The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (6 page)

I thought about Mandy's first story, “Home at Last.” It was about a shy girl from Stamford, Connecticut, who arrives at college and feels lonely (“as lonely as a single pebble at the bottom of a vast blue sea”) because her roommates decide, for no good reason, that she's a bitch and won't include her in any of their activities. But then she meets some really cool girls from another dorm and gets transferred to their dorm and finally decides that “home is wherever people are willing to get to know the true you.” I looked at Mandy, who had just reached into her purse and would soon start applying lip gloss to her mouth, and started to sort of miss “Home at Last.”

“I'm not interested in appropriate sex,” Mandy said. “That's what the guy I was seeing was saying, the therapist. I always go for these older guys. I went for a couple of the teachers in high school. Well, one of them was a coach. It's pretty shocking how easy it is to get them. I guess some teachers are pretty desperate.”

I did not say anything. I did not think about Mandy's tattoo or any other part of her. I did not watch her apply lip gloss. I remained very still. I remained very still and thought about the tapes of Clinton talking on the phone with one of his old flames. She asks him, “Do you like to eat
pussy?” And he, the future President of the United States, answers: “You
bet
I do.” The shock jocks had this snippet on a continuous tape loop. What a noble answer! A president who goes down! It was sad to watch those dopes in Congress mugging the guy, day after day. Thirty years ago, when JFK was getting head from whores in bathtubs, nobody made a peep.

“That's what I like about college,” Mandy said. “The teachers are so much more, like, professional. And your class, especially. You give us a chance to express our feelings. Like how you talk about we shouldn't be writers. We should just tell the truth.”

“Right,” I said.

Mandy folded her arms across her chest. “Is it always so cold in here?”

“It's central air. Sorry.”

“Yeah.” She produced a shiver. “I've got, like, goose bumps.”

“About the story,” I said. “I do think you've got something. Take a look at my comments—”

“Can I ask you something, Mr. Lowe?” Mandy said. “Like a more personal question.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you know what? Let me just check to make sure there's no one else waiting.”

Mandy looked me dead in the eye and I looked back at
her and a couple of seconds passed, a couple of very
long
seconds, like perhaps the longest seconds in the recorded history of my life, extremely complicated, morally uncharted seconds, white-toothed, lip-glistening seconds, abject, wave-goodbye-to-certain-sacred-principles type seconds.

Mandy nodded very slowly. “You should do that,” she said. “You should check.”

So I got up and walked over to the door and as I stepped past her, Mandy grazed my thigh with her hand, swept her hand down the outside of my thigh, and a great current of hope passed through my body, followed by a frisson of dread, followed by more hope, such that I began to tremble a little, more than a little, and Mandy, sensing this physiological event, let her hand settle on my knee.

She began gently to massage the anterior regions, as if checking for ligament damage, while I looked down into her face and tried to decide what sort of witness she would make in a court of law.

“I can tell you like me,” Mandy said. She smiled and blew a strand of hair off her cheek. “And you want to kiss me, but you're afraid I'll say something to one of my stupid roommates and ruin the whole thing. True?”

I dipped my chin in a manner that was both a nod and a plausibly deniable non-nod.

“But why would I do that to my favorite teacher in the whole world?”

Mandy closed her eyes and made her lips into a buttery little bow. She gave my trousers a prompting tug.

Well.

I suppose I bent to kiss her, just a glancing kiss, a swift brush of my mouth across hers, but Mandy needed more than that. She grasped my thigh and let out a stagy moan and shook loose the chopstick, so that her hair fell free. There was something in these gestures, a certain rehearsed quality, that made me sad. I felt suddenly, irretrievably sorry for both of us, for Mandy, who viewed her sexuality as a bright new user option only obscurely related to her heart, and for me, who was losing hair in clumps and couldn't even give my wife a decent poking anymore. I wanted to have a good cry right then, preferably with my head nuzzled somewhere warm.

But before I could do any such thing there was a knock on the door. I leapt backwards, smashed my tailbone against the edge of my desk. The door swung open a crack and I could see Brendan Mahoney standing there with his visor in one hand and a cookie in the other. He reeked of pot.

I lunged toward him and flung the door the rest of the way, so that he could see the entire office, Mandy seated across from my desk with all her clothes on and so forth.

“Hey,” he said.

“Brendan!”

“I didn't realize you were with someone.”

“Just finishing!” I said.

“Hey Mandy,” he said, and waved his cookie.

Mandy was already rebinding her hair, gathering up her purse. She slipped past Brendan without looking at him.

Brendan remained in the hallway.

“Did you want to come in?” I said.

“Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

He stepped in the office and sat down.

“What's up?” I said.

But Brendan had spotted the antidrug poster, which showed a kid lying on the ground facedown, with his head bleeding. The legend underneath read: drugs sure are glamorous.

“That's not mine,” I said.

“It isn't?”

“No. I don't believe drugs are that bad.”

Brendan seemed to consider this. “Huh,” he said finally. “Yeah. I guess I'm still sort of undecided on the issue.”

“Tell me why you're here,” I said.

There was a long lag time on the answer. I wondered if Brendan might be under the influence of a more powerful sedative, such as rophynol, and where he might have gotten them and whether he had any in his pocket. He was now examining the naked Plato sketch.

“Is that you?” he said finally.

“Plato,” I said.

“Right. Plato.” He sat up and began to nod. Then he slumped down again, in that way characteristic of young men who haven't quite grown into their height.

“So,” I said.

“Yeah. I guess I wanted to apologize. Like, for all the stuff in class today. Sometimes I kind of get going on an idea and just don't stop. Mandy must have been pretty pissed.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “She appreciated how seriously you took her work.”

“I know Emily was pissed.”

There was another lengthy pause. It occurred to me that I was getting something of a contact high. Everything had started moving more slowly, more interestingly. The events of the day were coming to seem somehow related. Brendan looked up at me with his sorry, bloodshot eyes.

“Me and her were involved, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We just broke up. A couple of weeks ago.”

“That's rough,” I said.

“It was weird, man. I mean, I don't know if I want to lay it all out.”

“Your call,” I said.

“I assume, like, whatever I said would stay between us. Like, on the DL. The Down Low. Anyway, she's a nice girl.
I've got nothing against her. But she wanted to do weird stuff.” Brendan sat there, fingering the top of his cookie. “She liked to touch my ass, man. Put stuff up there. Weird. She had these balls made out of, like, mercury or something. And a string of pearls. And all this lube. Man, she was the queen of lubes. She was like, ‘Come on. Be an adventurer.' I told her, ‘Hey, unless you're my personal physician, you don't get to fifth base.' I dunno, man. I'm from New Hampshire. You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“She was all, like: ‘Are you afraid you're gay?' And I was like, ‘No. I don't like stuff put up my ass. Does that make me gay?'”

It wasn't clear whether Brendan wanted me to answer this question.

“So anyway, that's part of the reason I might have gotten sort of crazy today. Because here she is coming off all, like, puritaniacal, like, I'm so gross and I'm so sick, when the truth is she's the freak. Freaky deaky.” Brendan had halfway crushed his cookie and he stared at the pieces in his hand, then crammed them into his mouth. “I just wanted to say sorry. I guess there's no need to go into detail. You probably don't need to hear this stuff, seeing as you're married and everything.”

“How do you know I'm married?”

“The ring, bro.”

“Right.”

“How's that working for you, the marriage?”

“Fine,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“I dunno. I just figure it'd be weird to be around all these hot young chicks all the time and have the ball and chain at home.”

“You learn to live with it.”

We were both silent for a while. Brendan had slumped down so low his head was resting on the back of the chair. He closed his eyes and said, “I'm pretty sure Mandy Shaw wants to fuck you, dude. Man, I'd like to fuck her.”

I made my thoughtful professorial noise.

“What do you want to do long term, Brendan?”

“Long term?” he said. “Probably brain surgeon.”

“Don't you have to have pretty good grades for that?”

Brendan looked down at his hand and realized, with visible disappointment, that he'd already eaten his cookie. “Yeah, that's kind of the catch-22 of the situation.”

“Can I ask if you're stoned, Brendan?”

“Not really anymore.”

“Well, for what it's worth, I thought your comments today were very insightful.”

“You did?”

“Yup.”

“You weren't pissed?”

“Not at all,” I said. “A for the day.”

Brendan gazed at me shyly, as I imagined a child might gaze at his father upon receiving a gift. “I still kind of miss her,” he said.

My own wife had loved me once so fiercely that she clung to me through the night. In the moments after love, our skin had glowed and our lungs had screamed with joy. It was her belief, though, that something had died within me, a certain capacity for tenderness. She had me convinced.

Brendan had gone a little misty on me now. “It sucks to be alone,” he said. “It sucks shit.”

I got up from behind my desk and looked down into his face, a smooth, open face, with so much woe still to come.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked me. “At night, I mean.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Forgive her. Forgive yourself. There's no other way.”

I know this sounds depressing, but it was a lovely little moment, the both of us sitting there in my office with tears pooled in our eyes.

A number of unpleasant things happened later. Nicole Buswell filed a complaint with the dean of students, alleging that my class was “overly sexualized.” Rob Tway testified on my behalf. So did Mandy Shaw. But the whole thing put a cloud over me and I agreed to go on leave. My wife filed for divorce and took up with a Tae Bo instructor
named Jericho. The hard-on difficulty was diagnosed as a partial stricture of the vas deferens, which required a costly and painful surgery. Clinton staggered from office, a disgraced eunuch.

But all that was still to come on the day I'm describing. On that day, Brendan Mahoney and I rose from our chairs and strolled into the dusk. It was one of those warm spring jobs that coats everything in gold and we floated through the courtyard, with its sleeping crocuses and luminous blades of grass. The cafeteria was pumping out the sweet greasy smell of calico skillet and the tall stone cathedral was dozing before us and all the students gathered in the shadows to hug struck me, just then, as beautiful creatures, freaks, all of them, with their frail bodies and fearless hearts. We could hear them kissing, wetly, to the point of collapse.

Brendan Mahoney ducked into an alcove behind the rectory. He pulled a joint from his hip pocket, lit up, and took a drag.

“You want a rip?” he said.

“Better not,” I said, taking the joint.

The lovers were all around us, making their strange, gentle noises of mercy. I took my rip and Brendan nodded. “Nice,” he said. “Nice form.” He put his arm around me, as if we'd done something heroic together, as if the happiness
within us were a puff of smoke we might hold on to forever, and he snorted like a horse, a young fearless stallion who's just shaken his bridle, and pawed the ground, and I snorted and pawed the ground too and both of us began to giggle, wildly, senselessly, and went galloping (us stallions!) off into the dusk.

T
HE DEVELOPER
'
S HOPE
had been to establish the park in Dorset Centre as a “public square” of the sort British townships once organized themselves around. The design featured a lazy slope of grass circled by a gravel pathway. In the proposed model, displayed at Village Hall, little plastic mommies pushed perambulators along this path, while a knot of boys tussled after a ball on a swathe of green. Beyond this, a man on a raised box held one arm aloft, his tiny mouth open. A group of fellow citizens stood before him in postures of thoughtful attention.

This was not, in fact, how the park looked. The village crime consultant voiced alarm at the prospect of creating an unstructured “youth magnet” environment. The open space, therefore, was somewhat reduced and converted into a par course. When, after several months, it became clear no one used the par course, a baseball field took its place. As the village fulfilled its prophecy of attenuated growth, the roads around the park widened and a new round of fretting ensued over the possibility that a child
would chase a ball into traffic. The park's central location, originally embraced as a quaint communal flourish, seemed, upon sober reflection, inattentive, even reckless. The baseball field was soon encircled by a high chain-link fence.