Crocodile in the Sun
Clarissa had to touch everything, and it had become a problem. A hydra-headed problem that grew worse by the day. It reared one of its heads in the china shop, and I looked quickly for a sword. All I had were words.
‘Clarissa, careful!’ I said. ‘It’ll break.’
Mute flashes shot off the glazed black eyes of the statuette she lifted, weighed, put down; her eyes flashed too.
‘You worry too much,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’
She was right. I did worry too much.
I hadn’t always been this way. Before Clarissa, more than ten years ago, I’d been carefree. I didn’t expect flat tires or engine failure every time I drove our car. I did not fear tax audits or lawsuits or identity theft. And heart disease happened to old men—not me. This halcyon past, though, was like a fairy tale now, long ago, and far away.
Worry had since become my constant companion—with me even when Clarissa was not. A spinning feeling like too much coffee, it wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe it was age. I was past forty. Maybe it was Clarissa. Before she had to touch everything, she used to smell everything. My inclination to worry in earnest began then.
She would smell the flowers, of course. And she would smell the soil. The rugs. The neighbor’s dog. She would smell the neighbor. Visiting my mother, she’d smell the afghan on the couch, the pillows, and the potted plants. She’d smell her friends. Then my friends. She would smell those walking by. Her nose tilted up and on the lookout.
‘Henry, you’ve been drinking scotch again, haven’t you?’
She said it to him on a Sunday morning as we were leaving church. He was with his wife and children. Even if true, it was not her place to say. And it became awkward fast. Her nose lingering too close to his cheek after a hug. Just one example.
Now, though, it was touch.
We needed a sugar bowl and that’s why we’d entered the shop. There was lots to worry about here. The rusty metal taste of blood filled my mouth before I realized I was gnawing at the inside of my cheek. Given her compulsion to touch, to come into contact with, it was inevitable that something would slip and shatter. This had already happened, at home, to the sugar bowl she’d inherited from her grandmother, who had raised her, which I’d knocked with my elbow like an oaf to our kitchen floor.
But Clarissa was not me. She was more butterfly than bull, moving like a dancer, and hadn’t broken anything. Yet. Still, I was certain she was bound to if she kept this up. The natural tendency of things was to break, to decline or deteriorate, after all, as Clarissa knew better than I.
Not finding anything she liked, we left the store.
‘Let’s forget about the sugar bowl for now,’ she said.
I was grateful for the solid sidewalk and its regular, squared-off sections, I was grateful for the sky. An embarrassing onion smell bled out my pores.
‘Why don’t we go to the museum?’ I suggested.
We’d be safe at the museum, I thought. She wouldn’t touch anything there, what with the security guards, the velvet ropes, the electronic sensors.
She wouldn’t dare.
Immediately, once we’d bought our tickets and climbed the polished marble stairway, canyon voices echoing around us, Clarissa went straight to the sculpture hall. Rodin’s The Kiss sat near the center on its pedestal. Two lovers embracing, lips for eternity on the verge of touching, in bronze.
I had a premonition. Or was it déjà vu? I knew what was coming. Could see it in her raised shoulders and jubilant eyes. As if threatened by a ferocious unleashed dog, I froze. If I didn’t move, maybe she wouldn’t move. It was a false intuition. Or a wish. Or the casting of a spell that had no power, that couldn’t work.
More than get too close, she leaned up against the conjoined pair of doomed lovers. Caressing the woman’s naked hip, she pressed her belly and breasts into the woman’s back, snaking her neck and mouth toward that moment of electric intimacy.
As if needing to satisfy the unfulfilled promise of the work, she kissed the man’s cheek.
Then she kissed the woman’s gleaming head, her shoulder.
I waited for an alarm, for the guard to shout.
We were escorted out at the bayonetted tips of walkie-talkies—but only in my mind.
There were no sirens or bells. No flashing lights. And the guard was at the far left side of the hall, by a Brancusi, Bird in Flight, around which two swallows, a girl and boy, were perilously circling.
‘My fingers, Stan! You’re crushing them,’ she said.
‘I’m going to have a heart attack,’ I said.
‘You worry too much.’
In the room of Rembrandts, beyond the sculpture hall, we found Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. The artist had depicted himself as melancholy philosopher, standing beside the table with the bust, resting a paint-thick hand on the round head of the poet. Aristotle’s eyes were unfocused, mirroring the demeanor and aspect of that ancient one. Bounding the whole, the painting’s massive, intricately worked gilt frame, with elaborate arabesques, interstices, divots, and mounds, was a lure and trap.
But it wasn’t the Rembrandt or its frame that she went for. And, at first, she did not seem to notice the philosopher’s irreverent gesture. Instead, Clarissa headed for an actual living girl in a tutu, dressed—I guessed by her mother, who sat nearby—to resemble one of the dancers in a pastel by Degas.
She stood beside the little ballerina, then rested her hand on the girl’s head. The dancer smiled. She glittered, iridescent stars on cheeks. Her tutu was pink. Her tights green. Her hair in a blue bow.
She did a kind of pirouette under Clarissa’s finger. The mother watched as if this happened every day.
‘What are you doing!?’ I pushed the words through clenched teeth.
‘What?’ Clarissa said, smiling at the girl, removing her hand.
‘Not everyone’s going to spin with joy at your touch like a top.’
‘How about you?’ she said, laughing lightly. ‘Will you spin with joy like a top?’
She came at me, arm outstretched, fingers splayed.
‘Clarissa!’ I begged, now stepping back from her, as she approached. I ducked and dodged then put a bench between us.
Her arm fell and her eyes shimmered as she sought another object to settle on.
The longer we stayed the more the art and our surroundings repulsed me. I felt lightheaded and was afraid that I might faint. I took a seat. Clarissa noticed and sat beside me.
Rather than being the safe place I had figured on, the museum seemed designed to provoke, its treasures crying out, ‘Touch me!’ The rules, the ropes, the regulations saying just the opposite: ‘Touch me not!’
‘Put your arm around me,’ she said, as we left the museum. ‘I’m not going to let you fall.’
I wanted a space like Aristotle’s, a quiet study. I would need a hot shower. A cold beer. Maybe a walk among trees away from people and porcelain and paintings and glass.
I drove us home. Clarissa tangoed her fingers across her window. She palpated the knobs of the radio, the climate control—then gripped the gearshift in front of the cup holder between us. She tugged it back as we went down a busy street, traffic coming at us and pressing from behind.
Before I could stop her, she had us in neutral. The car yelped and jumped like a sleeping dog whose foot I had stepped on. We slowed abruptly.
‘CLARISSA!’
‘What?’
We coasted to a stop at the curb, my heart in my esophagus.
‘You’ve got to quit this!’
‘Just having a little fun. You’ll burst if you don’t have some.’
‘You’re going to kill us.’
‘Stop exaggerating. You need to learn to relax, Stanley.’
‘And you need to learn to sit on your hands. You’re like a three-year-old,’ I said. ‘Do I need to make you sit in the back?’
I said it brusquely. My voice mean.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just, we could have had an accident, you know. And I like you, Clarissa, just the way you are—alive. And breathing. Not through the windshield. Shredded like a rag and dead.’
She didn’t answer.
I shifted back into drive and pulled out onto the road, waiting to see what she would touch next.
But Clarissa was sitting on her hands, as I’d asked. Face like that of the blind Homer.
I took a tissue from the box in the tray beneath the radio console, reaching over to dab her cheek.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to crash.’
She was right. I put both hands on the wheel.
And she touched nothing. And she went on touching nothing. But now the more she touched nothing, the more I wished she would touch something. The sun visor, maybe. The switch to lower her window.
‘Want to hear some music?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you turn on the radio and find a station, a song you like?’
Her eyes floated out past traffic, through the windows of cars. She didn’t answer.
I longed for her touch on my leg, for the feel of my earlobe between her fingers—something she used to do, and which sometimes irritated me to the point that I would swat her hand.
Pulling into our driveway, I stopped the car. We sat there. The house looked back at us. White with black trim around the windows and doors, it was a classic traditional everyday American dwelling.
‘We made it,’ I said.
‘Safe and sound?’ she said.
She wasn’t sure. Something had broken.
I stepped from the car. I opened her door.
Clarissa swung her legs out and stood. We walked toward the house, onto the porch.
I reached for her hand. She moved it away.
She didn’t say don’t touch.
I opened the front door and held it.
Our golden retriever, Midas, was there to greet us. He jumped on Clarissa.
She raised her hands, palms in the posture of stop and enough.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Off!’
Midas backed away, shrunk down, whimpered.
‘Clarissa,’ I said, crouching next to Midas, rubbing his head and scratching behind his ears.
‘It’s okay, boy,’ I said.
‘I love you,’ I said, my eyes tracing Clarissa’s profile, lingering on her luminous, aristocratic forehead, as she stared at herself in the mirror. ‘But you always take things too far. Even at our wedding—it was seeing then, remember? You had to open all those doors inside the church, the closets, the confessionals, the entry to that inner sanctum—and look in. Why are you like this?’
‘Ask her,’ she said, gazing into her double’s eyes. ‘Maybe she can tell you.’
At dinner, she didn’t touch her fork or plate.
‘But you have to eat,’ I said.
‘So feed me,’ she said.
‘You’re acting crazy,’ I said.
Then later: ‘What about your teeth? You’ll need to brush.’
‘You do it.’
It was a tricky operation, brushing her teeth without touching her face, but she kept her mouth open and still like a crocodile in the sun.
At bedtime, it was impossible for me to change her clothes and not touch her.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, kicking off her ballet flats. ‘Just lift the blanket and drop it on me. I’ll sleep like this.’
And I did as she said and she lay pharaonic-mummy style, as if I had entombed her—my golden, cursed Egyptian in the glow of the lamp, her sheet a shroud.
I turned off the light.
Neither of us slept and I stared at the ceiling and listened to Clarissa breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The air moved through her nostrils, down her windpipe, filling her lungs, then back up and out her mouth, whistling, whispering, like slumbering banshees.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
It was just past three.
‘What are you sorry for?’ she asked.
‘If you want to touch, touch. If something breaks, it breaks. I don’t know why I worry so much.’
‘Because that’s who you are,’ she said.
‘But I can change,’ I said.
‘I mean, that’s life,’ I said.
‘What’s life?’
‘Things break.’
‘Is that the moral of the story?’ she asked.
I didn’t answer.
‘But can you really choose?’ she asked.
‘I can try.’
The night was listening, waiting.
‘Well, if you can,’ she said, ‘so can I.’
‘Really?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Besides, I’ve had enough touch. Now I’d like to taste.’
I had a vision of a banquet, a table overladen, on the verge of collapse. Crystal champagne flutes with impossibly long stems brimmed with golden wine. China vessels, cups, saucers, and plates of food piled up in pyramids teetered, gravies and sauces overflowing. Only in books had I seen Rembrandt’s Balshazzar’s Feast, but now I feared and hungered for its glistening grapes, as I looked for letters of divine admonishment to form in the air. Perhaps I was beginning to dream.
Pulling the words from my belly, from my soul, like being born—I asked her: ‘What shall we try first?’
Douglas Curran has published stories in A Shape Produced by a Curve, The Frogmore Papers, American Letters & Commentary, Notre Dame Magazine, Exquisite Corpse and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and was an Edward Albee Foundation fellow. He lives in the United States.