt out?” she asked, smoothing it down over her breasts. I thought she must have been pretty once, even though her teeth were crowded and her face was sun-lined now.

“Don't forget about the comet!” Mary Beth said, jumping up. “Should be real clear soon. A friend of mine is comin' over with a telescope.”

The Hale-Bopp Comet had been making nightly appearances and was spectacular, even to the naked eye. So we fixed gin-and-tonics, grabbed sweaters and binoculars, and headed for the waterfront with other guests who were drifting toward the boat dock. Two French guys and a couple from South Africa had staked out the deck chairs. An elderly man and woman sat on a swing hanging precariously from beneath a thatch-roofed sunshade. We stood on the concrete jetty huddling against the chill. Waves rippled into the jetty and seagulls swooped into them like kamikazes. The sky turned pink, then purple. Mary Beth's friend arrived with his telescope. Mary Beth wandered onto the scene. Lazlo had disappeared.

Just before pastel hues faded into darkness, Hale-Bopp appeared. Its hazy glow looked like a star covered by thin cotton, a tail trailing at the end. It was amazing through binoculars, which we shared because Mary Beth's friend never invited anyone to look through his telescope. Then everyone talked about where they were from and what they had seen in Florida. Afterwards we dispersed into the night.

After dinner, when we lay in the too-soft bed with the faded sheets, my husband whispered, “This place gives me the creeps.”

The next morning when we drove out Lazlo was talking to some people. He waved. We didn't see Mary Beth.

Driving north, we passed the Caribbean Club. It looked like any other shack by the road. I hardly noticed the sign for the African Queen. The Sheraton stood, imperious, like any other over-priced hotel. The malls along U.S. 1 could have been on any strip in America. There was nothing distinctive about Key Largo.

Except maybe Bogie and Bacall, or Lazlo and Mary Beth.


Elayne Clift, a Vermont Humanities Scholar, is a writer, journalist, and adjunct professor. Her latest book is Achan: A Year of Teaching in Thailand (Bangkok Books, 2007). She is currently at work on her first novel, "Hester’s Daughters," a contemporary, feminist retelling of The Scarlet Letter. She lives in Saxtons River, Vermont.