Transcendent Face

Winter in London is a claustrophobia of darkness. The night crowds out the day. Cloud cover and mist linger for weeks at a time; the water fowl in St. James Park huddle pathetically on the banks of the pond while pink-footed gulls skitter over the ice-crusted surface. By January, I was desparate to escape.

The National Film Theatre put on a Buster Keaton Festival with live piano. At the time, I'd never seen a Buster Keaton film. I went to The General out of curiosity. And then I went to another and then another. Until I was living from Keaton film to Keaton film, spending all my extra pounds and pence into the pursuit of just another couple of hours with him. His universe was in a state of entropy, and yet he kept on, undaunted, or perhaps because he simply didn't know what else to do. And then there was his face, haunted and still as a daguerreotype, strangely beautiful, the most ravishing man I'd ever seen. I would sit in the theatre and while laughing, would pine for this dead man. He soon came to occupy my daily thoughts and I determined that I would find a man with such a transcendent face.

I found one. I acquired a man with a face that made me nervous and wistful. Blue eyes in a dark, Spanish face. I often felt self-conscious walking next to him because I felt he made me look plain. We spent time in London, Prague, Vienna and Budapest. It was wonderful, carefree. In Bulgaria, it wasn't as easy. By the time we tried to transfer it to the U.S., it was going downhill. But I couldn't let go of his face. It was bad hoodoo. He wasn't what I needed in more ways than one. I stayed miserable longer than I should've because I was bewitched by his beauty.

The next one I dated was less attractive. It was still a mess. I learned from it, but he's honestly somebody whose warning signs I should've seen much earlier. I remember thinking to myself, "This guy seems really unstable." And yet, I proceeded.

And now what? I'm nursing a couple of crushes, but they'll probably come to nothing. I've got no confidence in my judgement. I feel like I should be assigned a boyfriend by someone who knows better.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Teeth (draft)

Felicia, my dumpling, knocked out her teeth for real in the 1997 black-out. She was winding down the stairwell in her apartment complex with a basketful of laundry balanced on her head. She was thinking of that Peace Corps poster with the African woman that has a typewriter balanced on her head neat as a teapot. Not your average nine-to-five.

Then the lights went. She tumbled through the blackness and bit a stair. The teeth clattered out of her mouth like dice. She didn't regain her composure until the lights came on again. She sat up. Her mouth lay in ruins on the concrete step. It was like the hand of God reached out and touched her, she says. It was like the Holy Ghost gave her a little shove from behind.

I heard an old Indian legend that a dream of tooth loss foretells death.

My dumpling is a phone sex operator. The hotline's schtick is GMILFs. She's twenty-seven, but the dentures age her voice. They like her muffled way of speaking. She riddles her voices with cracks. When she signed on, they sent her a helpful binder of material. Page two was a cheat sheet of outdated sexual euphemisms. She told me that more than once a caller has staged his telefantasy at Luby's. Then I told her to shut up.

So Felicia stays home with the cordless phone and the helpful binder while I leave to catch the bus. I am a security guard at an office park and man it kills me, this job. The lobby is one of those that's just full up with fake ferns and mirrors. I hear the chiming of that elevator when I go to sleep at night. There's nothing to do but puzzle over crosswords and think of Felicia sprawled out on the queen size talking about making whoopee in that crinkly, muffled voice. It makes me want to spit into the oversize silk ferns. Used to be when I came home, Felicia would have some mashed potatoes or some Easy Mac ready for me and we would chat and joke. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, I said once. She didn't laugh. But that was a long time ago. These days she just leaves a frozen burrito out to thaw and I am left to my own devices. She could at least put it on a plate, I think to myself. But it's always that damn lone burrito, frigid and forlorn on the bare counter.

She tells me she's lost that old feeling. We met at a laundromat, Bill. That's a bad sign enough. It's kind of romantic, I say. Like a worn-out movie plot, she replies. I think about telling her that Indian legend. Then I think twice.

Now I can't sleep at night with her breathing in the bed next to me. I recall the dentures in the glass on her nightstand, leering in the dark. I recall how when she takes them out of her mouth, it looks like somebody has punched her face in.

Sometimes a Mentodent commercial comes on the tv and I see Felicia get this wistful look as a senior citizen bites into an apple. It's the sound that gets her, a sound crisp as a slicing blade. Nobody with dentures can really pull that off. It's a fantasy, Bill. She says, it's applesauce days from now on.