Thursday, August 12, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Oxygen: Fiction by Lynnette Curtis

Standing atop a makeshift coffeehouse stage someone pieced together from plywood and a couple of two-by-fours, Shannon is every bit the out-of-place siren: beautiful, resonant, enchanting. She can take your mind off things better than anyone I know. If she weren't married to my best friend, I'd sweep her right off her feet. Figuratively speaking, I mean. The girl's nearly 6 feet tall and not exactly a lightweight.

She's reciting her poem about life as a feminist with size 38 DD boobs. She says she feels like Gloria Steinem trapped in Jessica Rabbit's body--"not bad, just drawn that way." I honestly understand what she's saying, truly appreciate her artistry--not to mention her giant knockers--and like her so much I almost forget for a moment what's waiting for me at home: a dying father, the Grim Reaper, cancer. This was the whole point of the evening. But I hadn't expected it to actually work.

Tonight's open-mic crowd is a patchwork of chain-smoking teenagers, yuppies, senior citizens and--no kidding--a group of middle-aged transvestites, all clustered around a half-dozen carved-up coffeehouse tables. There's even a sole Rastafarian squatting near the pastry counter, his dreadlocks drooping down his back. It's been weeks since I've seen anyone besides Dad, Jimmy the nurse, and an occasional hospice worker, so this collection of wannabe poets, faces angled appreciatively towards Shannon, seems all the more vivid--a jumble of smoke, mismatched thrift store clothes, electronic pagers--as though I've stumbled headlong into the wrong end of a human kaleidoscope.

Shannon fondles the microphone like a phallus and takes her time through her final stanzas, half-purring each syllable like Marilyn Monroe wishing President Kennedy a breathy happy birthday. She finishes with a slight feminine bow, steps gracefully offstage and makes her way back to where I'm slouching in the corner. People are still applauding when she says, "Come with me, David." Maybe it hasn't occurred to her that it's inappropriate to invite a man along to the ladies' room. I'm not about to complain.

"Thanks for coming out tonight," she says. In the mirror, she checks her perfect teeth for lipstick. I stand behind her, watching.

"You wouldn't take no for an answer." I massage my fingers over my scalp, which I've recently mowed to a quarter-inch reddish stubble in an effort to camouflage my already receding hairline. I look like Howdy Doody joined the Army.

She smooths the red sweater over her stomach and turns to the side to consider her profile. It's amazing. A brick house. "You needed to get out," she says firmly. "I'm worried about you. It's not healthy for one person to handle everything. Besides, you know Rich wouldn't be caught dead here. You wouldn't want me to go it alone, would you?" Her voice is light and flirty. Okay, maybe not flirty. But a guy can dream.

"Never," I say. I nearly get vertigo watching her dark hair float across her shoulders.

"And I adore you for it." She turns and presses her fingers into my chest.

"In a disgustingly platonic way."

"You mean delightfully platonic." She places a cool hand against my cheek. Someone should toss me a life buoy.

"Story of my life," I say. And it really is.

* * *

I first met Shannon fresh out of college when we both took jobs teaching high school kids how to score better on their SATs. She was applying to graduate school with plans to become a real teacher, while I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that maybe an English degree hadn't been the smartest way to go. To my still pitifully inexperienced eye, she looked mouth-wateringly fertile, all hips and lips and mammary glands, like God had chosen her to single-handedly overpopulate the planet, nurse countless children until they were at least 10 years old. She introduced herself to me one morning in the employee lounge, took my hand and squeezed it--hard. Her eyes were a disturbing shade of blue. She wouldn't stop smiling. I stared at her way too long.

"Sorry," I finally said. "I seem to have forgotten my own name."

Right then, I found out she wasn't actually too good to be true. She snorted when she laughed, and she laughed a lot.

We became friends over almost daily lunches together at the deli next door. She sat across from me chewing potato salad, stabbing the air with a fork while she talked about her obsession with 19th-century French poetry, her intelligence like a current in the room. I nodded a lot. She told me about her childhood spent on a Colorado dairy farm, how she was home-schooled and wore nothing but overalls until she was 13 years old. I didn't mention that I would think about this later, alone in bed, picturing her full-grown but still barefoot and pig-tailed as she clutched an ancient copy of Les Fleurs Du Mal, straddled a white horse and rode bareback in slow motion.

I liked everything about her--even her quirks that bordered on the criminal. I soon discovered that she wasn't above pirating dollar bills from my desk drawer, or swiping the Cokes I had stowed in the lounge's mini-refrigerator. She wasn't the type to ask permission or forgiveness. Worst of all, she pretended to have no idea of the havoc she wreaked on my fragile male psyche just by playfully jabbing my shoulder whenever we passed in the hallway, sprinkling her pheromones and little snorts along the way like a trail of invisible bread crumbs.

I soon made the mistake of convincing myself there was something undeniable between us, and nearly worked up enough courage to ask her out on a real date. Unfortunately, things happen. Like my buddy, Rich, deciding to tag along to our company Christmas party. I should have known. Even back in high school, he had stolen most of what I liked to think of as my would-be girlfriends. As soon as I saw the way he and Shannon wore their identical Santa hats cocked at precisely the same angle, how they accidentally bumped into each other beneath the mistletoe, I knew I was a goner. It wasn't long before I got the late-night phone call from a drunken Rich, hemming and hawing all over himself before finally asking whether I minded if he and Shannon got together.

I said, "What difference does it make? We're just friends." And the truth of it finally hit me.

Rich didn't have an answer, and I ended up with the measly consolation prize: best man at the wedding barely six months later.

* * *

I think the coffeehouse waitress may be flirting with me. She serves me two free mochas in a row. That's like giving me eight bucks. Then she laughs--genuinely--at my joke about how she manages to stay so thin with cream cheese pastries surrounding her like Indians at Custer's Last Stand. And she is thin. Long and elastic like a rubber band, with dark pools for eyes, and Levis she must've had to lie flat on her back to zip up. She could eat me alive.

Shannon pays no attention. She sits across from me, ample bottom scootched to the back of a folding chair, and listens politely to one of the transvestites reading a sonnet about his mother. I think about borrowing her cell phone to check in at home, but decide to give it a couple more hours to see if I can stand the guilt and numbing fear that Dad really could die at any moment while I'm here listening to bad poetry and ogling Shannon's bust. The only person around to hear his last words would be Jimmy the nurse, who is as nonchalant as a teenage babysitter. Dad doesn't say much anymore, anyway. He's mostly incoherent because of the morphine. Sometimes he even sees things that aren't there, curls his thin fingers into fists and swings weakly into the empty air like he's punching a ghost. It's almost funny--or would be if it weren't so utterly unfunny. It's the sort of thing Dad would joke about if he were well. "My equations aren't exactly adding up," he would say. He taught high school math for 30 years. Now he's unable to articulate any of what he's seeing or feeling, reduced instead to communicating with grunts and an occasional excruciating moan.

At nine o'clock, the waitress takes a break from slinging coffee to step onstage and deliver an ode to fresh produce. She's particularly fixated on bananas and crookneck squash--their tastes and textures, how the peels feel against her fingertips. She closes her eyes to whisper the line, "Naked cucumber skin." A tiny diamond stud lanced through her left nostril catches the light. When she returns to her station behind the counter, she notices me watching her and smiles. I look away and don't make eye contact again. The last thing I need is another woman to make me feel like a dog begging for a bite of dinner.

The final poet tonight is a 300-pound woman of ambiguous race who moves quickly to the front. Her colossal ass smacks the still-squatting Rastafarian in the face on the way by. The plywood stage sags under her weight. She takes a moment to collect herself, closes her eyes and inhales deeply, then launches into a fast-paced number she calls "In Lust and War." She has a voice to match her body. The poem turns out mainly to be about her job as a phone sex operator. She pretends to be 5'9, 115 pounds, 36-24-36, just lounging around in her black teddy, nipples erect as she waits for your call. She says she has nothing better to do on a Friday night while you're home alone watching Edward Dildo Hands and devouring an entire bag of Cheetos.

"How'd she know?" I whisper to Shannon in mock alarm. But she doesn't laugh or even look at me, just shrugs in my general direction. She's fingering her necklace and listening intently to the giant poetess--maybe considering a part-time gig sex-talking horny men for three bucks a minute. Graduate school doesn't exactly pay well.

Now the woman onstage is talking fast and loud about how she was ready to kill herself before lust came into her life and rescued her. Her eyes are wide open and haunted, scanning the room anxiously like she's afraid one of us wants to assassinate her. She snaps her fat fingers, yells, "Hear that sound?" and makes a low, whooshing noise that reminds me of the oxygen streaming through Dad's nasal tube. Then she glances ceilingward as if a phantom missile is about to burst through the vent. She stands silently for a long moment before anyone realizes she's finished, then smiles widely at the spattering of applause. A couple of people ooh and ahh like tired hookers hoping for a tip. I feel like raising my hand to ask if her callers ever say: Please lower your voice.

"Well," Shannon says. "I think it's time to go to the movies." She announces this matter-of-factly, as though we had planned to all along. I'm tired. It's already late, and I really should be getting back. By now, Jimmy the nurse is probably drinking liquid morphine from my Disneyland shot glass while Dad shrieks and thrashes around in pain. But I'd follow Shannon anywhere.

"Rich won't mind?" I ask, like I really care.

She rolls her eyes at me and says, "Whatever." On our way to the door, she takes a quick detour to whisper her goodbyes to the coffeehouse waitress, who looks at me, nods, and conceals a small smile behind her fingers.

We pick a movie at random and end up sitting in the center of an otherwise empty theater. The large, cool space is a sobering contrast to the crowded coffeehouse. Because we're alone, it feels deliciously intimate. We've bought popcorn with extra butter, Raisinets and Twizzlers. We share everything, our greasy fingers sliding together as we pass a quart-sized Coke back and forth.

The movie tells the subtitled story of an old Argentinean man whose wife, stricken with Alzheimer's, doesn't recognize or remember him. Still, the old man insists on spending his life savings to plan the elaborate church wedding they never had, though his wife can't possibly comprehend or appreciate it. Shannon and I munch our popcorn noisily. She squeezes my hand during one of the many sad parts and whispers, "Sorry, David. I didn't know this was going to be so--"

"Hilarious?" I say. "Yeah. It's a real knee-slapper."

"We can leave if you want." I shake my head and risk resting my cheek on her shoulder. Her enormous breast is less than an inch from my mouth, her sweater soft against my skin. She doesn't stiffen or push me away. The sweater's neckline is low and tight. I could curl right up in there. She smells like licorice and lavender skin lotion.

Onscreen, the old man visits his wife in a nursing home. He wears his best suit and presents her with a large bouquet of wildflowers. Her gray-blond hair has been pinned neatly back by one of the nurses, and her eyes are a deep, muted blue, like sapphires covered by a thin layer of dust. She stares straight ahead, lost somewhere in the fading landscape of her own mind. The old man is nervous as he asks his wife of 40 years if she'll marry him again. An agonizing moment of uncertainty passes before a flash of recognition spreads over her face. She turns to him and smiles. She strokes his withered cheek with the back of her hand. Mi novio, she says. My boyfriend.

Shannon cries easily--tears spring to her eyes when she finds anything the least bit touching. I haven't cried since I was a kid, so I'm surprised to feel my own eyes filling with moisture. Shannon passes me a tissue from her purse. Somehow, this doesn't embarrass me. But I'm glad to be in a dark, empty theater where only she will know. It's remarkable how comfortable I feel with her, as though we're an old married couple with a shared understanding that comes from years of compromise.

In the black anonymity of the theater, I allow myself to think about what it must feel like for this old man to be able to say to his wife, "I'll love you through it," and mean it. Is it really possible to continue loving someone you no longer recognize? I wonder if Rich loves Shannon like that. Or whether I could feel that way about her--or anyone--if given the chance. In my vast experience, which consists of exactly three failed romantic relationships, the woman always leaves long before it gets anywhere close to that point. Their survival instincts kick in as soon as they realize how shallow my emotional supply is, and that I don't carry a reserve tank in case of emergency.

Hell, in my more honest moments, I'll admit to myself that I don't even love my own father enough. There are times in the middle of the night, when I'm sitting next to the hospital bed I made up for him in our living room, that I feel nothing whatsoever. It's as though I'm under heavy anesthesia. This really spooks me. So I try to remember Dad as he was before. How he dedicated his entire summers to me while I was growing up. His penance, I suppose, for moving me away from my mother and subjecting me to a single-parent home. No matter that we both knew I was better off without Mom's detached brand of maternal affection. We spent weeks together on the road--Dad's fingers drumming the steering wheel in rhythm to one of his old Foghat cassettes--because he wanted to take me hiking in every Western national park. Or I try to think about how patient he was those many nights he stayed up late with me during junior high because I couldn't "get" geometry, his voice remaining as calm and steady the hundredth time he explained Pythagoras to me as it had the first. But the only memories I seem to muster are the too-recent ones. The quick daily worsening of his condition, how he has seemed like a corpse for weeks now. Waking up sometimes to the sound of him gasping, choking in air, unable to coax it into his lungs. The helpless feeling I get, later, when I lean close to his mouth to check that he's still breathing, and the smell of sour sweat and decay that doesn't seem to go away no matter how often I bathe him or change his sheets.

The movie ends happily, at 1 a.m., with the long-anticipated wedding coming off with only a couple of minor hitches. It's cool outside. Shannon takes my hand again in the parking lot.

"I don't want to go home," I say. My mind is full of images of Jimmy the nurse playing solitaire on the computer while Dad chokes to death on his own blood. An intense stab of guilt hits my stomach for feeling like that would be a relief.

"I know," Shannon says. She holds my hand tightly and looks at me like she really does know.

I'm glad she insisted on driving. I would have had to take Dad's Buick, littered with old, wadded-up tissues stained black with blood from his lungs. I haven't yet felt like throwing out these leftovers from before he admitted to anyone what was happening to him, when he could still drive, still stand and sit up by himself.

Through the window of the house, I see the dim kitchen light. "No hearse in the driveway," I say. "Probably a good sign." Shannon sighs heavily beside me as she shifts her Pontiac into park. "Hey, Shannon. Thanks so much. This was really a relief." I place my hand on her shoulder.

"You're the one who needs comforting," she says. She manages a quick laugh--really one of her famous snorts--and puts her hand on mine. Her fingers are warm. We sit like that, touching and not looking at each other. I think about reaching out with my free hand to stroke her cheek, her hair. I think about leaning in and wrapping my arms around her and kissing her on the mouth--softly at first, then not so softly. Maybe, at this precise moment, parked in the driveway in front of the house where my father is dying, she won't mind. Maybe she'll even kiss me back, take my hand and place it encouragingly beneath her sweater. That's the feeling I get, anyway, from her damp eyes and the uncertain half-smile playing at her lips. But she knows I gave up on all of that a long time ago, and I know she depends on it. There's never been the need to have an actual conversation about it.

"I better see how they're doing in there. That Jimmy guy seems a little shifty to me. Probably not long since he was released from custody." I smile right back at her to show her I'm just fine, and open the car door.

"Wait," Shannon says. She pulls a small piece of paper from her purse. "Almost forgot this." Under the roof light, I study the torn corner of a napkin from the coffeehouse. There's a phone number, with the name Janie written above it, in purple. A tiny, hollow heart dots the i. "The waitress's number," Shannon says. "She said call anytime. She doesn't sleep."

I stare at the napkin and shake my head. "You're amazing," I say.

"Call," she says firmly. Her eyes are blue flames. She makes her thumb and index finger into a gun and points it at my chest.

"Okay," I say. "I surrender." I feel a little unsteady, so I step out of the car and shut the door. I can't see Shannon's face through the window in the dark, but I wave anyway. She puts the Pontiac in reverse and off she goes.

Inside, I find Jimmy the nurse asleep on the couch, drooling all over my grandmother's afghan. When I poke his shoulder to wake him, he bolts upright and looks guilty like I've just caught him masturbating. He shakes his big, square head and mumbles, "There's been no change," as if he'd know. Then he's out the door. He probably has a wife waiting at home.

Dad's sleeping--that's pretty much all he does now. His mouth is wide open and toothless. I removed his dentures for good several days ago. His hair is long and thin. I lean over to check his breathing--just as shallow as when I left, many hours before.

I hold the napkin in my hand and look at him again. I try to imagine color in his face, flesh thick on his body, eyes looking at me with affectionate recognition. What would he say?

The clock on the card table beside his bed reads 1:23 a.m. I stare at it until the numbers become blurry, as though I'm reading them under water. Then I pick up the phone from beside the clock and dial the numbers written on the coffeehouse napkin. Somehow I find myself cupping the receiver to my mouth the way I would an oxygen mask, already breathing in whoever will answer my call.