Contrivances

David Balzer

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 13 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770901131
• Langue: English

Extrait

For Derek


PATRICIA Sholem Krishtalka 2012



Patricia
PATRICIA WAS PUTTING ON A DRESS , but she was not going out dancing. She was staying in; she was playing hostess. Patricia liked putting on dresses for occasions that did not normally require them. Tonight, it was required, yet held for her, because of her proclivity, a different meaning than she assumed it did for others. The dress was a costume. It was this way, to be sure, for all women, but, still, it was different for her: it was, she imagined—she hoped—an abutment for wit. Patricia’s dresses held discourses. They were old dresses, some from fifty years ago—her grandmother’s ones, for instance, that had, in their day, been shown at, well, dances. Dances and many proper social outings: they had certainly been tools of status.
But when Patricia wore them she was not in them for that. The one she wore tonight was of thick, cobalt-colored silk and announced, with all its might, that it had been a graduation dress. It, in Patricia’s opinion, was at once the most comfortable thing in the world and the most awful of traps. And how could it not be both, given what it had been intended, always, to do: to decorate, to flatter, to give the illusion of mobility? Yet Patricia allowed herself to feel free, to enjoy the room the dress provided her legs. She was not about to censor her movements to conform to its shape.
So, she wore things on her own terms. This one she had augmented with a crinoline and fishnet stockings; in this way, she was free to spread her legs without vulgarity. And the top of the dress, which fit snugly and had spaghetti straps, didn’t necessarily bother her, for her arms and shoulders were, like her legs, at liberty. And this liberty was, on the whole, a secret guarded from men, some of whom read the dress, outwardly, as a form of bondage. And that was okay, too. That signified a lot; that was, nicely, part of the contradictions to which she firmly devoted herself.
And the dress and she were still beautiful; there was no denying that. The fact remained: Patricia looked better in the old than in the new, this adherence to history and, further, to her reconstruction of it, making her all the more special and specialized, pleased and pleasing. Patricia was born for this; she was not a contemporary body type. She was not slight. She had, she knew, the danger, because of her shortness, of looking too round, but she was not too round now. She took care of her shape, always, wrapping it well. She remarked to herself as she put on lipstick—curling her top lip and admiring how well her braces shone against the shade and her outfit—how much independence and courage had to do with it.
She had clued in to that truth that not everyone was represented popularly. People had rampant cowardice; they would not admit that the kinds of beauty discussed in media left out all those forms they all liked equally well. Lately, Patricia tried to push things further; her lipstick and eyeliner were tending more and more towards the confrontational, the tribal, her outfits more and more towards the conventional. It worked. Even her parents and their acquaintances knew it. She was electrically pretty.
It worked best, however, when Patricia was in the place where she had been designed to be. Last week she had, she thought, gone too far, showing up onstage in lemon-hued polyester coordinates, nude-colored pantyhose, and pink pumps. She decided that she would not take that outfit apart at all before appearing in it. She even added a purse and earrings that matched the pumps. She wanted everyone to get it. They did. When she yelled an introduction to her first song, they yelled back, and at one point a girl below her tried to steal the purse. This was not, in Patricia’s opinion, to rip her to shreds, but to express jealous admiration. They wanted what she wore and knew her closet was voluminous.
Thus with her ensemble tonight, with its fishnets that seemed almost elegant, she was indeed who she was—who she really was—when wearing it.
Paul would know. Having just stepped out of the brilliant hallway, he closed himself in hurriedly and smiled. And Patricia, full of love and lust, laughed teasingly: not only had he somehow managed to brave the front door and its various intricacies, but he was also wearing a tuxedo. It was a surprise; his style was not about finely tuned paradoxes. He was, in a way, what she desired because he was opposite, yet so akin. He revealed, and made no excuses; she concealed, and in turn revealed, also making no excuses.
She rushed to him and he grabbed her tightly, moving his hand up and down her back, almost taking her dress off. They both laughed more, and Patricia whispered in his ear (though there was no risk of her parents hearing) that he had smudged her lipstick and had better be careful with her dress. He backed away, still holding her in his arms and allowing her to appreciate him fully, in portrait: his dark eyes, eyebrows, long nose, and chin, an attractiveness that, to her, was miraculously superior because of how inborn, how almost-feral, it was. He seemed, in pulling back, also to be assessing the extent of the damage he had done, but Patricia did not care at all and grabbed him close once more. The two fell on her bed and continued their kissing and touching.
Patricia began to take off what Paul had on. It was too delicious, this disrobing: he had gone to the trouble of wearing, of renting, a tuxedo, just for her, and now was allowing her to take it off him! She jerked his coat away and began undoing the buttons on his vest and then on his shirt, which were not like real buttons at all. They just sort of popped out, falling to the side. She put her fingers in the parting she had made, rubbing his chest over the T-shirt he had on underneath. As it was uncovered, she squealed.
“Where did you get this?” Patricia stopped her fondling and looked straight at Paul with ecstatic affection.
“You know where I got it.” He smiled. “I’ve got to support you.”
He sat up and opened his starched folds meaningfully; the T-shirt said, in capital letters, “CLAPTRAP.”
Patricia grabbed him and began kissing him again. His fandom made her giddy.
But Paul looked uncertain. Did he not want to? She looked back, knowing that, if she seemed as grateful as possible, he would. She pushed him down and continued her work, not undressing him further but kissing him sensuously, hoping she was relating the message that this was the right thing with which to start the night. She was absolutely enamoured, and the T-shirt made her think, naturally, of playing a gig—which she had not previously thought of while doing this, at all. And Paul did keep relenting the harder she tried.
And it was the dress, above all, that kept her trying this hard. She resolved not to take it off. She merely pulled away her crinoline, which was cheap and held in by an elastic band, tossing it aside with a vehemence that renewed her laughing, her squealing. Paul was into it, and she undid his fly and pulled down the top of her stockings and underwear to meet him. The hemline of her skirt had been touching his neck, and as she bent down to kiss him, she made sure to pull it up there again, for she liked seeing him covered in this way. Apparently, he did, too. He was being outrageously acquiescent. And Patricia, while the two found a rapid rhythm together, added an extra idiosyncrasy by pulling, on occasion, the tip of her dress just slightly down from Paul’s neck, and gazing at the word, CLAPTRAP, and then staring at him with fervor and kissing him once more. And when she knew he was almost finished, she began to sing in a loud whisper: “A string / A string / A string is the thing / You use to connect / To correct / To bisect”—he seemed to enjoy this, especially her stress on the “bi” in “bisect,” and so she went on—“A string is the thing you play with / A string is the thing you play on / A string is the thing you pull / On the thing you want to sing.” She yanked her dress over her head and flopped down beside her concluded lover.
“We can’t have made too much of a mess,” said Paul, after a pause. “Check your clothes.”
Patricia got up and checked her makeup and hair instead. Then she grabbed her crinoline, wiggling into it, and checked Paul, who, it seemed, was falling asleep.
“I’m going to meet you downstairs, okay?” She pulled a curl down her forehead.
Paul groaned blissfully. “I know more about Satanic Ritual Abuse,” he said.
Patricia cackled and corrected. “SRA. Later,” she said, and left the room.

Patricia had been to Paul’s place for dinner and he had certainly not worn a tuxedo. She had certainly worn a dress; however it had not quite signified in the way that she had wished. She had felt overdressed; she had felt uncomfortable. Not maladroit, though: she had felt, actually, as if she had had to beat down some of her gracefulness. She had wondered, then, when she arrived, what Paul had really told his parents about her: if he had somehow delineated class differences; made their match seem unlikely, or subversive; somehow prefaced her in any sense as aristocratic. He, and all her friends, would make fun of her, as the child of diplomats, but never entirely derisively. The derision was her own scepter there, in the club, regardless. Her origins made her fascinating, funny. Who better to communicate with the underworld, to charge it with importance, than someone bred within the art of negotiation and cultural mediation?
Patricia’s discomfort at Paul’s parents’ was not total, but their not making fun of her, their not making light of what she was anyway, made her slightly uneasy. She did, really, love them so. His father was some kind of technician (Patricia wasn’t sure of what) and a painter