Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives—worldly, sexual, obsessive—of twenty–three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women d'un certain âge and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives—worldly, sexual, obsessive—of twenty–three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women d'un certain âge and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
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Overview
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives—worldly, sexual, obsessive—of twenty–three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women d'un certain âge and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668125 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
BEAUTIFUL SOON ENOUGH
By MARGO BERDESHEVSKY
FC2
Copyright © 2009 Margo BerdeshevskyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-149-2
Chapter One
Window
She hated Saint Valentine's Day. A woman in a garter belt.
And a moth who feeds on spice.
The woman stands in the beige lace belt, which is a gift that was in her mailbox this morning. She had said —I will not celebrate love's day anymore, unless or until some good man leaves me beautiful lingerie in my letter box.
And then it happened. She is standing at her window, wearing the gift.
Outside, it is Wednesday noon, and beautifully, delicately, snowing. Inside, she is warm and she is at her window. Below in the flying snow, he is watching. She makes a sign with the fingers of one hand, like a butterfly, and he knows he may visit, now.
When he enters her room, it is with another small gift, a square thing wrapped three times, in tissue papers the color of chrysanthemums. The mauve, the plum, the deepest red. She opens it like an eager child. A tiny cricket cage, like the ones in street markets in Hong Kong. Not a cricket in it, though; a spice moth.
A woman in a garter belt. A man who understood her need.
She takes the wonderful new gift and carries it to the window and she opens it quickly; sends the moth out into the fluttering white. —It will die, he says.
She frees the man, as she closes the blind.
He will forever speak of this woman.
No wife can bear to listen.
Cannibal Notes
There will be no action in the street for hours.
Dawn before hot rolls or crows, before monks and nuns in woolen hoods and naked feet, and kneeling. She has an hour in the church-candle darkness before the crazed neighbor she's fascinated by comes in with his cologne again, louder than incense, seducing her. He's manic and she can seduce him back, pew to pew, prayer to prayer—windows filling with Christ and him rocking on the balls of his feet when he prays. He says she has Magdalene eyes. Do monks love like this? She doesn't know.
But in her early hour she's quiet in her tight black coat, and there's no eau de toilette yet. She's heard madmen wear a lot of scent on purpose but that they can't help it. There's a dark place, like a womb, where she's waiting for the holy to rock her senseless. To split the top of her head with her soul thrusting her; she'd like a lick of it please: obsession is awake again.
And the man who is on heavy doses, who doesn't want to take what he's been given to calm what rages in him, who doesn't want to take it or be crazy either, wants help, and he's praying for it. Wants a sign. He's heard that mania's a spiritual crisis, hasn't he? Curling like a baby, all two meters of him. He thinks she has holy answers, which she does; she's worked on answers. She's praying to let her help him, heal him.
It doesn't work.
But now, his choir-boy eyes and baritone have her attention. And with her eyes closed, serenity is distracting her heart. And she thinks maybe love would be enough.
The man comes an hour late, sleeps in, arrives later than she—the neighbor lady who's getting too psychically connected to his story which is dire as a church fire. In her flat, alone, she wakens with his nightmares, in the darkest before dark. She heads for the church pews, long before pigeons are ruffling in their gutters. Before the monks. Driven by nightmare and perfume and piety. He'll be there in a little while, she knows.
An hour, and then a singing mass, to pray harder with the other rats and frogs in the baptismal fonts, that's what they call them: church-rats, moles. Morning after morning, penitence, until they get an Alleluia. A lady with healing hands, everybody says, healing hands, but it's femininity roused by her neighbor's perfume. Does anybody else notice the waft at the side door when he strides in from the chill, old pipe smoke in his pocket and clinging to his clothes?
A morning breed apart, before dawn. Before clanging, lauding bells, and the sun.
The monastic order files in: white, woolen, boys left, girls right, fervent as a tide drowning everything that isn't sacred.
But she has a purpose. She'd like to have a turquoise-light epiphany, to drown in dark heaven, in this Romanesque church around the corner from where they both live, at number 22, second floor front, hers, fifth floor rear, his. Both hurrying here, some sixty gargoyles, saints, and a revolution of dragons in her hair. Who's the manic here and how does she know it's him?
He confesses every morning to her after the last bells when they go to have cafi au lait, after they've had the wafer and the blood of wine. Now the sun is sneaking up, and the good monks tucked back in their ordinary robes with no hoods—do they have hormones? He confesses. He wants to love women. All women.
She with a wafer of wisdom over the perfume, and the man, the man, the man—he's dead certain that her optimism and hands can save his life before the crows. Of course she wants to, she desperately wants to, or they would not both be there at this deep-cut well.
She wishes a storm would come.
They don't want depression; they do want rolls and marmalade; don't want chaos; they like Gregorian chants; they want a sign. She wants a sign. Not a nest of dead birds.
If one of the living infants falls from a nest and is touched—its mother, were she singing still, would not let it back in. After the fall, if there is a fall, who truly loves a survivor? Not the nest. It falls through the damp air to embrace the ground, tongue-kissed only once, and now a cannibal for God, or love, or which?
Again, she takes him home. It doesn't work. He says again that she looks to him like Magdalene.
Takes him home and lets him try, and he stops dead in the middle and says he is going to become a eunuch. He says theirs is not a love story and he is too sad and too French, so she concentrates on healing him, on his shoes, on Jesus; she tries, asks for secret spells, listens to his sorrow; she suggests love, he threatens he'll drown in the river. She suggests exercise and a change of scenery: a camel ride in a desert, an island. Instead, he gets married. Rather soon, she thinks. To a lady far away.
He sends her a postcard to praise her. She doesn't go to morning mass very often, anymore.
The monks and frogs and rats don't notice.
She goes once. Once—more. Dawn before hot rolls or crows. On the way out of church, at that same side door, there is a blind man on the steps. He pulls her arm as if he knows her. Wants to whisper to her and only her. —I'll give you two-thousand euros if you can make me see the sunrise. They are standing on winter-silver steps, light of all colors coming on. She spends this one cold hour trying with every word she knows until all the sun is up and cloud-dead, and she has not convinced the blind man of anything other than that he is blind and she can talk.
There will be no sunset.
—I'm sorry.
She's broken, and useless for truth or humanity, neither of which the blind man paid for; things that take an hour cost more. Always, she knows, in winter when the light goes, her stride turns black, however holy. And she picks up strangers for their heat. An hour is not very long to undo. She's hungry as a crow.
A Friday Desdemona
Othello is holding a dime-store mirror up over their heads, so she can see herself as he plunges. —Look, dear. Sweeting. Look.
It is full-length. He holds it up with one arm, the other under and around her white body.
He'd like to touch the skin in the mirror.
He has a virgin again. He will play the Moor far better tonight.
The darkness turns inside out, flame-sideways-upside. This is heart medicine. My love, are we dying?
—Would you like to wear this? He holds a white woven robe, fit for a death scene.
I'm not a star-fucker. I'm a girl who makes him pay attention. I'm white and large-thighed. I'm new passion. I'm cougar-eyed just like him. I'm desperate for peace. I'm a lover, not a warrior. I'm courageous. I'm rain. I'm a liberal. I'm not my mother.
—Look at yourself, Sweeting.
Later he says —Would you be my Friday date? Every Friday, come here. He strokes her like a rabbit.
But she wants more.
Later he says —Don't ask for the impossible. Later he says —Hit me if you want to.
The stairs smell of cat piss. Homeless piss. He's on the third floor. The door is the color of rust. It has a heavy iron bolt, which he opens.
Uptown is my mother. I think she wants him. It enrages me. But I believe in peace.
I keep The Times' theatre section, with his pictures. She's always looking at them.
Downtown, there's a man crouching against a car, leaning with his cardboard sign that says: I am hungry. I am hungry. I am hungry. Until he runs out of space. I want to save him. And I'm afraid of him.
Further downtown, up the fetid stairs and behind the bolted door, Othello lays me down. I'm his sheet; for his brown marble skin. I'm spilled white.
And if I love thee not, chaos is come again.
Until we run out of time.
He has to go.
Now he doesn't need a mirror. Now he can teach her.
But the silly girl wants love.
He's playing a warrior. A killing machine. Othello. A soldier. He keeps that in mind. He can never stop thinking. But he can't stop thinking about her, either. Her fire, her rain, her pale peach lace. He is jealous of that. Only that.
The distinction between war and loss will be blurred to the vanishing point. She wants to hold him back. His will to kill. His murder of what is not her. There are no definable battlefields or fronts. Just a large bed behind a bolted door and his collected Shakespeare, his scripts stacked up for a headboard. And her. A child who holds the warrior's huge hand by the fingertips. This man has a shield and she wants to break it. Pierce it. He closes his eyes.
A pungent Lower East Side fume, where she walks back out into the furnace of a July afternoon, attacks. She sees herself in every window, a girl who's just been had by a great man. She whispers —I cannot understand the darkness of you. But a street can't answer.
She tries on Saint Joan's armor. A dress. A Friday date. It does not fit. She's only a student. Light your fire, do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? You promised me my life but you lied!
—Why won't you let it work? I'm your lover. I'm not a warrior. I'm real. She's shouting.
—Hit me if you want to. He says it again.
When he first saw her, she was white flesh and too young, but he loved what he saw. The ghost-eyed courage. She was playing Saint Joan. Light your fire, her legs planted, sixteen summers urgent, theatre pounding down between her thighs.
A great actor plays his Othello again and again, in different seasons of his life. He waited. An artist can wait for his inspirations. Everything in its time.
And then, a few weeks of coupling, and that was enough. He would remember her when he needed to, when the actress in his arms was too pale. When he was alone, and she had no name. That, he liked.
He's an enormous man in the director's row; he holds me pinioned with an ice-cougar gaze like claws on my nipples. He wants to touch where I am not revealed.
He waits until I am of age. Then we lie as though it were a fact. No mention of love allowed, in his bowery room, three flights up from the bridge, to hold his shoulders which are museum marble. Which are smooth. To hold his beard as if I could tear it out.
—You are war. A man who does not even sweat. He holds a mirror up over our parallel bodies like Atlas holding the globe with one arm.
A Friday date.
Inevitably, she loves. Inevitably, he won't. Peace and war and loss.
—Honey, don't count on me. Don't wait for a promise. It won't come.
War. I'm Desdemona in a shroud. I cling to the black marble of the actor's arms. The Moor's arms. How quiet the quiet is, in a city of loss. I have a useless heart. I'm ready for just about anything. Sex. Hostility. God. He is a killing machine. He refuses to lie.
New York City devours me like the last frontier buffalo's entrails. I shout more as I march until blisters swell and burst and ooze into my boot leather. I'm hating how we had a very quiet war and never loved. I kept a calendar of how many times he had me. Put my skin in his earth. In his teeth. Finer than Olivier, more surprising than Welles. Love's deus ex machina, and vengeance, its inexorable script. Scripts askew behind the mattress, stacked with all his reviews, stapled. Pills for being too human. Raves for being the Classics' modern mister. I'm your solitary fantasy, right here in your bed. Look at me! Curtain up and curtain down. I loved how you killed me, with your socks still on. It all only lasted what? A couple of weeks. A pebble in a machine, a war that kept on killing. Its wheel, huge.
I always thought it was my mother. How she flounced, when he called. I thought she read my calendar, my tiny white diaries on hot summer mornings in my closed blue-papered bedroom, and that she called him up and said —You stay away. Understand, Othello, our girl has a future. My armchair-liberal mother wanted a safe white daughter, that summer when dark James Chaney was strung from his Mississippi oak.
Under a canopy of gauze, you bring out the hip-grinding jazz. The Robeson recordings, a singing riverine bass note, even deeper than yours. Bring out a caftan for a queen. Blackberry wine, after the mirror, and before you send me back to my mother. My mother's copy of "John Brown's Body" high on her bookshelf, her prized portrait of a drumming African, crooked on our foyer wall. —Like that?
There's a candlelight march all through those summer nights. I wheel around and around the courthouse, that July, my black man who is not mine, who is the warrior of ancient Venice and is not mine, is not there. He does not defend. He does not raise his sword or word. He does not argue, does not fight for me with Black Power fists. He listens to my mother's warning and puts out the light. Just like that.
I'm a white rain; lost, paraffin sizzling my fingernails, melting the night.
He says —Hit me if you want to. And he goes to sleep.
Like that.
I'm not a warrior. I'm tired. I'm a buffalo. I'm the sacrifice. No, of course that's not it. I light a new candle under my dead mother's photograph. The paper catches fire and I have to douse it. In the crimson light I'm stabbing at forgiving her, like a slimed fish, but its eyes are open.
I read his book.
In the window next to an ice cream store and passing by a vat of the fudge marble-brickle, I see his famous face. You, on a publisher's cover. Brightened. Blurred. If I get in touch what will he do? He'll send me a daisy. A caftan. I pass ten broken telephones. He'll go ... Sweeting, see how beautiful you are? Thank you for wearing silk. And thank you for removing it. A hunter's orange grin. A warrior's red basso. My mother definitely wanted him.
There's one reunion, in his bed, after my divorce. I whisper —Help? Please? Couldn't you help me to shine, too?
—You know we're family, honey. The first is always family, he says, cello-voiced. Renowned. The best Othello since ...
A collection of bottled and capped sentinels lines up on his kitchen counter in a wooded upstate canyon. He is huge. More huge than before. He pops something yellow and small and dizzying under my nose in the sweet darkness, and surrounds me. More giant than before.
The darkness turns inside out, drugged shadows, burning flame sideways-upside, once again. But this is heart medicine. Are we dying?
—Would you like to wear this? He holds a white woven robe fit for a death scene. —Can you only love a Desdemona? I finally punch at the black marble that can't break. Nothing in him breaks. A star. Who does not mind guns. I punch. He doesn't shatter at all. My tight white knuckles hit. Go on, hit. Hate. Be a warrior, woman. Lovers do not last.
The girl makes him feel too old. He sends her off with a white caftan tucked into her purse for a present. The best he can give.
I have no eyes. I have no body. It is the quality of having power to be loved. It is something men need from women and that they do not get. It is the cause, Othello: So put out the lights.
I'm wearing peach lace pants. At the fountain near the Plaza Hotel. I like how the air slips up and under my loose high-polished legs. Men notice my leather skirt. With snaps. From Rome. It flaps as I walk. My knees show, silken. I speed-walk to hard and crazy tubas. Loud. I zoom like a blowfly. I dig deep in my pocket for a snippet of string to tie it around a rusted rod of a tall iron fence to proclaim that I was here. Because of that slide, there, I skinned my knee and needed iodine. See? I lived at number eight with the red canopy. Right over there. My mother wanted my black Othello. My skinned right knee hurts. I am a grey stone, in the middle of Fifth Avenue, all the telephones are broken.
I knock on your new uptown door. I'm a detective. I found you. And you peer out at me through venetian blinds, holding a hammer.
—Nothing, I say. Just hello. And I hold our gaze through the slats. You remember too, but not exactly my name. I have no name for you. Damn. I can tell.
—I was just walking, and I needed you.
—Of course you did. Basso fame, old Shakespearean chuckling. Unlatching the chain, grudgingly. An old man's gamble.
You really cannot think what to call me.
—Do you want to come in?
—I'm ok, Luke. You're startled by the use of your first name; no one ever uses it. Hey, cougar. I'm prowling. I'm out checking my fence posts. I extend my hand. Press his flesh.
A sound like an old warship moving metal through ice. You're going to like me, soldier.
But I turn on one runner's toe and bound away, Olympian, through the open window. A blowfly. A gadfly.
Brava. This was courage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BEAUTIFUL SOON ENOUGH by MARGO BERDESHEVSKY Copyright © 2009 by Margo Berdeshevsky. Excerpted by permission of FC2. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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