Hot Pink (4 page)

Susan's hypotheticals often end sadly and hardly ever make their point with force. Disregarding the ever-present effect that the Wheelchair Factor has on her confidence, the Sadly Ending Hypothetical Factor is the number one reason for why she can't bring herself to engage Carla Ribisi in conversation. But back to trickery:

The considerer will arrive at two interpretations of “Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass,” each one implicated by the other:

Susan Falls has, by now, watched enough TV and studied enough social and cognitive psychology, she hopes, to soon fulfill her dream of becoming one half of a powerful and revered creative team at Leo Burnett. Susan knows about attribution. She knows self-perception theory. Susan knows that for every considerer, there is a specific amount of time, designated
x
, that must be spent considering a thing before the considerer becomes aware that she has spent time considering the thing. Moreover, Susan knows that after the considerer has considered an as-yet-neutral (unvalenced) thing for
x
, that thing will appear to the considerer—unless she is someone who suffers from terribly low self-esteem or clinical depression—to be a good (positively valenced) thing, for the (non-depressed, self-esteeming) considerer knows she wouldn't spend her time on a thing that wasn't good. Therefore, once
the mystery of Carla Ribisi's ass
has been considered for
x
,
the mystery of Carla Ribisi's ass
is good. And all good mysteries are good to solve, so
solving the mystery
is also good.

In order to
solve
the mystery
—in order to see Carla Ribisi sans blue snowpants—one would have to spend time with Carla Ribisi, time enough to wind up in places where wearing snowpants would be out of the question: dressing rooms, beaches, showers, etc.

If Carla is a smarty—and Susan is sure that Carla must be, for Susan wouldn't otherwise waste so much time gawking at and thinking about her—then Carla, to ensure that any given considerer's
x
be met or surpassed, would stretch out this getting-to-know-Carla time for as long as possible before letting the considerer see her without snowpants, for in being kept from seeing what Susan will call Carla's
true ass
for
x
or longer, the considerer, always considering, would work the previously outlined self-perception algorithm, but this time the considerer would transpose
solving the mystery
with
true ass
, itself, such that not only would
to solve
be a good thing, but
true ass (the solution)
would also be good.

If Susan Falls were to create a successful television advertising campaign for Carla Ribisi's ass, the only two things she would have to figure out would be (1) how much time
x
equals for the average viewer, and (2) how to make the campaign compelling enough to keep the viewer considering it for ≥
x
.

If Susan Falls could pull that off, then even if the viewer were to start with a bias (e.g., “prefers big asses,” “disdains small asses,” “abjures jacked-up small asses that look bigger than they are”), the bias would, by campaign's end, be made irrelevant; whether im- or explicitly, the viewer would, once her
x
was met, reach the same conclusion as Susan:

Any ass worth spending all this time on must be some really good ass.

CHAPTER 130,024

AN ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

The other brilliant aspect of Carla Ribisi's blue snowpants is the sound they make when Carla enters a packed lecture hall, tardy, as she just has. Except people in college are never called
tardy
. The tardy go to high school. In college they're
late
, and this is the sort of thing—this usage of
tardy
—that Susan Falls wouldn't want to betray to Carla Ribisi upon their first actual meeting, but might come in handy later on, when Susan decides it's time to coyly let Carla know something that she wants the whole world to know.

Susan wants the whole world to know that she is a fifteen-year-old college freshman, but she doesn't want the world to know that she wants the world to know. She wants the world to see her as the sort of person who would not only make light of such an achievement on her part in conversation, but the sort of person who would
really
not
consider it an achievement. She has a statement prepared in explanation of her being a fifteen-year-old college freshman, and she hopes that the topic will come up so that, one day soon, she can make the statement. This is the statement:

“Ah, well… When you're legless, no one wants to play with you, and TV gets boring fast, so all you have are books and time.”

CHAPTER 130,025

SHIKKA SHIKKA, A GLIMPSE AT DEATH

Carla Ribisi enters the packed lecture hall, late for Logic I: An Introduction to Propositional Logic. Her snowpants make the snowpants sound. For every person present, the sound is the seed of a tree of uncountable self-perceptions relating to Carla, and, three strides in, Carla sees them all watching her, the professor included. He's clearing his throat, over and over.

Instead of making her way to her usual desk at the back of the lecture hall, she considerately heads to the nearest open seat, which is in the front row, between a deaf boy—in front of whom crouches an interpreter whose frantic signing distracts all hell out of the ASL-fluent Susan Falls—and Susan Falls, in front of whom is a wheelchair.

The interpreter signs, “Lecture interrupted by noise: S-H-I-K-K-A S-H-I-K-K-A,” and Susan's mind twirls at the thought of signing sound for a deaf boy; at the thought of a deaf boy reading a sign for a sound; at what must be the sameness, to a deaf boy, of a sign for a sound and the sound the sign stands for. As if a sound were nothing more than the sign that stands for it.

Susan Falls shivers, like in the Nordstrom dressing room, but not hypothetically.

Carla Ribisi, while getting settled, inadvertently knocks loose the brake on Susan Falls's wheelchair. The wheelchair rolls down the moderately sloping floor of the lecture hall. “Oh God,” whispers Carla Ribisi.

And Susan's shivering body starts to shake, only, with her mind still twirling, it's as if it isn't Susan's field of vision that's trembling, but that which is
in
her field of vision; the shaking of Susan's body seems to be the shaking of the classroom, and although a part of her knows that it's her body shaking—a part of her knows from experience that classrooms don't shake—the shaking of her body, rather than being expressed by the words
my body is shaking
, seems to be the expression
of
the words
my body is shaking
. And no part of her knows otherwise, not from experience. And the thought of this makes her shake harder.

And harder, until the rolling wheelchair strikes the wall beneath the tray of the chalkboard and clatters, and Susan startles out of the twirl. Stops shaking. Ideas can't get startled, is what she tells herself; they can't shake. Names don't shiver, she thinks. The world is not just a
word
with an
l
. Everything is fine. The twirl was an outcome of low blood sugar is all.

Look at things, Susan thinks, look at the wheelchair.

The wheelchair, having struck the wall, rolls back a few inches, as if the wall had struck it back, thus describing Newton's third law of motion—rather,
demonstrating
Newton's third law of motion… Or rather demonstrating
the effect of
Newton's third law of motion, for the wheelchair doesn't do the demonstrating, does it?—the
motion
of the wheelchair does the demonstrating… Newton's third law of motion, which is the name of a principle described by Newton, explains why the wheelchair describes the
motion
that it describes after striking the wall. And a shiver comes on.

Better to look at Carla, Susan thinks.

“Oh God,” Carla says. “Oh no.” The shiver wavers, quits. Susan never got to eat her breakfast is all, her Eggs Jiselle, she tells herself, and to quell the last tiny remnant of her panic, she inhales deeply, slows her blood down. What Carla hears is mounting rage.

“Oh God,” says Carla Ribisi once more. “I'm really so sorry.”

“It's okay, Carla,” says Susan. And all her panic is gone.

“It's just, God, I mean, it's just that…”

“Carla?” Susan says.

“I hate today. Anything I do is wrong.” Tears tremble in the scoops of Carla's eyelashes. One falls, splats against a thumbnail the color of a robin's egg, is atomized. More follow.

Everyone in the classroom continues to watch Carla Ribisi, even the professor. To defend Carla, Susan Falls glares at anyone who thinks she's strong enough to stand the eye contact. It is a sacrifice. Susan also wants to watch Carla cry.

“Let's leave,” Susan says.

“Really?” Carla wipes snot on the arm of the matching blue parka that she hasn't yet removed. The parka's shell is a shiny kind of nylon, iridescent, and the snot is clear and perfectly straight, like some three-inch pinstripe. It performs miracles of refraction with the fluorescent light particles that fall through the grids of the ceiling panels. Now Carla leans in close and whispers, “But,” and then she sees the line of snot. “God that's gross. I'm so gross…” She snorts a giggle.

“But what?” Susan Falls says.

Carla, still whispering: “How will we get out of here?”

“Just pull my chair over and we'll go.”

“Everyone'll see.”

“Fuck them,” says Susan Falls. This is the first time, in her entire life, that she has employed an extra-cerebral profanity. Though in fantasy she has often used swear words, she has never spoken one. It feels good, and it occurs to Susan that, as stupid as most people sound when they use profanities, as stupid as she must have sounded just now, the feeling of power that just rushed through her, from inner labia to thyroglossal duct, the trace sensations leftover from just now, just now when she said the word
fuck
, make sounding stupid more than worthwhile.

“Fuck them, then,” Carla Ribisi agrees, and it is the hottest motherfucking thing Susan has ever heard.

CHAPTER 130,026

TWO BOUNCES IN LOGIC

Carla, eschewing the intricacies of the plan, crouches in front of Susan and, at the sign-language interpreter who is staring at her, makes this sound: “Tch.”

“Hook your arms around my neck,” Carla says.

“Really?” Susan says, but she's hardly gotten it out before she's in midair, her stumped thighs at Carla's soft sides, under her unzipped parka. It is two steps to the wheelchair, and so two bounces, from which Susan deduces that the thing rubbing against her is a navel piercing.

“Okay,” says Carla. With one arm, she turns the wheelchair around, then lowers Susan into it, slowly, their bellybuttons meeting for a sliver of a second. “Do you need me to push you?”

“Not at all,” Susan says. She follows Carla out of the lecture hall.

“Nice knowing you, ladies,” says the professor.

CHAPTER 130,027

IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE OF LOGIC

“That guy's such an asshole,” Carla says.

“He just wants to fuck you.”

“I think maybe he wants to fuck
you
.”

Susan's first impulse is to insist that what Carla has just said is not true at all. Instead, she says, “He probably wants to fuck us both, simultaneously. If he had it his way, he'd have us from behind, have us each bent over his office desk. He'd slide his dick in and out of your pussy, so he could watch your beautiful ass twitch beneath his sloppy thrusting, and he'd keep his unclipped fingers rhythmlessly whittling away in me, so as not to obstruct the freak-show view of my lower half.”

Carla gasps and does a cat stretch. “That made me tingle, what you just said,” she says. “What's your name?”

“I'm Susan Falls.”

“That's a pretty name. You want to go somewhere and get really fucked up?”

“I have my Moderns in Paris seminar in an hour but… Fuck it. I was born to get really fucked up with you, Carla.”

CHAPTER 130,028

A DANCE, A DAMNED GOOD TIME TOGETHER

Carla rents a second-story room from a professor of music on 59th Street, just east of Ellis Avenue. The home is a standardly professorial Victorian, rampless. Carla wheels Susan through the alley and up to the garage. Punching out the command code on the number pad, Carla bounces a little and turns her head to smile at Susan, twice. “That's my Ali Baba dance,” she says. The garage door opens. “Have you ever smoked opium?”

Susan considers telling a lie, but chooses not to. “No. Never.”

“Good,” Carla says. She wheels Susan into a corner of the garage and crouches down in front of the chair, the tip of her ponytail touching Susan's half-lap. “Wrap around me,” Carla says. Susan obeys, lets her hands fall where they may on Carla's chest. Carla stands up.

“You're strong, Carla. How'd you get so strong?”

“I speedskate.”

Rather than remarking on any number of the positive effects that she imagines speedskating would have on the ass of Carla, Susan utters a simple “Wow,” but her face is pressed against Carla's face, and she feels Carla's face get hot, as if Susan
had
remarked on the likely effects of speedskating. Susan likes that.

Carla brings Susan up the stairs to her room. There aren't any chairs. “Where do you want to be?”

“The bed's fine. If you can get me somewhere near the headboard, so I could lean…” she is saying, but Carla is already getting her somewhere near the headboard so she can lean.