Excerpts from Kabuki in a G - String
Meet Roberta
Shrieking, “Take me, sweet Jesus,” Roberta Martin’s great grandmother hurled herself into the fiercest tornado in the history of Lubbock County, Texas. She promptly perished in her savior’s stormy embrace. Her youngest son Wilson found her naked body – minus the plastic hair curlers, slippers and house dress she’d been wearing – wide-eyed and as bald as a bowling ball, out in Orville Covington’s cotton field, past the railroad tracks on Avenue 11. Perhaps she was demented; then again, perhaps not. Say what you will, a lot of God exists in a tornado. Roberta was thinking about Great Grandma and the tornado just now, as she had given up trying to sleep on her Air France flight from New York to Paris. There was too much activity and someone behind her kept belching. She figured on a flight from New York it was best not to say anything to a man who belched, so she just endured it.
She was also thinking about her upcoming reunion with her cousin Chad. Other people had momentous meetings, and now it was her turn. Darcie Copely, from upstairs in fines-collections, met Shia LaBeouf at Universal Citywalk – or so she said (you could never be sure about Darcie’s stories). Roberta’s parents had a momentous meeting with a freight train one Friday evening on a level crossing down near Sweetwater. They died in the nick of time. Her father had wanted a son and her mother a real West Texan female, frilly and fluffy. Except for female, Roberta wasn’t any of those things, and things had been getting worse not better. Last winter, during an ice storm – in her defense, she was wearing a flannel jacket and earmuffs – the man at the service station called her ‘sir.’ So, even female was getting iffy.
Chad and Paris
Then he was out the double doors, down the cobbled street, away from celebration and joyful people. At the Porte de Saint Cloud metro station, he merged with the afternoon travelers who, like him, were headed into rather than out of central Paris. Basking in the refreshing anonymity, he felt uplifted by the distance between him and these other travelers. From a young age, Chad cultivated the art of disappearing. He even escaped from himself, into books. By the time he managed physically to escape the pains and places of his childhood, he discovered that he’d already done it emotionally.
Paris, with its impassive heart, always provided Chad detachment from other people. If he loved anything about Paris – and he loved a great deal about Paris – he loved her indifference. He loved how waiters dismissed you with a flick of their elegant wrists and shopkeepers ignored you and check-out clerks yawned at you and police turned their noses up at you and the ticket ladies at the Musée snubbed you. The cynical disregard of Parisians always heartened him.
Big city life should be like this.
Thinking about Paris had become one of his most important activities. He understood Paris. After many years, he didn’t know if he counted yet as a Parisian or still as a West Texan in exile. How did you gauge such a thing, anyway? And yet
questions of identity, the theme of his adult life, seemed urgent now, a week before his fortieth birthday. Limbo, he thought, he lived in limbo -- lost somewhere out in the undulating fastness of the Atlantic.
Simon and Roberta
Back again in the Peristyle, they walked hand-in-hand, shoulders brushing, down the stairs into the clear, clean light of the upper gardens. There, on the terrace of the Jardins Bas, in full few of numerous tourists, Simon pulled Roberta to him and
kissed her.
She clung to his hard chest with a shocking immediacy, clung like epoxy or Velcro.
“Nice, that,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, her head tilted back, looking up into his eyes, tenderly jolted in some female place she couldn’t even locate.
He released her.
She stared at him.
Then, flushed with passion, she looked away. From where they stood, at the top of the horseshoe staircase, she could see the green-hued lower basin and the vast span of the Petit Canal, the flower beds behind them, the woodland which embraced the canal. Over Simon’s shoulder she observed the Château and the Peristyle and the people sitting on the stairs of the Trianon-sous-Bois. A mother pushing a baby in a stroller crossed slowly through the flowerbeds toward Mansart’s Buffet d’Eau, where Neptune had been cavorting with Amphitrite since 1703.
“Really nice,” Simon said, gesturing back toward the Château, toward the parkland of Versailles. “Now. How about an ice cream?”
“Okay,” she said, softly, one hand against the heat of her face.
“Okay,” he echoed, leading her off by the hand.
