What We Are (14 page)

I think about the harem of images Willie has in his head. “Aren't you concerned that he never comes out of his room?”

“We don't fight no more. 'Cause we don't talk. So the longer he stays in there, the better.”

“I don't think it's for the better.” I can see it hurts her to hear this.

“How long has it been?”

“Nine months.”

“What?”

“Same amount of time I carried him around in my belly.”

“How is that even possible?”

“He got a door in the bathroom, leads to the yard. Buys fast food with a trust account his father left him. No school, no job, no nothing.”

“As long as he stays in that room, he might as well be in Africa.”

“That's what I just said, fool.”

I lightly slap at the mocha globe of her ass, our lone connection. “How come we get busy in the garage and that's it?”

“I don't wanna dirty up the house. Gotta live in the damned thing. You want a little bit of that backside, my sweet Samoan pancake?”

“This whole thing is fucked up.”

“Well whatchu want then, nigga?”

Where do I start? I want time to stop. Right here, right now. So I can figure one little problem out for good. It doesn't have to be a big one, but it needs to be definitive, it has to be something I believe in. That I don't question. That I don't debone in the meat grinder of analysis. By the time I'm finished with an idea, there's nothing to cook, eat, and freeze but air, and you can't cook, eat, or freeze that. It goes right through you.

Do I need permission from the mother to assault with great fury members of my gender like Willie who seize on the modern-day right to be a nonentity, a living zombie? His little mental stutter steps before the attack could cost him his life. I want to take Willie up into a C-130 and kick him out at five thousand feet like a package of C-rations over the hungry deserts of Southern Sudan. When he lands, awake at last, I want to brand his forehead—the Catholic cross, let's say, of Ash Wednesday—and slap a sign across his back that reads,
YOU ARE THE REAL INFIDEL, OMAR AL-BASHIR
, and rub alligator bait into his threads, then watch him scramble. Let him negotiate the world in its raw sick fury like some reject protagonist from a Cormac McCarthy novel fleeing the Antichrist. And whether he lives or dies as a wannabe Lost Boy, little Willie will have a story.

“You wanna hear some Shakespeare?”

She rolls her eyes.

“
Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles
.”

“So whatchu want then?”

“Look, I'm offering you my free services.”

“That's my loyal Polynesian lover.”

“You want me to straighten that boy out? I'll take him down to the handball courts and let the parolees slap him around a little bit. They got tags on their faces that'll scare the shit out of him. Look like mutherfucking Maori warriors. Make him wish he never saw a sphincter.”

“Damn!” she shouts, coming out the car, jumping in my face, right there in her g and a T-shirt.

“I'm trying to help out your family here,” I say. “Your peeps.”

“Family? Peeps? What you talking about, fool?”

“What's wrong with you?”

“Me? Me? Where the hell you been? You talking like you in another place. You forget where you're at? No one knows wassup anymore. Not your own son, not no one.”

I
KNOW
what I'm talking about. It's embedded in me, too, that modern gluttony of the mind, that wild lewd greed. I'd ruined the only substantive relationship I've ever had with a woman because of the evolving sexual palette, the revolving nasty image. I was twenty-two, I was a walking hard-on. I crossed the busy streets of San Jo with my tongue out the side of my mouth. A sharp shift in the wind, an exotic accent, a gentle moment with a stranger, an idiosyncrasy as stupid as how one sips her morning coffee, had me tucking and repositioning and disappearing into obscure places for a stroke session. My poor girl and I would double-back beast twice a day, but she had only a partial understanding of the rotten nature of my organ. I was a demon. I should've been purged by fire, burnt at the stake. Or sent off to war.

In the beginning, Sharon was constantly making plans. Plans upon plans. She was like a kid building a fort in the yard. There were orchards and vineyards and beaches where our nuptials would be consummated, exotic locales in South America and New Zealand where our first child would be conceived. I bought a subscription to
Bride
magazine for her birthday, and she giggled. She considered the
>utility of certain friends ten years in the future, measured by who we'd be in the future: the Tusifales. That we could change and actually grow together, morph into some variable beyond our control, fascinated her. She was petite, blue-eyed, and thin-boned, but when she'd envision our future, Sharon inflated into a prophetic American genie.

Our pact was based on faith, on not cheating. For us it was a matter of driving toward the sanctimonious, of preparing ourselves for the carriage—when it came—of love. Every woman I'd dated before Sharon had been casual about adultery. “Just don't tell me about it” had been a common utterance. That meant, by translation, “I won't tell you about it either.” They wanted to keep the gates open. For fun or just in case.

Everyone I knew had cheated, was cheating. Even my happily married sister, Tali, whose friends often say, “She was meant to be a loving wife,” had had an affair with a brotha when she'd first gotten married. I overheard her telling a girlfriend named Tonicia about it at a luau, worried that she'd been knocked up and that the baby was gonna come out a little too brown for dove-white McLaughlin's tastes. “Poor McLaughlin!” the friend cried. “He got a sperm-bank son and a baby on the way that ain't his'n!” She'd asked for advice and the friend shrugged and said, “I don't know. Just keep the kid and that dude away from those DNA-testing scumbags!” I struggled with desire. I felt, somehow, sexually gypped in a monogamous deal, a fool on the stage. Like I'd been suckered into the narrative by a deceased Puritan playwright who was no longer culturally relevant.

In Sharon's daily absence, I started a ritual, the three-dollar three-minute run. Back then, 1999, 2000, I'd quit school eight classes short of a degree and was pushing a broom at the Mountain View Parks and Rec so she could finish up without worrying about tuition. She worshipped me for it, her parents questioned my ambition. That was tough to take: her mother was a swing-shift clerk at a Mervyns liquor
store and her pops was unemployed. He always enjoyed speaking to the myriad ways in which he was overqualified for any job. I'd think,
But you've yet to look into our burgeoning fast food industry, sir. You could be so overqualified pushing chalupas and bean burritos that no one would know the difference
.

Anyway, after work I'd catch the bus to the 7-Eleven in downtown Mountain View. Inside I'd buy a bag of barbecue Cornuts and a peach-flavored Kern's nectar. This was the first step of the ritual, getting the paper change (three one-dollar bills, each worth a minute in the booth) from the purchase and making sure the store clerk (this one a different Singh) wasn't suspicious. But he never made eye contact, which was the way I liked it. Each visit I'd walk under the bridge of the door determined to be inconspicuous despite the customer beep announcing me.

On the day of my sixth uncaught month it all blew up.

I went behind the 7-Eleven alleyway and started toward the booth. I kicked at a few broken stones of concrete. The air was Bay Area cool, half an hour before sundown, mid-March, the sea blowing its salty kisses inland. I was taking the half-breaths that I was used to in the alleyway. In my Parks and Rec T-shirt, Ben Davis jeans, and steel-toed boots, I was sweating profusely in the crotch and under-arm regions, yet not enough to stifle the rising of arm and leg hair. I was at the tips of my senses, alert for any interruption to the ritual.

I passed the back door of Delia's Cleaners, a few hanging racks on wheels, rusting at the corners, discarded plastic. A bottle of Olde English, unfinished by a golden third. Two more doors with numbers painted on the wall above, 223 and 225. There was a cardboard box on its side between the two doors, popcorn filler spilled out the mouth, the Styrofoam floating on the ground wind of the alleyway.

The back doorstep of Ga Bo Ja Korea Buffet was stacked with empty kimchi bottles, the scent of garlic and soy strong. A penny-bronze pussycat was digging through a box of kalbi bones. Sometimes
the cat would run when I came, but that day it just sat there and watched me. I didn't like what I imagined on its face of disheveled whiskers and so I hissed, “Hey!” and it scuttled into the restaurant. I could feel the excitement growing despite the stench of the alleyway. I reached down, still walking, and shifted my boot. I looked behind me and quickened my step.

The boot. The package. The wood. The johnson. The rooster. Used to call it the engine. I can remember the day when the engine would run wild on the cheapest gas, the oil dripping constantly. One shot of Elle MacPherson's nipple poking through the green latex fabric of a
Sports Illustrated
shoot—one nipple!—and it was running on empty for weeks. That photo would last in my head for a year, long enough for the next annual
S.I
. shoot on the beaches of Jamaica to hit the shelves by the millions.

I can remember, too, that primeval feeling I'd have when Sharon would walk into our shared studio, soaked from a two-hour workout at the 24-Hour Nautilus. I'd cross the limited space of our studio like a lion pacing his cage. Keen in the olfactories, watching her strip down, smelling the salt from her sweat-dried brown skin. The absolutism in my guts to fuck her absolute and hard feels now strangely foreign, almost out of body, the memory not even nostalgic. But I was losing interest even back then. A year into living together, I began to fantasize about Sharon's best friend, Susan, or Sharon's mother, Jan, the liquor store clerk, Susan's mother, both mothers, or a big messy sandwich with everyone involved.

That's the kind of deviant I was becoming at twenty-two, not even a father yet, a decade from a midlife crisis. Oedipus manipulating the images caught in his own head, wannabe orgy proprietor. I craved anything that would make the gasoline—Sharon, monogamy—not monotonous.

My straying mind was something I would try and hide from Sharon, but eventually I started dropping clues about the warped nature of my
desire. Leaving hints at the scene. I had, for instance, placed a copy of Updike's
Rabbit, Run
on Sharon's dresser. I'd felt a kinship with the perpetually fleeing Rabbit Angstrom. After she'd read it as I knew she would, and said, “That was good,” I offered her the next step-up with Updike, a tattered paperback copy of
Couples
that I'd bought at Recycle Bookstore on the Alameda. After she read it, I'd awaited a reprimand of some sort: adultery, philanderers, swingers, et cetera.

Instead, she'd said, “His picture sure doesn't fit a spouse swapper. He looks kind of New Englandy and bookish.”

I said, “Okay, try this,” and handed her
Tropic of Cancer
.

“Now this guy,” she'd said, two days later, “he's interesting. Should we get a bidet?”

I soon discovered that Susan, the best friend, frequented a nude beach. Susan was muscular and somewhat butch, yet I found her very sexy. She had the quads of a gymnast, the bob to match, and the tattoos of a nineteenth-century swabbie.

I'd said, “I bet Susan needs some company in the sun, huh?”

“Nah. She doesn't want you going with her.”

“No,” I said, kicking my toes into the heel of the other foot. “I meant you.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me? Susan says we don't talk enough.”

“Well, then you should go. Talk on the beach.”

“Not Susan and I. You and I.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I don't like the idea of old men watching. They hide behind the rocks and wait for Susan to roll over.”

I said, “I'd be back there, too,” and Sharon laughed. For some reason, I became embarrassed. “I'm just kidding.”

“Really, Paulie. Sometimes you're so strange,” and then, “Let's eat out tonight. Get ready to go.”

So I started bringing
Playboy
home. I put the magazine on the coffee table in front of the television, a place where visitors would
not only find it but find it first. Right between the framed photos of myself and Sharon pointing at the camera at Alcatraz, the other of Sharon and Susan hugging in Vegas. When Sharon had come home from her workout at the gym, she'd said, “What's this?”

“What?” I said.

Sharon was flipping through the pages and she'd already found the centerfold, an Amer-Asian with a bob. “Well, isn't she cute? She's got hair like Susan.”

“Yes,” I said, approaching Sharon, trying to find her scent, “like Katie Couric.”

She pulled away. “Don't.” She was studying each photograph. “So young.”

“Nineteen.”

“How do you know?”

“It says right here.” I reached for the magazine and Sharon moved half a step away. I said, “It gives her basic bio. Ambitions, the kind of men she likes, a pic of her cheerleading days.”

“What guy wouldn't want to do her,” said Sharon matter-of-factly. “What an ass.”

“What?”

“You might as well get a subscription.” Sharon tossed the
Playboy
on the coffee table. It slid and spun. “Save some money that way.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“If you say so.”

I was a little confused, having been prepared for a verbal assault. I was ready to take the discussion back to another century, touting the French Renaissance and its full-body models, or another decade and Marilyn Monroe—“the sexual avatar of class,” I'd planned to say—or another memorized phrase: “The last artistic venue of portraiture.”