Glass

(published in Shades, Vol. IV )

The sun at my back, I’m pulled up the side of a high-rise.  Floor after floor flashes by in repeated, rhythmic brilliance.  I close my eyes, but the sting and the shine come through, a slot machine registering red over and over.  I reach the top, stop, and cinch up the belt over my belly.  The air is worse up here.  There’s no glares under the eaves, just the scratching of the pigeons, a couple of them.  Fat, tattered, one without a toe. There’s a frying smell, bacon, and something sweet mixed with the usual bilge of exhaust.  Somebody’s hat is up here, one of those driving caps, an envelope and a bunch of cigarette butts.

I adjust the spider machine, step out from the cage onto the plank, and spray on the trisodium.  I start on the window.  The room on the other side is plush–three couches, a big looks-like movie screen, that Arizona decor.  Somebody comes in, and then a line of them, all suits.  They push together, make a part of a circle.  Put their arms around each other’s shoulders, jab each other, grinning, awkward.  After they get it together and smile their self-satisfied smiles into the cameraman’s camera, they sit down. They glance up.  One of them waves.

Can’t decide what to do about Smithey.  If only he weren’t so damn good.  Three times now, I’ve had to call in Miller to pinch hit.  Miller isn’t as good, but he’s steady.  I love Smithey, one of the most resonant sets of strings around.  To get rid of him, I don’t know, he provided the group…what…a certain panache?

In the next one a guy stoops over a map, big, beautiful thing, blues and greens like you’d see, looking down, if you were way, way up there.  The guy doesn’t move, stares at it.  He’s got a bald spot right at the axis of his bowed head.

Behind the next one there’s a woman stamping checks, licking her finger as she goes.  In a basket beside her is a baby, its fists pumping away.  She finishes the stack and by then the baby’s head and feet are all working.  She shoves her hands under it and lifts it to her middle, pulling up her shirt.  Her hair hangs down her back fitting symmetrically the line of her chair.

There’s a piece of insulation stuck in the windowsill and a pigeon pecks at it and takes a dump.  I remember to buy milk on my way home.  Something else, oh yeah, a double A battery for the clock in Minnie’s window.

I work out fingerings to Haydn’s Opus 74 around my teacup. Not a user-friendly medium.  I can see the bay, blue-grey and lots of barge activity.  The bricks are warm against my back.  I gorge on the sights, in love with the heights.  And miss the high C in the last measure.  Abernathy will pick it up. Abernathy is a better violin than I am, always knows the music but no soul to him.  Made the orchestra try-outs, but he stuck by the quartet, loyal.

There’s a tap on the glass behind me.  A woman that looks like a giant bug is on the other side of the glass.  A dress with red and black spots the size of oboe-bells covers her, leaving skinny legs and head sticking out.  She smiles a big beet-red lipstick smile and looks through black goggle-like glasses.  She is pointing down at the harbor, her index finger jabbing at the glass, leaving all these fingerprints.  I follow the direction of her finger and look back at her.  Shrug my shoulders.  She looks around, finds a lighter, flicks it and holds it up at arm’s length, trying to look statuesque.  I nod, smile, lift my cap.

Somebody’s rooftop garden below me.  Palm trees, eucalyptus, topiary in giraffe, impala, and crouching lion variation.  Apostrophe-shaped pond with water lilies.  Looks like strawberries cascading from a clay-pot.  I told Minnie she should stock frozen fruit, at least strawberries.  It was a purely selfish move, but I usually bought them all off her.

Last night was stellar.  Smithey in form and clean.  Stanley and Abernathy steady.  The living room was transformed.  A church. At least a duke’s residence.  Shostakovich, smooth as glass.  Teresa on the piano in the Mozart piece, and again playing Brahms like a virtuoso and she’s only seventeen.  Then strawberries and champagne.  Teresa, the only one discriminating enough to appreciate them with me. Minnie came in later and finished the champagne.

Minnie was outside my apartment last summer when I went to close a window.  A gust had come up sending sheet music in the air.  She said, “Oh please, leave it open a little.  I like to hear it.”  She is my biggest fan.  Comes to practices every week, but won’t come in during them.  She thinks I should get rid of Smithey.

I finish a second cup of tea and pull out the squeegee again. There is a woman in this one with lots of auburn hair, thick and rolling.  She sees me and looks down at her desk.  She is fitting some sort of puzzle together, big pieces, trying them in different ways.  Oranges, yellows, and reds, around a green center.  When she gets it right I tap on the window and give her the thumbs up.  She flips me the bird and then comes this long, slow smile.  She leaves them the way I say she should, slips a piece of cardboard under the pieces and takes them out of the room.  She comes back in, walks over close to the window and turns her back to me.  She bends over to look in a file cabinet and then she thinks she’s got a run in her nylon, smoothes the back of her leg up higher and higher showing me the back of her thigh, garter belt, even a liitle of that creamy white crescent above.   She suddenly pretends to remember I’m watching her, drops her skirt and pretends to be embarrassed.  I take my time on her window.