Iceberg Tempting Read online

  Turning left, I took Addison west to Southport, and then a block north. There was a jewel from the late twenties, a movie house with working organ, how quaintly sexual is that, and a mosaic floor in the lobby, chandeliered high ceilings, and a fountain. There was a fountain, for Chrissake. It was the Music Box, now home of artsy fartsy movies. No Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone here.

  We sat in the dark and held hands, and on the screen those two writers Henry and Anais were doing all manner of things to each other, and before it was over we were too, necking in this grand old movie house.

  Quickly, then, to my place. “It’s a mess,” I warned her.

  Maria saw me for who I was, these three rooms in Bucktown, stuff all over the place, old laundry and pizza boxes. In a scene as natural as I could imagine, Maria undressed in front of me, and I saw the beauty of her nakedness in dim light when we weren’t in so much of a hurry. She gracefully slid out of that short skirt, shedding underwear slowly yet efficiently, coyly hiding her breasts with folded arms, as though she’d never done this before.

  Oh, my. She was flawless. “You’re beautiful,” I told her.

  Maria eased on to my bed and stalked me, pursuing my essence. “Lemme see what you’ve got,” she whispered, and showed me another facet of her iceberg imagination, stroking my cock this way and that, teasing me, playing at me, exploring it like she had never seen one before. Then she consumed me, stroking by tongue and hand and lips. Wow. I watched her eyes, the surprise of someone much younger with a new toy. And oh, the glory of her mouth on me.

  I found myself whispering “Uncle!” and then “Uhhh!” She stroked me by hand as I came, as though it hadn’t occurred to her to leave me in her mouth. She stroked until I was more than finished. I wondered just how much experience she had with men, and then three things instantly occurred to me: one, it was none of my business; two, I hoped she never made love to anybody before; and three, I could teach her things. All of that in a microsecond inside of my head.

  As they say, turnabout is fair play. I found myself eye to eye with her sweet pussy, and of course I had to experience all aspects of it, the feel, the touch, the taste, the smooth texture. I had to lick it and play Maria like several musical instruments, a wind at first, doing the flute flutter; then tongue pizzicato to her labiaviolin, her going uh uh uh in harmony, as she held my head in desperation. She thrust upward, crushing her pussy to my face, smothering me with passion.

  “Ohhh.” Somewhere between grief and ecstasy, her life had just changed, too.

  I held Maria, and it was nice. I fell asleep.

  ***

  She was gone when I woke up.

  Maria had drawn my face on the bathroom mirror with soap. There were no more than a dozen or twenty soapstrokes, but she had captured me. I unscrewed the mirror, and put it on the mantle in the living room, where her art belonged.

  A wordsmith, and words to describe her talent failed me.

  ***

  I was disappointed that she’d left so quickly; surely we would’ve fooled around again that morning, gotten to know each other a little better, continued the fantastic fun that we had started yesterday. Fooey, or words to that effect. Instead, I thought that I’d go out for breakfast.

  At the time when this was going on, I had a fully functioning urban car. It was a little five-year-old Chevy Cavalier, and its black exterior had been subdued by the city. It had a hundred little dings and bumps from parking on the street, and I no longer cared what happened to the body of it; I felt like I could park anywhere with impunity. Nobody would steal this wreck. Rust adorned the wheel wells, and was slowly eating through the floor boards, the old salt on the streets routine--wet plus salt equaling terminal cancer.

  We’d had a light winter by Chicago standards, with just two, no, make that only three snowfalls that were rated ‘blizzard.’ And most of that snow was already gone. We were a hair from the ides of March. The Cubs were in Scottsdale, Arizona, and hope hung out on the North Side like so much fresh laundry, including the sexy things.

  I wanted to drive to breakfast, but my car had a flat tire. Driver’s side, front. What a pisser.

  I did the job, the tire from the trunk and etcetera. I dropped the flat off at Fat Tony’s, who would fix it, and I’d pick it up Monday. No problem. Or so I thought at the time.

  Chapter Four

  I’m kind of sure that it’s a relationship, but not absolutely.

  Maria and I had gone on our first date, and a second, and a third, and had made love--the ‘what the hell are we doing’ sex--and it was pretty good. It was incredible. Suddenly I felt like I was riding a tiger, like the Japanese saying goes: I was afraid to ride this tiger, but I was just as afraid to get off it. I could crank up the metaphor a few more decibels, yes, making love to her was sometimes exactly like riding a truly abandoned tiger, indeed, but other times it was distinctly like being consumed by a whale, and didn’t I already say call me Ishmael?

  So just like that, there’s somebody else in my space, and my habits were changing. I could no longer shave using the bathroom mirror, because it was in the living room, on the mantle. I went to the Wal-Mart on my way to work and picked up a tiny shaving mirror, the kind that can be hung up in the tub. The Amish would’ve loved it, because it was about four inches in diameter, not a whole lot of room for vanity.

  There’s an element of the scary in getting involved with somebody again, to have a person who consumed the time set aside for my indulgences, my freedom to do just about anything whenever I felt like it. It’s the space that I didn’t know I had until it was no longer there. It’s the YAAA! of somebody new.

  Thus started the relationship yoyo: the two minutes of wild excitement over Maria, followed by panic and the YAAA! of who is this woman, are you fucking nuts?

  Then, Things will be okay. Really, they will. Man, is she pretty.

  Then Yaaa!

  All day long. Sometimes the ‘okay’ won, other times it was the ‘Yaaa!’

  ***

  Here comes the weirdness. Okay, maybe there was weirdness all along, but here came some of the more scary stuff, not the fear of relationship stuff, which admittedly was already doing a number on me.

  I went to pick up the flat tire, and Fat Tony the Garage Guy said, “You got any enemies?”

  “Eh?”

  “Look at this,” he said. White chalk circle on the side of the tire, not on the tread, indicating where the problem was. “Look close,” he said. It was a gash, a neat little shiv hole. Somebody had slashed my tire. “No way that was an accident.”

  So I bought a new tire, and I was on my way. Sometimes there just wasn’t any explanation for what goes on in the city. I accepted that. Somebody had a bad night, and took it out on me.

  I thought, Maria? No, nono, nono. Uh-uh.

  ***

  I‘d written three novels up to this point, when I’d met Maria. Matter of fact, the third one was out there right then, being indifferently perused, poked, prodded by an army of agents and their minions, mostly their minions, none of whom seemed particularly interested in the book, passing deadly judgment on the minimum three chapters. To this point, nobody had asked for any more of my third novel, let alone setting aside that ten or fifteen percent of their lives to push the sucker.

  I kept a fine file of rejections, and had intended like some mad monk to paper my bedroom walls with them someday, not a particularly original idea, yet it was compelling in some fatalistic way. “Yes, here’s the proof,” the police inspector noted, waving a hand around my room, “this writer died of rejection.” Murdered by literary agents, a passive killing, but here lay poor Stevie Zielinski, surrounded by brutal rejection.

  What would possess anyone to write a novel?

  The short list: it’s a rocket to the moon. It’s a shout in Echo Canyon. It’s buying that Corvette. It’s a climb up Mount Everest. It’s taking out the prettiest girl in school.

  Writing a novel was a damn difficult thing to do, and not too
many folks can do it or would even want to do it. Sure, the finished product always sounds attractive. And how many times have you heard somebody say, “I could write a book about that.”

  Well, I could, and I did. Three times now, going on four. And after getting cuffed around pretty good by the publishing world, it’s amazing to me that I still did this thing. I concluded long ago that writing a novel must be a compulsion, because I’m sure not doing it for the applause. And it ain’t healthy. No siree Bob.

  Go back about five years. I’d been decently married for a while at that point, and I was writing short stories all over the place, all of them under 3000 words, or about twelve printed pages. I got in, scribbled a few thou, got out, tweaked the story for a couple or three days, and done, and back to the marriage, which was already in progress. A short story was a serious writer’s snacky time, no more.

  My ex-wife was named Cassandra. She’s a loving woman who had a job and sang in the church choir and liked to sit around and watch TV. She had no hobbies to speak of, and so she didn’t understand what she thought was my hobby, my writing.

  Granted, the stuff I was turning out then could accurately be compared to a hobby guy in his workshop turning out these really awful wooden signs that said THE ANDERSON’S--with the apostrophe between the N and the S. Why in the world did this guy put that apostrophe in there, anyway? Drove me nuts. So I was turning out stories that seemed to have apostrophes where they didn’t belong, and that took a little time here and there, and my wife got somewhat lonely because I didn’t join her on the couch to watch ‘Seinfeld’ with her like I used to.

  Ominous minor chord: and then came the novel.

  I had an idea. I didn’t get this idea overnight. I wrote a story, and another, and they were related, and then there was a third, and they just sort of intertwined, and…

  I doubt there’s a novelist in the history of man who’d decided ahead of time: I will write my first novel now. A first novel was usually a short story that got away from the writer. Suddenly he’s eight or ten thousand words into it, and no end in sight, and there’s this vast desert of three hundred unwritten pages in front of him, and it scared him, and then it excited him, and then it scared him again, and it’s a whole hell of a lot like a new relationship.

  That’s in fact what it is, complete with roller coaster emotions, the high of fifty or a hundred well-chosen words that the writer would read over and over and go ‘Cool!’ Then the low of “Now what do I do?’ And ‘This is fucking awful!’

  It’s good. It’s bad. It’s good. It’s bad. What that first novel probably was, even for the most talented novice writer, was mediocre. It’s uneven. Worse than all of that, it’s unfixable.

  There’s no class in the world that could teach you how to write a good first novel. They can give you theory, and mechanics. But there’s only one way to learn how to do it, and that’s to jump right in there, beat the shit out of yourself and those all around, and let chaos prevail. Ignore the wife. Kick the dog. Screw up at work. Write all night for a hundred nights. Yeah, write that novel. Or don’t, and then think about it for the rest of your life, the charade that you could’ve been a writer. Or a brain surgeon. Or the starting center on the Chicago Bulls.

  So I wrote my first novel, and my marriage just sort of slipped away. I didn’t seem to mind very much, partly because I’d finally written a novel. It’s a bad one, but it’s mine. Cassandra had felt betrayed, because this wasn’t the person whom she had married, this NOVELIST, like I had converted and become some escribular Satanist.

  Maybe I had.

  Just about nobody got that first novel published, either, because it’s ragged and uneven and unfixable. Here’s my list of good first novels, all one of them: Norman Mailer wrote ‘The Naked And The Dead’ when he was twenty-one. Okay, add ‘Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,’ by Richard Farina. Poor guy got killed in a motorcycle accident right after it was published, so we’ll never really know how good he was. Some smart ass out there will name five more, but that’s missing the point.

  ***

  I didn’t know it at the time, because nobody tells me this stuff while it’s going on: Maria was taking a survey, talking to her girlfriends about the absolute weirdness of our dating. She didn’t know what to do about this, uh, relationship, either. Months later she told me that she was finished with me after the first date, for sure, when we had disagreed about art. And then she was done with me, absolutely, when I’d bailed out of her apartment after sex on the second date. And then she ran out of my place after the third date, and she was convinced that it was over, that she was too goofy and forward and we had done these sexual things, and she was embarrassed and she couldn’t look at me.

  I’d thought that I was the flake in this fledgling relationship. If I’d known that last part, I might have let Maria be, maybe just stopped pursuing her, if I’d known just how rough this relationship was on her. Instead, I thought that it was just rough on me, and that she was the cool one.

  Here’s what happened after I had passed out on that third date. Maria lay there next to me in my apartment, and heard my steady breathing, and wondered what had made her do all of those things. She’d been the one jumping me earlier at her place, then showing her paintings and opening up to me; and then there was the oral sex back at my place. As I had suspected, Maria had never been that abandoned with anyone, not ever. There was something going on with us on several levels. I made her laugh, we both loved art, and we seemed to have all of these things in common. And the sex was better than anything she’d ever known.

  Maria went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She’d been an artist in need, and all that she had to work with was a bar of soap and a mirror. She drew my face on the mirror. There’s not one erasure, one misspent line. It was a moment of artistic clarity unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Maria freaked out from it and from me and from being there. She had a panic attack. She threw up, as quietly as she could, trying not to awaken me, because this would be some ultimate embarrassment, for me to see her with her head in a toilet bowl, far more embarrassing than the best sex she’d ever had. Then Maria snuck right out, and caught a cab, and went home, thinking all the while that she could never see me again.

  “So let’s see some of your writing, Pal,” Maria said to me, on the phone. This was the Monday after, after we had made exquisite love at my place and she had soaped my mirror and had run off for reasons that I couldn’t fathom. Don’t ask me how she’d done this, but in the intervening twenty-four hours or so, she’d gone from panic and complete despair, through calming resignation that we were finished, then to indignation that I’d give her up so easily, to fighting mad that I didn’t think she was good enough, to Oh, my, that had felt so good. And finally, she thought, I want more.

  I asked, “Is this the ‘I showed you mine, now you show me yours’ bit?”

  “The same. Now you can come along peacefully, or we can do it the hard way.”

  “Can I try the hard way first, and if I don’t like it, then go with the peacefully?” I got a little rush from the way she’d said ‘the hard way.’ Then I thought, What would I show her? Would I inflict her with early stories, similar to my seeing her early paintings, so that she can see how my writing had evolved? Or jump to the good stuff? The good stuff was always my current work; the other stuff was older and therefore not as good.

  Here’s where painting and writing depart. It just takes longer to read a story than it does to absorb and appreciate a painting, the difference between making love with one’s eyes and making love with one’s mind. Both the art and the writing took a long time to create, and both were absorbed far too fast, as far as the artist or writer was concerned. Hey, enjoy the nuance! But it takes longer to read a story than to look at a painting.

  “What would you like to see?” I asked.

  “You know your work. You pick it.”

  Thanks a lot. “Should I be there while you read it?”

 
“Ha,” she said, “Not sure if you noticed, but that’s not how it works with us.”

  “I mean after the sex, you want me to stick around while you read?”

  ***

  So I picked out some stuff, short stories that had made it somewhere, and some that had not but that I really liked. And my first novel, that disaster, I had a weak spot for it, and maybe that told more about me than our all-too-brief liaisons had so far.

  We were busy all week, so I gave Maria the stuff to read. I should have explained something to her, a preface to reading my work: I wrote to entertain, myself first, and then anybody else who wanted to come along for the ride. She should just have fun with it, and not analyze it or critique it or look for the ugly flaw.

  I wanted Maria to love my work. Love it. Passionately. Without reservation. Every word, don’t change a thing, it was beautiful.

  That’s what she should’ve said.

  ***

  At work we had lunch a couple of times, but not too much, trying to keep a low profile. I noticed that I’d just be sitting there talking to her, and I’d get a bone out of nowhere. I was just looking at her face, hearing the subtlety in her voice, watching her talk, and I wondered if we could go to the woods or to a motel or something for lunch.

  We sat in the same restaurant, the one where we had first connected. “What,” Maria said. She was watching my face.

  “Can’t tell you,” I said.

  “It’s the smirk. I wonder what you’re thinking when you have the smirk on.”