It Was a Noteworthy Day

It’s a lie, how could anyone believe such a thing? 

Henry loves his Cuban wife, Lucia, he wants to take her in his arms and hold her. He wonders why she’s upset.

You must believe me, Henry, it may sound stupid, but, I’m telling the truth.

He looks out the kitchen window at the palm branches swaying in the morning wind, wondering what the drama is about and thinking, 

she’s Latin, when she’s upset she's has a problem expressing herself.

The lovers are sitting at the kitchen table, she lights a joint and takes a deep drag, forgetting about the liar, whoever he is, and saying,

querida, you burned la tostada, make some more. I finished Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude last night, I adore him, his stuff feeds the Latino soul, it's butterflies rising from mud and flying to the moon.

Yeah, he’s cosmic, baby, I know you love him.

Estas celosa bebe?

No, I’m not jealous, Gaby Marquez is dead, he's dust.

Henry, you’re jealous because you’ll never write like him, and his mind is beautiful and yours is muck. 

Lucia, is it rag week? Look, I write like me, OK?

I want to kill you, Henry, you make me crazy, tonight when you sleep I’m going snuff you out with a pillow. 

Let me tell ya, croaking beats dealing with you when it’s your monthly. If somethin’s eatin you doll I'll call Skank the shrink.

They shower, dress, braid each other's long hair, then make the short trip to the Skank’s office on their Vespa, parking it in the Sunset Mall lot— a conglomerate of pink cement modules connected by blue tile walkways.   

After walking past Radio Shack, and Sears, Lucia ducks her head inside her girlfriend’s salon saying, 

Chica, back in a few, vamos a hablar Skank the shrink. 

Inside Skank’s office, they go to the reception desk, where Henry asks, 

how much is a session with Skank? 

A middle-aged nurse whose face is deeply lined scowls as she answers,

160 dollars for sixty minutes, 

how bout a half hour for 80 beans?

Sir, our office is a member in good standing of the American Psychiatric Association, we don’t bargain.

OK then, an hour for my wife, Lucia, it’s somewhat urgent, but I wouldn't call it an emergency. 

Sir, if your wife’s situation is urgent I’ll call 911.

Call me Henry, so how long is the queue?

two hours sir,

two hours? Jesus, we’ll go have a drink then.

That's none of my business.

Whataya mean you old goat? You're Skank's nurse, ain't ya? Lucia pulls his arm and says, 

querido común.

The couple makes a b-line for Chica’s Beauty Salon, going inside where Lucia collapses in the parlor chair.

Oh mi Chica, that bitch at Skanks office is crazy. Henry laughs saying, 

when Nurse Ratched finishes jacking the patients up, Skank the shrink makes em whole again.

Chica brings them a beer and goes to work on Lucia's long curly hair, spraying it with water and shaving the split ends off her curls with a razor. 

Then the Cubano stylist leads Lucia to the shampoo station, where she washes and conditions her friend's hair.

As she’s being shampooed Lucia unconsciously spreads her long legs, exposing her thick black bush. Chica laughs saying, 

darling your cono es maravillosa, like a jungle bush.

She draws a mesh curtain on a circular track around Lucia, leaving and returning with a stand-up tray that has warm wax and strips of cloth on it. 

Then swabbing Lucia’s pussy with alcohol, cleaning her clitoris and vagina, slowly drying the sensitive area with a soft hand towel, arousing Lucia.

She applies tepid and gooey wax to Lucia’s bush that she’s trimmed down with scissors. Finally, placing strips of cloth on the pubic hair, letting them settle, and jerking them off.

The pain of waxing is akin to ripping a bandaid off sensitive skin— Lucia doesn't feel anything because she and Henry are three sheets to the wind.

When the beauty treatment's finished, the couple drinks with Chica till sunset, walking to the parking lot and getting on their Vespa.

They pull out of Sunset Mall— driving northwest on the Key’s Overseas Highway instead of driving home, pulled by something unknown to them.

Twenty minutes later they’re at Saddleback Key disoriented and driving in circles. 

Eventually, they stop and get off their scooter in an open field lit by a Waning Gibbous moon. Henry says, 

It’s fun bein lost ain’t it babe? This island’s witchy.

I wanna go home and go to bed, pollino.

OK, give me a second to suck in more green microbes. 

Green microbes? Are you loco, Henry? 

They’re in the sea air, they’re sobering, revitalizing.

A dark form moves out of a shadow, approaching them and saying, 

I’m Dom the Jew, I live in a Gypsy commune on Raccoon Key. I was night fishing and got lost so I rowed ashore. 

Everything about Dom the Jew is black, his curly hair, beard, overalls, and T. Henry smiles and says, 

you’re on Saddleback Key, Dom, can we help you?  

I'm OK, I’ll row home when the sun comes up. Let me reward your kind understanding. He reaches into his pocket, pulling out a polished crystal, raising it to the moon, holding it there as shards of rainbow-colored moonlight flood the field. 

Henry and Lucia begin to feel a happiness that is impossible under ordinary circumstances. They feel sheer harmony leading to bliss.

Then, they’re engulfed in a balloon-like white aura that expands, and implodes, uncovering a field of fine white dust, a purely energetic state yogis call Sahasrara— a wholly other dimension of reality. 

The couple experiences an aha moment as they realize a pearl of wisdom has been thrown their way by the Gypsy boy.   

The out-of-body experience ends as quickly as it began and Dom the Jew is nowhere to be seen— most likely he was never there.

In a whisp, Henry and Lucia are cruising the Key’s Overseas Highway, wailing Walt Whitman’s Songs of Joy to the night sky.

O the joy of spirit— when it's uncaged— it darts like lightning!

A Quasi-Subterranean Stream

 

Lucia, Henry’s Cuban wife made him happy, he depended on her to deal with the people he didn't want to talk to.

The couple wakes early at nine. While sitting at the breakfast table Henry does a quick sketch of Lucia then shows it to her, 

dios mios, bebe, I’m all tits and ass, 

It’s a caricature, you know, exaggerating your prominent traits.  

So, when you look at me, you only see tetas y culo? 

No, I’m not a shallow guy, I’m a writer you know. 

Yeah, but you're no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I adore him, he's an artista who's versed in the words of love. 

Your right I'm no Garcia Marquez. I think you love him because he's Latin and writes in your language. If you love him so much go dig him up and play with his bones, he's buried in Colombia. 

Estás celoso cariño? 

No, not jealous, I just don't like you pooh-poohing my work.

Henry gets up from the table, leaving Lucia, going to his study and crouching over his typewriter. Then looking out the open window, breathing the tropical breeze through his nose and exhaling the stuff from his mouth, thinking,

I hand my chance and there were no bullrings, boxing matches, or young Señoritas. There weren’t even any insights, I was fucked. Words backed me into a corner and punched me out. 

Henry thumbs through some paperbacks on his desk— Hemingway, Durrell, Miller, Marquez and such, turning on his Grundig radio. As he listens to Brahms 5th Symphony  he types a few paragraphs, 

only one great writer surfaces every five hundred years, and I’m not the one. I'm fucked but I write anyway. 

If my mind was like flypaper I could really write something, but I’ve got to sit and wait for it to come, manipulating and squeezing it once it arrives, on its own schedule, not mine. 

I used to have balls, conjones, what happened to them? Maybe I’m getting old. I used to bust balls in my early days, now I just talk about busting balls. 

Lucia walks into Henry’s study, looking over his shoulder she says, 

busting cojones? Are you writing about fucking? 

No, taking the piss out of punks at bars, back in the day, my day not theirs. 

I gotta work babe, roll me a joint and make a pitcher of somethin will ya? 

Lo tienes, bebé.

John William Cheever was an American short story writer known for his rapierlike view of the middle class. His attention to detail and hypervigilant writing plucked the eyecatching from the mundane.

He was born on May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts. His father Fredrick owned a shoe factory that he lost in the Great Depression and his mother Mary Lilly owned a gift shop.

Cheever was sent to Thayer Academy, a prep school in Milton, Massachusetts. As a seventeen-year-old Harvard-bound senior he arranged his own expulsion as he smoked and drank at seedy bars in downtown Milton. 

John struggled with alcoholism throughout his life and wrote about the disease in his stories dealing with suburbanites who drank too much.

In the mid-1930s, John lived in a bleak boarding house in Greenwich Village and supported himself by writing synopses of books for budding MGM movies. 

In 1943 he married Mary Wintergatz and in the same year published his first book of short stories, The Way People Live, mirroring his lifelong subject— the ways of suburban dwellers. 

Then in 1947, The New Yorker published his story, The Enormous Radio, and it got raves from reviewers.

As he continued to write each short story eclipsed the last. Then in 1951, Cheever was made a Guggenheim Fellow.

By 1964, he was on the cover of Time Magazine, a world-renowned author. 

Later the same year his story The Swimmer was adapted for Hollywood, starring Burt Lancaster.

Henry was cocoa-nuts about The Swimmer, a dreamy odyssey that takes place over the course of a few hours on an August day.

On a midsummer afternoon in the sixties, the day after a rolling drunk beanfeast, all the suburban folk in town are sitting around their swimming pools saying, 

we drank too much last night.

Ned Merrill, who sees himself as a legendary figure, is sitting in the Westerhazys’ garden with a glass of gin in his hand when he decides on a whim to swim home via the pools of his neighbors, a route Cheever labels as,

a quasi-subterranean stream that curved through his friend's backyards.

As Ned’s journey begins his mood is buoyant and in Cheever's words he's, 

sucking in the powerful eroticism of travel, traveling with a hard-on. 

Ned runs across the grass and is warmly greeted at the first party he comes to by the hostess who says, 

look who’s here!

On to the next party via pools and grass, like a conquering decathlon athlete on the booze circuit, Ned's offered drinks along the way which he sucks down.

Then, as thunder roars and rain pours Ned takes cover under a neighbor's patio where he notices a red maple stripped of its leaves by the force of the storm and the sign of autumn makes him feel glum, causing his sense of self to waver.

Somewhere around the halfway point of his journey, he crosses a busy road and is jeered at and a can of beer is thrown at him.

In the end, Cheevers's greatest short story leaves you hanging, wondering if Ned made it home. 

Of course, the masterpiece transcends the swimmer's safari through the suburban backyards and is more of a journey into one man’s heart of darkness. In Cheever’s words,

it’s the telling of lies, a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

Lucia looks over Henry’s shoulder and says, 

what ya doin bebe? 

I'm finishing a bit on John Cheever’s The Swimmer. Whataya say we go for a swim at Sunset Pool?