Touching Distance
“An order of Glenfiddich and one of Pernod and peppermint were in a club one night, side by side and looking rather lonely.”
Another Juliana excerpt, for the curious. I believe this was published in Yellow Medicine Review.
Touching Distance
(an excerpt from Juliana)
by Travis Hedge Coke
An order of Glenfiddich and one of Pernod and peppermint were in a club one night, side by side and looking rather lonely. Maria Cam picked them up, and flickered towards a small black table that was as far she could go without leaving. While walking, she inadvertantly watched the tangerine strobe of the overhead lights stretch pulses on the surface of each drink. The light grew reddish as it refracted through liquid and exited glass to streak from wrists to the ends of her white pleather opera gloves.
Nana tapped nine fingers against the table in a rolling motion that somehow failed to keep any sort of rhythm whatsoever at all. She blinked, one shin swinging continually against a table leg, and whenever anything happened at all, her head would shift just enough her long, black, pleated hair seemed irridescent as it shivered over her rhinestone jacket. That it was all so rhythmless as it was unrelenting, only enhanced the ambient impatience.
Cam placed the drinks at the table's edge, put her hands over Nana’s and stood. Her standing was sufficient to snuff the tapping. Releasing and taking a seat across from Nana, she then had to put away one third of her whiskey before she capable of coping with Nana picking at loose chatons with one hand, and resurgently tapping via the left. Wincing under the whiskey’s sudden influx, unsubtle influence, she mentally prepared her small speech and tried and failed to deliver it. Hiss of air and clacking of fingernails: nonvocalised moment: bzbuzbz: suspended in pseudosilence: klklik.
Nana raised her drink and, knowing clearly she was soon to be engaged in a thoroughly rhetorical conversation, watched Cam intently and with complete disregard. She isn’t in love and Nana knows it, but an unrequited stance is superior to any duet you can sing. Nothing to do but sip and smile, singing, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”
“Quit that,” said Cam. The strobelights ceased, the club temporarily dismissed as a Lou Reed standard picked up in scattered speakers. She never made fun of Nana's name, after all, not a single Balzac reference, never a Momma or even an offhand reference to that dog in Peter Pan. Nothing but compliments on poise Cam could not keep up, poise that belied her youth. Nana sang at her, pointed out her clean, smooth neck belied her junk habit. Nada from Cam, but Nana kept it up all the... Everything relit, this time in a permanent sort of blue.
Blue glass betwixt thumb and two fingers, now-bluish Nana tightened her smile and blushed through her foundation.
Warming sympathetically, Cam regretted her preplanned statements (but that regret quickly passed) and redoubled her determination to get on with termination before the night was done. Guilt scoured her veins along blood and (not enough) heroin. The menial message of the cerulean illumination permeated through pores, through her eyes. Her ears hummed with the sounds of Rearranger. She was thankful for the cold cauterizing effect of the whiskey, the cool piezo-disaffection of her gloves, her boots and eyes.
“Well,” said Cam.
They sat in the silence of the music.
“Well,” said Cam, slightly louder, “say something.”
Blue let up from the ceiling, and much in the club stopped being blue in its turn. Maria’s makeup unblued itself. Maria Cam. Cam’s Cavalli shiftdress went back to being as white as the waters of the Severn (and just as likely to swallow even the best of princesses whole, scant and thin as it was) while the silk sapphire scarf she belted it with hardly changed at all.
Nana wanted to touch, but instead, tossed out a casual, “How can I?”
Nana almost touched Maria’s soft bleach-white hair, retracting before that tangential could become action.
Nana sung, “Beedle-dee beedle-dee dee,” and with her glass in her left hand, her right took the deathly depths to across the table and the middle of Maria’s sharp chin. How strange, the pale opalescence, she thought, distracted by her own painted fingernail transcribing from beetlewood chin to jaw to that soft, plumped and pierced, earlobe. Gave it a tiny tug of tribadic-tendency while her victim reddened slightly and made a face significantly more extreme than what Nana gauged as her actual feeling.
“That, you can do, but you can’t say anything? ... Song snatches, pulls and pokes, tapping, prodding, pushing, but nothing to say, eh?”
“All I’ve got is this poor little glass for defense and you’re looking at me like a ground to surface missile. While, I’m thinking something more in terms of surface to surface.”
“You’re all surface,” said Maria. She removed the hand from her face and placing it back on Nana’s side, kept the table between them.
Nana slid her seat in response, sidling to the opposite end of the oval impediment of that thinly-lacquered tabletop. Lifting three legs of her chair she lurched left with a sequence of scratchy jerking movements.
“All surface,” reaffirmed Cam, for and to herself. “And you can quit thinking of osculation, right this minute.”
At Nana’s smile, Cam felt it necessary to add: “Of any kind!”
“They’re all of a kind,” said Nana. “Topologically and logically.”
“Don’t,” Cam carefully produced the so slenderly pronounced word with glass to lips and took a pull before saying anything further. Lips receded from glass and further was: “Where do you get off telling me what’s logical? You’re not in a position to dictate, to speculate.”
Three swigs more of the whiskey; Cam held the near-empty glass defensively between Nana and herself. Held it right in front of her face, now entirely depleted of drink, as Nana now encroached. Warmth and an orchestra number and thick white light all encroached. Nana would put a hand down, Cam would lift and put it somewhere else. And Nana would do it again.
“Do I have to fall back on Sound of Music, again,” Nana asked, “or are you going to confess and be sated?”
“The hell does that mean?”
“Means, simply, if I don’t know what your problem is, I can’t solve it.”
“Not that anyone’s asked you to.” It was becoming nothing but words, at that, and Maria Cam could not bear, to the degree that she left Nana’s palm on the pulse in her thigh.
“Ask...” began Nana, but it was not going anywhere and she grew quickly quiet.
With almost mock exasperation (but not mock enough to be comfortable): “You don’t even know what monogamy means, do you?”
“Sure,” Nana said. “I had a beautifully carved nightstand made out of it.”
Cam sighed.
Nana broadened her smile, deepened her breathing, flexed her palm along a twitching and stockinged abductor and said swiftly, “Locked in the attic, some time back, I believe.”
Sighing once more for good measure, Cam tried to remember her precise and deftly engineered speech. It fled, quick and spiteful it left her, so short ago on the tremulously eager on easy tongue-tip and now totally absent. Gone from her mouth, from her brain and the club, up in a puff and she was blushing again.
“We can’t...” She scratched the scars under a white glove with fingers firm and subtle and under another white glove. Succinct as she could, she said, “I can’t keep up like this.”
Ascetic Nana, an antecedent, how lovely an houri. Already lying for comfort, Nana and Cam. Then Cam and already Nana. Already on her feet, Nana said two things: “In an hour, then, at the Dead Delicious, downtown,” and “Nah, forget it, lets recollect at Lin’s.”
Then Nana stalked off, getting just far away enough from Cam to comfortably search out another customer. It was exhausting work, true, but you had to make each feel like they were something more than warmth a pulse and a paycheck. Possibly, one over the course of the night would prove to be, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
A few brief words of reintroduction and the fresh customer pushed through a mass of the club’s occupants, hers amongst theirs and theirs all hers for the picking. Moments passed, and again, under the softening light, two in a club, side by side and looking rather lovely.