The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (17 page)

Instead, we close our eyes and let our lovers step toward us, through the fading hydrangeas, the impenetrable dusk. And when their hands tremble, we take them in ours and pledge never to leave them, not now, not ever. Even as the summer ends and the books take on their true, cruel weight, this is the story we tell ourselves, and I would trade every word in the English language for the chance, right now, once again, to believe.

L
ARSEN HAD WRITTEN
a novel, and his best friend, Flem Owens, had no earthly idea what to do about it. He could, in point of fact, barely lift the thing.

“What is that?” his wife, Beth, said. “Is that a rabbit? Did he give you a rabbit?”

Flem dropped the red velour binder onto an end table. This happened every time he brought home something unexpected: Beth accused him of harboring an inconvenient pet. All because, years ago, he rescued an opossum he had somewhat accidentally hit with his car and attempted—alright, he could see this now,
foolishly
—to revive the animal on their kitchen table. “Is a rabbit twenty pounds?” Flem said. “Is a rabbit made of paper?”

Beth flipped the binder open and inspected the pompous font of the title page. “So this was the big surprise, huh? Wow.”

“Six hundred and seventy-three pages of wow,” Flem said.

“You didn't tell me he was writing a book.”

“I didn't
know
.” Flem shook his head.

He heard his daughter, Belle, pounding down the stairs in that vehement way she and her friends had.
The running of the Belles
, Beth called it.

“Did Dad get me a rabbit?” she hollered. “I heard you guys talking about a rabbit.”

“No such luck,” Flem said.

“What's that?” Belle began rubbing the red velour. She was eleven years old and in a rubbing phase, which unsettled Flem.

“Daddy's friend Teddy wrote a book.”

Belle wrinkled her nose, a bit like a rabbit. “Why's it in a photo album?”

L
ARSEN LIVED IN
an Eichler with his wife, Poor Jude. Flem could not think of her as anything but Poor Jude. She was a small woman with the hacked nose of a minor league hockey player and incongruously plump, firm-seeming breasts. These were her marquee feature, these breasts. Once, at a swim party years ago, Flem had found Jude alone in the cabana and watched her unsnap her top and let it fall to the wet cement. He breathed in the mildewed bamboo and coconut oil and looked at them, sagging like old grapes.

And then there was being married to Larsen, who had
insisted on an eighteenth-century British nautical theme at their wedding (not long after the swim party), because he had been on a Horatio Hornblower jag at the time. When the minister said, “Do you, Theodore . . .” Larsen shot the crowd a big grin and yelled, “Aye aye, Cap'n!” It was the sort of gesture another man—a man, say, with charm—could have pulled off. Poor Jude.

She answered the door looking, as she often did, like someone was yanking at the corners of her mouth.

“What's that smell?” Flem said. “Is that sap?”

“Incense.” Jude made a befuddled noise. “Go on back. He's waiting for you.”

Larsen was on the living room rug, wedged improbably into the lotus position. He had one of those exaggerated faces, the features large and set too close together. His lips and nose seemed to yearn for one another, as if he might kiss himself at any moment. He looked like a gargoyle was the truth, in the autumn dim.

“What's the deal?” Flem said. For nearly a month, Larsen had been bugging him about this meeting, saying things like
brace yourself
and
make sure you come alone
.

Larsen was trying extremely hard to appear beatific, as if he had looked the word up in the dictionary. “Sometimes in life, we reach a kind of a crossroad,” he said. Larsen was a year older than Flem, and prone to weighty declarations. “A place where we realize there is more than just one person
inside of us. We think there's just one person, but then we realize, uh, there's another. You see what I'm getting at?”

“I think so,” Flem said. He was thinking about the Rams, who were scheduled to get clobbered by the 49ers at four.

“Put it this way,” Larsen said. “‘When one door shuts, another opens.' You know who said that? Cervantes, the man who wrote
Don Quixote
, which is considered perhaps the first great novel ever written.”

“I think it's Cer-van-
tes
,” Flem said. “Three syllables.”

“Right,” Larsen said. “What it is, the point, is change. Evolution. Creative growth. If you'll just close your eyes.” Larsen called out to Jude, who did not respond. “Okay,” he said, “just wait here. Eyes closed.” Flem heard a bang, followed by a crash, followed by some nifty cursing. Larsen lumbered back into the room and placed what felt like a huge, furry music box on Flem's lap. “I wanted you to be the first one to read it,” he said, “after Jude.”

Flem stared at the title page.
Just Call Me Bones: A Novel by Theodore Habadash Larsen
. “Wow. I mean, since when . . .”

Larsen was grinning ridiculously. “I don't want to say too much. Because the truth is, this is just a working draft.”

“But I'm not a critic,” Flem said gently. “Shouldn't you show this to someone in the field? Like a professional?”

“That's the whole point,” Larsen said. “I want this first novel to be the sort of work that appeals to all audiences,
even the kind who consider soup labels high literature.”

Flem didn't consider soup labels high literature, though he did spend more time than he would have liked to admit reading the labeling on food.

“What am I supposed to do exactly?”

“Just read and react. That's all I ask.”

Flem nodded. He flipped through the pages in a bit of a daze. The house smelled of unwashed laundry and vanilla, and he could hear the small chaos of Larsen's sons in their bedroom. Teddy Jr., the four-year-old, was a little slow, but the older one, Jake, was sharp as a tack. He was blasting away on a TV video game and cackling.

“You want a drink?” Larsen said. “I feel like we should have a drink.”

“I'd love to. Really. But I promised Beth I'd do some errands.”

“One drink,” he said. “Make it a Neer Beer.”

As he pulled out of the driveway, Flem saw Jude watching him through the front window. The tight smile was still in place, the same expression, he thought, you sometimes see on hostages.

“I
T DOESN'T MAKE
any sense,” Flem said. Or actually, whined. The manuscript lay on his lap, steadily pressing his quadriceps to sleep. “The guy tells me every mundane fucking detail of his mundane fucking life.”

Beth shook her head. She didn't much like Larsen. Or Jude. They were
his
friends. “Just read the thing and get it over with,” she said.

This was easy for Beth to say. She tore through novels like . . . what was the expression? A bat out of hell's hand-basket? Something. Flem considered himself more of a measured reader. It had taken him four years to finish the first half of that Le Carré novel, the one about the Tinker and the Sailor. He'd done better with that book about the bridges of Wisconsin, which he nearly finished before the movie came out. He'd expected to see Meryl Streep's breasts in the film and found himself angry at the book when this did not happen. “You could read it, too, honey,” Flem said, snuggling Beth's elbow. “You're such a terrific reader.”

“Oh no you don't,” she said. “This is your fiesta, bub.” She snapped off her bedside light. “I've got an off-site to handle tomorrow. Early.”

This was how Beth talked since she'd become a consultant. Flem still had no idea what it all meant. He stared down at page one.

Ever since he could remember, Red Lawson had known he was different. As a baby, he had looked around the maternity ward of the hospital, at the other babies wrapped up like loaves of sterilized bread, and he had thought to himself:
I am not the same. I am different
.

His mother Angel and his stepfather Billy Ray had raised him to live the American Dream, and he had grown up determined to please them. He was the most handsome kid in his class, with dusky skin and bright green eyes like marbles, and the best athlete. Most of the girls had a crush on him. But Red eschewed all distractions. He even passed up the chance to go to the Olympics, even though Coach Hardy said he would have won the decathalon without even breaking a “sweat.” But instead, he kept to his studies and graduated fist in his class. One day, he read a book on trends in dentistry and realized that the big money resided in the revolutionary field of gum disease prevention. His parents were so proud of him. But deep down, Red knew he was different
.

He was a periodontist with the soul of a bluesman
.

When Flem arrived at work the next morning, his secretary handed him a pink message slip marked
URGENT
.

From: “Red”
To: My Pal Flem
Message: Well???

“He specified,” Gloria said. “Three question marks.”

Flem stared at his drills. “Hold my calls,” he said.

By two, Larsen had called six more times. Flem phoned Beth after his 2:15, a septuagenarian with a condition Flem
privately referred to as “black gum.”

“Is this
Hutchins
?” Beth said. “This better damn well be Hutchins.”

“It's me,” Flem said.

“Hutchins?”

“No.
Me
.”

Beth barked something at one of her coworkers, a death threat it sounded like. “I'm tied up in an interface,” she said. “Can this wait?”

“I just wanted some advice.”

“Quit breathing like that. You sound like you just ran a marathon.”

Gloria tapped him on the shoulder and handed him another message, this one marked
MEGA URGENT
.

“H
E CALLS EVERY DAY
,” Flem told Dr. Oss. “I mean, no kidding. Every day.”

“Hmmm.”

“It's so self-centered. Like I don't have the rest of my life to tend to. Belle's starting to grow breasts. Beth says it's the hormones they pump into these chickens. My mother won't stick with the Saint-John's-wort. You take her out, she makes a scene. The salad bar doesn't have gherkins, whatever. And that damn dream has started up again.”

Dr. Oss raised his eyebrows, his countertransference equivalent of an erection. He loved the dream—it was like
a golden oldie—though it always consisted of the same thing: Flem in the middle of his life, doing something utterly routine, when suddenly no one could see him. He turned the color of his environment, the beige and whites of his office, the winter hues of Beth's decor. And life went on as usual. Occasionally someone might say, “Has anyone seen Flem?” But there was never any panic over his absence, as Flem might have preferred.

“Where were you?”

“At Larsen's.”

“And?”

“I stood around.”

“Might you elaborate a bit, Mr. Owens?”

“I stood around, being invisible.” Flem sighed grumpily.

“I wonder,” Dr. Oss said, “why you might be attracted to Larsen. If he disregards your feelings so much, I mean.”

“I'm not
attracted
to him,” Flem said. “He's just one of those friends, you know. We went to school together. We wound up in the same city. Our kids play. It's one of those things. You know what I mean.”

“No,” Dr. Oss said. “I'm afraid I don't.”

T
HE PHONE RANG
and Flem did a little involuntary neck twinge, what Beth called his “chicken peck.” Belle snatched up the receiver and frowned. “Hey,” she said.

From the dinner table, Flem mouthed the words:
Who
is it?

“I'm fine,” Belle said, coiling the cord around her pinkie in a vaguely lewd fashion. “No. Yeah. Noooo.” She giggled. “Okay. Let me check, Mr. Larsen. Okay-ay . . .
Ted
.”

Flem mouthed the words, and he mouthed them very distinctly:
You don't know where Daddy is
.

But Belle, who was showing the first hints of adolescence, pretended not to see him. She held her hand over the phone and called out, “Daaaaad! Daaaaad! Pho-ooone.”

Flem placed himself directly in front of his daughter:
Daddy is not here. Not here
.

Belle took her hand off the receiver and said, “One sec.”

Daddy is gone
, Flem mouthed, and, from the table, Beth said, “Honestly.”

“Oh,” Belle said, “I think that's him. He just came in.”

No no no
.

“Yeah, okay. Here he is.”

Belle held the receiver out and Flem considered (briefly) the scene that would ensue if he punched his daughter in the jaw.

“Oh hey. Hey buddy,” Flem said. “I was just out in the garage.”

“You guys have a garage now?”

“Carport.”

Beth made her you're-being-an-idiot sound, like a cat sneezing.

“You're a hard guy to track down. You get my messages?”

“Yeah. Didn't you get
my
messages? I left a few at your office.”

“With who?”

“I don't know. Sounded like a new girl.”

“I'm going to have to give her the shitcan, I swear.” Larsen chuckled. “Anyway, that's a relief. I was starting to get
paranoid
, thinking maybe you were avoiding me because you didn't like the novel.”

“Are you kidding?” Flem chuffed. “No way. No siree. Just busy. Super busy.”

“So?”

“That's the thing.”

“You haven't read it?”

“Oh no, no. I've read it. I read it all right.”

Belle started to do a little tap dance, with an imaginary cane and all.