A Paradise for Fools Page 2

  Both women wore the smocks of the establishment—long-sleeved Dunkin’ Donuts pink, buttoning up the front, hanging halfway down the thigh, emblazoned at the left breast with an open pair of scissors and the shop’s name, Cut - Rate - Cuts. While Kim talked Claire approached to stand back of Fred. Coffee and patchouli. The scent of the young woman striving to break free. She began selecting tools, taking her time, from the shelf beside him, under the mirror that filled the wall.

  Kim went on, “As long as you’re careful, which we are. Arthur says, ‘I care what goes into my body. So keep everything clean, no problem.’ You, I’ll take you over some afternoon, evening, Claire, we get off at the same time, you’re interested, you meet Arthur, you both, like he says, survey the territory. His place, it’s in Central Square.”

  “Cambridge. You told me.”

  “Cambridge, sure. Ten minutes from this end of Harvard Square. You can walk it, or the bus.”

  “What can I do for you? Sorry. We get in the middle of something. Women.” Claire was talking to Fred.

  “Buzz cut. I forget a trim, let it go. It’s been two months. Try to set me back two months.”

  Claire ministered cold mist from a plastic spray bottle.

  Kim, from her lectern, continued talking, looking toward the reflection of Claire, working back of Fred’s seamed and scarred face. Claire’s eyes, if Fred interpreted correctly, took more interest in the reflection of Kim than they did in the square head she was charged with trimming. Why not? Both women were markedly pretty, both vivid and lively this morning. All three in the room struggled to look past Fred. As far as they all were concerned, Fred wasn’t there.

  “And so, I was saying, and that’s what I was saying, I was thinking, but when I get old? The first thing Arthur says is, ‘Don’t get fat. You get fat, it gets fat at the same time. Everything distorts. Then, next thing, you get sick, lose weight, you’re thin again,’ he says. ‘It’s all in folds like a balloon with the air out.’ Where he lives, his apartment, Arthur…”

  “I know Central Square,” Claire said, clipping.

  “Over the G Spot,” Kim said. “Third floor. On Green Street. Lots of cops in the G Spot, most of the time. Coffee break, off duty, whatever. Station’s what, four blocks away? Cops just as soon not go home. At first I thought you don’t want to be doing anything illegal upstairs. But then, what Arthur says, what could be better protection than cops on the street floor drinking beer, coffee, or a hamburger. They do a hamburger you should avoid. Worse is the hot dog, which they had ready for your dining pleasure since last week. The hamburger, at least they are ‘on demand.’ Fry them up frozen while you wait. Fry the hell out of them. Anyhow, some of the customers are cops. You’d be perfect. The right body. Nice skin. Arthur’ll go ape. And he’s still...”

  “Tapered or square?” Claire asked.

  “Tapered,” Fred told her. “I want to look as close to natural as I can.”

  “…learning, so he’s cheap,” Kim said. “He advertises there. The G Spot. Bulletin board next to the bar. Not his address, the telephone number and what he’ll do. You want the Japanese look he’ll do that, Loony Tunes, runes. Whatever you want. I get it almost for free. Old friends. He figures it could be another year, we get done. It keeps…one thing leads to another. The last thing he started, we call it a gremlin, is like an egg with two heads and chicken feet, I love. In the middle of my back. I feel it. Where I can’t reach with the oil. I don’t know how he keeps from going blind, the fine work he does. My idea, first time I went in...I wanted a pirate ship full of the pirates, the flags, the maidens. Parrot screaming. Guns, sabers. Over my whole entire back. Maybe the front. It was all in my mind but I couldn’t see it. That’s why you go to an artist. You think it, they see it. They see it, they make it, you see it. After they make it.

  “Then I saw this, what he had kicking around, like a dirty old wooden painting, and him and I fell in love at the same time. With the idea.”

  Kim kept talking. The electric clipper resounding its buzz off the bones back of Fred’s ears, and reverberating through the skull, drowned out the words. But Kim’s gesture wasn’t hard to miss. She opened the buttons of her smock, did a half turn while lifting the white Tee shirt she wore under it, and exposed, for the sake of the mirror, and her colleague—and their invisible customer, Fred—a square yard of back and side so intricately tattooed with figures—humans, animals, plants, birds, all interwoven—there was hardly room left for the girl.

  “That’s only a start,” Kim said. She was pushing the waistband down over a decorated hip when she recalled, or her sidelong glance caught, Fred’s looming presence not only in the mirror, but in the real world of the shop. Her clothing almost clattered into place again. She continued as if oblivious to the passage of a minor earthquake. “There’s a thousand more things in the plan. Devils and a burning city. It’s not like you can see it clearly, it’s so dark. He’s going to make drawings I can look at, and we’ll talk. Plans. On me, though, it’s not gonna be dark because, Arthur says, and it’s what he calls his credo, at least a third of the final color has to be me. And a round pool where there’s naked women swimming he thinks is perfect for my left butt, I mean hip, and why not keep going? I’m young, he’s young.”

  Claire’s attention focused on the blade of the straight razor she was applying to Fred’s neck and the lower edge of his sideburns.

  “It’s like a garden where you hope you’re never going to wake up in it,” Kim said. “And at the same time you say, ‘Here I am already. As long as I am here, I hope I never have to leave.’ That’s, in about a year, going to be me. The whole entire garden, including hell.”

  Claire’s hot, damp towel addressed the areas she had scraped, before she applied the powdered whisk brush, infusing Fred’s nostrils with the scented equivalent of crawling under the bed. She held a mirror to the back of Fred’s neck and asked him, “Did we get close to natural?”

  Fred nodded, standing to count out bills. “And thanks.” He added a couple more.

  “And for you, Kim.” He stopped at the lectern on his way out, giving her two bucks. “If it’s permitted to recognize the management.”

  Chapter Four

  Fred crossed the river and walked the Boston side, letting the cool glare from the rippling water defy the day’s increasing heat. It was a nice day for lolling in the sun, but the age group that lolls most convincingly had pretty much left town. Unless it was still in bed.

  He couldn’t get that painting out of his head, though he hadn’t seen it. It pressed against the inside of his skull, as possibility.

  The cherry trees had long since given up their blossoms and moved into activities more suitable for mature adults. Each tree cast its puddle of shade, neatly arranged in such a way as not to fall across the bench the Parks Department had placed in its vicinity. Cormorants worked the river, singly or in pairs, and on the Boston side were ducks. The drakes clubbed in their own reserve, letting the mothers with their ducklings parade and forage slightly downriver.

  That river smell of wary fecundity, maybe yesterday’s fecundity. Morning-after fecundity. The water rippled slowly along. The Charles was a small river, speedily growing smaller as the universities—Harvard on the Cambridge side, and Boston University on the other—dwarfed it with greedy high-rises that were echoed, in turn, by hotels put up by the big chains. In due course this sleepy, modest, charming country river would become an urban trickle. It was all a matter of scale.

  No wedding ring on that woman, was there? Molly Riley? Was there? Recently Fred had been trying to look before he became interested, rather than after.

  Molly Riley, the librarian whose voice had already attracted him—she itched even more than the painting did—another possibility: more certain, more complex. She was real.

  What did scale have to do with the woman with green eyes, made greener by the dre
ss she had to know was going to do that for her, or to her? A woman doesn’t do that by accident. But the issue of scale was in his mind, not color.

  Fred found a bench that happened to fall within the green shade of a maple, from which he could keep track of the river and the Cambridge bank.

  Question: was it true that the smell of the surrounding world is different in shade from what it is in sun? That the place from which one smells all the same things influences the smells themselves? The shift from sun to shade—was that similar to the shift in sun? So that as soon as a building was tall enough for its cast shadow to cross to the far bank of the river, the river itself was irrevocably changed, becoming smaller?

  Brave girl that was. At the barber shop. Allowing her body to be so taken over by a single image. When her body was already, you might say, in and of itself, already an image of sufficient complexity, and with the power to compel attention on its own. The insouciance of her exposing twist, whether from arrogance or innocence, had left a haunting image. But it was not, surprisingly, the image of the young girl’s exposed skin but rather—because, given all the marks that had been inked onto it, that skin was far from naked—it was the image itself, the picture, drawn and stained, that stayed with him. He’d seen it before. Or something very like it. Odd birds. Structures of trees that seemed to be half egg. A weird resolution of unnatural clarity that aped surrealism but seemed almost medieval. The girl looked, under her smock, like an ancient fable with worrying religious undertones, more than likely heretical.

  Although she sounded, when she spoke, like a grade-C movie in the early stages of rehearsal.

  Scale. Yes. It was the inked marks on that woman, the receptionist at Cut - Rate - Cuts. They were haunting Fred’s retina and making him pretend to be occupied with a purely abstract musing about scale. Reversed in the glass, truncated by the furtiveness of her exposure, the display had lasted, what? Five seconds?

  Five seconds. Time enough to assess the intentions of the man with the drawn blade; time enough to steer the careening truck, loaded with munitions, into the guardrail; time enough to say the two words that might kill a friendship; time enough to step off a high building, although the falling might take longer and most likely feel a good deal longer. Wouldn’t one notice everything? The flavor of the air? The shocked faces below?

  Scale. The kayak fit the river, with the single oarsman. The kayak almost took the river’s shape, moving upstream. Whereas that pleasure craft, white fiberglass with radio beacons and a cabin and a raised seat from which to fish—because of its size, it seemed to disregard the river, defy it and diminish it, rendering it less than real.

  The woman—Kim?—the receptionist—had mentioned an egg with two heads and chicken’s feet. It was that she’d been trying to show, somewhere up in the middle of her back, but Fred hadn’t spotted this so-called gremlin, partly because he was aware she was only inadvertently showing her tattoos to him. He did not want to contribute to her discomfiture when she realized he was there. Until she noticed the back of his head, she had forgotten that he had the mirror image of her spread before him.

  Scale. No, even before the issue of scale there was another that intruded. A pattern, originally flat, is—surely “violated” would be the wrong word?—when that pattern is transferred to the convexities of the human body. The eagle, flag, anchor, or Mandala in the tattooist’s pattern book, flat in the book, takes on bulk and ripples or bulges, even grows, as its new support moves.

  “Am I calling her a support?” Fred mused aloud. “That’s not going to be appreciated by the women’s movement.” The tattoo didn’t care. It could as easily be embellishing a male support. Irrelevant. Dismiss. There was nobody around but ducks. “Seems mighty crass and cold. Am I an art historian, as Molly Riley accused me of being?” Because the art historians love to talk technique: the support (canvas, paper, plaster, wood) and then the ground (whatever material prepares the support to receive paint—or protects the support from being destroyed by paint)—pigment or paint, then varnish. Oh, and then, whatever the painting seems to be about. Or, like Clay, they start from what they think the painting is about—the story they read as if it is an illustration—and try to work backwards from there.

  Where seven ducklings had been swimming at the grassy edge, there were suddenly six only. Something below had pulled one under. The mother and the six remaining siblings formed a tighter line. The appalling speed, vacancy, deliberation, nourishment in progress, hidden menace—all those things in a brisk act barely puckered the bright surface of the water—the bright support of the water—in less than five seconds.

  That was how Fred saw a good painting. It was like that moment, but made—not permanent, nothing is permanent—made far less transitory.

  “Turtle,” Fred guessed. “Or a gremlin.” How had Kim described her embellishment? In the center of her back, out of her easy reach, and beyond what she had thoughtlessly revealed in the mirror. An egg with two heads, and the feet of a chicken.

  The back of Fred’s neck prickled. The sun glared down. Beneath the surface of the water, something gulped and crawled deeper into the concealing mud. The remaining ducklings snapped at flotsam. The mother, swimming in a nervous circle, looking for a way to comprehend the missing unit, quacked nine times.

  A dragon fly now. No, two—but flying in a tandem cemented by copulation—glistened a jeweled blue close enough to the surface to reflect in the ripples and attract one duckling’s inquisitive attempt at capturing the coupling with its beak. The flying object was too fast, too large, too high.

  You’d have to be a swallow.

  Scale. Suppose yourself the duckling’s size. That would quickly change the world.

  There, that was the issue. A pattern in a pattern book, or the picture painted on the canvas, either could be interpreted as any size at all. Because of the way our eyes are trained from the age of two, we see the thing on the page that we recognize as a duck, and know it for a duck despite the fact that it is flat and only an inch tall. The image on the page can be accepted as potentially any size at all. Draw the giant an inch high, and call it a giant, it becomes alarming. But only on the page, because we quickly learn to disregard the edges of the pages as limits defining scale.

  But ink that same figure into the skin of the woman’s forearm, at one inch high, it becomes forever one inch high because it must be seen in contrast to the size of her elbow or her finger. Call it a giant all you want, the size of the woman, the support, gives that claim the lie. Or does it? Might the image conveyed in the tattoo occasionally prove so compelling as to negate the nature of the support?

  Not long ago, on several occasions not that many blocks away, the serpent engraved around that woman’s arm—what was her name? She’d been Fred’s lover—that snake had done a fair job, from time to time, at claiming an existence almost independent of the woman. What had her name been? She had an apartment over one of the antique and junk shops on Charles Street. Had or, in the pluperfect tense, had had. Fred, at the woman’s instance, had lost track of her.

  Lose track of. How nice a euphemism. It could be used for almost any disappearance. Gentler than “passed on.”

  For that seventh duckling—too young to know its sex, scrambling amongst the bickering comfort of its siblings, within the illusory protective shade of a scolding, anxious, and distracted mother—nine square yards of river had been paradise enough. Not nine square yards. Nine cubic yards.

  The remaining six continued stitching patterns into the water’s surface, their little webbed feet needling only into the top two layers of the water. If it were possible for those feet to administer ink, along with their earnest puncturing, what pattern would be created? Something far more confused than Japanese. Fred watched the tracks, but they caused ripples, and the ripples crossed and complemented and negated each other. The marks were speedy. Transitory. Evanescent. In any case, the water
had its own notions of the patterns it was making, as did the hint of breeze caused by the difference in the temperatures of the river’s surface, and the heating air.

  Molly Riley. Fred’s question, over the phone a month ago, had inked a track into her attention. Now Fred, tardily traipsing after the question he had planted, had found the voice was connected to a smart and pretty woman with green eyes, whose presence in the world had caused him to submit unexpectedly to the haircut he had been deferring.

  Fred stuck by the river until he reached a spot where he could cut over to Charles Street.

  Chapter Five

  Since he had accepted the validity of one of Clayton’s instructions, “Look at everything,” Fred could not walk down Charles Street without putting his head into one shop or another. The canny proprietors shifted their material from time to time, changing the placement of an object so that Tuesday’s hasty glance might spot what had been hidden the Saturday before. If you are not looking for anything in particular, context changes everything. Fred liked to stay ahead of them.

  Oona’s, closest to the subway’s elevated stop on the Boston side of the Longfellow bridge, was open, though it was nearing time for Oona to shift the door’s hanging OPEN sign to CLOSED to allow herself lunch at her big desk, and a siesta in the back room.

  Oona, seated behind the desk in the rear of the cluttered showroom, lifted her eyes from a folder, took note of Fred, and shifted the folder under a blotter as she gave a half wave of recognition. If Oona was the portion of the iceberg that appeared above the surface, the rest of the iceberg was mammoth indeed. She did not appear to have been designed for locomotion, although Fred had seen her move with astounding alacrity on occasion. Much of her material was Hungarian, as if she herself had been accompanied by containers full of old bric-a-brac, antiques, and objets d’art when she arrived, probably right before the war. Unless she had a current source, though traffic in objects between Hungary and Charles Street would not presently be either easy or aboveboard. However she managed it, every week there was something new.