The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (16 page)

Fred looked on, mortified.

But Charlie, who was backed against a door that read
EMPLOYE ONY
, with his hand on the knob, peered at Janie for a long moment. It was not a look of pity, exactly, but of
some larger human recognition. Charlie scratched his nose and glanced at the floor. He muttered a few words to Fred in Chinese.

Okay, he said to Janie. We do. But last time. Last time.

Of course, Janie said.

Fred muttered something plainly disapproving and put his windbreaker on and marched out of the shop. The two of them were, at last, alone.

Charlie went to his desk and stripped the wires and fired up his sadder gun and the snow continued to fall. Outside, the workers lumbered home and the air above the road took on a metallic shimmer and Charlie twisted the strands of wire and soldered them to the bridge. Janie pulled up a stool and watched him.

Can we listen to music? she said.

Charlie shrugged. He seemed to recognize that something deeply unorthodox was transpiring and ducked into the back room; a few moments later Bach filled the store.

Janie did not speak as he worked, but she imagined what Charlie's life might have been like, how he came to this country on a boat, probably a very small boat, or else wedged down at the bottom of a very large boat, and how he had struggled to open his own shop and now sent money back to his family in a place like Kunming or Shenyang and how his wife had died, oh his poor wife, and this had left Charlie Song as a widower and he lived in a
small apartment with very few windows and had to cook for himself and sublimated all of his erotic impulses into his stunning repairs of RAM drives and disk defragmenters.

And this life, for such a considerate man, this made Janie quite sad, for the alcohol inside her had begun to fade and left a yearning behind. Charlie was touching the wires to the ohmmeter; he didn't notice Janie's tears. She sniffed finally, and he looked up in alarm.

No cry, he said. We fix. Make good connection.

He began searching the drawers of his desk and the countertop and glancing back at Janie and he was a good man, an ugly man, true, but nothing a little dental work couldn't fix. Or maybe she would leave the teeth be. They gave him character.

Charlie returned, cradling something in his palm.

New coupler, he said. Flexible. He pressed the device with his thumb. Now you wired for life. No cry.

Janie's heart began to jump and she set her hand on Charlie's cuff and he stared down at this hand while, with her other hand, Janie grazed his brow and brought her face close to his. She scooted her stool forward and took a lavish breath. Charlie remained very still, like a squirrel. The sadder gun was smoking and Janie thought for a second about Drew and his beautiful bum and imagined the terrible joy she might feel in soldering his hairless cleft shut, though you couldn't really do that, could you?

Charlie was not moving.

Do you like me? Janie said. I like you, Charlie. Do you understand?

She felt the tremors in his arms.

Pretty. Very pretty lady.

Would you like to touch me? I'd like that. If you'd touch me.

Charlie swallowed. His throat revealed an immense suffering.

Married, he said. I have wife already.

Where, Charlie? Is your wife here?

No. Home. Wife home.

He leaned back, but Janie leaned forward and pressed her bundled breasts against him. Her hand settled onto his thigh and this too was shuddering and she set her lips against the damp skin of his temples, which smelled of burned solder, and then he was letting out sad little barks, and saying, Please, pretty lady, please no do that, in a tone of terrible confusion.

Now Janie saw what she had done and took her hands off him and she began to weep again. They were both there, on the green monitor, weeping.

I'm sorry, Janie said. I'm so sorry. I thought—my God, I've been so stupid.

Charlie Song could not stop weeping. His tools were all around him and his hands were at a loss.

I'm sorry, Janie said again. I had no right. Please. Will you forgive me?

Charlie took a minute to settle himself. He wiped at his eyes furiously, as if they were to blame. Then he did something quite wonderful: he gave Janie a gentle little touch, just the tap of a single finger on the back of her hand, or not so much a tap as a stroke, a soft little accidental stroke, in the hopes that she would stop crying, and he said, Pretty lady, pretty lady, don't cry. I fix. Promise. Promise.

There was an electricity to this gesture, a hopeful twinge, which struck Janie in her gown and smeared face as a version of herself from the outside world, the stranger world, and communicated her worth in a way she might never have known without him. And though he couldn't have meant so much in the one part of his gesture that was public, in the private part he was trying to communicate to her that she
was
a pretty lady and she
would
be touched and that all the happiness she desired would be hers in time, if only she could bear to wait a little, to forgive herself a bit more, and to answer, when it came again, the fierce, sweet alarm of love.

I
WANT TO SAY
that it was high summer. I want to say that the hydrangeas were exploding, and that I was in love. None of these things was true, exactly. It was nearly August and the hydrangeas were tailing off, brown veins seeping in at the edge of the purple clusters.

But, you see, this was one of those perfect summer days, the kind that burns off all the inconvenient truths, and I was in Vermont with my new lover, Lil Thorn, and we had risen hot with sleep, slippery in the rude places, desperate to start rutting again.

Oh how we rutted!

Rutted and gasped and tried not to breathe our rotten breath onto one another. And then, toward nine, Lil shambled to the kitchen, with her big lovely strawberry of an ass bouncing after her, and fetched us some juice and we gulped that down and let the fructose rev our blood and licked each other until our skin turned ticklish.

It was summer, our first summer, our only summer, and
the grass was the color of straw and the oaks on the hilltops wore skirts of black shadow and the lake down below us was an absurd milky blue. Eons ago, a glacier had passed through the surrounding valley, dug out an alluvial trough, which filled with runoff from the winter snows. The water was warm for one month a year, and we were in the thick of that month, lodged in the house of a friend who had left us his key with a note instructing us not to stain any of the furniture.

That was about our only agenda: don't stain the furniture.

We were students of literature that summer, Lil and I, and we'd brought more books than clothing. Summer was the time to catch up on the reading lists. Our duffels were crammed with Stendhal and Gaskell and James. There was always some book we should have been reading, though we were in the thick of our inaugural lust, bulletproof and glowing with sun, streaked in tanning lotion and dried sweat.

We were still reading for ideas back then, for style. We hadn't figured out what literature was for, actually, that it was mostly about loss, that without hope there was no risk and without risk there was no danger and that every story, in the end, is about danger. We still believed literature could be reasoned with, I mean.

L
IL LOOKED LIKE
this: tall, fleshy, with crooked teeth and a gently scalloped underlip. She'd found me somewhere, at some party, and showed me her tattoo. I was certainly ready for a major disruption.

Lil was just back from a year in Sierra Leone, doing relief work. She had the serenity characteristic of someone who has pushed past her surface fears, and this terrified and thrilled me, as did her decadence, her tendency to gorge on the sensual pleasures. The books could wait.

By noon, we had staggered down to the lake, down the steep rickety wooden stairs that led to the dock, with its quaint boathouse, where, of course, we had done it the previous day, Lil atop a bed of orange life preservers, the scent of rotting beams and boat fuel drifting down onto our sweet salty merger and the spiderwebs rising like faint scarves with our exertions.

There was a wooden float a hundred yards out, and we swam out there, with books held over our heads,
Gatsby
for me and
The Lover
for Lil. She was insatiable after doomed love, though she said she read Duras because she liked the way the author shaped her thoughts. I was stuck on Daisy Buchanan, winsome and cruel, gazing tearfully down at Gatsby's shirts (all those lovely silk collars).

We lay on our backs and held the books up to shade our eyes. And we might have gazed at the pages, absorbed a paragraph or two, but that was it. One of us would shift
our weight and the raft would sway and the other would reach out. We could feel the erotic intent, transmitted through the fingertips, and the books would fall away.

In the afternoon, famished, dizzy, we drove to the country store and bought smoked ham and rolls and chocolate bars, and Brie cheese, which we slathered onto a frozen pizza. Then we curled up and slept for a few hours and rose in time to watch the shadows of the trees drawn across the lake.

Lil wanted to swim. She ran down the stairs in shorts and one of my long sleeve shirts. I might have noted her precarious gait, the way she nearly stumbled on each step. But her tits were in an uproar, swirling all around; a little clumsiness didn't strike me as any problem.

She landed on the dock, almost drunkenly, and pulled the shirt off and kicked off her shorts and she was naked there for a moment, tall as a tree and solid, before leaping into the water.

There was no one watching, no one who would have said anything. It was one of
those
lakes. Folks didn't buy houses here to spy or complain, but to remove themselves from their duties to the poor.

Lil dove down and her body jackknifed. Her bottom broke the surface for a blessed moment. She stayed under for a minute at least, then rose near the shore with her hair dripping onto her chest. Oh that chest! That water! Those pale swollen hips, which shone against her sunburn.

I was astounded at my good fortune, mistrustful, unsure what I'd done to deserve Lil. I thought surely I would be the one who made too much of our affair, forget that it was summer, just a summer thing.

A
ND THEN DUSK
fell around us and we were into the wine, deep into the wine, two Chiantis straight from the bottle and thick as blood. It was a kind of greed that Lil made essential. Perhaps she knew what was happening inside her, that certain crucial circuits were, even then, fizzing out.

What I remember, though, is the sunlight lancing down from the stubbled brown ridges, falling across Lil as she fell against the railing of the stairs. And down below the lake, burnished in gold, the color of nostalgia—I can see that now—though at the time it was only a dappled backdrop for our next sex act.

Lil took a sip of wine and her hands were trembling and she reached back to sweep up her fine mess of black hair, to show me the delicate blue butterfly tattooed on the nape of her neck, and to lift her breasts to my caress. She stumbled a little, her knees buckled; I thought it must have been the wine, the sun, our long day of ardor.

She was wearing my shirt again (it was one of my father's old shirts, actually) and she reached down to undo the buttons and her hands were still trembling. She wanted
to undress for me, there against the rail, and her fingertips played at the top button. She tried to coax the button through the hole, once, twice, three times. I thought she was being coy, prolonging the act. But then suddenly she was in tears and I said, What is it? What is it, sweetie? and she shook her head and said, No, nothing, nothing, I'm just so happy, and tried, once again, to fumble the button through the tiny stitched hole.

I reached out to help her, but she pushed my hands away and her eyes, for just a second, flashed. Let me do it, she said. I can do it.

She laughed a little, tried to laugh, but then she was weeping again, more quietly now, and I thought of Daisy, bent in obeisance over those helpless shirts, and how happy it made men to see a woman, a beautiful woman in particular, weep.

And just a little later, when we'd managed to rid ourselves of clothes, she clung to me until we were both choked of air, though when I asked her what it was all about she only shook her wild hair and bit my neck.

I
COULDN'T HAVE KNOWN
. She was a beautiful young woman after all, big and pink and vital. And it was summer. You don't think about such things in summer. You're in love; you think you're in love.

And then summer ends and the chilly breath of autumn
comes out of the East and the flags of skin get folded into sweaters and it gets worse, the shaky hands, the stumbling, the mood swings, until finally, just before Christmas, she names the thing and it's some disease you've seen on posters, some breakdown in the muscles—one of your teachers in junior high had the same thing, Ms. Rolff, and you can still remember the way her head shook at the chalkboard, and you, teasing her behind her back.

Who was it who pulled away from whom? I still can't keep it straight. There weren't any scenes, any blowups. We simply agreed to let the affair run down. She made it easy for me. No talk of loyalty, duty, the things I might have done.

It was only that one day I couldn't rid myself of, the golden varnish of summer, which, rather than ebbing, ebbing away as the white glare of winter took us under, grew warm and encompassing.

Lil moved on, staggered off to a new program and later, I heard, to an experimental clinic run by a doctor in Mexico. But I was still snagged in that summer idyll, the sun, the clear blue water, her skin—it was my punishment. We never think about such days as they're happening. We never consider what it means that Daisy is weeping over those shirts, feeling her betrayal before she has enacted it. We never read a book for its deepest human lesson, not in summer.