The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (14 page)

Jess is still calling his name and she has, by now, stepped close, close enough to smell the meat on his breath, the tang of mustard, and she, too, is thinking about that trip to the beach, though she isn't quite certain where she was, only that it was someplace outdoors that smelled of fire and smoked meat and that she woke to find her father on top of her mother, moving against her with a wet desperation, as if to devour her, while her mother smiled delicately in profile. Then her father looked over and saw her watching and seemed to want to say something to her, to yell or apologize, she couldn't tell which, and she shut her eyes and turned the other way and soon after her mother got skinnier and skinnier and they locked her in the study. This is when all the aunts began to arrive and to give Jess gifts, one every morning. They told her she was beautiful again and again.

Jess would have no idea, at this point in her life, that she has associated this memory with her mother's death, that, in some hidden cavern of her heart, she regards her father as having killed her mother, or, more precisely, that she regards she and her father as having collaborated in the murder of her mother.

She knows only that she has arrived home to find her father in her room, that he is shaking, his eyes clouded over, and because she loves her father she moves to embrace him, not a full hug, just a brushing of their two bodies in the dark. Her hair is shining like some wild flag and he is staring down at the ring, breathing heavily.

Paul is so hungry now he could eat a pig, a cow, an entire farm of useless beasts. All the fields of crops in all the countries of the world would not fill his belly. He can smell the smoke of the fire and the meat and he is lying with his wife on the warm sand and he is holding on to his only given daughter and he is starving to death.

It is important to remember that this is only a single moment, this tentative caress, nothing they will speak of again, an
interlude
.

It is important to remember that their crimes are not really crimes. They are simple human failings, distortions of memory, the cruel math of fractured hopes. The only true crime here is one of omission. The woman they both loved has been omitted from their lives. She is a beautiful ghost, a floating ring.

In less than a second, a horn will sound from below. Jess will fall back, swing herself away from her father and toward the rest of her life, her friends waiting in a car by the curb, the night to come, the boy who has told her she is beautiful, who will, in a few hours, in the basement of
another home, slip his hand inside her pants and whisper again that she is beautiful.

As for the ring, it will be replaced, first by Paul, on the dresser, under the scrunchies, then by Jess, in the box on the shelf in her father's closet.

Paul will return to the kitchen and make himself a sandwich, but the meat will taste rotten and this taste will haunt his tongue, even after he rinses with mouthwash, and he will drink warm milk instead and take a sleeping pill, and then a second, until he can feel the convincing blur of his dreams. In the days to follow, he will swear off meat, a gradual transition, so as not to detect the notice of his daughter.

But this, of course, is what lies ahead for them, as they race away from the hot center of themselves. Decent lives. Reasonable consumption.

For now, they are still together. Her arms are around him, one hand on his shoulder, the other touching the padding of his waist. He is staring at the ring. Hunger is surging inside him as he sways with her, once, through the dimness of the room. What are they doing here, exactly? Who can say about such things? They are weeping. They are dancing. They are prisoners of this moment and wonderfully, terribly alive.

J
ANIE MET THE ELECTRICIAN
Charlie Song in August. The AC adapter to her laptop had frayed and the connection kept failing. Thus she was forced to jiggle the plug until the current returned, at which point she would have to remain
very still
for many minutes at a time—she worked with the laptop on her actual lap, which was ridiculous, pathetic, but there you have it—lest the sadistic plug icon disappear and the machine revert to battery mode, which was supposed to last six hours but which ran down (and this Janie had timed) in seventeen and a half minutes. It was a little like being a hostage.

Charlie Song's shop was on a stretch of Mass Avenue that was constantly being torn up. Great chunks of asphalt lay about, while men in hard hats and dirty shirts murmured into cell phones. They were hostages, too, though they seemed somewhat liberated by their proximity to loud and senseless destruction.

Inside the shop, dozen of computers had been disemboweled. The remains were so: dusty circuit boards,
magnets, stripped screws, woofers like little black eggcups. Keyboards dangled from their cords. Had Torquemada worked in the high-tech medium, this would have been his style.

From the back of the shop, Charlie Song emerged, weaving through the lifeless monitors. He was middle-aged, the color of a weak varnish. He smiled, shyly, as if embarrassed by the size of his teeth.

You need help?

Janie said yes and began to explain her situation, rather too elaborately, while Charlie Song nodded and blinked.

Power broke?

Right, Janie said.

Charlie played the plug between the tips of his fingers. He licked his lips.

Okay. We try. Thursday.

Oh no, Janie said. I mean, if there's any possible way, see, all my work is on the computer, I'm a designer and I've got these projects, deadlines, so if there's any way, I could even wait—

Charlie nodded. It was a complex nod, one that seemed utterly to dismiss Janie's words and yet somehow (was it the mournful aversion of his eyes, the slightly injured stoop?) acknowledged the panic behind them. He carried the adapter to his worktable.

A pair of pliers appeared in his hand. With these he
snipped the cord and peeled back the black casing to expose the wires. The spot where the connection had frayed looked like a tiny copper fright wig. Charlie gazed at it and let out a sigh and played at the filaments with his thumb. Then he clicked on the ancient contraption at the center of his table, something like a whisk.

Is that a welder? Janie said.

Charlie Song said, Sadder.

Sadder?

Sadder. Sadder gun.

Janie wanted to ask him what did he mean, sadder gun. She had heard of a warm gun, a gatling gun, even a love gun—and now she thought of Drew, her beautiful boy-friend, whose beautiful love gun she would not be sucking this evening, nor receiving inside her with delicious slow-and-hurried difficulty, but which would, instead, lie tremendous and pink across his thigh while she quietly pleasured herself and wept, there in the dark, quietly. Charlie pulled a spool of silver thread from his desk drawer. The label read:
SOLDER
.

He grazed the shaft of the gun against an old sponge, producing a faint hiss. The tip came against the thread and the solder dissolved into a shiny glob and released a coil of white smoke. Charlie touched at the glob with great tenderness. It was a tricky business, coaxing the wet solder into the space where the wires had come apart. The muscles
between his knuckles tensed. His tongue dabbed, a bit rakishly, at his upper lip.

Janie felt she should use the occasion to learn a new skill. She might even fix her own adapter the next time it broke. But there was something else. It dawned on her, as Charlie gently replaced the solder gun in its holster and pressed the fused wires to the ohmmeter and watched the needles happily bounce, she was, how to put this, well, there was no other way—the flush of blood, the sudden moist warmth and down-below pulse—turned on.

H
E WAS SO PRECISE
, Janie said. Like a surgeon.

Drew nodded. Isn't it amazing, he said, how hypnotizing the simplest repetitive motions can be? I used to watch my grandpa whittle for hours.

He took a bite of fried dumpling and Janie gazed at his glistening lips, the boyish enthusiasm of his chewing, and at his sideburns, which she'd had to beg him to grow out. They looked devastating.

Yeah, it was like he had this touch, you know. Janie paused. Almost like a sensual thing.

She wanted to elaborate, wanted this terribly, but Drew had stopped chewing and his eyes began to narrow and she knew that anything more she said would be construed as an
unacknowledged, passive-aggressive
attack because Drew didn't happen to feel comfortable, for now, expressing
himself physically. Or, as Janie sometimes put it, after a glass of wine with friends:
he refuses to fuck me
.

Three years ago, when she and Drew met, this had not been an issue. They'd had sex then, not as much as she would have liked (never as much as she would have liked), but she felt this was somehow only fair because he was so beautiful after all, even his cock was beautiful, venous, unwavering, with its soft swollen head like an Italian plum, and she so thrilled to the music of his body and the sweet painful inconvenience of love between them, and told herself that such gifts were not to be gone at greedily. He was a good lover, too, generous in the modern fashion, determined to bring her off, though he tended to shy from his own pleasure.

All of which memorialized the occasions when he did come, when he would let her suck or stroke to the end, the prodigious and sticky end, which wrenched him free of his poise and brought the blood to his skin and the ooze of him down her chin or thighs and the final shuddering. He held her so violently in these moments she felt sure he would crush her ribs, that they would perish together, ecstatic and doomed.

Drew was starting in on the cashew chicken, asking her if she wanted green tea. It's good for the lymphatic system, he said, gesturing with the pot. His eyes were so lambent Janie wanted to poke one with a chopstick.

Whatever it was, the danger of vulnerability, some past trauma, a chemical deficit—
whatever
—the sex had diminished. He had grown more and more uncomfortable with contact, until she wasn't allowed to touch him in suggestive places at all; his body would go cold. She finally convinced him to attend couples therapy with Dr. Dumas, who spoke with great fluency about libido dynamics and intimacy paradigms and asked them to engage in tummy therapy (
circle the lower abdomen, please, with just the tips of the thumbs
) a ritual they both considered so humiliating that they had agreed, without actually discussing the matter, to stop seeing her.

Now Janie worried this topic, the Drew-won't-touch-me-fuck-me topic, all the time, on the phone, to her friends, and when she hung up, the cuff of her ear hurt. They always told her the same thing:
get out, get out, get out
, or,
have an affair, call an old boyfriend, that one who used to play in the new-wave band, just to see, you've got to
. They pleaded with her, keened at her, and she agreed with them, made little vows and planned her speech. But then she would actually see Drew, the cleft in his chin and the long, elegant hands, and this would completely fuck her up.

She was becoming a person she hated.

Besides, her friends, with their chintzy Cosmo-girl-empowerment shtick—she had seen them in Drew's presence, the way they fussed and preened and found excuses
to touch him.
Is that a new watch
?
I never noticed that freckle
. Once she had walked in on a scene in which Margo and Ali seemed to be asking Drew if he had ever seen their nipples, and would he like to, a charge they denied with much forced laughter.

Janie was a set designer. It was her job to make things look perfect, and that was at least part of the problem. Drew looked perfect. When they entered a party, there was always a fleeting hush, a flurry of swung necks and murmurs.

On Sunday mornings, he sat in the bay window with his tea and his cat, a stray he had named Clawed Rains, and the sun scrolled down the side of his face and Janie tried to determine if she would still love him if she were blind and the answer was, well, she was pretty sure. Drew was funny and self-deprecating and he could dance, he was graceful. (Often, as she set about a new design, she would envision Drew waltzing her under the houselights.) There was a decency about him. He designed curricula for at-risk kids, a little tiresome on the subject, yes, but
committed
. Noble.

But the point, the point, she wasn't blind, thank God, and oh dear God, he was good-looking. He was another species. He was Elvis, Elvis in his soldier days, with the Egyptian profile and the crew cut, only Drew was pale and something Janie wanted to call ruddy, kind of pink and splotched, which sounded bad, but on him, on his particular person,
his face, and the veins that stood out on his inner arms and his calves and his ruddy, muscled ass . . .

He was Scottish. Andrew Coletart, Drew. His people were ugly people, the Coletarts, mule-faced and benevolent. Every time Janie looked at Mrs. Coletart (whom she privately thought of as Mrs. Muletart) she thought: How could this be? How could this creature have sprung from your loins?

This was how she managed the whole affair: she relied on her own shame, her inexhaustible shame, and converted his rejection into something bearable by assuming she was at fault, that she pushed too hard for his love or wasn't pretty enough for him or smelled funny. He had asked her once why she didn't wear perfume more and now she was convinced she smelled funny, funny down there, and washed obsessively and even douched, and it was odd, really, because her old boyfriend, not the new-wave bassist, but the one who taught preschool and whose fingers smelled of paste, he had told her how good she tasted, like the juice of tulips, and insisted that she taste herself on his tongue and yeah, it was hokey—the juice of tulips,
Christ—
but every time he said it she felt a damp surge.

Drew had cleared the dishes and set a bowl of ice cream down in front of her. It looked like a lump of wet rust. Red bean, he said helpfully. He was into themed meals. Do you want hot fudge, babe? I can heat some.