Hum: Stories Page 8

  “What’s that?”

  When we reached the bed, he turned to face me and unfastened two buttons on his groin. A flap of felt fell away to reveal that most beautiful part of him, of which I had been in awe from the beginning.

  It was average in size but exceptional in appearance, covered as it was with scales of many hues, ranging from the palest white to the deepest blue. When in repose, it lay against his body like a cylindrical jewel. What cruelty, to be blessed with such a thing of beauty, but to be unable to share it with the world!

  That night, separated from him by a layer of plush white felt, it was like making love to a pillow, or a human-shaped yurt. Except, of course, for the one part. Our way of making love was to be very, very still, to let the closeness of our two bodies be a substitute for motion; even so, I came away from the event cut and bleeding. Afterward, it wasn’t too bad as long as I was sitting or standing still. But walking around the maritime museum, instructing eager third-graders on the mating habits of stingrays and jumbo Gulf shrimp, proved excruciatingly painful. In a way it was terrible, but in another way it made me feel as though I had happened upon an exceptional love. He was like no man I’d ever been with. I could search for years, and never find anyone like him. It was satisfying to think of the women I knew at work—the secretary with her portentous hair, or the events planner with her eternally disappointed air of someone who has just missed out on a very good party—passing through the days with their ordinary loves, while, in the little house by the bay, my own love waited, freakish and beautiful.

  ***

  As it turned out, the suit was only an early prototype. Over the months and years it would be followed by many others, each one hand-sewn by a celebrated textile artist across the bay in Mobile, each one an improvement upon the last. An improvement in that each new suit was less obvious, more natural-looking than the one before. The white felt gave way to something thinner and somewhat flesh-colored—also smooth, but with the faint hint of human hair. He gave the textile artist photos of himself as a very young child, before the scales began to appear, and gradually, the color of the suit came to resemble, more and more, the color his skin had been prior to the affliction. That’s what he called it, in his more depressive moods, when the memoir was going badly—his affliction—and I didn’t have the words to tell him that it was the affliction that drew me to him, more so than his personality, which, I came to realize, was rather ordinary, or his intelligence, which tended toward the esoteric, or his humor, which could be cruel.

  The suit’s hair, too, became more supple and fine, placed discriminately in the appropriate places—thicker on the legs and upper arms, a lighter patch of it on the chest, and only a few stray hairs, for authenticity’s sake, in the small of the back and on the wrists. By and by, the suit began to look alarmingly realistic, so one had to examine it closely to see that something was amiss, that he was wearing not his skin, but rather a suit of simulated skin, designed, ingeniously, to bruise upon impact and to emit faint odors reminiscent of the wearer’s last meal. Under the proper conditions, the suit was even designed to sweat.

  The suit was so realistic, in fact, that he gained a kind of confidence he’d never known before. Over time, as the suit improved to near perfection, he began to go out in public, to socialize with ordinary folk. Eventually he got a job. He kept his hair long and always wore a hat and scarf, even in the merciless humidity, in addition to a thick makeup that had been designed by a friend of the textile artist. With all of these precautions, he was able to keep his face pretty well concealed.

  But at night, when he came home from his job at the finance company—something he’d dreamed of his whole life, not least of all because it smacked of normalcy and unobtrusive prosperity—he allowed me to unzip the suit and peel it off of his shimmering skin in the pastel light cast through our windows by the sleeping Gulf, and to rinse the makeup from his face, and to do the one thing I desired most, the one thing that, unbeknownst to him, kept my love for him alive: to look at him, in all his scaled and glittering glory. When he was naked, stripped of the deceptions he had so meticulously acquired in order to pass in polite society, he was nothing short of beautiful.

  When it came time to make love, I willingly zipped him into the suit again. With my job, it would have been difficult to endure the all-over scarring that would have occurred if we made love without the suit. Not to mention the fact that some genetic code was at play, some peculiar aging process was afoot, so that, while his suit grew softer and more pliant with each mutation, his scales grew sharper and more pointed.

  During all this time, the suit’s one supposed flaw remained: one key part of his body had to remain exposed during lovemaking. According to the textile artist, it had something to do with the chemical makeup of the fabric, which could not sustain exposure to certain types of bodily fluids. So it passed that, year after year, my feminine parts bore the brunt of our lovemaking. As a result, I felt that I belonged to him, as if our union had been purified by fire: for what is love if not sacrifice?

  And then, one Friday afternoon nearly a decade after that night meeting at the pier, my husband—by then, we had walked down the aisle of a non-denominational church by the sea, and feasted on champagne and crawdads while a local Zydeco band inspired the small group of wedding guests to flail about in the sand—came home to me and said, “It’s been solved.”

  I was sitting at the kitchen table, reviewing the literature for a new live specimen the maritime museum had acquired, the Tonicella lineate, or lined chiton, a prehistoric-looking mollusk with a single large foot whose tongue, or radula to be precise, is covered with iron teeth. I suppose I didn’t properly hear him, or didn’t note the enthusiasm in his voice, because rather than asking him what exactly it was that had been solved, I was moved to share with him an interesting fact I’d just discovered in my reading. “It says here that the lined chiton can travel up to three feet on the ocean’s surface to scrape algae off nearby rocks. Then it returns to its home scar, which is a depression in its own rock that is, get this, shaped just like the lined chiton.” I shoved a potato chip into my mouth and kept talking. “I mean, the chiton has used his iron-coated teeth—they get that way, the teeth I mean, by a complicated chemical process called biomineralization—to shave away the rock until it fits his body just so. Like a glove! Like a lover!” I exclaimed, taking a swig of my beer, for by this point I had really made myself at home on the Gulf Coast, swigging beer and sucking crawfish heads with abandon, occasionally even attending a tent revival, forgetting that I’d ever lived in one of the strange cities of the North or that, in a past life, my logorrhea had made me intolerable.

  “Says here that chitons have flexible shells,” I said, “composed of eight articulating valves, which are covered with thousands of tiny eyes called aesthetes. The largest chiton in the world is the Cryptochiton stelleri, or gumboot, which can reach thirteen inches and has valves shaped like butterflies. Butterflies, mind you! Never say there isn’t poetry in the sea.”

  My husband, at this point, was staring at me in stunned silence. And why shouldn’t he? I’d never strung so many words together the entire time I’d known him. Something strange had happened that long-ago night on the pier; I had, without warning or effort, been cured. What I’d believed at the time to be a temporary reprieve from my own affliction had turned out to be permanent. Weeks turned into months, months to years, and I did not feel the need to talk. Quite the opposite, I felt compelled to silence, so that by the time I returned home each day from the museum, where it was my duty to speak at length about the wonders of the sea, I had little desire to say anything. Instead, I listened. In truth, I could not help feeling that some important part of me was missing, that I was somehow less than I had been before.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” my husband asked, taking a seat beside me at the table, and looking with some disgust at the oily stain the potato chips had left on my paper plate. “I said it has been solved.” He was wearing B
ermuda shorts, a T-shirt, and thongs—Fridays were mandatory casual day at the finance company—and his suit was so excruciatingly skin-like, so perfectly fitted to his body from neck to fingertips, that, had I not known better, I might think that he had been cured. By this point we were making love infrequently, and the intimacy we’d once shared had begun to melt away. He had taken to wearing his suit round-the-clock, even to bed, so that I rarely experienced the sweet thrill of disrobing him in the evening after work, peeling away his outer layer to reveal the man I loved.

  At that moment, I felt that I was sitting across the table from someone no more familiar to me than the paperboy or the clerk at the 7-Eleven. Then, mercifully, he unwound the scarf that covered his chin, and took off his floppy hat, and brushed back his long hair, and I felt enormously grateful for this glimpse at his private self, this glimpse he allowed to no one but me.

  “What’s been solved?” I asked.

  “This.”

  He stood and dropped his shorts. And there before me stood an entirely natural-looking man, adorned in curly pubic hair and dangling flaccidly in the heat, the scrotal sack appropriately wrinkled, the whole package dismally common.

  “How did he do it?” I asked, reaching out to find the zipper.

  At which point he began to swell at my touch, saying, “Baby, there’s no zipper.”

  “Well then, how do we get this damn thing off?” I said, tugging at it in a completely utilitarian way, which he mistook for an erotic overture.

  “There’s no taking it off. I’ve been sealed into the suit. I can bathe in it, exercise in it, even make love in it.”

  By now I was using my teeth, trying to tear the wretched false skin away.

  “It has to be removed once a year so that the skin can go through an aging process and any necessary alterations can be made,” he panted, as if this thing I was doing with my teeth had something to do with sex, as if it were not a desperate attempt to reveal that most beautiful part of him, that most real and multi-colored thing, which was a specimen in its own right, deserving of its own field of scientific study, not to mention an entire school of experimental art and a movement in postmodern literature.

  But I was no match for the suit, this soft and lifelike armor. I did not find what I was looking for.

  That night, we made ordinary love. While he thrashed and thrusted above me, I faked an orgasm for the very first time. And when it was over I had nothing to say. My speech on the mighty chiton, that master of disguise who carved for itself a home in the rock and looked, to any possible predators, like nothing special, like a part of the rock itself—my speech had been a one-time thing. My logorrhea really was gone, relegated like the ex-boyfriends and the therapists and the big city to my distant past.

  Before long, the textile artist came up with a way to disguise my husband’s one remaining feature, his face. He fit in so well, even he seemed to forget that the skin he presented to the world was not his own. Eventually he got a promotion, and we moved across the bay to a restored antebellum home in downtown Mobile, keeping the little cottage by the bay for the sake, I suppose, of nostalgia. Mornings, I’d drive the Causeway to the maritime museum in Fairhope, watching the sun blaze over the silver bay. Afternoons, on the return trip, I’d catch a glimpse of the old warship, the U.S.S. Alabama, sitting placidly in the water, a gigantic relic of some bygone glory, its dull gray cannons barely hinting at the violence they’d once wrought upon the world.

  Nights, my husband and I would sit together in our well-appointed living room, reading: he read biographies of captains of industry, while I buried myself in colorful textbooks detailing the wondrous creatures who made their home in the sea: sharpnose puffer, ocellated frogfish, mushroom scorpionfish, flying gurnard, dragon wrasse, leafy seadragon. There were pictures of sea stars and urchins, mollusks of many varieties, crustaceans of indescribable beauty.

  My husband had long since given up his dream of writing a memoir. After making several attempts to break the lock of the file cabinet in which the manuscript was concealed, I finally called in a locksmith. Upon opening the drawer I saw that the book had never really been started. It was little more than a list of potential titles and chapter headings, accompanied by a few photocopied documents from the medical files of his youth. These documents were characteristically clinical in nature, but among the dull listings of medications and false diagnoses, recommended treatments and such, a little light occasionally shone through. Upon removal of a small sample of the scales, one doctor had typed, the subject bled profusely. Close examination of the scales under a microscope revealed a range of exceptional colors not found in nature. And then, in nearly illegible handwriting in the margin was a note the doctor had apparently scribbled to himself, an afterthought: Rare opportunity to witness a thing of wonder. Thanked his mother profusely for bringing him to me. No diagnosis possible. Very clearly one of a kind.

  I returned the files carefully to their places and had the locksmith conceal any sign that the lock had ever been compromised. I did, however, steal from the files the one piece of paper on which the doctor had allowed himself a moment of professional awe. I keep it hidden in a secret place. Every now and then, when the ease of our ordinary lives becomes overwhelming, when I think I cannot pass another day in the shadow of my husband’s brilliant disguise, I take the paper from its hiding place and review the doctor’s words, and I think of the treasure I found that night on the pier in the moonlight. It is almost close enough to touch, this treasure. Sometimes I dream of some point in the future, when some ordinary disease or accident will take my husband’s life, and I will lay him down in the good light of our little house by the bay, and I will go exploring. With my fingernails, my teeth, my eyes, I will search until I find his secret seam. Then I will open him up like some splendid fruit, like some creature from the depths of the mysterious sea, and behold, once again, his beauty.

  HONEYMOON

  She had this red hair. She liked to compare it to a pack of rowdy schoolchildren, presentable one moment, and then all wild and out of control the next. Her teeth were perfect and straight, as was her back and posture. She said it was the product of operations, braces, and odd contraptions that, with the goal of making her ultimately attractive, had made her totally unattractive at a time when those things mattered the most. High school. If anything, she said, it had taught her at an early age that she was going to have to work for a living. While the other girls were meeting boys and dreaming of weddings, she was taking physics, computer science, and wood shop. Oddly enough, it all paid off. Now, she has her own company designing kitchen utensils. The money is in the forks and knives, she says, though she spends most of her time on the more interesting pieces, whisks, spatulas and rubber scrapers.

  Our deal was this: she would plan the wedding, and I would arrange the honeymoon. Her only request was that it should include a stay at a nice hotel, one with turn-down service.

  The wedding was remarkable, and not because the food was tremendous, the guest list artfully constructed, or the location perfectly chosen. No, the wedding was remarkable because it included me in such a prominent role. You see, I’m 39, and well, I just figured that the window had already closed on those opportunities. It’s not that 39 is a horrible age. It’s simply that, before I met her, I had started to feel a certain way. It felt like a movie, like I had just seen the matinee and now the reels were starting all over again for the afternoon showing. I had been having a lot of déjà vu; everything seemed to remind me of something else. Nothing was new, but rather a variation on something old. Once I met her, though, for the most part, the sense of déjà vu stopped.

  First, a word about turn-down service. I can be brief because I’m sure you’ve probably experienced it for yourself. It’s that thing you get at nice hotels, when the maid comes—usually while you’re off at some meeting—and straightens things up, puts your papers together on the desk, bends down the sheets on the bed and, if you’re lucky, puts a nice mint on the pillow.
It’s unnecessary, yes, but nice all the same.

  My wife’s request for a hotel with turn-down service didn’t surprise me. You see, my job requires constant travel to a bunch of different countries, a bunch of different hotels. Some are good, some are bad, more often the latter.

  Whenever I travel, I’ll call her from the hotel, and the first question she asks is whether the place has turn-down service. She likes the idea of a bonus, something totally unnecessary but special. If I say yes, she shrieks with excitement. “Did they fold your T-shirts too?” she’ll ask, and “How’s the mint?” If the place doesn’t have turn-down service, she’ll quickly change the subject, as if she is trying to take my mind off of some bad news. It’s become a joke between us. I guess it’s something new to me, something I hadn’t experienced before her, something I never saw in the matinee. In a way, it is this, not the beautiful hair, not the smooth skin, but rather this something else that is the very essence of what I love about her.

  With that in mind, you understand how tricky it was for me to plan the honeymoon. Don’t get me wrong—there are a lot of great hotels with really great turn-down services. Hotel Gellert in Budapest, the Grand Hotel in Llubjana, the Serena in Zanzibar. I’ve done my research. The Palace in New York probably has the best. Still, I chose the Llao Llao, a strange but amazing hotel at the foot of the Andes in Bariloche, Argentina. I studied their brochures, I browsed their website, I conferred with their concierge, and then I saved my money.

  When we arrived, the manager came out and met us in person, remembering both our names and congratulating us on our wedding. He then paused for a moment, smiled, and explained that he had been able to “work some magic” (my translation), and get us a special suite on the third floor. The room has a name, which I can’t pronounce, rather than a number. That’s how good it is.