The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (3 page)

“I'm sorry,” B.B. sobs.

“You've got to be kidding.” I slam the phone down.

The lesser gay underlings, sensing a disturbance in the Boss Force, have clumped outside my office. In Marco's absence, one of them will soon be nominated to check in on me. I regulate my breathing and call B.B. back. He comes to the phone in tears.

“Stop that,” I say. “Be a man, for crying out loud. Be a man and tell me how long you've known this.”

“A couple of days,” he whispers.

“So you knew on Saturday, when I gave you that jacket? And you knew at the party. And you knew when you fucked me Saturday night, and Sunday morning. And when you brought me those fucking flowers? You knew. But you didn't have the guts to tell me, is that your testimony, you little piece of shit?”

B.B. blows his nose. “I was trying to make sure, you know, I wanted you to have a great weekend. I felt I owed you that.”

And here I find myself, in my ripening thirtyish cynicism, newly confounded by the perversity of male logic. Best to dump someone on a high note? Is this the way men think? As if love were a discrete property, something one accrues, like money or promotions? But surely B.B. is empathic enough to recognize I had gone into full meltdown. And this
must have made him panic. He's one of those men who conducts his love life like a catch-and-release program. Though it's worse than that actually, because B.B. made me feel safe by showing me
his
insecurity. While my ex, for instance, played himself in public as a seducer and a tough, then wound up privately clinging to me for years. Which just goes to show how little women can know of their men—because men know so little of themselves.

Or maybe this is just the line they run. Maybe they know what they're doing the whole time. They'll give you an office and a desk and a title. But, in the end men win, always, because they can better withstand their own poor behavior.

B.B. is saying something, sniveling about what a fool he is, as if even at this point we might collaborate in a final scene, commemorating his guilt. I want to shout:
I was going to teach you how to kiss! You can't do this!
But giving him anything else, a single word, seems absurd.

I call Marco at home and the machine picks up. The glossies are staring at me, tireless and beatific in their gospel of self-improvement, urging me and all the other mes in the bleary sorority of millennial womanhood to find our G-spots, to insist on equal pay, to revamp the drapes and consider a diaper service, to do anything but succumb to our own truest feelings of anger and inadequacy.

I
TROMP ACROSS
the godforsaken Government Plaza, through the fishy stink of Hay Market and into the North End. I could just barf at the quaintness of it all: the zephyrs of garlic and dusty bricks, the old paisano peddling shaved ice under the weather-stripped cupola. But I need some tea and teary commiseration and I need Marco's bullshit wisdom and I need a hug.

Marco lives on Salem. But the moment I see the sign for Prince Street, I start thinking about Dinah. Dinah who lives on Prince Street. There must be something she possesses that I don't, some emotional or sexual power, some nonthreatening poise.
Something
. Because otherwise he would've chosen me. And now it occurs to me that I have wound up near Prince Street not entirely by chance, that some darker, unraveled part of me is hoping to find and confront Dinah. So that, rather than hurrying on to Salem—surely the prudent course—I find myself sort of hovering on the corner, though what I'm actually doing (it occurs to me unpleasantly) is
skulking
, a verb I had hoped to avoid during my brief tenure on earth.

The old man selling shaved ice smiles at me.

“You want-a eat a good meal?” he says.

“No.”

“Good-a calamari.”

“No thank you. Really.”

He continues to smile at me, suspiciously now, and I flee
onto Prince Street and begin checking the numbers on the apartment houses in a very obvious way, then looking down at an invisible slip of paper in my hand, as if I'm part of the census bureau, a special agent sent out to ask the locals random questions such as:
Is there a skinny little slut living on the premises who might have stolen my Chinese boyfriend?

I've been at this for anywhere from fifteen minutes to perhaps an hour, when a strange thing happens: a woman strides out of the building across the street with a tiny white dog. She looks just like in the photo: dyed blond hair, leotard top. Her waist is the circumference of a baguette, and she has that ducky dancer walk, mons pubis thrust forward, like a pregnant woman minus the child.

I cross the street and walk up to her: “Can I say hello to your dog?” I'm wearing a tailored suit and pumps—an outfit that favors the irrational gesture.

Dinah shrugs. “Sure.”

I bend down. “Hey there. What's your name?”

“Charmie,” Dinah says.

“Hey there, Charmie.” Then I look up and say, “Hey there, Dinah.”

“
He-ey
.” Dinah cocks her head. I can see her rifling through her little change purse of a mind, trying to recall how she might know me.

“You don't know me,” I say. “I'm a friend of Brock Chow's. He told me you lived around here.”

“Oh.”

“Actually. I used to go out with Brock. But he just broke up with me. Just a few minutes ago. He told me he's still in love with you.”

Dinah takes a half step backwards; little tremors of dread vine the skin around her mouth. I keep petting her dog. The fur around its eyes is the color of dried blood. A cumulonimbus has drifted over the spires of downtown, where it hangs like a vast gray anvil. I imagine how this would play in the magazine: “Hex His Ex: How to Confront the Woman Who Stole Your Man!” (Maybe a Photoshop illustration of a voodoo doll in a miniskirt?)

“Do you have a few minutes?” Dinah says. “Like, to talk?”

T
HE MOMENT
I step into her apartment, I know I've made a mistake. The decor is what Marco would call Early Porno. Popcorn ceilings. A particle-board entertainment center. There's dust on the sills, crusty dishes in the sink, a to-do list yellowing on the fridge. The air smells sharp and rotten and a dull wet chopping noise comes from down below, a butchering sound.

“Sorry about the smell,” Dinah says. “There's, like, the landlord put out some of those poison traps. My roommate's boyfriend said he'd find . . . whatever it is.”

“You have a roommate?”

“She only spends about half the time here.”

I'm just about to ask Dinah where, precisely, a roommate would stay, when I notice a door located
behind the stove
.

“Do you want some juice?” Dinah says. “We've got some great juice.” She pulls a plastic cup from the cupboard, the kind they give away at baseball games.

“That's okay,” I say. “I'm actually supposed to be visiting a friend.”

“Yeah,” Dinah says. “Anyway, you know, Brock's started calling me again.” She gestures, indicating that I should take a seat.

“I sort of figured.”

“You have to understand about Brock. He's so, like, insecure. He'll be with one girl, but then he starts thinking about his last girlfriend. It happened to me, too,” she says. “He left me for this girl, Tina.” She touches the sleeve of my blouse and her hand lingers there for a moment, as if what she really wants is to play the material between her fingers. “It's not even his fault, really. His parents, you know, they put a lot of pressure on him.”

Dinah picks up her dog and traverses the room. She wants me to see how graceful she is, I think. She plops Charmie onto her desk. On the wall behind her is a sampler that reads:
I
'
M A DANCIN FOOL
,
WHAT
'
S YOUR EXCUSE
?

“And it's not like I called him back,” she says. “He's a
great guy and all. I think it's amazing what he does. But I've really been trying to do some work on myself, like, interpersonal stuff. And Brock is someone, you know, he can be a little, like, too much.”

The phone rings and we both freeze. “I'm going to let the machine pick that up,” Dinah announces. Charmie starts darting around the desk. The machine clicks on and Dinah's desperately cheery outgoing message fills the room. Then there's a long beep and we both stand there not looking at one another.

Whoever it is hangs up.

“How long were you guys involved, anyway?” Dinah says.

“Not long.”

She nods and her ponytail bobs. “Were you guys, like, intimate?”

“Listen,” I say. “I should really get going.”

“Yeah, I just wanted, you know.” Dinah makes a little tossing gesture. “Brock is kind of a confused guy. But he's got a good heart. The work he does, you know, it's really the work of saints. I remember one time, right before we broke up, he came back from the hospital and he was just, you know, wiped out. Because he'd seen this little girl die during an operation. There was something wrong with her skull.”

The air seems to thicken around me, and I have to lean
against the door to support myself. “Do you have a bathroom?” I say.

“That's the one thing that's kind of weird about this place,” Dinah says. “The bathroom is actually, like, in the hallway.”

I stumble out the door and into the bathroom and drop to my knees over the bowl, which is stained with what I hope is rust, and my body begins to clench.

Dinah's outside asking if everything's okay, do I need anything? “I'm okay. Just girl stuff.”

“Maybe I could get your number,” Dinah says through the door. “In case you want to talk some more.”

“Sure,” I say. “Just give me a minute.” I sag back from the toilet and glance at the milk crate full of magazines under the sink. Right on top is Cher's face, winched by countless surgeries and beaming from the cover of our Survivor's issue, alongside Tina Turner and Oprah. Dinah has every issue of
Woman's Work
dating back three years. She's folded down the corners of certain pages. I feel ready to weep.

D
OWN BELOW
,
ON
the orange sidewalks, with their steadying smell of baked yeast, I want to feel vindicated, to know that B.B. dumped me for this wreck, that he's simply one of
those
men. And I want to feel relief, that he wasn't in my life long enough to do much damage. I've been in far worse entanglements, where the shared data
was extensive and the smells haunted my clothing for weeks. Most of all I want to feel my rage again, at the world of men, who never tire of exploiting our ability to care, our hardwired weakness for weakness.

I know I should toddle off to Marco's now and have a good cry and listen to his sweet useless pep talk and pretend to make sense of it all. But there's nothing in me but weariness. I'm weary of moving through life in this way, punished for my capabilities, betrayed by the glib promises of love. I'm weary of managing these disappointments. I'm weary of my body's gruesome tick. And I'm weary of telling women it can be different.

Instead, I wander the docks, the old schooners burdened under ornate masts, the colonial cemetery dressed in gravestones, names and years in elegant rows, and roasted garlic everywhere, everywhere tourists in their pink summer legs and dusk on the bricks, rain gutters fat with pigeons and rooftops sprigged with antennae, the sediments of beauty, I mean, and the widows on their stoops, done with the suffering of men and silent before the soft click of bocce balls. There is so much time in this life for grief. So many men lying in wait. And here, tonight, there is a harvest moon, which hangs so heavily yellow above the sea it might be God, or my heart.

I
WAS ON MY WAY
to see Wilkes. We were going to have brunch. Wilkes was a minor friend from college. He played number one on the squash team. I'd challenged him once, during a round-robin, and he annihilated me with lobs. Afterwards, in the showers, he told me his secret.

“Vision,” he said. “You have to see what's going to happen.”

Now it was five years on and I still felt sort of indebted to him. This was idiotic but I couldn't unpersuade myself. I kept remembering those lobs, one after another, as elegant as parasols.

Wilkes was in the back of the restaurant, in a booth. We said our hellos and he picked up his menu and set it down again.

“We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Jim?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Eight years now, coming up on eight.”

“That sounds about right.”

“You wouldn't think less of me if I told you something, would you?”

“Heck no,” I said. Mostly, I was wondering how much breakfast would cost, and whether I'd have to pay.

“I've got a cartridge in my head,” Wilkes said.

He had that drowsy pinch around the eyes you see in certain leading men. He was wearing a blue blazer with discreet buttons. He looked like the sort of guy from whom other guys would buy bonds. That was his business. He was in bonds.

“A cartridge has been placed in my head for surveillance purposes. This was done a number of years ago by a race of superior beings. I don't know if you know anything about abduction, Jim. Do you know anything about abduction?”

“Wait a second,” I said.

“An abduction can take one of two forms. The first—you don't need to know the technical terms—the first is purely for research purposes. Cell harvesting, that kind of thing. The second involves implants, Jim, such as the one in my brain.”

Wilkes was from Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay area. He spoke in these crisp, prepared sentences. I'd always thought he'd be a corporate lawyer, with an office in a glass tower and a secretary better-looking than anyone I knew.

“You're telling me you've been abducted,” I said.