I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek Page A

spreading bullshit. Well, fucking allora, Sallie, if a very much alive Marisol, trailing perfume, doesn’t get into the Bluebird, help herself to a smoke from the pack on the dash, and ask, “Know where a girl can get a drink around here?”
    Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, “What else you got in that bag, Joe?”
    â€œWhataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.”
    â€œWhew! Smells like your athletic supporter’s got balls of scomorza, ” Marisol says. “But what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.”
    Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who he’s with he misses her. Where’s Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol
to flow from her mouth into his, but it’s just her tongue sweeping his.
    â€œWhat?” Marisol says.
    â€œI thought you were going to share.”
    â€œDahlink,” she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, “you don’t remember I’m a swallower?”
    Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater he’d go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and you’d get a laugh—shit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whitey’s so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.
    â€œSo, luvvy, is here where we’re spending our precious time?” Marisol asked, turning on the radio.
    Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Bruno’s. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.
    â€œWhere’s all the sheets and towels?” she asked. “Joe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?”
    â€œThey’re at the Chink’s. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.”
    â€œYou better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe you’re missing a woman’s touch.”
    That was all she had to say, touch , and they were on the bare mattress.
    Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he
pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time she’d invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch , she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A woman’s touch .
    When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her body—low tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. “Hear that?” he asked, not sure she was awake.
    â€œThey’re loud enough to wake the dead,” Marisol said. “When I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.”
    â€œI didn’t mean the nighthawks,” Joe said. “Those new