Twisted
A. F. Cronin
May 2006
May 2006
I had actually said the jumping around part was really good. To this day, at odd times and places, that moment in time flashes in my memory and my pathetic ineloquence turns my face red with embarrassment and shame. Her performance had been transcendent, exquisite, perfection–it was beyond description. Telling Beatrice, directly after that show, that the jumping around part was really good would have been like telling Einstein that the General Theory of Relativity was a good read or telling Picasso you liked the bluish-grey color he used in The Old Guitar Player. They’re not appropriate compliments for such staggering works. It’s best to keep quiet in the face of greatness if you’re not prepared with an appropriate comment. But most of us are born blathering idiots and die as blathering fools – such is the way.
I know now that I should have responded to Beatrice’s question with a simple yes or no, or maybe a little nod. But she had snuck up on me and I had been caught flat-footed. Even now, after having been together for many months, when she tilts her head and smiles at me, the neurons in my brain’s language center misfire and my usually sharp whit becomes thick and dull as a log.
Beatrice, never one to let my inarticulateness get in the way of her own speech, ploughed onward.
"Really?" she asked.
"Really."
"I’m glad you think so." She whispered. "I was a little off tonight. Nerves, I guess."
I was, quite rightly and quite involuntarily, speechless.
She was lovely in the dimming candlelight, by the way-- more beautiful than she had been on the stage. Her wolf-eyes were soft, and relaxed, and they flickered with the reflections of candle flames. She was wearing a grey, hooded New York Athletic Club sweatshirt and baggy orange sweat pants–and her high barbarian boots of course. Her stay-puft down coat and her red scarf were beside her.
She twisted her blue hair back into a loose French braid and she stood up. "You wanna go?" she asked.
Not realizing that Beatrice and the snot-nosed-wolf-eyed-falafel-loving girl were one in the same, I stuttered "I’m waiting for a girl who invited me..."
"You’re waiting for me." She giggled.
"You?" I replied.
"I’m the girl from, Ahmed’s." She smiled and pulled on her coat, wrapped the scarf around her neck, and yanked on the red pom-pom hat. "See?"
I did, indeed. It was she. Beatrice, the exquisite, trapeze swinging, blue haired, awesomely ripped, red-bikinied gymnast was, in actuality, the puffy-coated-snot-nosed-rude-girl with the wolf-eyes from Ahmed’s–or vice-a-versa. To this day I’m unsure of which one is the real Beatrice.
"Thank you for the falafel." She whispered and she leaned across and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek. "It was kind of you to let me have it. Let’s go." She took my arm and we walked down to the stage. As we started into the hallway the old woman spoke.
"Love each other," she urged. "Love each other well." She held up her ancient hand in a simple benediction and smiled softly at us. Then she returned to her candles and Beatrice and I walked down the long hallway and out of the building into the softly falling snow.
Beatrice clutched my arm and looked up into the gentle maelstrom. Several flakes landed on the pale skin of her face and she sparkled like a fairy princess. She leaned her head against my shoulder and we watched the snow fall a moment in silence. If I had uttered one intelligible sentence to this young woman before this instant I would have given her the softest of kisses to mark that magical moment on a quiet, New York City sidewalk in a lovely nighttime snowfall, but, since we had barely conversed with each other, and I my most recent attempt at conversation had been the dreadful jumping around part was good line, and since she didn’t even know my name, I restrained myself.
"My name’s, Anthony," I whispered. That sentence, while short, came out pretty well, I think.
"Hi, Anthony," she replied. "Anthony?"
"Yes?" I answered.
"I want a pizza." She said. " And a gorgonzola salad and garlic bread and red wine."
"OK." I said. "Where do you want to go?"
"Where the pizza’s good," she whispered. Then, thanks to the extra six inches the barbarian platform boots added to her height, she gave me a second soft kiss on the cheek. "Just take me, Anthony", she whispered, "Take me where I want to go".
So I did.
An enormous bowl of baked Ziti with a vegetarian marinara sauce with a thick frosting of melted cheese augmented Beatrice’s pizza, gorgonzola salad, and red wine. She ate it all -- and she talked while she did so. I sat munching on my pasta with meatballs and small green salad and listened to her. Occasionally I would get in a phrase or two but, by and large, Beatrice voiced a meandering, multi-faceted stream-of-of consciousness monologue that was as spellbinding as it was confusing.
I’ll give you a small example.
A chomp of pizza, a gulp of wine, and a breath of air and she’d start up. "I’m from the southwest, so we have lots of burritos but not such good Italian. You’d think Spanish food would be more like this but it’s not. Mexican food is really just slop–it’s good slop, but slop. Beans. Falafel are ground up chick peas you know. They’re legumes, as are most beans, but do you no what they really are?"
This is where I would insert "No." Beatrice would continue and she chewed her salad.
"They’re seeds. Isn’t that amazing. Seeds. Little seeds. Just like fruit. Pits? They’re seeds. Strawberries have all those teenie seeds in them. Beans and peas, and fruit are seeds. Corn is seed. Wheat. Barley. We eat proto-vegetable children to live. What savages we are. But.... Did you know that women were not allowed to be performers in Medieval Europe? At all? No acting, no dancing, no circus work.? You know why?"
I would again insert "No," and she would go on.
"Because seeds need a place to grow. Can disturb the field. I never liked chickens. They’re stupid animal. Now horses are not stupid. Or dogs. But chickens... Most people are like chickens. They don’t have a clue; they get born, eat a bunch of seeds and then have their necks wrung. Metaphorically wrung I mean. It sad. They believe what they see because they trust their eyes to tell them the truth but eyes don’t tell the truth because they only process the light reflected of the surface of things. For example–where’s all this food go?"
She’d shove a fork full of cheesy ziti into mouth. I would answer "Your stomach."
She would continue.
"That’s right. But how do you know that? You can’t see it go there? What if it really went to my lungs? Think about it. This is why cats get it. They don’t think. They just want. So...."
She went on and on.
A wave of shame shuddered through me. As if somehow all the putrid sexual fantasies and images and thoughts that had plagued each man since adolescence could be miraculously cleansed by this evenings show.
A. F. Cronin resides in Los Angeles. That's in California.
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