Aurora Wolf

Never Happened

By Hugh Fox

Art by Maria Costa-Fox

      It was just luck that he’d gotten into the building at all. He didn’t want to ring from downstairs, cell-call, up to the door on the eleventh floor, period. Someone just coming out as he approached the downstairs door, took the door in hand, the old white-haired, perfect ankled witch wasn’t too sure, about to say “But do you live here? I don’t know you, do I?” but there he was in his September tweeds with his Orkey Island tweed cap and almost (fake) English accent, “Thanks a lot,” grabbing it as she walked out. Or was she afraid of him and just wanted to escape?

     One block down from the Art Institute. One of the fanciest (oldest) apartment semi-sky-scraper apartment houses in all of Chicago. Nine stories sky scraper in Chicago. Which Sam always laughed at.

     But once inside, loved the old lobby, elevators.

     Up to the fifteenth floor. At the end of the hall. Rang the bell. No reaction. Rang it, rang it, rang it, finally banged on the circular metal-on-metal door-knocker and the metal disk behind it slowly opened.

     Leah.

     Cheez. Look at them, those eyes.

     “It can’t be you, can it? What are you doing here in Chicago?”

    “Here for one purpose…to see you…”

     Still the door opened just a crack, a chain just below her face. And she did look seven-hundred years old, whatever had happened to the ballet-legged, short-skirted eternal seductress madonna? Like that day when she was the “best woman” at Helen and Joe’s wedding fifty years earlier, looking at her up at the altar wondering how she could even stand, much less walk in those ankle-strapped heels, always radiating eternity, the earth and sun may age and conk out, but not her, but now…

     “I don’t feel like letting you in. Maybe I’m afraid of you. You’re a crazy. Mr. throw-the-dice, shot-in-the-dark…”

     “Come on, I’m Mr. Antique now!”

     “No cane and you’ve still got all your hair and are hardly sagging at all…”

     “My wife was a plastic surgeon, she used to like to play with me. She was twenty years younger than me. Brazilian. You know…and I was castrated for prostate cancer. Not that it worked, but…she just died two weeks ago, Deborah…two weeks ago…undetected bowel cancer, undetected until it was too late…”

     Suddenly slamming the door shut.

     He wanted to bang it, pummel it, break it open, but just stood there like a frozen waffle, until he heard a chain jiggle, and the door slowly opened again, like waking up from a long, drunk-drug-helped sleep.

     A different her hovered there now, no longer Ms. Rejecter /Firm Stance, but Ms. Experimenter, I Wanna See What’s Coming Next.

     “Come on in.”

     “I don’t know if I want to now,” he game-played with her, Mr. Bitch to match her previous nastiness.

     “So don’t!” and the Bolshevik Nazi returned, she started to slam it again, hard, but suddenly his youth was back in his hands and arms, and he stopped it, pushed her back, almost making her slip and fall, was inside, and he slammed the door, found himself in the middle of a vast living room that looked out on the lake, the clouds, the Art Institute, even a few boats skimming along in the water, as if they never-ever stopped regardless of time, temperature, danger or raptures, as if raptures were always in everything when it came to the lake shore.

     The living room frighteningly impressive, the walls all filled with Monet-ish impressionistic paintings, all kinds of tiger-lilies and hills, mountains, clouds, ravines, gullies, cat-tails, as if she’d robbed the basement of the Art Institute itself and taken all the lesser knowns like Gillaumin, Boudin, Steen, Signot, Corot…

     “What did you do, rob the basement vaults at the Art Institute?” Sitting down on a chair he was almost afraid to sit down on, what looked like a Louis Quinze furniture museum masterwork.

     “Chicago’s a great place for junk sales…the writers, like you, who never go out into the real world but just live inside their heads, don’t have any idea of the amount of classic ‘junk’ out there that is really ‘antique treasure.’ Not just garage sales, either, but stores hidden away on old streets in the old parts of town. Like me, hidden away here…the main thing I think about most of the time is how long I have left.

     My will’s all worked out with my lawyer-daughter, Marcia, who gets most of it, the rest goes to Bill and Jim…who aren’t really that interested in antiques. What they’d mainly do would be to have garbage-garage sales until everything would be sold. You remember Joe died from AIDS…my youngest…and Jerry…he’s been gone for fifteen years now.”

     “I know. I got all the info from Helen.”

     “Bigmouth Helen! She really ought to clear everything with me first…there may be things I don’t want you to ever find out about…”

     “Venereal disease?”

     Anger flared into her eyes, an SUV running into a gasoline truck. She wobbled over to the door and opened it.

     “I want you to leave.”

     “Call 911, I’m not leaving,” and he walk to the end of the living room and sat on a plush fake-suede couch next to a glass door open to the west side of the city.

     She picked her cell phone out of her blouse pocket and dialed. “You could spend quite a bit of time in jail for this. And I’d enjoy it, you dying in some shithole prison hospital ward, your arms and legs full of all kinds of puncture tubes….”

     “Your medical terminology isn’t quite up to it, Ms. English Know-It-All!” he smile-sneered, and walked out the door. Genug was genug. Wer braucht Frau Frankenstein? Glad for a long moment that he hadn’t ever speared her, married her, gene-mixed with her, “Wiedersehen…or maybe Nie Wieder…nevvvvvver again…”

     She cancelled her call, running after him down in the hall, no more half-crippled, but more like Quincy Carter in the old football days, actually tackling him, bringing him down, and then crawling over and grabbing on to him, kissing him like she had in the old Tudor-Victorian days, the woman who finally got him to have his first orgasm, when it happened at three AM he was half-asleep, him totally confused as to what it was all about, that’s how idiot-Irish-Puritan he’d been raised in the evangelical orthodox world of Old Time Chicago.

     “I’ll probably have to have knee surgery after this, but…” He struggled painfully to his feet, then helping her up, practically carrying her back into the apartment.

     “You have no idea how painful the aloneness is since my two J’s died, and it’s even worse being here in the middle of downtown…but I’m not going to Orchestra Hall alone, or Much Ado About alone, not Bye Bye Birdie me…alone, alone, alone…”

     “You can relax with me after my orchiectomy,” he whisper-bleated out, either a just-born or just-about-to-conk-out lamb, “and I’m afraid of taking those stimulus packages…you know Up Against the Wall and Reborn Down There…”

      Pushing him over to the big plush sofa facing the nowhere-anywhere skyline and going over to this huge old Steinway Grand in the corner, picking out a very soft, carelessly-playfully melodic, Debussyian in a way but…

     “Cecile Chaminade!” he suddenly said, listening to his inner, archival voices that never stopped speaking whenever Les Arts appeared caressing his eyes and ears.

     “I knew you’d know…” stopping and coming over next to him, plopping down with newborn zest, “Death and resurrection. I don’t believe in ANYTHING any more except the ANYMORE itself. Like Karla Andersdatter…”

     “How do you know about her?”

     “Reading your criticism books. Internet insanity….don’t you miss that whole Berkeley gang?”

     “Like the time I was in Paris and found Debussy’s grave…”

     “Cimetiere de Passy…”

     “How do you…?”

“Look, morning coffee down the streets there’s a hundred cafes, some kind of muffin or eggs, crepes, then there’s beds and arms and breasts and lips, lips, trips into the mountains and the river-towns, a week in Budapest or Curitiba or Stourpaine, just being here together, TV and a million Les Demoiselles d’Avignon films, always plays, re-doings of Our Town and The Importance of Being Ernest, and the Chicago symphony just down the street, the Art Institute Cafe, all kinds of lectures…quelquefois je voudrais aller a France…all the years I spent studying French. You too…and the Church still works…and lake cruises…lying against each other watching whatever, lying in each other’s arms all night long…your kids, my kids, trips out to see them in Boston, New Hampshire, Carpinteria, Portland, Cleveland…Christmases with kids and grandkids, all turned into our collective flesh and blood. So I had an abortion before I was supposed to marry you and I confessed the truth and you dropped me like a frying pan filled with lava, so I almost killed myself before I finally got married, actually bought enough arsenic to do the job, not like Napoleon’s poisoning little by little, but in one guillotine-slap beheading, but I pulled back and retried life, and you retried, we both survived, but obviously you didn’t come here out of indifference, and over the years all the Christmas and Easter and From Nowhere cards…”

     She acts like she wants to go on, but stops, goes over to the doorish window and opens it, steps out close to the edge of the balcony, wind blowing her hair back behind her head so her practically pure, unadulterated face.

     “Very nice. If I squint a little I can imagine you sixty nine.”

     “Not funny,” she laughs and comes inside, goes over and gets a bottle of Irish Crème Liquor and pours out two glasses. “It’s mainly milk…good for ulcers,” still pure grin, handing him his glass, putting hers on a table next to the couch, turning on the TV, switching it to DVD, then going to a huge shelf of DVD files next to the TV, picking one out with speed-demon alacrity, getting it started. “I know you’ve never seen this, you and your Française-Deutsch manias, as if you’d been married to Dietrich or Deneuve…Kismet, Kismet, Kismet…Les Demoisellesd’ Avignon…” getting her glass and sitting down next to him, clicking on all the right places and there they were, he didn’t know where, countryside, flowers, hills, moors, this almost Deneuvian woman treating everything as if she was Mother Earth and she was checking out the well-being of her Earth Creation, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, after fifteen minutes of immersion in mother-earthiness, clicking it off, “We can go anywhere we want. I have enough in the bank to open all possibilities. And I won’t even mention my gold-safe behind the fireplace…”

     “Listen, I know…”

     “I know too. You were Mr. Orthodox Medievalist, just a touch of Galway Catharism in you, when I told you I’d had an abortion and you walked out on me and married your Brazilian trash heap…but…” Getting up and making the sign of the cross over him, “Dominus whatever…we’re beyond all that now. Can’t you hear the countdown in the background full-time…one trillion five million and sixty four, three, two…”

     “Fifty years ago I would have had tears in my eyes by now.”

     “You’ve got them, alright…permanently…”
     Smiling, sitting back down, another button-press and they slid back into the Whistlerian, Scottian, Sickertian, Starrian world of Edwardian sanity as if the last fifty, sixty, seventy years since they’d met had never happened.

Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. Polio at age 4, cured by a pre-Saulk experimental medicine that worked. Spent his children totally immersed in the arts, was part of the All Childrens’ Grand Opera group run by Viennese genius Zerlina Muhlman Metzger, studied violin and composition with P. Marinus Paulson, art and ceramics at the Art Institute in Chicago, was pushed into Medicine by his M.D. father, finished four years of pre-med and a year of medicine, then got an M.A. at Loyola in Chicago and a Ph.D. in English/American Literature at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

It was at Urbana-Champaign that he met and married Lucia Ungaro Zevallos, a Peruvian poet-critic who was getting her Ph.D. in Romance Languages, and after the marriage they moved to Los Angeles where he taught for ten years at Loyola-Marymount University and was immersed in the film-world.

At the same time thanks to his wife he began to go to Peru to visit his Peruvian family and slowly visited all the major ruins in the pre-Columbian Americas. He met Harry Smith in Berkeley in 1968 and they became best friends and for some twenty years Fox would visit Smith 2-3 times a year in New York City/Brooklyn and work on Smith’s magazines, get to know the poets and writers in the New York scene.  He was a Fulbright Professor for a year in Mexico (1961), two years in Caracas (1964-’66), which especially made sense because he married a Peruvian in 1956.

In 1968 he moved to Michigan State U. and taught there until he retired 6 years ago. While at Michigan State U. he had a Fulbright professorship in Brazil where he met and married a Brazilian M.D., studied Latin American literature on a grant from the Organization of American States at the U. of Buenos Aires, and after beginning to make archaeological discoveries and have his books on archaeology published, he received another grant from the Organization of American States to spend a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He has some 104 books published.

Art by Maria Costa-Fox also known as Costinha