The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

Goss slithered out of the hotel bed, careful not to wake the woman beside him. This was not easy: she was the lightest sleeper he’d ever slept with, if that particular night was any evidence. He hadn’t been able to shift a millimeter without getting an interogative grunt from her; his escape from the bed had taken what seemed like hours of excruciating muscle control. He slipped into the bathroom. It was suppertime in Minneapolis, he calculated. He sat on the toilet, seat down, lights off, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. But he was smiling.

She sat up in bed: he could hear the creak of hotel box spring and the rustle of chemically-treated bedclothing. ‘Jimmy?’ she said. Not his name. And she pronounced it weirdly, anyway. Yeemy?

Go in there, he ordered himself, and get your clothes. And don’t you say a fucking word.

‘Jimmy?’

Goss stood up, after forming a mental diagram of the location of his clothing, heaped on the chair nearest the television, and he exited the bathroom, ignoring her frighteningly motionless outline, staring straight at the black corner where his pants were waiting to be rescued. Her silhouette registered on his peripheral vision like a shape in a sinister dreamscape. He groped and found his briefs and slipped them on, then his socks, his pants. He got on all fours and patted the floor for his cap and found it. His scarf. His pullover, he recalled, was flung with open arms across the half of the bed they hadn’t used and he remembered kicking his shoes off right inside the door, bouncing them against the wall near the bathroom.

‘Jimmy,’ she sang, softly, sounding very sad.

He shod himself, hopping once on each foot, and got both trembling hands on the door knob and pulled, squinting against the light. He backed out the room with averted eyes, careful not to look as the wedge of illumination closed on her old face as he eased the door shut. He blew out a long breath and turned towards the red AUSGANG sign at the end of the hall before remembering that his jacket, containing not only a copy of Levy’s keys but also all of his money and his passport and the sacred lock of hair, was still hanging in the hotel room closet.

He rapped gently on the door. He waited and rapped again and he tried and failed to adopt a light-hearted tone.

‘Mom?’

Two days before, Goss had been on a couch beside Levy in a café on Königen Strasse called The Supreme Bean. They both liked the music, and one of the waitresses was approachably pretty, so he was often there with Levy after ‘work.’ There were usually one or two dogs in the café, a detail Goss couldn’t get over, and hot coffee was served in water glasses, a technology he had yet to adapt to, but he was comforted by familiar details such as lonely males with powerbooks, lit like young Nosferatus by their desktops. As Tears go by, the ballad second only to the majestic Angie in the Richards/Jagger songbook, was the one playing when it happened.

Goss had never written a song, nor fucked a girl worth writing a song about, but he could remember a time in his life when both activities had seemed like eventual givens. He had almost fucked Tina Yee, and had almost written a song about almost doing it, twenty years ago. It was Levy who had pointed out that every woman whom Goss had ever fucked (not counting his first, a cousin) had been the ex-best friend of the girlfriend previous, proving that Goss was as lazy as lightning when it came to where he struck.

It is the evening of the day…

Goss was clandestinely mouthing the lyrics while Levy talked. He was anticipating with relish the last stanza, containing as it did one of the great couplets in English verse: doing things I used to do, they think are new. Levy, meanwhile, who knew so much about everything that he knew exactly how much of everything that he didn’t know, as he often quipped, was yammering away. Pompeiian snowflakes were animating the cafe window and padding the city, performing a miraculous makeover on the district in which the café was situated.

Something told Goss to look up.

An oldish woman, furred and painted, very tall or on preposterous heels, was pushing through the beaded curtain of the snowfall. Her epic grimace. Her coin-colored bob. Three quarters of a second was all it took. Levy, with his back to her, was still monologing, but Goss’s heart flinched as the beautiful old woman moved across the picture window of the Supreme Bean like a queen puppet traversing a stage. The knowledge, the recognition, was so basic that it was barely conscious. His body knew before his mind could comment. Levy hunched forward in his chair, prepared to deliver the Levy-affirming punchline to his anecdote, banging Goss’s knee for pre-emphasis, when Goss suddenly tugged at and then yanked half of his army surplus jacket from under Levy’s ass.  He held up a finger and said ‘Excuse, please, one second,’ and bolted.

Goss thought about running back for his scarf and gloves but didn’t want to risk losing the woman he was chasing up a shopper-choked sidestreet. She was a long-legged fast walker, like Goss.  She was roughly a block ahead.

She was walking so fast, with a spine so straight and her open coat flying, that Goss wasn’t sure briefly if she didn’t look a bit crazy, haughty and busy in the way of the insanely alone. She was, or had been, he had been told, a performer, if this was her. Goss was 36.That would make her 55. Her bob was luminous in the creamy gloom of the highstreet. In his mind’s eye, Goss, huffingly jogging after the old girl, was an alarming figure…a thug who’d been hired by a jilted plutocrat to ruin her looks or something. But no one else seemed to notice.

In the back yard of the house at 25th and Colfax, one dog-breathed Minneapolis summer during which Tie a Yellow Ribbon had been a hit, a teenage Goss was on his knobby knees, digging a hole behind the oak with a bent spatula. It was a Saturday morning, a lawnmower morning, resounding with the sci fi sound effect of a planet-wide hive and the neighborhood was awash in the green perfume of eau de lawn while Dad added to the ambient roar with his own nasal motor while sleeping a stiff one off. When was the last time anyone mowed this lawn, thought Goss, as he worried a rooty wound in the earth at the mouth of the tree. This was a household of three males sharing the surname Goss, and yet Goss, the youngest son, was the one everyone called Goss. He was back there, in the back yard, behind the oak, intending to bury a picture of Tina Yee.

‘I guess it’s not too right to be doing this over the phone,’ she’d lisped, early that morning. ‘But I gotta be over at Lake Harrriet by noon with the concert and all, huh? So I guess you gotta pretty good idea what it is I called to tell you, huh?’

You may lose that pale recollection, that fading sense-print, of The First Kiss, but you never forget the first ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore,’ because it’s recurrent, it returns in times of great stress like a retrovirus, and the first occurrence feels the same as the Nth. Despite the traditional disclaimer, it is you, you’re the one, the failure, the disappointment, the faded value. The seed, on the deepest level, unworthy of egg. Goss could always tell when an outbreak of I Don’t Love You Anymore was coming. A tight scalp and an upset stomach usually preceded it. They never look better than on the day they dump you. If there is an equation equating the effort a female puts into her physical appearance with the seriousness with which she guards her egg, Goss suspected that his numerical value in the calculation was hovering near some crucial cut-off point.

Tina was face-up, in cap and gown, smiling, beside the hole. About a foot down, down in the nugatory cakemix of middle class earth, his spatula scraped the corner of a cigar box. Hello. Just a few years earlier, finding a box by accident while digging a hole in the backyard would have been the fulfillment of such a cardinal boyhood fantasy that it would have probably given the pubescent Goss a fatal orgasm.

He dug it out with his bare hands. He grunted when he levered it up and out and knocked its cold moist jacket of dirt off. It was an old wooden panetellas box with a clasp and hinges, a little coffin for a photograph of a disturbingly attractive woman. Also in the box was a long lock of ice-blond hair. Goss just blinked at the photograph, no recognition, no switches were tripped, but the lock of hair was eerily-if-inaccurately familiar, like flying had been, the first time he’d ever been on an airplane.

The evening of that day, while Goss was out with his big brother and his big brother’s so-called friends, mourning Yee, dousing the burning witch of his heart with tepid beer at a place near the West Bank called Moose’s, the photograph he’d found in the cigar box that morning disappeared from his bedroom, from the top right drawer, behind the magic mushrooms, never to be seen again, as discreetly as though it had evaporated. He could appreciate, over breakfast the next morning, the value in not mentioning this miracle. Also glad that he still had the ice-blond lock of hair in his pocket. He fought the urge to place it, without comment, on the breakfast table.

Joe senior had been a band-leader, a sax player. He’d even toured Europe. His sister, Aunt Pennie, had told the brothers all about it. ‘Your father was once considered the white Charlie Parker…in Germany.’ But there hadn’t been a horn in the house since shortly after the year Goss was born. The saxophone, with its fetal curves, was a dead sibling you never mentioned. It had become Goss’s stillborn twin, like the one that haunted the dim but intense imagination of Elvis.

Elvis was how Goss and Levy had met, in line to see a Beatles marathon (the rapturous A Hard Day’s Night, the wonderfully of-its-era Help, ‘the tragically under-appreciated’ Magical Mystery Tour, the relatively Beatle-free Yellow Submarine, and the elegiac Let it Be) at the Uptown Theatre, a month before Elvis’s self-satirizing death on a toilet. Levy was short but ramrod erect among a slouching jumble of sideburned lotus eaters near the front of the ticket line, turning suddenly to confront Goss about his t-shirt.

‘You’re wearing an Elvis t-shirt to a Beatles film festival?’ Levy laughed. ‘Man, if we weren’t all hippies, we’d have to kick your lanky ass!’

What you do with your hands when you’re not doing anything with them says a lot about you, thought Goss: this loudmouth has his arms folded over his chest like a drill instructor. Goss’s thumbs were hooked in the front pockets of his dungarees. He hankered after girls who struck limp-wristed postures like Cher (or Robert Plant, to be honest), a pose so feminine that it seemed to have vanished entirely from the increasingly macho planet Earth by the time Goss was thirty, a loss that inspired vague pangs.

‘Do you grok what I’m saying, Elvis?’ Levy’s posse laughed the stingy hiccupping smoke-conserving laughter of the gaggle of pot heads they were. ‘Capisch?’

Twenty years later, Levy was still Goss’s friend, and friendship-deformingly rich. He had a company called The Bombardier Beetle and split his time between Minneapolis, Vancouver and Berlin.

Back in the spare room, listening to Levy’s German girlfriend do something dramatic with Levy on the other side of the large flat, Goss found it impossible to sleep. But when they were finally finished, the flat was so quiet that the noise of his own breathing kept him awake, too. He slipped into his briefs and out of his unfamiliar bed, down the hall into the pulsingly blue-lit living room, where he found Levy’s post-coital girlfriend watching the final few minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in German, but with the sound off.

Goss was prepared for what he found because Levy had carefully prepared him: Liesl liked to go naked around the flat. It had something to do with good health, or self-expression, or equal rights. She reflected the light of the wide-screen television, naked as an Equatorial baby and unremarkably attractive. Nice big hands, though, Goss noticed. Her breasts were like a goatee’d lunatic’s unblinking stare. Like a giant surrealist bust of Lenin transfixed by It’s a Wonderful Life.

‘Hallo, man,’ she said. ‘…this flick is so corny.’

Goss squeezed her shoulder. ‘Corny? Are you kidding? It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm.’

She laughed as Goss settled on the couch beside her. She lowered her voice and said ‘Levy is completely asleep. He’s sleeping like a baby. It’s always like that after…’ She smiled at the Tv. ‘I put him to sleep. Like a baby.’ She licked her lips. She stared sidelong at Goss and Goss cleared his throat but said nothing. He scratched his head. He was breathing in tiny gulps to avoid whiffing evidence of Levy’s recent sex act. Jimmy Stewart was clutching Donna Reed with all of his might, sending a pang through Goss that made him want to jump out of his skin. Liesl hugged her knees and said, a tad loudly, ‘You know what I hate?’

‘What?’ asked Goss, who assumed he was about to be treated to a diatribe against American kitsch as embodied by Jimmy Stewart.

‘I hate not being pretty enough to compromise anyone’s integrity.’

‘I’ve heard disturbing reports,’ said Levy, softly, the next morning, pacing the new carpet in his furnitureless storefront, ‘…that some of you, in violation of my clear policy on this matter, are smoking while distributing promotional materials to the public.’ Levy’s muscular arms were folded over his growing chest because becoming rich had inspired him to start working out. ‘Smoking on the job is not just simply verboten. It’s also un-lady-like and perfectly disgusting.’

A steady stream of grimacing shoppers, some stopping briefly to use the window as a mirror, criss-crossed the sidewalk in front of the shop. ‘Trust me on this; The Public does not need to see a Santa’s Helper with a Marlboro hanging on her lips!’

Levy, who had specific intelligence on the matter, glared at Nikola B., the fleshily-attractive brunette with blonde streaks he had hired on the spot without any references. Nikola had a china doll face. Everyone else…Goss, and five other employees (many of whom didn’t quite get the nuanced English of Levy’s sermon)…looked on as Nikola then gathered her purse and coat from a pile in the corner and left without saying a word, slamming the front door so hard that Goss was afraid the building would collapse. Goss snuck an appreciative peek at Levy, thinking: You dog.

‘That solves that problem,’ said Levy, tucking his Bombardier Beetle t-shirt into his pants with decisive energy. ‘Everyone else gets a raise of fifty cents an hour.’ There were hats, t-shirts, coasters, tote bags and two company cars bearing the Bombardier Beetle logo, a beetle formed from back-to-back Bs with a thunderbolt exploding out of its graphic ass.

‘Why can’t I be like Levy?’ Goss asked himself, out loud, hours later, making his way to the apartment building, not far from Levy’s shop, which he believed was harbouring his long-lost mother. He had followed the woman that far. But did he really believe this? Or was it a sort of meta-belief… a belief that this belief was possible to believe? What seemed shakiest about this latest in a long line in improvised quests was the lack of gravity in his response to the situation. Where was the bloody roil of emotions he was supposed to be feeling at the prospect of seeing his long-lost mother after thirty five years of abandonment?

He only knew for a fact that his mother had been from Berlin… had followed Joe Goss to The States and bore him there two children and very soon after left. Presumably back to Berlin. She could be there now… a mile, two blocks, a neighborhood away. Yes, she could very well be the woman he saw walk by the café window last night. He would know his own mother, wouldn’t he? Mammals have that going for them, at least. Don’t they?

Last night’s spectacular snow was already melting under the surprisingly fierce efforts of a little white custodial sun. The shoppers Goss squeezed by were unreadable, lugging mandatory purchases and avoiding eye contact.

Goss had asked Levy: what’s with the lack of eye contact in this country? Why do Germans try so hard to avoid eye contact? And Levy had answered by giving aYiddish-inflected shrug and winking. Goss was thinking about this, six blocks away from The Bombardier Beetle, when he slowed and then stopped. He stuck his hands in his pocket and cleared his throat. His heart was racing.

‘Hey, Nicole,’ he said. She was crying. Not sobbing; her face was relatively expressionless, but her cheeks were bright red, and tear tracks decorated them with silver streaks like Christmas wrapping. ‘Nikola,’ she corrected him. He looked away from her, up the street towards the shop, frowning at it. He wanted to say: I’ve been searching for all of my life for the mother who abandoned me as an infant, and I’ve finally tracked her down to an apartment building here on Schloss Strasse…will you come there with me now as I see her again for the first time in thirty years? But instead he said: ‘I’m sorry about what happened this morning.’

‘Why?’

He gathered the collar of his jacket around his neck. ‘Because…I don’t know. I thought you were a good worker.’

She began laughing. Encouraged, Goss said, playfully, ‘What?’

‘I thought Levy is so seductive to the women only because he is an American,’ she said, digging in her purse for a taschentuch; a kleenex; ‘But I see now that it is because he is a Jew.’ She blew her nose. ‘Talking to a female is hard for you, isn’t it?’ She shocked Goss by tossing the used tissue on the sidewalk. ‘You will probably be remembering this conversation for the rest of your life. Simply by sleeping with you in order to have my revenge on Levy I can make your wildest dreams a reality, isn’t it true?’ She gestured at a short balding red-haired scowler pushing impatiently between them on his way up the street. ‘Whereas to him, fucking me would mean less than nothing.’ She studied Goss. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Digging in her purse again, she produced a package of Marlboros and rattled it perfunctorily at him, but he shook his head. She lit one and took two long drags, staring through a curtain of smoke.

‘So?’ she said, finally.

Her place was a very long bus ride away, and early in the route the bus took them right by the building that Goss believed it was possible to believe harboured his long-lost mother, so he made a mental note about which stop was next for the return trip. As the bus rounded the building’s corner he suppressed the urge, again, to proclaim, ‘I have good reason to believe that my mother, who I haven’t seen since I was an infant, is dwelling in that building.’ He only allowed himself to smile and shake his head with rueful awe as they rounded the corner, but she missed the cue. Her thick hair was in a loose knot, held in place with a pencil, and she untied the knot and shook out and re-tied it twice during the arduously speechless trip.

When they got off the bus, at its Endstation, it was in a neighborhood of fenced brown snow-patched yards and their dead-vine-covered houses of stone. Goss felt as though he’d flown to another city. They walked through a rustic maze of narrow lanes under the naive commentary of suburban birdsong, until Nikola lifted the latch on a splintery crooked wooden gate, and Goss followed her in.

The first thing he noticed was that the front door was unlocked. In Minneapolis they’d all be long-dead by now. The second thing he noticed was that she removed her shoes at the door, so he followed suit, thankful that he was quite by accident wearing two good matching socks, and they shuffled across the darkly gleaming hardwood floor of the gloomy living room.

In the kitchen they found Nikola’s mother busy at the sink with her back to them; she either hadn’t heard them enter the house or chose not to react. Nikola opened the refrigerator (the first adult-sized refrigerator Goss had seen in Germany) and removed a large black ceramic bowl of green grapes and pantomimed that Goss should take the bowl and follow her out of the kitchen. The bowl was heavy and warm; the mother had just then put it in the refrigerator.

Nikola’s room was up a staircase so brief it was ridiculous, down a hallway, last right before a circular hall window overlooking a stone-ringed pond through the branches of a tree in a posture of agony. Goss managed a peek into two rooms along the way to Nikola’s bedroom, and was surprised to see that each room he peeked into contained a person; the first was a teenage boy, the second a man; each wearing a churchgoing suit and tie.

In Nikola’s little room, Goss put the bowl of grapes down on a dresser and closed her door and removed his jacket and tried to drape it from her door knob, which wasn’t a knob but a handle like in a submarine. His jacket shrugged off into a puddle on the floor and Nikola removed her own coat and purse and piled them on top of it. She positioned an old wooden folding chair beside her bed and reclined on the bed, smoothing her dress, her feet touching. Then, as though to a blown whistle only she could hear, she sat straight up and pulled the dress off over her head. She unsnapped her bra and reclined. She had large, gravity-oppressed breasts…the breasts of a beached sea creature. Goss was touched at how helpless they looked on land. Her vagina seemed very simple, like a fold in a table cloth. She reached and patted the seat of the folding chair and Goss sat down with great care, afraid the creaking thing would split and collapse.

‘No,’ she said, ‘bring the grapes here first, and feed them to me.’

Goss hesitated before moving. He was concentrating; had the look of a man attempting to make something happen in the physical world with the power of his mind alone. Bend a spoon or something. ‘Get the grapes,’ she repeated.

Goss cleared his throat. ‘No.’

Nikola flipped over, on to her stomach, facing away from him, hugging her pillow. Her long hair was peuter pouring from her head. Under the cool spread of her ass, Goss could see a silver strip of moisture receding through fleecy shadows. Had she heard what he said? He wasn’t sure until she responded in the distant unhurried voice of a working woman courting sleep, sighing into her pillow. ‘Then leave.’

‘Get out,’ she reiterated, after a minute.

He was half way down the hall when he remembered his jacket and had to go back and knock in order to have her unlock her bedroom door and open it only as far as was necessary in order to hand it to him. When he left the house, the sky was a clear bleached blue; the blue of something collectibly old and fragile, and he was surprised at how calm he felt.

It was possible that Joe Goss, sideburned and swaggery back then, had been in this very neighborhood, had trod these very cobblestoned lanes. Maybe Goss’s mother, a teenager not so much younger than Nikola at the time she’d met Goss’s father, was from this part of town, had grown up in this area and had often used the bus that Goss had ridden pointlessly out there. Goss, who had been born in the small town of Minneapolis, was used to the kind of small-town coincidences that people from Chicago or Tokyo considered mindfucks of cosmic import. He was thinking that very thing when he looked up and saw Levy walking towards him, talking to himself with a self-satisfied smirk.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ asked Levy, stopping in his tracks, genuinely surprised.

After Goss deadpanned to Levy that he’d taken the wrong bus to the end of the line and was now good and lost, Levy led Goss back to his car. ‘I have a little business to take care of; won’t be long. Drive you back home when I’m done.’ He pointed. ‘Coupla Playboys on the backseat if you want. Okay? Twenty minutes. Okay?’

But it took so long for Levy to finish his business and return to Goss that Goss ended up climbing out of Levy’s car as night fell. It had been a profitable hour alone, though. He told himself that he’d learned a lot about himself, as well as about the dreams and aspirations of the post-modern, late-capitalist Bunny: they still claimed to prefer men who could make them laugh. ‘Dipshit,’ he said, with affectionate self-disgust, as he climbed out of Levy’s car. He put his cap on and zipped up his jacket and knotted his scarf and picked a random direction to walk in.

Loping along above the low seare hedge of one chalk-white cottage after another, Goss turned right, abruptly, when he spotted what looked like a major thoroughfare at the end of a darkening lane, a major thoroughfare behind which the sun was crashing, torching the brittle lung of the forest as it ground to a halt in the earth. Where the lane emptied into the thoroughfare, Goss found a bus stop bench in a shelter across the wet black shadow of the road. Seated on the bench was an older but nice-enough looking woman who smiled as he settled on the bench beside her. She waited until he was completely still and said, with an old woman’s precision, ‘You are an American.’

‘Correct,’ said Goss. ‘How could you tell?’

‘You weren’t afraid to look at me.’

Goss laughed. ‘Who would be afraid to look at you?’ He reached for her hand and looked her right in the eye and said, defiantly, ‘Jimmy.’

To his horror and delight, she blushed when she took his hand, confirming what he suspected about his own intentions. She hesitated so long before announcing her name in return that he knew it was a lie, and he knew what the lie meant, and it encouraged him. ‘Margarethe.’ She was tall and slender and profited from what looked like a fairly expensive dye job. Her hair, up in a thick bun, shone like burnished gold in the last light of the day. ‘Where are you going, Jimmy?’ she asked him. ‘Would you like a ride?’

He pulled his cap off. ‘You have a car?’ She was the right age. It was possible that she’d lived in America, too.

‘Yes, I have a car.’

He closed one eye. ‘Why are you waiting for the bus if you have a car?’

She smiled as though Goss’s reasoning was quintessentially American. ‘For one person, it is not worth it. For two, yes. Now we are two.’ She stood and smoothed the dress under her open jacket. ‘Come.’