A Gentleman Shark

Whatever we had, it was gone. I couldn't deny that. Maybe I imagined more than there was, or longed for it so greatly that I, for a time, loved enough for two — surely an unsustainable model for an affair of any sort. But we had exchanged such beautiful and personal letters the likes I had never had with anyone before that I had great difficulty while conducting the necessary autopsy of our brief association to believe it was fictitious or contrived. I still have those letters as evidence.

She works at the post office — Ms. Emma Vail. I had been going there for several months before I courageously handed her a daring letter. 

"Would you like a stamp for this?" she smiled as prettily as ever, looking up at me through her thick eyelashes. It was our usual exchange. It had gone on for months. I'd hand her a letter and the three cents, she would pull a stamp off the roller and affix it appropriately. Three Abraham Lincolns and the portrait of George Washington that hung above her head, witnessed our affair. 

"That will not be necessary," I replied nervously. Suddenly I felt ill, as though it were a bad decision, but it was too late now. "This one is for you."

I flipped it over and it had her name on it — with no address. Just her beautiful name in my very best cursive written ten times over on ten different envelopes until I settled on one. She smiled, awkwardly at first, but then she eased into the satisfaction of it. I had been to the post office at least twice a week for the past two months to buy individual stamps to mail letters to people who probably didn't care much to receive a letter from me. But who were anyway my reluctant penpals because I had to have a reason to come to the post office to see her. Quite simply, I could have bought a book of stamps, surely she must have known this, but it would mean I wouldn't see her as often. The entire reason I wrote letters at all was to buy stamps from her. 

The post office was an enormous old building. The kind of building they don't construct anymore. High ceilings and enormous grand pillars. Marble floors and ornate sconces. There was a large painting of a chestnut-brown horse on the wall, unsaddled and unbridled, who was standing in the middle of a lush kerry-green pasture. That horse and I were aquainted. As I stood there in line, in formation dictated by the snake of a red-velvet rope and the brass poles it crawled through, I hoped that it would be her window that would be open when it was my turn. If not, as it happened sometimes, I would allow the person behind me to go on, feigning some sort of confusion with either my mail or a misplaced wallet, which wasn't misplaced at all, of course, but which was an act so that I could be called to her window. 

"Hello, Emma," I'd say each time. 

"Hello, Mr. Maddox," she replied in turn with her usual smile. I pretended it was a smile reserved for only me. That there was a degree of radiance in that smile she offered me that she didn't offer anyone else. That the corners of her mouth curled a little higher and the sparkle in her eye was a little deeper like that in a well full of coins when a light hits it just so.  

"You can call me John, if you wish."

"Mr. Maddox," she replied. "I don't think I could ever refer to you as anything other for I do like the sound of it so well. Rarely, in the course of a day do I get to use the 'x' sound which is my favorite of them all. This job can be rather dreary," she whispered looking over at the grim unnaturally gray lady next to her that resembled a walrus in a blue dress. "So I take my pleasures as they come."

I chuckled. And so this went on for several months. My strict formation in that line. My posturing to make sure that I got Emma, which I did each time without fail. My admiration of that post office and the horse painting. The three Abe Lincolns and George Washington above us. It went on and on until I boldly gave her that letter in which I confessed my desire for her. The next week I came back to buy a stamp for a letter to my mother who lived in Nantucket, and before I left Emma gave me a letter of her own, which she furtively pulled from under the counter. It was as though we were passing top secret documents, and if discovered, we might have both been sacked. 

"A letter — that needs not a stamp," she grinned at me, proudly poetic. I was sure in that instance that this particular smile was in fact exclusive and reserved for me. Beneath two fingers, the nails of which were daringly painted pink, she slid the letter across the marble counter and through the little slot. For some reason, like it was a bank, each window was barred. I took the letter with great enthusiasm and quickly buried it in the inner-breast pocket of my coat where I was sure not to lose it. 

Then at home, I tried to not open it, to keep it sealed for as long as I could, and thus to prolong the suspense of it, to possibly imagine more than there could be inside of it. I layed it on the table. I looked at it. Smiled at it. Smirked at it. Had dinner with it. Surely, I wanted it to say more than it likely would, I reasoned. But when I finally opened it, it didn't fail to impress me in such a way that left me hungering for more. 

We exchanged only a few letters, but each of them had great meaning and I asked her if she would like to go out and have coffee, or a drink, or dinner. Anything at all so that I might see her from something other than across a counter or behind those bars. She agreed, and I thought all was well. I thought I had at last found that woman I had long been seeking. The one the others turned out not to be. I am, indeed, a rather ordinary man, but my dreams were wild and my romantic aspirations had welled up inside of me for so long I simply don't know how I had managed not to bust at the seams. 

Our plans never came to fruition. The next time I went to the post office with a letter for her, she accepted it, but not in the eager way she had done so before. She hardly looked at me at all. She sold me two stamps for letters I was sending to my brother in the Army and my mother in Nantucket. The contents of that letter to my mother was simply, "Hello Mother, I am simply writing you this letter so I had an excuse to buy a stamp from the girl I told you about. Hope you understand. Love, Johnny."

But Emma didn't show any particular interest in me that day. Nor did she have a letter for me. I was just any other ordinary man to her, it seemed. I asked her if she would like to go have dinner Monday, but she declined, offering a simple, "I don't think so." The mind searches for reason even when there is no reason to be had, just as we sometimes speak even though no one listens. We all crave love, even when we have been heartbroken. We all want ears to hear us and kindness to soothe us and grace to abound us. We all want love to affirm us, if only so that we do not feel so alone. She was cold and indifferent to me as I stood there. She took my letter, but it wasn't as it was before. She didn't immediately place it in her bag and smile. She took it and tossed it somewhere beneath her counter as though it were a scrap of paper that I had asked her to dispose of for me.

"Two stamps, please," I requested in a state of sudden melancholy that I had never known before in her presence. She handed me the stamps and said six cents. I gave her a nickel and a penny and she scooped them off the counter and deposited them in the register and shut the drawer. 

I didn't know what to say. I was speechless. "Would you like to see Peter Pan with me? It's Disney's latest —"

"I'm much too busy for that sort of thing. Will there be anything else?"

"No. Thank you, Emma."

I walked home dejected. It was as though she were another person entirely. What had happened to the beautiful one who stole my heart? Who had expressed at least a moderate interest to meet outside of the post office? Perhaps there was someone else. Or maybe she didn't favor something about me that she hadn't noticed before. Maybe my clothes were too casual or I was too poor. So I sought to remedy both things immediatley. I cashed in a bond that had been willed to me and I took a better paying job as a professor at the university, which paid twice as much my beloved job teaching high school English.  

I bought nicer clothes. I bought a good cologne because I read that much of our implicit response to someone else is in the nose. Phermones and such. I went back, hoping her mood had changed. Hoping she would seem happy to see me, but she was not. She hadn't budged. I was to her something less than I had been before. I was just another customer buying stamps making her day a little busier than it was. Despite my clothes and the fragrance of my expensive cologne. Despite the large bills I whipped out of my wallet for three cent stamps. Despite whatever elaborate story I tried to tell her that day, nothing at all seemed to impress her. She was as unimpressed by me as that horse on the wall in that kerry-green pasture was of the post office it hung in.  

Then I had a sudden inclination that it might be my hair. I had recently cut my hair short and after I attempted to style it as normal with the cream I've alwasy used, it appeared to be thinner than I ever recall it being. One of casualties of age, I suppose. In retrospect, I thought I did notice her looking at it that last time when she seemed happy. I quickly became convinced it was my hair. I watched movie upon movie in the local theater and all the leading men had luxurious and styled haircuts full of thick hair. But what could I do? A wig would be too obvious. A hat would be improper. A gentleman doesn't wear a hat inside a building of any sort, let alone, a federal post office.  

The answer came at the local drugstore. There was a bottle of pills they sold, Neptunic, a brand-new product that promised results in 30 days. Thicker, fuller hair, or your money back. So I bought it, though ten dollars seemed an exorbitant price to pay. I convinced myself it was a down payment on a happily-ever-after and that it was probably that expensive because it actually worked. They said it was made in Japan and perhaps, my mind wondered, it was one of the inadvertent side-effects of the atomic bomb that was dropped just eight years earlier. It didn't seem that far-fetched. Maybe there were a bunch of hairy people running around Japan these days. 

I kept going to the post office to see her. Although she wasn't apparently moved by me, or interested in the least, I was moved by her and interested, nonetheless, perhaps the way an undertaker is interested in the beautiful young corpse of a love he never had the pleasure to meet while living. But I kept the dream alive inside myself that maybe she would change her mind and revive like Frankenstein's monster on the slab of her indifference. One day she might smile at me the way she used to. Maybe she would smell my cologne and wake up from her slumber. Or notice my new clothes and be impressed. Or perhaps the stubbles of new hair that grew through the thinning forest of my once proud mane, might help her reconsider. 

The Neptunic appeared to work. I gave my scalp serious inspection nightly and new follicles of growth appeared. I decided to double up on the dosage, so to hasten the results. After several weeks there was quite a noticeable improvement and I was impressed by the way that it only grew hair on my scalp and not on my back or in my nose and ears and other undesirable regions. It was almost too good be true. What started as peach fuzz quickly turned into a thick head of actual hair. 

I hadn't given the ingredients any consideration until a good friend and fellow professor at the university named Dick asked me, "Say, Johnny, what's in that stuff?" 

"I don't know."

"Why you taking it for?"

"To grow hair."

"You don't look bald to me," Dick countered. He was bald though. Balder than a bowling ball bald. To a bowling ball, I wasn't going bald. It's relative. But to a young attractive woman who works at the post office, surely I was. 

So I read the bottle and realized that it had some usual ingredients, to say the least. It had something labeled as MarineEMG — which was the key ingredient. It took me some time and research to find out that MarineEMG is an ingredient that is made entirely of shark testicles and concentrated shark muscle protein. This made no sense to me, considering I've never seen a hairy shark and could find no record of one, not even from the prehistoric-era. The second key ingredient that it had was horsetail extract, which made more sense. 

I didn't think much of it. Dick asked me again what was in it and I said it was "all natural stuff." 

But then the night sweats came. I was okay with it for a while. I simply threw the covers off me and opened a window. I bought a fan. But then a painful and sudden deformity swelled on the back of my neck. The tumor-like mass grew so large I had to wear a scarf to conceal it. I thought it was a side-effect from the pills. Or maybe it was a cancerous tumor, but it didn't stop me from taking them. I needed hair to attract Emma, I was sure, and I would do whatever I had to do to get it. Whatever type of ailment that it was, surely it would subside. It was probably just some kind of seasonal allergy affecting my lymph nodes, I convinced myself. 

But then, while eating lunch, I accidentally bit myself and drew blood. I nearly took off my right index finger. So I went to the doctor and they stitched me up, saying they'd never seen anything like it before. After closer examination it appeared that my teeth had grown sharper, and an extra row began to emerge from behind the first. Feeling like a freak, I concelaed it from the doctor. They were sharp, pointy, triangular teeth. He asked to see my teeth, but I shook my head no. 

It was about this time that I noticed a dramtically enhanced sense of smell and found that I had an uncontrollable hankering for fish so much so that if I didn't pack tuna in my lunch, I would drive over to Thimmes' Fish and eat everyday. I was eating there so often the owner felt obligated to warn me about the dangers of mercury poisoning from eating too much seafood so that I couldn't sue him if I went nutty, as he said. I had to sign a waiver. 

Around the next day, that tumor on the back of my neck revealed it's true identity. Much to my relief it wasn't a tumor at all. It turned out to be a dorsal fin. My God, I realized smoking my pipe that evening, regarding my changed self in the mirror — I was turning into a shark. I could smell fish from a mile away. I had an irrepressible urge to bite things. I impulsively bit two students but spit them out and the university, without acknowledging that I was turning into a shark, convinced me to take a leave of absence until I felt like myself again. 

I ordered groceries from the market because I couldn't go out in public as my condition worsened. What hair I had fell out, but a very elegant horsetail sprouted out from right around my tailbone. Then my skin turned silver and my eyes turned black. My freezer couldn't hold enough fish, so I dug a large pond in my backyard and had it stocked with various catfish, bass and trout. 

I wrote my mother a letter telling her not to worry about me, but trying delicately to explain my condition, yet finding it impossible to do. "I've seemed to developed sharper teeth," I wrote candidly. "Something triangular has grown on the back of my neck and I find it very difficult to breathe air. I've taken up swimming and sometimes swim twenty hours a day. My eyes are darker than the last time you saw me. And I am on a new diet of fish, which they say is healthy. Brain food. But all else is satisfactory and normal," or so the letter went. 

I couldn't go to the post office and let Emma see me this way, so I wouldn't be able to buy a stamp. I'd have to have someone go for me so I called up Dick, and like a good friend, he came over straight away. I opened the door just enough to hand out the letter and the change for the stamp. But I nearly bit his arm off when he stuck it inside to try to get in, saying he heard all about me and just wanted to help. He said he saw me through the window and that it was a miraculous metamorphosis.

"There's no helping me, Dick!" I gurgled. 'I'm doomed! My condition has worsened and continues to decline so much so that all I do is swim in my pond and eat whatever unfortunate fish that swims near my mouth. Oh, Dick! Don't tell anyone! Whatever you do, tell no one I am so unfortunately afflicted!"

When I wasn't swimming in my pond I was milling around in my bathrobe, smoking my pipe. Fortunately, it was summer and hot because I wasn't sure I could take the cold. Nothing further changed. I still had all my extremities from neck down. I still had the horsetail that whipped around when I was excited. I decided to take up painting pictures and I did a self-portait. I decided to write a last note to Emma and to ask Dick to deliver it. But I couldn't find the words to say, so I didn't. I wasn't interested in her anymore. All I wanted to do was to watch television like a normal person and eat things. I felt so cold-bloooded. 

The next morning, a large van pulled up in front of my suburban home. A camera crew and someone I vaguely recognized spilled out of it nearly all at once. Then another car pulled up with men with cameras and a few women for sidekicks who looked confused and willfully dense —like the cameramen promised to show them something worth seeing and give them exposure in exchange for the obvious thing men desire from beautiful women — a quick dip in the pool, eh, guv'nuh. Then there was Dick traipsing across my lawn with a smile on his face and his hairless cranium glowing like a hundred-watt lightbulb under the morning sun. He seemed to be the organizer of the event and huddled everyone together in my driveway with his hands in the air as though he controlled them all like a fiendish puppet-master with a thousand strings tied to his prodigious fingers. 

My nose was in the front window and I caught a glimpse of my great white head staring back at myself while looking out upon them. Dick collected something from each of them until a large black limousine pulled up and he seemed to forget the other guys in favor of this new visitor. It was none other than Ed Sullivan. How Dick arranged Ed Sullivan coming to my house, I didn't know. Then I realized, they were all here to see me. Not me. But the deformed version of my former self. My stomach complained it's usual early morning borborygmus and so I hurried and grabbed a dethawed halibut out of the fridge and stuffed it down my throat before the fateful knock which would come any second now. My mother would die if she knew Ed Sullivan was on my lawn. 

I fixed my sweater and adjusted my tie. Checked my teeth for fish and wiped my chin of blood and thought to put on my hat, but decided against it. Then there was that expected knock. A very excited and cheery sort of rapping. I could hear Dick's nasally-voice pule from outside the door. I opened it and there he was, standing next to Ed Sullivan who gasped and took a step back as I stood there welcoming them inside. Immediately, the flashes of the camera bulbs and the shrieks of the women took over the tranquility of my quaint bungalow. Ed Sullivan's eyes were as wide as golfballs, and he still hadn't said anything. Dick proudly smiled and shook my hand and patted me on the back, talking me up like a car salesman would a used Chevy. 

"Isn't he fantastic, Mr. Sullivan? Didn't I tell you I had the goods? You can't get any better than this! Huh? Will you just look at him, for crying out loud! This is as good as it gets right here, and I am sure we can work out a fantastic deal for him to appear on your show!"

Dick handed me a stack of checks, which is what the reporters had paid him to take my picture, unbeknownst to me. 

"Johnny boy, I'll explain it all later. I know you would have said no, but you are a goldmine! It's all yours. I'll just take a modest 10 percent and we both can retire to Bermuda. You in the ocean and me in one of those all-inclusive resorts. Women in bikinis! All you can eat! What do you say, old man?"

At first I was overwhelmed. What could I say? Money and fame in an instant. It would be very anti-capitalistic of me to say no. To decline. In fact, they might consider me a communist and haul me away. Ed Sullivan cautiously approached me and poked my face with a timid finger while the cameramen all snapped away. Then he pinched my cheek to be sure it wasn't some sort of costume gag. Some kind of latex rubber suit. He is a man not to be duped. Satisfied by his inspection, he smiled and then he had his people come in and clear the herd of cameramen out of the house. They scattered like gazelles amongst a lion. He wanted the exclusive. He offered us top dollar. $10,000 for three appearances. It was an unheard of sum. Of course, we agreed. I signed papers before I knew it. 

"You can do tricks, right?" Mr. Sullivan asked as he gently touched the points of my teeth. 

"I can eat fish."

He didn't seem impressed by my answer.

"He can eat living fish whole. By the bucket! While standing on two legs!" Dick added. 

"Alright, gentleman. I'll see you in New York. My people will handle all the arrangements and such."

I had a desire to bite Ed Sullivan, but I suppressed it. A month later, we appeared on the show and it was a great success. So much so that he wanted to book us again. Magazines right and left put me on the cover. Time and Life both did a story. Scientists offered me hundreds of thousands of dollars to take my blood and to do research and studies. Movie studios wanted to put me in pictures with glamarous Hollywood starlets. Advertising agencies wanted me to do commercials, particularly, ones for toothpaste companies. 

I became very wealthy very fast. I was rarely home, but when I was I liked to relax. A fence had to be built around my bungalow to keep people away. Not everyone was a fan, though. People who lost loved ones to sharks seemed to bear an incredible grudge against me, as though I had eaten their loved one. I tried to defend myself, but there was just nothing I could say that could make it right. They looked at me with horror. The gentleman shark, most people called me. Ed Sullivan bragged that he had coined it, but it was Dick who had first said it. On the way to New York. 

Then on a lazy Sunday when there weren't very many people crowded around my gates hoping to catch a glimpse of me and snapping pictures, I had a visitor. A lovely visitor. It was Ms. Emma Vail from the post office. She came to my house and stood at the gate and waited for me to arrive. I pulled up in a new black Lincoln convertible and she waved like a school girl might wave. I smiled back, giddy as a schoolboy, but realized my teeth might frighten her so I grinned and kept my teeth concealed beneath what I had left of lips. My stomach was a lepidopterarium of butterflies and I felt the way I always did when I went into the post office and bought those three cent stamps. Just to see her smile. I never really wanted or needed anything more than that. I suppose, one day, I just got greedy. 

She was more beautiful than ever. I invited her inside and she acquiesced. 

"I saw you on Ed Sullivan!" she cried. She stared at me intensely. Even more intensely than she had ever before when she seemed interested. "I've always adored you, Mr. Maddox — I mean — John. I just — couldn't find the words to adequately express my — interest."

"I didn't think you were interested at all. At first, I did. But then you changed."

"Excuse me for being finicky," she explained as she stared at my enormous head. "I didn't lose interest, I — I just didn't know what I wanted. I'm young. I had to think things through. You know, I meet flirtatious men every day and — well. Well, I saw you on Ed Sullivan and I realized you were the one for me! You are going to be in movies they say! You might meet President Eisenhower! Or the Queen of England! Johnny, you're going places!"

"So you want me?" 

She bit her lip and nodded her head as she grinned. It was a new face I hadn't ever seen before. Then she unbuttoned her dress and pushed it off her shoulders and it fell perfectly to the floor in a cotton puddle at her feet. And there she stood in front of me naked as the day she was born with all the progressions of womanhood, right on my living room rug. I wasn't ever sure how I would act if and when I saw her again. I had been so in love that I took pills I shouldn't have taken and became someone I really wasn't at all in hopes to impress her somehow. She was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined naked. Perfect as anything I had ever in this life seen, and probably ever will see. But it was all so overwhelming and sudden. It was the first time I'd ever seen her outside the post office. Without copper bars striping her. And naked, of course. 

Maybe I had become more cool than I really was because I was half shark. Or maybe the money and fame inspired some sort of confidence I never before had. Whatever it was, I shook my shark head no and told her that I appreciated her coming, and it was nice to see her again, but I believed her motives to be disingenuous. And although I dreamed of her coming back to me in such a dramatic way, or in any way, if I wasn't good enough for her as myself, as the good, yet, ordinary man I was, who adored her as I did, she wasn't for me at all. So I picked up her dress and handed it to her. Then she left, rebuked and undeniably dismayed.  

The effects of those pills wore off in a few weeks and I returned to normal. Scientists were baffled by my transformation, and my transformation back to my normal self. Some hoped they could understand it because surely they could have sold it to the military as a fantastic weapon that might have changed the geography of the world. Some amphibious soldier sort of deal that isn't permanent. My mother phoned me and told me she had prayed for me so she was giving God credit for my recovery, and herself for the assist. I never ate fish again. 

I found love soon after. She was a check-out girl named Rose at the local market. I go there all the time buying small parcels of groceries so to see her more often. Sometimes, I forget the eggs. Or the bread. Quite on purpose. I took her to see "Peter Pan" and I fell in love with her in that theater, looking over at the glow of her smiling face lit up by the wonder of that colorful screen. And though I was again but an ordinary man, my affections were thankfully and adequately requited.