The Curve of the Bell

1

One hour remained until my flight left LAX for Reno, pressed between Nevada’s scorched air and sediment. Leaning in from the security checks and storefronts, Christmas lights spilled their synthetic glow across the crowded airport terminal, and I heard the cold first notes of “O Holy Night” seeping out of the speaker system. After locating my boarding gate and confirming the departure time, I decided to pass the interval with breakfast.

Despite the multitude of holiday travelers shooting past me, The Flying Egg was almost deserted. I ascended the carpeted incline at the entrance of the restaurant and crossed below the archway, my backpack swinging between my shoulder blades like an orangutan. Decorations hung from the ceiling panels on silver wire; papier-mâché reindeer and elves with pterodactyl faces dashing through a landscape of glitter-encrusted snowflakes. An ancient couple coiled up in one booth regarded me with hooded eyes, and the stench of camphor and eucalyptus lunged at me as I crept past them, selecting a table near the back wall.

The dining area encircled the subterranean kitchen like a wreath and was elevated to allow patrons an unobstructed view of the airfield. Flexing a menu between my fingers—watching the planes taxiing on the runway and the slipknot of morning pulling apart to grease the eastern horizon—I didn’t notice my waitress had arrived until she engaged her retractable pen with a click and muttered: “What do you want?” at my shoulder.

I turned in the direction of her voice and fell in love.

With an order pad clenched in one hand, she stood beneath a rosy-muzzled reindeer, its antlers constructing an aegis to fit over the glossy blur of her mouth, nose impaled by a septum ring, eyelids coated in blue shadow. Tangles of dark red hair—hacked unevenly, littered with black clasps—traversed the ridge of her chin, corkscrewed toward her left breast before swerving in the opposite direction and braking above the deep hollow of her cleavage. Brown and sorrel stripes scissored across the terrain of her uniform, stretched taut at the plump rounded saddles of her hips.

“Well?” she said.

A nametag reading NNABELLE was pinned below her collar, and I conducted a thorough search of her nubile topography for the letter A that I decided must have become lost in some uncharted region of her body.

“What?” I said.

Nnabelle’s moist lips parted to reveal a pierced wedge of tongue. “What do you want to order?”

“Oh, right,” I said, remembering the menu in my hands. I flipped it open, surveying the list of comestibles aligned down the center accompanied by dollar amounts in cramped font. “I don’t think I’m ready, actually.”

“Fine, I’ll come back.”

“No wait!” I exclaimed with more force than I’d intended, and countered with a slight chuckle. I saw the two geriatrics on the other end of the restaurant twist around in their booth to appraise the situation. “There’s so much to choose from. Do you have any recommendations?”

Nnabelle raised her eyebrows, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and rotated toward The Flying Egg’s entryway as her ass—a beacon, a lodestar, broad and inviting and flaring so bright I had to resist the urge to steer my body closer to hers—sparred with the tight uniform.

“Here? I dunno,” she said, the tone suggesting she’d taken her share of indecision from difficult customers in the past and was in no mood to endure it from me. “We gots a lot of stuff. French toast is kinda good.”

I shrugged, a gesture I hoped would demonstrate the innocent nature of my question. “French toast? I assumed eggs would be your establishment’s forte. You know, given the name.” Shut the fuck up, Levi, I thought to myself. “But French toast sounds fine. And some grapefruit juice.”

“We only gots orange,” she said, her face still directed at the archway of The Flying Egg’s entrance and the terminal’s flashing windows. Yellow beams of light rolled through the airport and wrapped sweat-stained haloes around Nnabelle’s head, her saturnine voice issuing grammatical slip-ups that sounded to me like the hymns of a Rubenesque angel.

“Okay, I’ll just take water.”

She tossed a glance over one shoulder, her full lips pursed. “Just water.”

“Yeah,” I replied, and locked eyes with her before she could wrench them away again. “My name’s Levi.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Nothing. Just, I’m Levi.”

Nnabelle turned and jabbed her middle finger at her nametag, the point of the pen she held aimed at my face like a poison-tipped dart. The volume of the carols creeped up a notch, “Winter Wonderland” spinning out of the speakers in all of its sleigh-bell-ringing, snow-glistening glory. Nnabelle pirouetted and went sculling into the depths of the restaurant’s kitchen.

The music cut off with a concussion of static as the pre-boarding call for Delta Flight 1336 to Columbus, Ohio ricocheted through the terminal. My two dining companions rose from their booth, affixed jackets and luggage to their skeletons, and rattled down the entrance ramp of The Flying Egg.

Illuminated by the rising sun, the windows of the airport flushed orange, and alone in the restaurant I watched the swinging doors that dropped into the kitchen, hoping for another glimpse of Nnabelle’s stacked figure emerging from the cook-smoke and steam. The carols on the speaker system groaned back to life:

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks,

Dressed in holiday style,

In the air there’s a feeling of Christmas

“Yee!” a bastardized southern drawl twanged behind me, and I swiveled in my chair to witness a squat vaquero that I figured was the headwaiter—due to his oxford shirt and gold-plated nametag identifying him as BETO VARGAS—suspending my backpack by one shoulder strap. He wore a turquoise Stetson hat, a bolo tie, and a 5-ounce bottle of Tapatio hot sauce was nestled in his belt holster.

“This yours, pardner?” he asked, and shook the bag from side to side.

I felt almost compelled to deny my ownership before answering the backpack did belong to me.

“Well look ‘ere, let’s not leave it lyin’ in th’ middle o’ th’ thoroughfare where our other customers are liable to trip o’er it. Y’ hear?” He dropped the backpack and slid it under my seat with the pointed toe of one boot while depositing a glass of water in front of me.

I looked around at the empty booths and tables, the peach-colored walls resplendent with snowmen, red tinsel bells and green garlands encircling support beams, knots of Christmas lights like tumbleweeds shining this way and that. What other customers? I thought.

Beto hitched at his pants and said: “French toast’s gonna be a while yet.”

“How long is a while?” I said.

“Oh, a spell.”

“Where’s, uh, Nnabelle?”

It was the first time I’d said her name aloud. The lexicon of rain pulling toxins from the air, of spring and the explosion of daffodils, peonies, roses, of songbirds announcing their departure from one branch and arrival at the next, sprawled across my tongue as the syllables bounced off.

Beto scratched at his belly, stretched and yawned. “Where’s who, dogie?”

“Nnabelle,” I said. “My waitress?”

“Reckon y’all mus’ mean Mabelle.”

“Mabelle?” I removed my glasses, wiped the lenses with one sleeve of my shirt and replaced them, as if expecting the twin N's I had imagined to appear before me and converge. I had been concentrating so intently on her tits and dizzying curvature of hips that I’d misread her nametag.

“French toast’ll be a spell,” Beto confirmed, tipped his hat and ambled away.

Mabelle, I thought, the word feeling thick and awkward as it struggled to conform to the interior of my skull.  It seemed a gross error, a blunder in the natural order of things. Mabelle was the designation of a stooped and timeworn elderly woman knitting sweaters, mending trousers, placing pies on windowsills to cool, not a curvy dropout working the early shift at an airport restaurant, poured into a uniform that left little to the imagination and invoking a hard-on from my lap by the simple act of waitressing. Not the name of a goddess. I fell out of love a little.

Outside, the morning’s blue tegument snapped across the sky, anchoring itself behind the city’s dentition and fastening shafts of sunlight to the pavement, avenues and freeways. I brought the glass of water to my lips, observing the airfield as it cracked apart and rebuilt itself through the rounded surface, as the melting ice whispered of its own disintegration.

Mabelle. I tried to convince myself that the attraction I felt could not be thwarted by something as inconsequential as an incongruous name, that it existed on a level higher than thatof carnal interest—that I wasn’t picturing her stripped naked, heavy breasts jostling, hardened nipples pressed against my mouth and large ass spread out in my hands, the white flesh quaking as our bodies slammed together—while the Christmas tunes coursed their way through the terminal, honey-smooth and laced with desire:

Silver bells, sil-il-il-ilver bells,

It’s Christmas time in the city,

Ring-a-ling, hear them ring,

Soo-ooo-oon it will be Christmas day

The initial boarding call for passengers on my Reno-bound flight banged across the airport. “Fuck it,” I said, stood up, dropped twenty dollars onto the table, placed my water glass on top of the bills, shouldered my orange backpack and headed for the exit.

Halfway down the ramp I heard Beto yelp: “Hey pardner! Your order’s up! Hey!”

I revolved and saw him standing next to my table, the breakfast plate held aloft in one hand and a bottle of maple syrup balanced in the other. A toothpick waggled from the slit of his mouth and fell to the floor.

I shrugged, readjusted the bag, and turned my back on the headwaiter with my French toast, The Flying Egg, Nnabelle—as her name would remain in my memory—and the ring-a-ling of the silver bells that were ringing to assure me:

Soo-ooo-oon it will be Christmas day

2

The airliner rose, wobbling into the sky’s milk canyon emptying across the atmosphere. As the plane banked over the ocean and veered northward, I watched the strip malls and condominiums that comprised Southern California fuse together in a blur of stucco and Spanish tile before receding through the small port window at my side. Sunlight blasted the curve of the fuselage, negotiating the narrow aisle and flattening against me.

I turned from the scenery, slouched against the window and shut my eyes, reflecting on Mabelle—Nnabelle, Nnabelle, my brain reminded me—as the words from some old song my grandmother used to sing unspooled in my mind:

I fall in love too easily,

I fall in love too fast,

I fall in love too terribly hard,

For love to ever last

Known among her family as Paca, my grandmother had passed away in November from her third bout of pneumonia, and I was headed back to Reno, my hometown, for her memorial service. My father, who I’d not seen in close to a decade, had paid for my flight and was picking me up at the airport.

The sun pulsed, projecting spermy filaments across my darkened field of vision as the plane dropped through the hiss of collapsing air. I tried to concentrate on Paca’s eulogy—which I would be delivering—and not fantasize about Nnabelle, fending off her zaftig image as a gnarl of surging wind jerked the airliner violently back and forth.

Under the spooked laughter and nervous voices of the other passengers, I detected a gasp at my elbow. Seated between myself and a snoring female cadaver, a child whose presence I’d only vaguely registered before planted one hand over her mouth and looked in my direction. Freckles shot like meteors across the girl’s cheeks, and perched atop her head she wore a set of headphones. I could hear the thoom thoom thoom of the music as she brought them down to hang around her neck.

“I’m scared of flying,” she said around her fingers, eyes like two glittering apostrophes punctuating her tiny face.

“I’m scared of flying, too.” I tapped my thumb against the window, beyond which the dark tilt and pitch of the Pacific was visible, gray waves hauling piles of foam across its surface and flinging them onto the shore. “Especially over the ocean. Wanna trade seats with me?”

Her eyes widened and she shook her head, mumbling something I couldn’t decipher as we entered into another installment of turbulence. Her hand slipped from her mouth and gripped my sleeve. Something twisted at my heart. I estimated her age to be eight or nine, and was reminded of my younger stepbrother Cecil when he was little and terrified of the Gremlins, or the time I’d convinced him it was prudent he baptize his stuffed animals in the toilet and flush away their sins.

“What did you say?” I asked her as we lurched into the jet stream and the plane evened out.

“Do you believe in Santa?” she said.

“Santa, as in Santa Claus?”

“Do you think there really is a Santa Claus. For reals?”

I thought about the night—seventeen years ago—when I woke near eleven on Christmas Eve and, through my bedroom’s open door, saw my mother steal down the hallway on tiptoe, remove wrapped boxes from the linen closet addressed from Kris Kringle, and carry them to the living room.

“Definitely,” I said.

She let go of my sleeve. “I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Skyler told me he’s not real,” she said, smoothing the creases in her OshKosh B’gosh pants. “He says no one can bring all the toys to everyone. And my daddy’s apartment doesn’t have a chimney even, so how can Santa get in?”

“Maybe he knows how to pick locks,” I offered.

She cocked her head to one side, as if considering the possibility of Santa Claus toting around a valise full of torsion wrenches, miniature screwdrivers and bobby pins. “Hmm.”

“Who’s Skyler?” I said.

“He’s my half-brother.”

And apparently an asshole, I thought. Despite Skyler’s claim, I sensed the girl still clung to a thread of the magic fabric blanketing her from the confines of physics and what she knew about the world, enabling a red-suited saint to burn past the constraints of geography and time, forcing himself and his gunny sack through impenetrable passageways.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Chelsea Spitz.” She wrinkled her nose with obvious distaste at the implication of her surname, and blurted: “I’ll be nine soon!”  

“Cool,” I said, and nodded my head in the direction of the decrepit old lady asleep in the seat next to Chelsea. “Is that your grandma?”

Chelsea glanced at the woman. “No, I don’t know whose grandma she is.”

“Well, where’s your parents?”

“My daddy and his girlfriend are picking me up at the airport,” she said, and informed me: “Her name is Vicky.”

“My dad’s giving me a lift, too.”

“Does he have a girlfriend?” Chelsea asked.

“My dad?’ I said, and snickered. “Not that I know of.”

“How old are you?”

I told her I was twenty-four.

Chelsea squinted, assessing my face. “Hmm. You don’t look old.” The music pounded out of her headphones:

And another one gone,

And another one gone,

Another one bites the dust

“How old is Skyler?” I said.

“He’s twelve.”

“Okay. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus when I was twelve, either. But if he isn’t real”—I dropped my voice and paused for dramatic effect—“how is it that I saw him?”

Chelsea’s eyes switched from inverted commas to enormous white O’s. “You saw him? For reals?”

“For reals,” I said. “It was last year. He was scraping ice off one of his reindeer.”

“What does he look like?" Chelsea said. “Did he talk to you? What did he say?”

Whoops, I thought. The lie had sounded good in my head, but I hadn’t considered the need to supplement my story with added inventions. “Oh, white beard. Really fat. He kept saying ‘ho’ a bunch of times, like three times.”

I was about to elaborate when Chelsea asked: “Was it Dancer?”

“Was what Dancer?”

“The reindeer that Santa was… scratching.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “You know, I’m almost certain it was Dancer.”

So long as Chelsea’s wavering skepticism was in my grasp and Skyler’s credibility on the verge of being completely dismantled, I decided to venture ahead with something Paca had told me when I first questioned Santa Claus’ existence.

“Did you ever notice,” I said, “how it’s always cold in winter, and especially during Christmas?”

She nodded, fidgeting with the buttons of her denim jacket, the song on her headphones fading out with an: “Ee-hee, alright!”

I looked around, past the sleeping elderly lady and across the aisle to the row of travelers opposite us, making sure no one else was within earshot or in a position to become aware of the top-secret knowledge I was about to disclose.

“He freezes time,” I revealed in a whisper. “That’s how he delivers all the presents in one night.”

Chelsea’s mouth sprang open. The connection between Santa Claus’ arrival and the decrease in temperature—once irrelevant—snapped into place, and I watched her disbelief vanish behind a flood of sugary bullets sparkling as if discharged from a candy cane pistol.

“That’s why it snows,” she breathed.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s why it snows.”

The old woman in the seat beside Chelsea stirred, peered left and right with bewilderment and fell back to sleep, grinding out a high D-note with each exhalation: “Ehh… ehh… ehh…” Reno lay out before and beneath us, clothed in frozen light and movement.

Chelsea remained silent as we descended on the city. At last, when the landing gear struck the tarmac and I could see white flakes corkscrewing past the window, she said: “Hmm, Santa Claus,” and leaned forward in her seat to watch.