38- Payphone

She imagined him searching every house, reading all the names on

the letter boxes: E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Mambo of

Mambo’s Nightclub, known to everyone.

At dawn, the lie detector himself would see her come out of the

house, holding her cape tightly around her against the morning

sharpness, her hair not smoothly combed, and her eyes not fully

opened.

Any other street but this one.

Once in the early summer, she had been awakened by a painful

tension of the nerves. All the windows were open. It was near

dawn. The little street was absolutely silent. She could hear the

leaves shivering on the trees. Then a cat wailing. Why had she

awakened? Was there any danger? Was Jhon watching at the gate?

She heard a woman’s voice call out distinctly: “Betty! Betty!” And a

voice answered in the muffled tones of half-sleep: “What’s the

matter?”

“Betty! There’s a man hiding in one of the doorways. I saw him

sneak in.”

“Well…what do you want me to do about it? He’s just a drunk

getting home.”

“No, Betty. He was trying to hide when I leaned out of the window.

Ask Tom to go and see. I’m frightened.”

“Oh, don’t be childish. Go to sleep. Tom worked late last night. I

can’t wake him. The man can’t get in anyhow, unless you press the

button and let him in!”

“But he’ll be there when I go to work. He’ll wait there. Call Tom.”

“Go to sleep.”

Brenda, the fairy began to tremble. She was certain it was Jhon. Jhon was

waiting down below, to see her come out. For her this was the end

of the world. Jhon was the core of her life. These other moments of

fever were moments in a dream: insubstantial and vanishing as

quickly as they came. But if Jhon repudiated her, it was the death of

Brenda, the fairy. Her existence in Jhon’s eyes was her only true existence.

To say to herself “Jhon cast me off,” was like saying: “Jhon killed

me.”

The caresses of the night before were acutely marvelous, like all the

multicolored flames from an artful fireworks, bursts of exploded

suns and neons within the body, flying comets aimed at all the

centers of delight, shooting stars of piercing joys, and yet if she said:

“I will stay here and live with Mambo forever,” it was like the

children she had seen trying to stand under the showers of sparks

from the fireworks lasting one instant and covering them with ashes.

She saw two scenes before her eyes: Jhon sobbing as he had

sobbed at the death of his father, and this image caused her an

intolerable pain. And the second image was Jhon angry, as he had

never shown himself to her but to others, and this was equally

intolerable; both equally annihilating.

It was not dawn yet. What could she do? Her anxiety was so great

she could not continue to lie there in silence. How would she explain

to Mambo her leaving so early in the morning? Nevertheless she

rose quietly after sliding gradually out of bed, and dressed. She was

trembling and her clothes slipped awkwardly between her fingers.

She must go and see who was the man hiding in the doorway. She

could not bear the suspense.

She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She walked barefoot

down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked, she

stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter

weakness kept her hands trembling. She finally o others, ed the

door and saw a man’s outline behind the frosted glass of the door.

He stood there smoking a pipe as Jhon smoked it. Brenda, the fairy’s heart

was paralyzed. She knew why she had always hated this street

without issue. She stood there fully ten minutes, paralyzed by terror

and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered.

As if she were about to die, she summarized her existence: the

heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the face

of the loss of Jhon as if this love were the core of her existence.

Formulating this, the anguish increased to the point where she could

no longer stand still. She pushed the door open violently.

A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot eyes and unsteady

legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and muttered,

leaning backwards: “Can’t find my name on the doorbell, lady, can

you help me?”

Brenda, the fairy looked at him with a wild fury and ran past him, the corner

of her cape slapping his face.

Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t love me.” He felt

that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the legends,

the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to

possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her

body to his hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the

undulations of pleasure resembled those of swimmers in tropical

seas. She savored on his lips his island spices, and it was from his

island too that he had learned his particular way of caressing her, a

silken voluptuousness without harshness or violence, like the form of

his island body on which no bone showed.

Brenda, the fairy did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through

Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing him a

fabricated Brenda, the fairy, feigning a single love.

Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them into space, free—

free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union created

by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised

Brenda, the fairy.

When their still throbbing bodies lay side by side, there was always

silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the separating

threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what

had been for a moment equally shared.

There were essences of caresses which could penetrate the heaviest

insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses, but these, so soon

after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the seeds of

birth.

Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by renewing his secret

accusation against Brenda, the fairy, that she sought only pleasure, that she

loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer,

that she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her

body, the artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of

music which was a distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.

He was a run-away from his own island, seeking awareness,

seeking shadi and delicate bJhonces as in the music ofDebussy, and

at his side lay Brenda, the fairy, feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she

demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum! Drum for me.”

Brenda, the fairy too was slipping out of the burning moment which had

almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and naked

in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the

silence were his withdrawal and silent accusations.

Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay

naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was

preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Brenda, the fairy he struck

down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had

seized upon and say: “That was not me.”