Read Online Radio Belly by Buffy Cram - Free Book Online

Tomorrow, 5 pm, my yard, be there, or something to that effect. Then I got the idea to keep an eye on the Gregorys’ house from inside the bushes.
    It was nearly midnight when I heard them. I climbed out of the bushes in time to see a dim, shifty light, a candle or a Bic lighter, moving through the Gregorys’ house. I crept across the yard, on hands and knees, and pulled myself up against the tall fence separating our yards. I could smell tuna grilling. I could hear the clink of wineglasses, the hot tub bubbling.
    I didn’t even walk around the fence; I jumped over and marched up the back steps to confront those hybrids for once and for all.
    There were ten, fifteen, twenty of them. They were in the yard, on the porch, in the house. The ones in the patio hot tub were nude, debating intensely. Inside, the air was thick with cigar smoke. It was dark but for the moon and the odd candle. My clothes must’ve helped me blend in, because nobody noticed me at first. In the living room women and men were lounging about, sipping wine with their feet in each other’s laps. They were passing a book—Rilke? Neruda?—taking turns reading verses aloud. The last woman to read finished the poem and asked, “What do you think it means?” closing the book gently. “Do you think he might really fail his lover or is he just afraid of his own mortality?” I was tempted to lie down with them, to speak about love and death while some young woman played with my hair, but I kept on.
    Several people were gathered around the dining room table, attempting to interpret a tide chart. They had an almanac out, an atlas, a dictionary, a small flashlight. A petite redhead was at the kitchen counter dishing out food. “Niçoise?” she offered each passerby. It smelled delicious.
    A man was drawing different constellations into the dust of the foyer mirror. Cassiopeia, Pegasus and Chamaeleon: he described each one and then a huddle of women with tall hairstyles and names like Scarlett and Arabella recreated the shapes by squeaking their fingers across the marble floor.
    On the stairs, two men in tailcoats were debating the Bible from a literary standpoint. “From a purely literary standpoint, Genesis almost directly correlates to Aristotelian structure,” one said as I passed. In the upstairs hallway a couple was slow dancing to a song only they could hear. They were humming softly, voices in perfect harmony. Another couple was making love in the spare bedroom. I stopped before the open door. “You complete me!” the man yelled. “You com plete me!” and then they collapsed in groans. A woman smelling of snuffed-out fires came up beside me and passed me an orb filled with bright smoke. I inhaled once, twice, and began to feel impaled. Then, once I was a limbless black core, once I was only the body, only the parts of me that beat, she led me toward the master bedroom. Pinky was there, and Constantine. He was playing a delicate stringed instrument (a lyre?) and she was warbling operatically. They were accompanied by a woman playing some sort of pan pipe.
    People were twirling and floating around the room in what can only be described as interpretive dance. The woman, my friend, led me forward and before I knew it my arms were swaying—now I was a tree, now a woman’s hair, now grass in the wind. I was twisting carpet pile up between my toes like meringue and reciting something, a French poem I had memorized years ago, a poem I forgot I knew.
    I WOKE UP late, alone on Bruce and Linda Gregory’s bed, my mouth coated in red wine, salade niçoise ground into my hair. Except for a few minor details—couch pillows, crumbs, the odd carpet blemish—the house had been put back in order.
    It was afternoon. Driveways stood empty and for a mo-ment I thought my wife had locked me out accidentally until I found a stack of sandwiches and a glass of milk set outside the back door.