Pitch Fork

Brave new fiction by Errata Adder

ORCAS Island, again. Without Jake. In search of Jake. In captive need of Jake.

Jake told me that what caught his fancy (can fancy only be caught? or can it be thrown, lateraled, intercepted?) was the way I swayed at parties as if to a personal draft. We met at Manhattan parties where Susan Sontag shook the ashes from her hair and Michiko Kakutani found herself stuck between the cracks in the sofa cushions. He loved, he said, my gypsy sandals and twirling skirts, my flair for turning every party into a campfire polka. Fancifully, Jake longed to fiddle while I danced with the flames and enchanted the crickets. He loved most, he said, my long, lime green earrings, which tinkled like wind chimes when I tilted my head to drink in his sweet nothings (which were more than nothing to me!). Tinkle for me, he whispered, disturbing my earrings with his virile breath. I tilted, I tinkled; I tinkled, I tilted. I went from side to side like a wind chime molested by mutual breezes.

Glass in hand, I never spilled a drop.

But those parties. There was talk at those parties, and crackers, and beverages. In a sense the talk was the most trivial commodity, for the crackers left crumbs, and the beverages left stains, but the talk—there were no loose sentences left on the carpet, no commas mistaken for fallen lashes. The talk was swallowed by the smoke, which in turn was vacuumed by the cool, inhaling night.

If only it had been Jake’s wife lodged in that sofa crack. If only we could have found a closet safe for our kissing. We were forced instead to take refuge in our beverages. Slivers of ice tantalized our adulterous lips.

The first flush is the hardest.

The last trombone is the loudest.

Fat with oysters, the Walrus and the Carpenter serenaded the moon with twin kazoos.

Cacophony—flushes, trombones, kazoos—is unwelcome on Orcas Island. The carousel mares remain savagely mute. The castles are curtained in a silent mist.

Film at eleven.

Jake, Orcas Island, me. Jake, wise to my distress, told me that if I followed him to Orcas Island he would refuse to lower the drawbridge (ha ha); that we needed to be apart, to replenish our love in different climes; that his wife was growing suspicious of my swayings; that—oh, he had a laundry list of reasons, rationalizations. I told him that I would cleave unto him, that if need be I would sleep in the wet shadows of his castle in a pup tent. Rainproof outerwear provided by L. L. Bean! He sighed, fastening onto the emotional greeds festering beneath my whimsies. To jolly him up, I made a serious face and said that I had a dream there were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee. He didn’t catch the reference. He didn’t laugh.

“You’re so vain,” I said, “you prob’bly think this sequel’s about you.”

Life is a fiction, I told him. Art is misery’s tariff. And, adjusting my voice to whisper mode, I said, I shall never leave you. Never.

Feets, he said, do yo’ stuff.

And to Orcas Island he bolted.

So in the shadow of the castle I have pitched my tent, spreading my checkered cloth upon wet grass. From the castle tower Jake’s wife shoots me looks which, were they arrows, would slay. Jake, furtive, afraid, bundles himself into his sporty import and speeds to town before I can flag him down. Times like these were made for Taster’s Choice, I shout; but he has no time for coffee, for biscuits. Stains and crumbs belong to the metropolis. He’s chosen country life in all its rude economies; chosen his wife over—me.

In Manhattan, the Walrus and the Carpenter would be asked to deposit their tools at the door. In Manhattan, terror is an affair of the tongue.

Susan, Mishie, I’m coming home.

Orcas Island, adieu.

—James Wolcott