was part of the package.
“What fresh Hellenic is this?” Bonnie wondered on her first sighting of Vidal Papadopoulos. This was the morning of December 2, scant hours after her Santa Maria embarkation, the shoreline of the recent past still visible, swimmable if she cared to throw herself overboard. Semi-comatose from a night of unpacking, her cuticles a ragged disaster after so much rending of cardboard, she’d taken her coffee onto the Juliet, thinking only to escape the jumble of cartons, to survey the scene.
Across the alley from the Santa Maria’s hindquarters was – still is – the Pacific Colonnade, a twelve-storey mid-rise, a building unremarkable in design, substandard in execution. Bonnie gave it a critical once-over, noted the rust stains left by rainwater trickling from downspouts, noted the cracks in the cladding, noted that most of the tenants – conventionally modest, covetous of privacy – kept their blinds lowered. Not Vidal. Her aerie was on a parallel plane with his fourth-floor flat. To look ahead was to look into his unobstructed living room. There he stood, perhaps twelve metres distant, assuming the wide-legged stance of a Colossus astride, swaddled in a plush white terrycloth bathrobe, his hands-on-hips posture suggesting impatient, yet amused, expectancy: a burlier, more hirsute Mrs. Danvers, waiting for the second Mrs. de Winter, eager to find out just how much she could take. Eye met eye. There was no doubting the mutuality of their regard, but neither gave a wave or nod or wink. Neither looked away, not until Vidal pivoted on his heel, spun in the direction of the adjacent sideboard.
“What are you up to, funny man?”
Vidal bent over a turntable. Did he give his butt a Br’er Rabbit wiggle, this way to the briar patch? He set the stylus on an LP – already in place, primed for this moment – then turned to his audience of one. The vinyl spun. Vidal danced, a shy little shimmy that evolved into what Bonnie described to her best friend Philip as “Zorba Night with the Chippendales.”
This was no one-off. For twenty-five years, more or less, from December 2, 1984, until well into the present millennium, morning after morning, barring those short spans of time when one or the other might have been out of town or flu-ridden or hungover, Vidal vamped and Bonnie observed. For a quarter century Bonnie saw her neighbour age, watched his cock shrivel like a slug slow-roasted on a tanning bed, saw hernias emerge, the scars of their correction, saw the lavish bath mat of his chest hair whiten, the Yeti of Naxos. Others must surely have benefited from Vidal’s terpsichorean contortions – they were visible to anyone with a north-facing view – but Bonnie was persuaded he had her uppermost in mind as the ideal audience for his signature moves. The Tumescent Trot. The Priapic Preen. She was his first reader. His Muse.
Leafing through a magazine at the grocery checkout, Rosellen noted a spacing error, or so she supposed; “The penis mightier than the sword” surely wasn’t the writer’s intention. She was intent on buying pork chops and onions, was undefended, unprepared for molten joy to pour down from the parapets. She thought she might wet herself. Nothing had ever roused in her such happiness. The penis mightier than the sword became her dulling mantra on those mercifully rare occasions when Bryan called her up from the audience to assist with the dick trick that took no time at all to perform. It was the penis mightier than the sword that came to mind when Rosellen saw, for the first and only time, Vidal in full flight: an experience that reinforced her conviction that external genitalia evolved for reasons that were at least as comedic as generative.
“You don’t mean it,” she said to Bonnie.
It was a chance collision in the storage room. Rosellen – new to her supervisory duties in the building, anxious to prove herself, perhaps more rule-bound and doctrinaire than necessity required – was on a get-acquainted inspection tour, alert to evidence of vermin, sniffing to determine if anyone had been smoking, which was forbidden in public areas.
“Can I give you a hand?”
She helped Bonnie force shut the door of her locker, its interior a study in tortured complexity. They talked, compared notes. Bonnie’s included Vidal.
“You don’t mean it.”
“I do.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Come see for yourself,” said Bonnie. “Tomorrow morning. Be there by eight, curtain’s at quarter past.”
“Should I bring anything?”
“No need. I’ve got coffee. He’ll bring buns.”
“And a weenie,” said Rosellen.
They fell about. Sophomoric indulgence. Transgressive giddiness. Next morning, she was there on the dot; Bonnie’s mother, Gloria, was the other guest.
“I have binoculars,” she said.
“I don’t think they’ll be necessary,” said Bonnie.
“You’re pretty close to the action,” said Rosellen, whose tool belt contained an advanced tape measure she might have used to ascertain the exact span.
Bonnie said, “Spitting distance.”
“Maybe you should,” said Gloria, raising her glasses, optimizing the magnification. “Wait. I see movement. Definitely not an eggplant.”
Gloria, Gloria. Gloria in excelsis.
Bonnie never misses her more than at Christmas, a season neither could abide. It was the only time of year her mother, etiquette’s standard bearer, allowed herself one hearty, loud “Fuck.” It would fly from her lips – seemingly unprovoked, at some random moment – with the merry, pent-up power of a champagne cork orbiting the room on New Year’s Eve.
Gloria, Gloria. Sic transit Gloria.
On Christmas Eve –
Not any Christmas Eve, either, but Christmas Eve, 2018, the Santa Maria’s last Christmas Eve on Earth. In 101, Rosellen mulls wine and waits for J.C. In the penthouse, Philip is at the window, looking across the alley to the Pacific Colonnade. Vidal Papadopoulos is decorating his tree.
“He has nice balls.”
“You had a choice,” Bonnie says, “yet you went there. God. Look at this.”
She holds up a cocktail apron, 1950s vintage, apricot-coloured, unfathomably sheer, with satin ties. Did postwar hostesses really favour such impractical apparel when passing around celery sticks slathered with Cheez Whiz? Bonnie ties it on, essays a model’s sashay, winces. Her hips are no longer runway limber. Never were.
“That was Gloria’s?”
“It was,” says Bonnie. She unfastens it, holds it up to her face like a veil: the Salome of Nicola and Harwood. “Yes or no?”
“No,” says Philip.
“Oh, come on.”
“No.”
Philip is firm.
