The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

 

Ginger Green stuck his thumb in the boiling water and counted to three, making sheepish contact with himself in the bathroom mirror by accident as he ran cold water over the blister afterwards. Almost enough to inspire him to remove the mirror, but how would he shave, then? People would start calling him Red Beard. He climbed into the fireworks-colored Porsche that the most empty-headed song in his catalogue had paid for and tried to stay off the streets that the hookers patrolled.

Long ago, before Europop or Miriam or his ex-wife or even Europe itself and all those ups and downs…back into the clearer sounds and warmer colors of another age there had been Father Pat, the ‘Red Jebbie’, with his monkish beard the color of strawberry KoolAid; the dayglo beard and the turtleneck sweaters and Jesus sandals slapping the concourse on hot mornings.

One day they were long-legging it across campus with Ginger scuttling hard to keep up. Pat would’ve called Miriam a succubus, thinks Ginger now. If he used that word for the homely girl who worked in the cafeteria he’d definitely have used it for Miriam, Miriam who was practically the clinical definition of the word and who had recently expanded operations to the province of Ginger’s dreams, though it had been eleven years since all that.

“I’ve got your number, Green,” Pat said, jovially. Father Pat was one of two foreigners on campus, the other being Gupta the math instructor. “You stopped believing in God approximately ten minutes after learning there was no such thing as Santa Claus, didn’t you? Worked it out for yourself and quite proud, no mistaking it. Why are you here with us, then? Off the record, of course. To what end?”

“My parents sent me, sir.”

“You’ll suffer for that honesty one day,” answered Pat, though it was clear he was pleased. “Gifted with all the requisite qualities but one: belief itself. Quite the irony, wouldn’t you say?”

“If you say so sir.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret when you’re old enough, Green,” said the priest, sneering affectionately at the boy whilst holding the cafeteria door for him. “Ring me up once you’ve started shaving and I’ll let you in on it. In you go. Promise?”

“Promise, sir.”

Probably dead by now, thought Ginger, sucking the tip of his thumb while steering. Ginger, after all these years, still wonders what Pat’s secret might’ve been, since he clearly hadn’t been Queer, unlike others among the faculty of that well-respected shaper of young men. If he’d been Queer there’d been ample opportunity to act. Ginger sucked the penitent blister. Der Weg ist das Ziel. It was Father Pat’s German that Ginger was regurgitating all these years later as a businessman in Berlin but it was Father Pat’s delicate sneer he felt his face deform into while doing things like doing his best to forget about Miriam. As though by stuffing his stained sheets into the washing machine or sticking his thumb into a pot of boiling water he’d exorcize her. The thought that she was still out there somewhere amazed him, even as the dream he’d had that afternoon during his middle-aged nap still tinted his thoughts with blood.

What Pat had failed to perceive was Ginger’s thing for money. What young Ginger had seen all too clearly was Father Patrick’s poverty. Ginger saw the BP station at Bismarckstrasse and shuddered, and within minutes he was parking in front of the sushi bar on Kant Strasse called Kuchi. The owners of Kuchi were Americanized badboys who knew very well what a ‘kootchie’ was and that Immanuel Kant rhymes with ‘bunt’ but Ginger could only hope they had not as yet made Miriam’s acquaintance. He took a deep breath through his high-bridged nose and sighed.

She looked Celtic, Irish, not genealogically German at all. She could’ve been of Patrick’s tribe, as people often mistook the young Ginger to be, with his oxidized crewcut. She was pale as a coma and twenty seven or twenty eight years old when Ginger first met her…just a few years off his own age. It all started with a phone call that jarred him swearing out of an intimate act with himself: the mood music; the candle; his ex-wife on all fours in contrition.

“Yes?”

“I have heard that you are the man who is looking for a singer?”

“Excuse me?”

“What you are needing is a girl who would like to sing?”

For some reason he turned off the lights and crossed to the big window at the front of his flat. The flat had been a storefront, originally. They are a common architectural feature in Berlin…little shops built in the fronts of the massive old flat blocks. He peered through the blinds of the floor-to-ceiling window onto the empty street and at the playground across it: the jungle-gym, the sandpit, the see-saw and the swings. The swings rocked by the cold hand of the wind, out of synch, back and forth, forth and back, in the morbid electric glare of the streetlight.

“Who gave you my number?”

No response.

“I’m sorry, I’m not looking…for a singer right now.”

The line went dead. He half-expected to turn around in his empty flat and see the naked phantom of his ex-wife stomping out of the half-dark behind him. That or a new ghost. What an erotically pitiful voice.

The next morning came fierce cold sunlight and Ginger was crossing a bridge over the canal near Potsdamer Platz which was nothing but the huge muddy crater of the navel of the geographic center of Berlin. Impossible to imagine that this vast mess of trucks and pipes and cranes and girders would ever be anything but a deafening playground for hardhats to splash around in shrieking jovial obscenities. A playground for men. The phone in his pocket rang and he fetched it out and looked at the display and stopped walking and just blinked at it as though seeing an image of pre-Christian revelation emblazoned on the palm of his hand: NUMBER UNKNOWN. A motorcycle roared by, engine gunning, making him jump.  

“Yes?”

Her breaths were shallow and (somehow he could tell this) sweet. “You are knowing a man who is needing a young girl who can sing?”

“Who is this?”

There was a long pause that made Ginger afraid she’d hang up again so he said, “Okay, it’s possible. Maybe I need a singer. It depends on how well she can…you know…do you have a demo or something? Are you gigging with a band I can catch you in?”

“No.”

Silence.

“Even a very rough recording…a cassette…”

“No.”

Another long pause and then, “We can meet us and I will sing for you?”

“Okay…sure. Okay. Let’s meet…let’s meet…at U-Bahnhof Wittenbergplatz, tomorrow, kurz nach fünfzehn uhr. In front of the tabak kiosk. But how will I recognize you?”

“I must recognize you,” she said, in her tremulous voice, and hung up.

At 3pm the next day, standing at a spot in a corner of the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station where he could observe the designated meeting place without himself being observed, Ginger was full of exhilarated dread, like a vintage astronaut in a leather helmet, squinting at the windsock through the porthole. He had a very good idea of what this girl would look like, if not in particularities then in magnitude, because of the way she’d handled him on the phone yesterday and the day before. Just being able to hang up like that…twice, now, very coolly…without even bothering to say goodbye. Only a certain brand of girl (if not strikingly beautiful then in possession of enormous sexual self-confidence) is capable of that. And of course those urgent calls of hers were ostensibly about music but urgent calls about music are really always about what music is about, which is sex. The offer or the request.

Ginger had been separated from his ex-wife for exactly a year and ten minutes when he saw, waiting in front of the tabak kiosk in the middle of the station, at five minutes after 3pm, a nervy slender girl with shoulder-length blonde hair in a soft pink running suit, looking surprisingly (embarrassingly) like a school girl, pacing and chewing gum with manic fervor in an unwittingly wicked satire of his own hysteria. Not as beautiful as he expected but much younger. If this were the puritanical States where the age of consent is eighteen, Ginger would smell a trap. He thought: How am I going to do this? She even appeared to be clutching a shield of school books to her chest. Ginger took a step towards her when he felt a tapping on his shoulder, fully expecting to see when he turned around a phalanx of gun-drawn American cops shouting halt!

“You are Ginger?” Ginger who attended a Jesuit boarding school for intellectually gifted boys who might otherwise be juvenile delinquents. Yes.

She smiled weakly and reached to shake his hand. She looked as frail and gauzy as an immigrant’s ghost, with long cherry-red ringleted hair and a waist he could circumnavigate with one hand, almost. She looked unwell. Her skin was the color of blood smeared thinly over porcelain. Her forehead came no higher than his chest and the crown of her head smelled strongly (but not unpleasantly) of pillowed scalp. Her silk blouse was a size too small for her breasts, which strained like the blind in their cups. Over all that her black denim jacket was buttoned askew, the last buttonhole mated to the next-to-the-last button, calling even more attention to the inadequacy of the clothing to contain her. She thanked him for showing up, speaking so softly that he had to lean down to hear it like a priest collecting a shy confession. 

That first time she came to his place and stood in his living room to sing without preamble, denim jacket unbuttoned, blouse unbuttoned to a strategic point, lacey red brassiere flashing, eyes shut, mouth open…  

…the sound that came out was so pathetic, so hopeless and small and lacking in confidence yet defiantly clinging to life and tenacious with conviction, clinging to the air itself, like some kind of creeping vine…it was just awful. Not comically out of tune but inhumanly tuneless. Ginger can’t remember the song she chose to traduce for him as an audition that day but he remembers thinking that there was something, nevertheless, in there…some spark or sliver or flicker of some kind of talent or human potential worth salvaging or was it merely that he was already obsessed? Was it merely that he desperately wanted to fuck her? But, yes…no…there was something under all that bad singing. Something as moving and awful as the thing crawling under the silk blanket of Billie Holliday’s voice the first time she ever sang Strange Fruit in public…something in this girl was crushed and buried. Almost Biblically so.

He listened to her with as neutral a face as he could possibly manage, hands in his pockets, glancing out the window at the playground. Kids fighting on it. When she finished and looked at him with tremulous expectation he leaned against the wall, hands still in his pockets, and, marshalling a certain technique of encouraging bullshit he’d developed after years in the music business in a country where almost no one could sing he said, “You need a little polish. But it’s very good.”

“A little polish?”

“I like…the sound of your voice but you need…some technical skill. Breath control, etc.”

“Oh.”

“But I…” he looked at his feet and folded his arms. “I can help you. I can…”

“You will?”

“I’ll give you voice lessons. I’d suggest twice a week. I believe in your…talent.”

She crossed the room and put her head on his chest. He knew the move that was required of him in order to establish the nature (the give and take) of their working relationship and she seemed poised to accept it but…he couldn’t for whatever reason bring himself to execute it, despite the fact that those ballooning tits of hers seemed to be crying out to be handled. Like fragrant loaves they rose from the unbuttoned top of her black denim jacket and the silk wrapping of her blouse. But something, either a voice from within or a faint transmission he picked up from her; more of a plea than a command; said: don’t.

“Next Thursday we start your lessons. Every Thursday and every Sunday from three to four. Give me a year. In a year I can make you a singer.” Even as he was saying it he knew how ridiculous it sounded. She’s not even paying me! I don’t even know her! A year!

That Thursday, the day of the first lesson, the temperature had plunged unseasonably and there was a gray blown scurry of snow like shaved twilight on the streets and she came wearing a camel hair coat and a cranberry colored scarf and her runny nose. She stood in the middle of his living room and refused to remove either the coat or the scarf and seemed entirely unaware of the fact that a pale ingot of snot rested on the soft maxilla-protruded incline of the rosy flesh over her lip for the duration. What could Ginger do? Mentioning it could be a fatal embarrassment to her and ruin what little self-confidence she carried so he spent an hour trying not to stare at the snot. And plus it was not cold in his living room and yet she stood there trying a warm-up scale in that coat and with that scarf still knotted around her neck. Ginger asked may I take your coat and she shook her head. Ginger asked if he should turn the heat up and she said no, she was fine. For the longest time he stared at her with a transitional smile, stymied.

“Every time you make a sound in here,” said Ginger, gesturing at the bare walls, “I want you to pretend that you’re singing in front of a packed concert hall. You’re singing in front of three thousand people. Okay? Do you understand what I mean? I mean that you must mean it every single time you open your mouth. Even when you’re simply talking. People who make casual noises aren’t good singers. Don’t make garbage noises that any old monkey could make. Make all your sounds become valuable. Make it so people want to pay you to make your interesting noises. Even if you never go pro I want you to learn to think that way.”

He thought: do I say nothing about the coat and scarf?

“But I feel something must come out but it don’t wants to.”

He paced around her and her eyes followed him to a certain point but he continued beyond that point and found himself behind her. He said, “We need you to get in touch with your pain.” Father Pat always said the twists and turns of a profligate life all occur on a path as straight as a watchmaker’s measure.

“Pain?” she asked. He nodded at her back.

“Yes. Your pain. Whatever…” he took a deep breath. “Whatever is keeping you from singing, holding you back, we can turn that around and it can help you to sing, and it’s all about your pain. Before we can unlock the potential energy of your pain, we have to get in touch with it. We have to know where it is before we can use it.”

Miriam stands very still with her back to him, in a fluffy white angora sweater and tight leather pants the full ensemble effect of which is a bit of a torment. He sits down on his comfortable old leather couch and wants to fall asleep on it…he is exhausted because he isn’t really giving voice lessons he is wrestling with the unknown unnameable. Even when she is long gone, after every lesson, god knows where and doing what, she leaves a few of her demons with him. Demons like invoices.

For every hour Ginger and Miriam spent together on those Thursday and Sunday afternoons their uncategorized feelings seemed to grow. They even established a romantic tradition. The tradition started at the end of the second lesson when Ginger just happened to have a bar of half-eaten chocolate with almonds in it on the kitchen table in its beautiful gold foil and offered it to Miriam when the hour was up. Yes I love chocolate, she said, gratefully, gobbling it like a child, and so every time after that he made sure to have a bar or two ready for her. He caught himself putting too much time and energy into it, in fact: hunting for new treats for her all over the city. He bought a bar from a confectionary on Frederichstrasse, near the Lafayette, half a kilogram, a very expensive joke bar for American tourists: just about the size of carry-on luggage. She turned and smiled at him after the lesson, searching the room with her childish, darting curiousity.

“Do you have something for me?”

He was delighted to produce it from a hiding place behind a big cushion on the leather couch. She squealed like a child and clapped her hands and bit a tiny corner off it and went about the business of chewing like someone who hadn’t eaten in days. Or more like someone for whom the chance of ever eating again had until a moment before seemed remote. Not in great haste but lingeringly, with a heart-breakingly introspective expression, she savored it…which made Ginger’s feelings swell and spill over. At moments like this his heart went out to her, blotting out even the faintest notions of sex. She licked her syruped lips and fetched her purse and re-wrapped the well-made bar neatly like an heirloom or a nest egg and put it away and said, “And so we are finished today?”

“Yup,” he saluted her, “We are finished today.” He clicked his heels and bowed.  

“Good.” She snapped the purse shut. “I must meet my boyfriend outside.”

“Ah. Your boyfriend.”

“He is waiting in his car. Every time we sing, he waits…I told him it is not his role to bother us. Today I promise him we meet his friends. So we go in a stupid club later.” She laughed. “But really, I am so tired! I only want to sleep.”

“Just tell him you can’t go, then.”

She smiled sadly and shook her head: now Ginger was the child. She crossed the room and hugged him a very long time, her heartbeat tapping his gut through the camel hair coat as he looked down at the pale lane of scalp and its fine white tributaries under the unwashed matrix of blood-clot-colored roots and the sweet attendant odor…that lover-odor of pillowed scalp rising to him. He breathed it in for several long cycles of meshed pulse, holding her. Her boyfriend, he thought. Her boyfriend! But Ginger had hidden his crushing disappointment well when she uttered it. Of course she didn’t mention a boyfriend before now. And yet: that lingering hug. That look she gave me when she left. But where does she go when she leaves? He had no idea and no way to reach her. After she was gone he realized she’d left her scarf and he masturbated on it. A webby sneeze of silver on the wool. To punish himself he stood in an ice-cold shower until corpse-numbness came.

What am I looking for when I look in a woman’s face?

Because men are always looking at women’s faces…looking from one face to the next, like they’ve lost something. On the U-Bahn Ginger is looking carefully at each woman or girl as she gets on. He’s standing on the packed train with an arm up, strap-hanging. The train stops and the doors pop open and women, dressed for winter, pour in with their shopping bags; girls pour in with their chattery friends. When he looks at the pretty ones he feels something that he doesn’t feel when he looks at the others, but it’s not a sexual sensation…this is what baffles and intrigues him.

“Senor Verde,” calls Father Patrick, from the door of his office. Wearing that grin he wears about which Ginger has learned to be wary. He’s clutching a rolled up Arte Fact magazine and directs Ginger to have a seat in the leather chair (musty and comfortable as an old giant African hand) in front of his desk, waving the magazine like a traffic baton. He unrolls it under Ginger’s nose and with his gnawed finger pokes a two-page spread…a kind of centerfold…of Fra Angelico’s 15th century The Deposition. A crucified Christ (with a puncture wound resembling a bullet hole) is lowered from his cross by five male figures (two of which are haloed-John the Baptist? Joseph the Beard?) choreographed in an X-like configuration while a vulpine, flame-haired Magdalene prostrates herself to the holy corpse.

“What do you think of this, lad? Be frank.”

“It looks…it looks like she’s sucking his toes, sir.”

Is this my punishment for going into show business instead of becoming a priest?

The next lesson, after the boyfriend revelation, Miriam didn’t sound any better than she had during all the lessons before, but at least she wasn’t wearing her coat or scarf while singing (the scarf Ginger had hand-washed and dried on a radiator and replaced the next day on the very spot she’d left it as though he hadn’t even noticed it in the interim), and she actually laughed a few times when Ginger did his joke conductor imitation to whip some vivacity into her performance…and that was