Fake House (8 page)

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll tell the bartender.”

“Thanks.”

I thought it was important for us to meet in a civil environment, a public place where we would be surrounded by strangers, a deterrent to aberrant behavior.

The bartender switched to Chet Baker.
More crap
, I thought,
but at least it’s soothing
.

Maybe he’s afraid of being involved. Maybe he’s gay. Maybe my body repulsed him. (It’s true that my hips are a bit wide, my
thighs a little too thick, but these imperfections are obvious through my clothes. Anyone can see them.) Maybe my pussy stinks. Maybe he’s in love with somebody else, although I don’t see how that’s possible. Maybe he’s offended by the way I escorted him out of the apartment.

The door opened. It was Tom.

“Hi, Susan.”

“Hi, Tom.” I had drunk four Bailey’s and was feeling gentle, diffuse.

“Have you been here long?”

“I’ve just got here.”

He sat down. The waitress came over. “Would you like to see a menu, sir?”

He looked at me. “Are we eating?”

“I’m not.”

“Well, I’m eating.”

The waitress handed him a menu. “Something to drink, sir?”

“A Hennessy, please.”

He hid his face behind the menu until the waitress came back, then said, “I think I’ll have the wings.”

“Anything for you, miss?”

“Another Bailey’s.”

He reached across the table, grabbed my hand. I let him hold on to it. He said, “So! What have you been doing all week?”

“Masturbating.”

“Ha! ha! Masturbating!” He looked toward the bar as if expecting the men there to laugh along with him. “Listen.” He leaned his face forward, “I must tell you the truth. I’ve been seeing other people.”

“What do you mean ‘seeing other people’?”

He pulled his hand and face away, took a sip of the Hennessy, then leaned his face forward again. “You know: other women.”

“What other women?”

“A bunch.” He smiled. “I’ve been sleeping with them.”

“Since when?”

“Since last week.”

The waitress showed up with the wings. “Here you are, sir. Enjoy!”

He dunked a wing into the blue-cheese dipping sauce and started gnawing on it. He’d been fucking all week. He pushed the plate of wings toward me. “Help yourself.”

“Tom, you told me you haven’t been with many people.”

“When did I say that?”

“After you screwed me.”

“Did I actually say that?! I can’t remember.… But if I did say it, then I was only telling the truth. You were only the third girl I’ve ever slept with. The first two were in high school. They were terrible! I had the worst sex. You were good. But this past week has been incredible. You’ve changed me, raised me to a new level.” He smiled. “Thank you.”

“Tom,” I calmly said, “I thought we’ve been seeing each other.”

“No,” he said with surprising, firm malice, “we haven’t been seeing each other. We’ve been talking to each other. You are a smart girl. I enjoy talking to you.”

“Tom, why did you fuck me?”

“You fucked me!”

“I’m not joking, Tom. Why did you fuck me?”

“What’s more important: talking or fucking?”

“That’s not the question.”

“Look, you’re a smart girl. You’re good-looking. What more can I say?”

He reached across the table, covered my hand with his. I pulled mine away. He rubbed the side of his foot back and forth against my ankle beneath the table. He said, “Susan, I’m sorry there’s a misunderstanding between us, but why can’t we just be friends? Why do we have to drag in all this emotional shit?”

“Do friends fuck each other?”

“If you can’t fuck your friends, then who can you fuck?!”

He wiped the blue-cheese dripping from his lips, gnawed on another chicken wing. I said, “What about love?”

“Love! Love! Where do you see love?! It’s a Greek chimera. They used to say ‘I love you’ before they buggered a little boy.”

“Excuse me.” I got up.

“Where are you going?” He grabbed me by the elbow. “The bathroom.”

I sat on the toilet. There was something ludicrous about my peeing, with my ass hovering above water and my vagina, a recent venue of so much drama, returned to its original function, a Narcissus contemplating itself. It is humiliating to be compared to, to have one’s body compared to another. It is humiliating to have one’s body compared to itself. He said that I was “good,” and that the first two girls were “terrible.” My naked body was an installment, one in a series. My breasts, rather large, with their brown, diffuse areolae, would now be seen in the light of other breasts, their relative merits carefully weighed and remarked upon.

He could, I suppose, if he wanted to, become a connoisseur of labial folds, of clitorises, and of ass hair.

He looked up from his plate of bones. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to my apartment.”

“Now?” His eyes sparkled. “But first let me pay for this.”

“It’s paid.”

“See you later,” the house painter said as we walked past him.

Outside it was cool, the first sign of autumn. I walked briskly, slightly ahead of him. He said, “What’s the hurry?”

I laughed and broke into a sprint. He ran after me.

“You silly girl!”

As we waited for the light at the intersection of Nineteenth and South, a block away from my apartment, he clenched my shoulders, brought his face close to mine. I recognized his musk. It was our first kiss in a week.

“Wait, Tom.” I pushed his chest away.

“You crazy slut!”

We entered my apartment like old lovers, a married couple returning from work. I did not flip on the light switch. We crossed the living room in darkness. “I’ve got to take a piss,” he said.

He seemed relaxed, grateful. He was at home.

“I’ll wait for you in the bedroom,” I said. My father would flush the toilet to drown out the sound of his own pissing. Tom had no such modesty. I listened to the sound of his piss hitting water with frank lechery as I took my clothes off. I lay naked in bed and waited for sex.

As I watched him take his shirt and jeans off, watched him step out of his briefs, a tender grief welled up in me. Soon I would come to feel nostalgic over this naked body. He climbed into bed. That first touch along the length of our bodies was soothing. We kissed briefly.

“Tom.”

“Yes, Susan.”

“Will you kiss me down there?”

He understood. His face slithered halfway down my body, sank between my legs. He began by rubbing his nose against my hole. He lapped my vulva and nibbled the skin around it. For variety he kissed my ass. His face was working hard to convey its expressive range. It was competing against his prick. My vagina had become perceptive. He lapped and lapped and lapped. He was cleaning my toilet. It excited me that this mouth, which could talk so arrogantly about so many things, was smothered in my menstrual gorge, suckling my twat. I wanted to flush this face with urine, drench it with blood.

“Tom,” I whispered.

“Yes, Susan.”

“Stop.”

He wanted to fuck, but I wouldn’t let him. He asked me to jerk him off and I did. We slept. Or he slept and I pretended to sleep. I looked at his dark form and felt heat emanating from his back, from his asshole. In the middle of the night I got up and went to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and took out a can of Rolling Rock. I drank it staring out the kitchen window. The moon was a sliver of a smile in the starless sky.

When I left home for college, my mother had given me one of those Chinese meat cleavers. “It can cut anything,” she said, “from carrot to chicken. The only thing it won’t do is vacuum your floor.” I had never really learned how to use this knife. I finished my beer and took it out of the drawer. To get the motion down, I hacked it through the air several times. I hacked it and hacked it and hacked it.

U
NCLE
T
OM’S
C
ABIN

N
ineteen eighty-four was a very bad year for house painting. No one could get any work. By the middle of January, I was selling my books practically every day—hundreds of titles at a fraction of their original cost.

“Come on, Jay,” I pleaded to the guy at the used-book store, “these books are out-of-print, man. Can’t you give me a little bit more for them?”

“You know I always give you more for your books than I give anybody else,” Jay replied. (And he was right, of course. I had taken my books to him for years, and he had always been very sympathetic.)

“You’re just going to drink it all away at McGlinchey’s anyway,” Jay said as I walked out the door. One could buy a generic brand of baked beans, Hormel Chili, ground beef, or spaghetti and some jive sauce—the kind that is laced with sugar or even corn syrup—for two dollars or less, and a pint of Black and Tan at McGlinchey’s was still less than a dollar.

Being broke and idle is a very bad combination if it drags
on for a while. I was going through old copies of
The New Yorker
looking for something new to read, jerking off, or paying for my beers at the bar with dimes and nickels. Whatever happened to all those losers I went to school with anyway? How come nobody’s rich or famous? So what if Laura Humes hit the jackpot with the Daily Double! Big fuckin’ deal!!!

Deborah Lansing, whom I hadn’t seen for about two years, called around this time and left a message on my machine. I wasn’t too keen on calling her back since she wasn’t exactly friendly the last few times I had seen her on the street. It was rumored that the girl was on smack. Maybe she wanted to borrow money? I didn’t have none, in any case. What else could she have wanted from me? Two more messages came, however, and I finally dialed her number.

“May I speak to Deborah, please,” I asked when some old guy picked up the phone.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Bui.”

“Booey?!”

“Bui.”

“Hold on a second.”

Who’s the geezer?
I wondered, then Deborah’s voice came on: “I’m so glad you called me back.”

“How’ve you been?”

“Not good.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t really talk right now. Listen, can I stay at your place for a couple of days?”

I hesitated.

“It will only be for a couple of days,” she continued, “I promise.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“It’s sort of an emergency.”

“All right. What time?”

“How about nine?”

“I’ll see you then.”

You just want her ass
, a little voice told me as I hung up the phone.
But why shouldn’t I think such thoughts? Because she’s in trouble and she’s asking for your help and you are incapable of helping anyone without tallying a potential benefit for yourself. Shut the fuck up, you righteous motherfucker. It’s wrong, son, according to Our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen
. I hastily made a little sign of the cross in compliance. And just think, Deborah’s dad is a retired USMC sergeant who did two tours in Nam to protect democracy for the likes of me.…

Our first time was very forgettable. I was sitting at the bar, alone and lubricated, when she came in with two friends and sat down at a booth.
There’s that Deborah
, I registered from behind my crazed lens, the cheery-looking one with a body like a pickup truck. “I like to sleep with Greg,” she had told me on a previous occasion, “because he has such a big butt.”

“You’re like a monkey,” she said to me later when we were totally fucked up and in bed.

“That makes me feel real good,” I slurred after a pause.

“Don’t be so sensitive,” she said.

Another pause.

“Okay. You remind me of a squirrel.”

“That’s better,” I said. Then we slept. There was a second time also, about a year later, and that, too, was very forgettable.
I will never
, I had promised myself—
no matter how horny I get—sleep with this woman ever again
.

The stunted growth of my race, I’ve often reasoned, comes from the fact that we have, for the last forty centuries or so, eaten nothing but MSG, duck sauce, mung beans, hot mustard, fermented garbage, flakes of carrot, Ramen Pride, and an occasional glazed doughnut, to be washed down by cup after cup of the world’s strongest coffee, sweetened by a digit or two of condensed milk at the bottom.
You were sired by a ring-tailed lemur
, goes a little ditty in my head,
and your mother is a gray squirrel!

I imagined Deborah’s father to be some boozy red-faced guy in a Phillies cap and an open shirt.

“Bui!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Do you know that I served two tours in your fuckin’ country during the prime of my life?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Do you know that I risked getting myself killed by little bastards like you just to defend your fuckin’ freedom?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you failed to satisfy my beautiful daughter?”

“I was drunk, sir!”

“I was drunk, too, when I fucked your mother twenty years ago!”

“You’re a better man than I am, sir.”

“You’re damn right. I was in the United States Marines!”