The First Bad Man (3 page)

My house isn’t very big; I tried to picture another person in here.

“They said I was practically family?”

“It goes without saying—I mean, do you say your mom is practically family?”

“No.”

“See?”

“When is this happening?”

“She’ll come with her stuff later tonight.”

“I have an important private phone call this evening.”

“Thanks a bunch, Cheryl.”

I CARRIED MY COMPUTER OUT
of the ironing room and set up a cot that is more comfortable than it looks. I folded a washcloth on top of a hand towel on top of a bath towel and placed them on a duvet cover that she was welcome to use over her comforter. I put a sugarless mint on top of the washcloth. I Windexed all the bath and sink taps so they looked brand-new, and also the handle on the toilet. I put my fruit in a ceramic bowl so I could gesture to it when I said, “Eat anything. Pretend this is your home.” The rest of the house was perfectly in order, as it always is, thanks to my system.

It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple:

Fewer dishes.

They can’t pile up if you don’t have them. This is the main thing, but also:

Stop moving things around.

How much time do you spend moving objects to and fro? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you
are
carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then. And maybe don’t fold the towels until the next time you have to use the restroom. When the time comes, see if you can put away the soap and fold towels while you’re on the toilet, since your hands are free. Before you wipe, use the toilet paper to blot excess oil from your face. Dinnertime: skip the plate. Just put the pan on a hot pad on the table. Plates are an extra step you can do for guests to make them feel like they’re at a restaurant. Does the pan need to be washed? Not if you only eat savory things out of it.

We all do most of these things some of the time; with my system you do all of them all of the time. Never don’t do them. Before you know it, it’s second nature, and the next time you’re down in the dumps it operates on its own. Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy. At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.

The doorbell rang at quarter to nine and I still hadn’t heard from Phillip. If he called while I was with her I would just have to excuse myself. What if she still looked like a gang person? Or she might feel terrible about the imposition and start apologizing the moment she saw me. As I walked to the door the map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. Not necessarily an indicator of anything.

She was much older than she’d been when she was fourteen. She was a woman. So much a woman that for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was. An enormous purple duffel bag was slung over her shoulder.

“Clee! Welcome!” She stepped back quickly as if I intended to embrace her. “It’s a shoeless household, so you can put your shoes right there.” I pointed and smiled and waited and pointed again. She looked at the row of my shoes, different brown shapes, and then down at her own shoes, which seemed to be made out of pink gum.

“I don’t think so,” she said in a surprisingly low, husky voice.

We stood there for a moment. I told her to hold on, and went and got a plastic produce bag. She looked at me with an aggressively blank expression while she kicked off her shoes and put them in the bag.

“When you leave make sure to lock both dead bolts, but when you’re in the house it’s fine to just lock one. If the doorbell rings, you can open this”—I opened the tiny door within the front door and peeked through it—“to see who it is.” When I pulled my face out of the peephole she was in the kitchen.

“Eat anything,” I said, jogging to catch up. “Pretend this is your home.” She took two apples and started to put them in her purse, but then saw one had a bruise and switched it out for another. I showed her the ironing room. She popped the mint into her mouth and left the wrapper on the washcloth.

“There’s no TV in here?”

“The TV is in the common area. The living room.”

We walked out to the living room and she stared at the TV. It wasn’t the flat kind, but it was big, built into the bookshelves. It had a little Tibetan cloth hanging over it.

“You have cable?”

“No. I have a good antenna, though, so all the local stations come in very clearly.” Before I was done talking she took out her phone and started typing on it. I stood there for a moment, waiting, until she glanced up at me as if to say
Why are you still here?

I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Using my peripheral vision, I could still see her and it was hard not to wonder if Carl’s mother had been very busty. Suzanne, though tall and attractive, would not be described as a “bombshell,” whereas this person leaning against the couch did bring that word to mind. It was more than just her chest dimensions—she had a blond, tan largeness of scale. She was maybe even slightly overweight. Or maybe not, it could just have been the way she wore her clothes, tight magenta sweatpants low on her hips and several tank tops, or maybe a purple bra and two tank tops—there was an accumulation of straps on her shoulders. Her face was pretty but it wasn’t equal to her body. There was too much room between her eyes and her little nose. Also some excess face under her mouth. Big chin. Obviously her features were better than mine, but if you just looked at the spaces between the features, I won. She might have thanked me; a small welcome gift wouldn’t have been unheard-of. The kettle whistled. She looked up from her phone and widened her eyes mockingly, meaning that’s what I looked like.

At dinnertime I asked Clee if she wanted to join me for chicken and kale on toast. If she was surprised by toast for dinner, I was going to explain how it’s easier to make than rice or pasta but still counts as a grain. I wouldn’t lay out my whole system at once, just a little tip here, a little tip there. She said she had some food she’d brought with her.

“Do you need a plate?”

“I can eat it out of the thing.”

“A fork?”

“Okay.”

I gave her the fork and turned up the ringer on my phone. “I’m waiting for an important phone call,” I explained. She glanced behind herself, as if looking for the person who might be interested to know this.

“When you’re done, just wash your fork and put it right here with your other things.” I pointed to the small bin on the shelf where her cup, bowl, plate, knife and spoon were. “My dishes go here, but of course they’re in use now.” I tapped the empty bin beside hers.

She stared at the two bins, then her fork, then the bins again.

“I know it seems like it might be confusing, because our dishes look the same, but as long as everything is either in use, being washed, or in its bin, there won’t be a problem.”

“Where are all the other dishes?”

“I’ve been doing it this way for years, because nothing’s worse than a sink full of dirty dishes.”

“But where are they?”

“Well, I do have more. If, for example, you want to invite a friend over for dinner . . .” The more I tried not to look at the box on the top shelf the more I looked at it. She followed my eyes up and smiled.

BY THE NEXT EVENING, THERE
was a full sink of dirty dishes and Phillip hadn’t called. Since the ironing room didn’t have a TV, Clee nested in the living room with her clothes and food and liters of Diet Pepsi all within arm’s distance of the couch, which she’d outfitted with her own giant flowery pillow and purple sleeping bag. She talked on the phone there, texted there, and more than anything watched TV there. I moved my computer back to the ironing room, folded up the cot, and pushed it up into the attic. While my head was on the other side of the ceiling, she explained that someone had come to the door with a free-trial cable offer.

“When you were at work. You can cancel it at the end of the month, after I go. So there’s no cost.”

I didn’t fight her on it because it seemed like a kind of insurance that she would leave. The TV was on all the time, day and night, whether or not she was awake or watching it. I had heard of people like this, or seen them, on TV actually. When it had been three days I wrote Phillip’s name on a piece of paper and ripped it up but the trick didn’t work—it never does when you lean too heavily on it. I also tried dialing his number backward, which isn’t anything, and then no area code, and then all ten but in a random order.

A smell began to coagulate around Clee, a brothy, intimate musk that she seemed unaware of, or unconcerned by. I had presumed she would shower every morning, using noxious blue cleansing gels and plasticky sweet lotions. But, in fact, she didn’t wash. Not the day after she arrived or the day after that. The body odor was on top of her pungent foot fungus, which hit two seconds after she passed by—it had sneaky delay. At the end of the week she finally bathed, using what smelled like my shampoo.

“You’re welcome to use my shampoo,” I said when she came out of the bathroom. Her hair was combed back and a towel hung around her neck.

“I did.”

I laughed and she laughed back—not a real laugh but a sarcastic, snorting guffaw that continued for quite a while, getting uglier and uglier until it halted coldly. I blinked, for once grateful that I couldn’t cry, and she pushed past, knocking me a little with her shoulder. My face had an expression of
Hey, watch it! It is not okay to ridicule me in my own house, which I have generously opened to you. I’ll let it go this time, but in the future I expect a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround in your behavior, young lady.
But she was dialing her phone so she missed the look. I took out my phone and dialed too. All ten numbers, in the correct order.

“Hi!” I yelled. She whipped her head around. She probably thought I didn’t know anyone.

“Hi,” he said, “Cheryl?”

“Yep, it’s the Cher Bear,” I barked, walking casually to my room. I quickly shut the door.

“That wasn’t my real voice,” I whispered, crouching behind my bed, “and actually we don’t have to talk, I just needed to make a demonstration phone call and you were the number I happened to dial.” This felt more plausible at the start of the sentence than the finish.

“I’m sorry,” said Phillip. “I didn’t call when I said I would.”

“Well, we’re even now, because I used you for the demonstration call.”

“I guess I was just scared.”

“Of me?”

“Yes, and also society. Can you hear me? I’m driving.”

“Where are you going?”

“The grocery store. Ralphs. Let me ask you a question: Does age difference matter to you? Would you ever consider a lover who was much older or much younger than you?”

My teeth started clacking together, too much energy coming up at once. Phillip was twenty-two years older than me.

“Is this the confession?”

“It’s related to it.”

“Okay, my answer is yes, I would.” I held my jaw to quiet my teeth. “Would you?”

“You really want to know what I think, Cheryl?”

Yes!

“Yes.”

“I think everyone who is alive on earth at the same time is fair game. The vast majority of people will be so young or so old that their lifetime won’t even overlap with one’s own—and those people are out of bounds.”

“On so many levels.”

“Right. So if a person happens to be born in the tiny speck of your lifetime, why quibble over mere years? It’s almost blasphemous.”

“Although there are some people who
barely
overlap,” I suggested. “Maybe those people are out of bounds.”

“You’re talking about . . . ?”

“Babies?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said pensively. “It has to be mutual. And physically comfortable for both parties. I think in the case of a baby, if it can somehow be determined that the baby feels the same way, then the relationship could only be sensual or maybe just energetic. But no less romantic and significant.” He paused. “I know this is controversial, but I think you get what I’m saying.”

“I really do.” He was nervous—men are always sure they’ll be accused of some horrific crime after they talk about feelings. To reassure him I described Kubelko Bondy, our thirty years of missed connections.

“So he’s not one baby—he’s many?” Was there an odd pitch to his voice? Did I hear jealousy?

“No, he’s one baby. But he’s played by many babies. Or hosted, maybe that’s a better word for it.”

“Got it. Kubelko—is that Czechoslovakian?”

“That’s just what I call him. I might have made it up.”

It sounded like he had pulled over. I wondered if we were about to have phone sex. I’d never done that before, but I thought I would be especially good at it. Some people think it’s really important to be in the moment with sex, to be present with the other person; for me it’s important to block out the person and replace them, entirely if possible, with my thing. This would be much easier to do on the phone. My thing is just a specific private fantasy I like to think about. I asked him what he was wearing.