THE SMILE

Jill saw him at the doctor's office on that day, on that day.

Face that belonged on a Roman coin. Luxuriant white hair, with a cowlick. Eyes light blue, like a dream of the sky. Tan face and arms. Wood-chopper's arms. Forest green shirt and pants. Work clothes. He looked like a tree with a cloud on top of it.

He sat in the chair next to the magazine rack.

A little girl, three or four years old, made whirls around the room while her mother sat reading House and Garden. She whirled closer and closer to the magazine rack, flashing glances at the man each time she passed him, but he didn't notice. He was gazing at something in another place. Was he the captain of a ship, looking out to sea? Was he a mountain-climber, marveling at the world spread out below him? Was he a philosopher king, envisioning peace and prosperity
for his people?

The little girl crashed into the magazine rack and fell in a heap at his feet.

He looked down at her and smiled.

She leapt up, startled, and ran to her mother. She pointed at the man. "What's that?" she said.

Her mother hugged her. "That's a man."

The little girl said, "I want one."

That night at dinner, Jill said to her husband Horace, "You totally ignored me the day we met."

"Yeah, and it was love at first slight," Horace said, winking at their daughter Caroline.

"Weren't you taking an awful chance, Dad?"

"Nah. Women are like cats. Ignore them, and they're all over you."

"I wish Benjy would show a little independence," Caroline said. "I might respect him more."
Caroline was 16.

"Follows you around like a puppy, does he?" Horace said.

"Not exactly, but he keeps asking me for another date, and I don't want to go out with him. I'm running out of excuses."

"Why do you need to give him a reason?" Jill aid. "Just say no."

"Common courtesy," Horace said.

"I don't see why. Do boys have to explain to girls why they don't ask them out?"

Horace and Caroline exchanged a look that said, "Who let her into a serious conversation?"

"I guess I'll just tell him I like him a lot, but I don't feel romantic about him," Caroline said.

"Don't!" Horace said. "Never tell a guy that."

"Dad, two grandmothers' funerals is all I get. And I'm fast running out of dead cousins."

"What's wrong with her telling him the truth?" Jill said.

"You want her to drive a stake through his heart?" Horace said. "Are you still writing to that guy you met at camp last summer?" he said to Caroline.

"Winston? Yeah, some."

"So why not tell Benjy that you and Winston have decided not to date anyone else?"

"Dad, you're a genius!"

"Hold it!" Jill said. "You want your daughter to lie?"

"They may decide not to date anyone else," Horace said. "You may decide that, right?"

"Caroline is 16 years old," Jill said. "You don't think that's too young to be engaged?"

"I didn't say 'engaged.' I said 'exclusive.' For now."

"But won't that mean she can't date anyone else? She'd have to sneak around to keep Benjy from finding out. Do you want her to sneak around?"

"If she dates somebody else and Benjy finds out, he'll get the message," Horace said.

"What message? That he can't trust anything a woman says? Why should she sacrifice her integrity to his ego?"

"Don't roll your eyes at your mother," Horace said. "That's just the way she talks."

"Sorry, Dad."

"Sorry, Dad?" Jill said.

"Mom, I love you. I really do. But sometimes I wish you could see your way clear to be a little bit more like other people."

Horace and Jill were getting ready for bed after dinner with friends.

"Is it absolutely necessary for you to pick a fight with Leo every time we see them?" Horace said.

"Leo started it," Jill said. "Could I just sit there when he said he was tired of paying for Food Stamps for women who keep having children they can't support?"

"He was just stating his opinion. Why did you have to jump all over him? 'Single mothers are the punching bag of Western civilization'? Frankly, I was embarrassed."

"It embarrasses you for me to talk back to an ignorant woman-hater?"

"It was a social occasion. And Leo's not a woman-hater. His wife thinks he likes women too much. But that's not the point. The point is, you don't seem to know the difference between relaxing with friends and giving a stump speech."

"And you don't seem to know the difference between the First Amendment and Nazi Germany."

"I'm just telling you that if you attack one of our friends like that again, I'll tell you to shut up right there in front of them."

"I know you'll say it in a nice way."

Saturday afternoon, Jill and Horace were having drinks on their patio with Cindy and Sheldon. Jill set a bowl of apples on the table.

"Are those from the Tree of Knowledge?" Sheldon said.

Cindy held out an apple to Sheldon. "Have a bite,"she said.

"She wants to kill me," Sheldon said. "My wife wants to kill me. You're my witnesses."

"No, no, I just want to smarten you up," Cindy said.

"If I was any smarter, do you think I'd be with her?" Sheldon said, winking at Horace.

Jill looked at Horace as if waiting for his answer.

"Sure you would," Horace said. "Cindy is a great catch. I don't know what she sees in an old snake in the grass like you."

"I've got my points," Sheldon said and waggled his eyebrows at Jill, who rolled her eyes. "Look at her, Horace. Your wife wants me."

"I don't think so," Horace said, not smiling.

"I could be wrong, buddy. I could be wrong at that. Cindy, while you're up, get me a beer."

Cindy sat down. "Get your own damn beer."

"Horace, every time my wife comes in your house, she gets uppity. Why is that?"

"I think Cindy meant that in a nice way, buddy."

"No, I didn't," Cindy said.

"She forgets what women are for," Sheldon said.

"What are women for?" Jill said.

"To atone," Sheldon said.

"For what?" Jill said.

"Bringing out the beast in men, I'll bet," Cindy said. "Sheldon blames the sex urge on women. If
there were no women, men would live in a Utopia of beer and football."

"How would the bills get paid?" Jill said.

"What bills?" Horace said. "Without women we wouldn't need money. We would live simple lives in mud huts, and hunt for meat and tend our gardens."

"And where you spilled your seed," Jill said, "little footballs would grow."

"If Eve hadn't eaten the apple, we'd still be in the Garden of Eden," Sheldon said. "Everything would be provided for us."

"That would include beer and TV?" Cindy said.

"God is omnipresent," Sheldon said. "That means he lives in the 21st century and he knows everything that makes a man a man, so certainly that would include beer and TV. But old Eve went and spoiled that, so what women are for is to atone for the sin of Eve. And part of that atonement right now, at this minute, is to bring me a beer." He burped.

"Not so fast," Jill said. "After Eve ate the apple, her eyes were opened."

"She saw that she was naked." Sheldon giggled.

"She saw that a woman has better things to do than be a slave to her husband. I'm glad Eve ate the apple."

"Your wife obviously doesn't realize what she's done," Sheldon said to Horace. "She has an insufficient consciousness of guilt." He was slurring his s's.

After Sheldon and Cindy had gone, Jill said, "I don't want that man in my house again."

"Your house? I agree with him."

"You think I'm guilty because we were turned out of the Garden?"

"Not you. But I think trading paradise for knowledge was a bad bargain. Take you: You read so much that you can't have a good time with friends without turning every conversation into a debate."

"You take the Garden of Eden story literally?"

"Of course not. But what it means is that men have better judgment than women. I know this is going to make you mad, but it's obvious. You want me to tell my best friend he can't come to my home because he disagrees with you about whether Eve should have eaten the apple. Does that make sense? Does it make sense even to you?"

Jill had her bags packed when Horace came home from work.

"I don't want to live with you anymore," she said.

"What are you talking about? Are you still mad at me because I think Eve shouldn't have eaten the apple?"

"That's just a gnat," she said. "I can't live with you because I'm in love with somebody else."

"Who? Who is it? Is it Roy? I've seen him looking at you."

"No, it's not Roy. It's not anybody you know."

"How could it not be anybody I know? You don't know anybody that I don't know," Horace said.

"It's somebody I don't know,"Jill said. "I mean, I've never met him."

"You've never met him, but you're leaving me for him."

"I'm not leaving for him. I'm leaving you because of him."

"What does that mean? What can that mean? Is it somebody in a book? You're in love with somebody in a book?"

"Yes," she said, to shut him up. "It's somebody in a book."

Two years after her divorce from Horace and six months after her divorce from David, Jill saw the man from the doctor's office again. She recognized the profile and the forest green work clothes and the wood-chopper's arms. He was standing in front of her in a restaurant line, and a sweet-faced gray-haired woman was standing next to him. In front of them, a young woman stood holding a squirmy little girl with light brown Shirley Temple curls. The little girl was
making eyes at the man over her mother's shoulder, and he was smiling back at her.

The mother looked around and said, "She's a flirt."

The sweet-faced woman said, "So is he."

Jill said, "Flirt is not the word for him. The word is homewrecker." But she must not have said it out loud, because nobody looked at her.

 

  

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

THE PLUTO CONSPIRACY

Attention all Scorpios! Misguided astronomers are conspiring to dispossess us.

Five years ago, astronomers at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York started the rumor that our planet, Pluto, is not really a planet, but only two chunks of ice stuck together. Since they have to call Pluto something (they can't pretend it's not there, given the existing photographs), they call it a "Kuiper Belt object," obviously a big demotion from "planet." Ludicrous! If Pluto is not a planet, where did all these Scorpios come from? Do they deny the existence of Pablo Picasso, Billy Graham, Johnny Carson, Robert Kennedy, Howard Dean? Madame Curie, Margaret Mitchell, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly? It's a question all of them, so far, have wiggled out of addressing.

This summer they widened the conspiracy to attack on another front. Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology found an object on the other side of Pluto, nine billion miles from the Sun, and called that thing a planet. I know their game: If they can't get the majority of astronomers to demote our planet (and so far they haven't been able to), they try to diminish Pluto's importance by saying it is not the furthest planet from the Sun. Do they take the world community for fools? Everyone knows there is no one as far out as a Scorpio.

Brown's faux planet doesn't even have a real name yet. All it has is a number: 2003 UB313. In a diabolical move to influence feminist astronomers, Brown has "nicknamed" the object Xena, thus pitting a warrior princess against the God of the underworld, the granddaddy of male chauvinist pigs. These people will stop at nothing, but this pitiful ploy is built on sand. They don't seem to know that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a Scorpio.

What can we do to stop these pseudoscientists run amok?

We are organizing a Million Scorpios march on the Rose Center in New York to begin October 23, the day the sun leaves Libra and goes into Scorpio. We urge all able-bodied Scorpios and Scorpio sympathizers who want to be on the right side of history to join us in this protest against planetcide. Linda Goodman will be the keynote speaker, and Jeane Dixon will walk among the marchers to offer free advice about important life decisions, on a first-come-first-served basis. Scorpio Goldie Hawn will drive cross-country from Hollywood to New York with 17 other movie actors on the "Stars for Pluto!" bus, and Scorpio sympathizer and former poet laureate Billy Collins will drive the lead car in a "Scorpio Sylvia Plath Memorial Caravan" of international poets.

Marchers will carry signs saying "Hands Off Our Planet!" and demand that the president of Rose Center fire any offending astronomer who refuses to recant at an international news conference. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald will be at the news conference, ready to grant immunity from prosecution to the first astronomer who agrees to testify against the other Pluto conspirators to a grand jury Mr. Fitzgerald will impanel as soon as he finishes with the Valerie Plame business.

If the president of Rose Center won't agree to our terms, we will camp on his campus until he changes his mind or until November 22, the day the sun leaves Scorpio on its way to Sagittarius. When the president gets a whiff of the garbage disposal problems of a siege that long, we think he'll see things our way. In the words of Scorpio Godfather Vito Corleone: "We're making him an offer he can't refuse."

 

Belle's Index