Mopsy
by Mark Mirsky
… He bent down beneath two bushes That grew from the same place, one wild, the other an olive, Through which the damp winds could not blow, nor rays of shining sun Beat, or rains pierce through, so thick together did the branches grow Interwoven. Beneath the two shrubs went Odysseus— With broad hands he scraped up a dry bed. Plenty of fallen leaves were there. Enough for two, three men—to take cover no matter how harsh the winter. Seeing this, the endlessly battered, godly Odysseus rejoiced, Lay right down in the middle of the leaves, under a heap stretched Like a man who in a pile of black ash buries a smoldering torch, At the edge of inhabited land, where no neighbors live nearby And keeps alive the seed of fire… The Odyssey, Book 5
I turn into the wiles of never-ending subdivisions, the dreaming of one-family bungalows, craning of Great Neck’s stately mansions. Embarked on serpentine pathways through the sprawl of city suburbs in the lanes of Long Island, I find hidden backways, byways, and shady curving streets. The trees, front yard and back, suck up salt spray whipped from its Sound, the driveways are draped with low hanging branches, a screen of green through summer, early fall, later a latticework for snow drifts. I sigh, as if I were Odysseus thrown up shivering from the Mediterranean, naked, buried in a pit of leaves.
Where along the backwater sweeping opposite to Bridgeport, Westport, lapping the promontories of the Island’s would he find shelter? On what finger of land poking into the Atlantic could he come ashore? What would he suspect concealed in these suburban homes—sleights of hand, intimate zones, touching that tender obscenity, “privates”? Here comes fourteen-year-old Nausika tripping across the backyard lawn toward a stranger hidden by the fallen timber, where wildlife survives in a thin line of woods or tangle of brush, despite the stress of fences, the crossword of streets with as many eyes as windows.
Mopsy?
Was it possible to name a daughter Mopsy? Was it possible for a father to be called Billy Barbarossa?
What was Mopsy doing with me?
Why did she tell me the tale of her best friend, Maraschino, consenting to be trussed in steel links between her legs, rolling under her armpits? The lengths locked together were borrowed from four custom built racing bicycles hanging next to Maraschino on ceiling hooks from the roof of the large garage. Under the tempered alloy chain shimmering blonde tresses, the pride of her husband, hung to below her waist, dangling on swells of flesh firm as an adolescent’s. The huge garage housed a Mercedes, a Lamborghini, a Honda Civic, the family van with child safety seats, an armor plated Hummer. Maraschino wavered four feet above the concrete floor, the chains looped prettily to expose nipples, a cold course strapped into her buttocks, steel chinks knotted on her back.
Occasionally Maraschino clinked when her husband set her going back, forth as if in a playground swing. In the garage the heat had been turned off. It was full blast in the brick Colonial where the children’s babysitter sat guard. Whip in hand, her husband paced. He wanted goose flesh. With a flick of the riding crop, he tried to sting a spark of fire in the dry leaves.
Was there a lesson in this for me?
“You will fall in love with her,” Mopsy promised.
And when I proposed that I could fall in love with Mopsy?
“You have a wife,” she retorted sharply.
“Why did you offer me Maraschino?”
She laughed in my face. “You have such an imagination.”
You will want to know what I was doing with Mopsy. I asked myself that every time I sat down to write a response to her provocations.
“Isn’t she beautiful,” Mopsy said in that bright voice, which leads one to imagine much more, her eyes soulful. Maraschino, her friend, after a brief conversation with me swept to the end of the room, dozens of eyes following the cleavage in her red, red, all too red revealing dress.
A room full of art critics, mostly men—there are uglier faces in the world, but… Disfigured by gossip, nastiness, these snort up cheap white wine in plastic cups. A few gallery owners stand out, superior in depravity, more forceful. The wine is barely drinkable. I owe my standing here to a willingness to write for nothing, scribbling on a new Web site dedicated to reviewing every gallery in Manhattan, Nosedot.com.
“Catchy, no?” its Creator asked when I offered my services.
“Too catchy?” My question was lost in the wave of the entrepreneur’s hand giving me leave to “Blow man, blow!”
Mopsy wants to be a journalist, wants to leave her husband in downtown Great Neck, a Heating Systems salesman. She befriended Maraschino in a Nursery school P.T.A. Mopsy does not live in immediate proximity to Maraschino whose many chambered home is in a gated community so private nobody knows its name; an ocean promontory kept off maps of Long Island.
This is Mopsy’s mythology.
I try to imagine Maraschino’s mate, the bored husband. What do I know of junk bonds, of arbitrage, of corporate merger and dissolutions? Is he a captain of risk capital, a computer whiz—something to do with numbers brought him such rapid multiplication he felt his wife, however beautiful, ought to be put in motion and there she is—at the end of the room coming toward me—but nothing makes her that special until I see her swinging in chains. How did he get her up there, suspended, on a pulley? The mechanical displaces the effort to imagine an erotic response. Clanking of chains, here she is in front of me, perfectly normal. We exchange polite, vague sentences. “Mopsy tells me…”
“She said you… the same…”
One can choose which of us says what. Not what we say, but what we do not say, is what I want to understand. Does she wince at the edge of each word?
I could never afford to keep her in chains.
I inhabit a rent-controlled hole on Avenue D and shower with plaster from a crumbling closet wall each morning. I rise to a job behind a university library desk. I give to an angry wife what is left from my monthly check. She feeds, clothes, houses and otherwise provides for herself on this, while supplementing the income of two very angry, post-adolescents. I am not a romantic object.
Mopsy met me while researching a paper on Caravaggio, coming to the desk for help in locating recent studies. Happily I had cribbed several striking sentences from a new coffee table edition of the artist’s work only the week before while preparing a review. Instantly I became something more than a morose man with silver hair, dandruff flaked behind the counter and when I introduced Nosedot.com into the conversation, I could see myself reflected, wild eyed in her mischievous ones, a satyr.
I made myself more terrible yet. I concealed from Mopsy that I still loved my wife. I never mentioned that it was I who urged her to contribute to the post-adolescents, that I made sneaking trips back to her apartment in the block of East Side Cooperatives by bus or foot and often spent the night there; leaving in the morning with jars of soup, meat patties wrapped in aluminum foil, whatever I could nab from the fruit bowl for my own larder.
Whom does Maraschino’s husband wrapping her in hardened alloy chain imagine? Is he a medieval knight securing an unbreakable chastity belt, stowing the key in his own burnished plate, before galloping off to a Crusade? Does he return by Lamborghini, contemplating after a time of bitter fighting, a weary trek through the toe of Italy, his piece of Nordic cherry pie, still blushing and secure? Is he a Roman General circling the female slave he has just purchased in the wake of pillage in the upper reaches of the Rhine? Or perhaps he is an S.S. sadist in a back chamber of Auschwitz, clicking his boots before contemplating the rape of a helpless creature?
Why doesn’t she brain him with a loop of the chain?
Or is she sorry, genuinely sympathetic, that this sorry man cannot summon a response to her except in a charade?
Of course I love charades—the reception for a very, very, bad artist is a charade and here are Maraschino and Mopsy in their charade dresses. I would hang in chains if it made me more attractive to them.
I was not in love with Mopsy. To be more precise, at this point I am not in love with Mopsy imagined in links of hardened alloy; or as she appears now (at the alcoholic debutantes’ ball in her ball gown of soft black velvet, neckline plunging to breasts about to pop). The two women stand out in this shabby gallery. Its best painters, sculptors long ago fled a place known to hold on to artists’ sales, pleading bankruptcy). A few uptown sharks circle twirl from canvas to canvas: everyone else is in dungarees.
In the future I may fall in love with her again as I did at first. When Mopsy left my desk at last, taking many notes after opening a chest of personal information— the vapors of intoxication floated in her wake. I had just about written the paper for her. A thick, recent volume on Caravaggio lay open to a full page illustration of the sick Bacchus, I thought of renting a car, draped in a sheet, with ivy around my temples, driving to her street on Long Island, finding a way to thread myself just behind the fence line. I suspected from there across a shallow space of distressed lawn to a concrete patio it would only be two or three feet. It would be enough—a blank canvas for strange footprints in the shelf of February ice.
She had given me her e-mail, as much as unlatching her window. A laptop could be as dangerous as the mirror of Snow White’s wicked queen. I did not need to go through a back door into this woman’s bedroom, or loom, as Jack Frost tracing in glass panes. She had but to flick on her machine and call up my messages. There, I was, as good as invisible to the rest of the house.
Endless e-mails, yes, but that’s what I clutch, a quiver of electronic responses buried in my flesh, little arrows, that barely break the skin.
Months after our first meeting, Mopsy tells me the story of Maraschino, when the latter calls on Mopsy’s cell phone, desperate; on a trip into possible oblivion. Is her friend hopped up on pills interrupting us, I ask as Mopsy leans over my counter at the library? No matter, her friend is in distress. Maraschino’s backyard goes into my file cabinet. Her home sits on ten acres and the way to the fence lies across a rolling lawn, through a garden, then into a grove of birch, alder, old growth timber, oaks, until the ivy clad electrified posts of a chain link fence.
These are heroic dimensions for romance like a great English country house. The limits of space in Mopsy’s backyard are too narrow for epic drama. Maraschino’s lawns are wide enough for Henry James or Edith Wharton.
Masterpiece Theatre, however is over. Maraschino retreats in her red dress for another triumphant turn around the Art gallery, and Mopsy tells her latest story. A racing driver roared beside Maraschino after her return from a desperate drive meant to end in Long Island Sound. She was fleeing from husband, children and house, but long before I could arrive on the scene the race was over. Mopsy kept me in suspense for three weeks with tales of Maraschino, and hints of how desirable, dangerous, needy, she was; how she would adore me, before revealing that I had been beaten to the finish line by a driver twenty-five years my junior.
The curtain was pulled prematurely on my part in a tragic-comedy.
#
Mopsy’s attention is only intermittent. She comes industriously to the library desk on days when she has stacked the children with a baby sitter or chained her husband to the post. Mopsy loves me—she assures me. She loves Soho. She loves everyone and everything, even Nosedot.com (I promised to help her write for it) but this unbounded love after several months seems to exclude more than include. The only thing she does not like is the name her father gave her, “Mopsy.” She prefers to be called “Mary.”
Does she have a less generous, more restricted, narrow, hot and clammy love that she pinches out to others? As “Mary”?
It is time to rise out of the pit of leaves, shake off the morning frost, bits of twig, raid a clothesline for some pants, a shirt, socks, search the dumpsters for shoes, hat and a jacket, head back to Manhattan. Face it—I am naked, out of season.
“Why do you call me Mopsy?” I hear from a back window.
“You are a rag doll, ready to be torn apart at any moment, subject in your image of who you are to the whims of the child who holds you against his or her cheek?
I, obviously, am also a Mopsy.
Back behind my counter in the starched uniform of a senior Librarian, the wind down the corridor declaims, “Forget Mopsy! Forget Maraschino!” They are out of reach fruit in the branches of the suburbs. They are too real and pursuing the bodies of young men, all too real, heroes of the road, disheveled and probably untalented painters. Mopsy confesses that she is smitten with one who proclaimed his genius at the beginning of her class and defied the teacher to prove otherwise.
This last is an abuse of language. This is against the library rules. The schoolmaster in me comes to the fore. I decide to shut the door and restrict both these women to the Young Adult Room.
On the counter lies a letter from Sweden I have printed out. It’s too cold and far for even an Odysseus to swim there, but distance only renders it ethereal. The sentences are from a former sweetheart who wandered in one day to ask for a Par Lagerqvist (“I am Barabbas!” I wept, and sent her out with the volumes of Hamsun and Isak Dinesen.) She writes from Stockholm now that her last few trysts with men have left her bereft of hope in romance outside the library.
Surely these are golden words interspersed with the brass I had exchanged lately with other women and their timid electronic starts and stops. “I am searching in books now,” she writes, “for my partners.”
How to step into a book to meet her?
I recall her breasts in the bookstalls when I entreated her to come in early one morning, during a coffee break, when the upper floors were sure to be deserted.
I leaned her back against the very shelf from which, months before, I found Hunger, and sent her home with Hamsun’s novel of starvation and desire. My lips touched hers and found that her tongue met mine. My fingers inserted themselves into the buttonholes of her blouse, the hooks of her brassiere. At that moment I unsealed my dark eyes and looked into her blue, blue ones, looked down at her naked chest and then up.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
The question was so serious that I removed my hand from her nipple, which was waiting before deciding whether to rise, for my reply.
Hours, days, years, flashed before me as I went and returned in a wormhole to the future and back. Only a second before I was deep in dream. The question’s cold water woke me—to stare at her exposed breasts—the charade was over. A series of further questions, one nested in the other quickly unfolded. Her breasts were lovely but could I father a child to fasten on that depressed nipple still expecting an answer?
I leaned away. I tried to resume our conversation. The metal rim of the shelf pressed into her pert behind, I saw how pretty she was and the way possibility seemed to bubble out of her but at some point she began to re-button. Didn’t I invite her into the bookstalls with the intention of penetrating that bubble?
Was I the only party to this parlay? The Swedish girl too had to decide, “What does this mean?”
Or perhaps she meant, this does not mean what you think it does, unless…
Yes.
“Unless you are prepared to mean something more, if you mean to go further…”
This was a serious young woman. All the tales of dancing naked on the bars of downtown Newark honkytonks, of the wiles of Au Pair girls in northern New Jersey, their fleshly teasing of old and young, tickling their private parts, evaporated in that cold heroic look of the figurehead from Stockholm from the fourth shelf of Scandinavian literature.
We both put the best possible interpretation on what had just happened. What did we talk about next?
I have no idea.
Weeks later I understood. I had answered her question.
“Nothing.”
Mopsy would suspect the same.
#
What do I mean?
In that letter from Stockholm I can touch the breasts of the Swedish girl in love with danger, romance, through whom the shelves speak, but only in the books I sent her home with and those she spoke about. To pace under a woman in chains with a whip in a Long Island garage, however, is to walk a strange Arctic.
Only in a book could that possibly be more than an exercise in infantile futility. In books life goes beyond the moment’s possibilities. Who would leave wife and children for that paper existence or an electronic one? Yet the instructions for those hours in which we walk the earth lie in the Manual of Arms on the shelves. Are chains just one more trinket that should have been left with stuffed animals in a child’s toy box? Or would they place you in a story image that would renew desire? Books like images borrow from real, everyday life.
What do I mean when I write to Sweden, “I love you”?
Did a man called Odysseus ever swim in, from a cold sea, having escaped an island where time was lost to bury himself naked in leaves and twigs? Did he walk out on a beach to find a fourteen year old so beautiful he could forget the trembling of age in his throttled bones? What specks of truth clung to the old, blind, bard’s body who sang of Odysseus’ flesh on the wet sand? Mopsy, Maraschino, my Swedish friend were long past the moment when Nausika’s breasts rose under her modest gauzes to meet the stranger’s gaze.
Raising his eyes to the night sky as he knelt in that hole, scooped out of loam, sand, moss, lined with “plenty of fallen leaves,” did the great navigator who went to Hades to see his mother, look beyond his own world? The gods he courted were subject to birth, pubescence and maturity. There they stuck but could not go backwards. Their amours and adventures are marked by human time. This is the fatal intermingling of divinity and flesh. A song set down in a scroll or book, had its words pass beyond the era of the heroes and heroines assigned to stars above the poet and his sailor’s head.
Odysseus’s gods are suspended in the paltry dimensions of the perceived universe.
Time’s chains in links drag heavier and heavier. The warmth that goes through Odysseus when he thinks of touching Penelope’s breasts again, his wife’s laughing globes whose nipples wrinkled hard at his fingertips, slowly drains away. Even the thought of Kalypso’s “lovely hair” and her “shining” thighs filled with musk fails to arouse him. Where has it gone, the thrill that passed through his bones like honey on his palate? Has it fled to in the vault above and does it require him to pass beyond even that to recover?
Seeing Nausika, he will feel some of it still cradled in him, and seek to stopper it in words.
#
At the court of Nausika’s father, Ulysses realizes that he has found a land of magic, a circle of sailors, ships that can sail against the wind of seas, oceans and planets. These seamen hold a circular notion in their calloused palms that he and others have entertained in dreams. He begins to recite the long lines of an epic. He is the song’s principal actor. He sings a tale in which the teller can disappear, go backwards, then appear again, to go on and on in the worlds in which it is recalled, as long as it is repeated.
Maraschino hangs in chains like a pirate, on a gibbet in the harbor, waiting for the ocean to engulf as the tide rolls in. Looking over my shoulder, it is Mopsy who swings beside her. There is a third figure, fastened by a hook in a vast garage, cold, but keeping them company.
Mark Jay Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up in the Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury district that borders Franklin Park to the east, north and south. Attending Boston Public Latin, Harvard College and Stanford University, Mr. Mirsky has previously published four novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, The Red Adam, a collection of short stories, The Secret Table, and several books of criticism, My Search for the Messiah, Dante, Eros and Kabbalah, The Absent Shakespeare, and his latest, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, A Satire to Decay, He is the co-editor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) The Jews of Pinsk Volumes 1 & 2, (Stanford University Press) and the editor of Robert Musil’s Diaries in English (Basic Books). He founded the journal Fiction in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. Professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and Director of Jewish Studies. His reviews and articles on architecture and literature have appeared in The New York Sunday Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Haaretz, and numerous other publications. His play Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2007 and can be found on the www.indietheaternow.com
An Autobiographical essay published in 1999 on Mark Jay Mirsky can be found in Volume 30 of Contemporary Authors, Gale and a chapter is dedicated to him in Jules Chametzky’s volume, Out of Brownsville. He is about to issue a novel about Boston lost in the 1950’s, called Franklin Park Puddingstone as an e-book.
His articles appear on the Fiction Website, Fictioninc.com and a blog, markmirsky.com
