by Tom Lutz
Two more dissimilar people may never have encountered each other, except perhaps Cortés and Montezuma, and even they didn’t have to stand awkwardly in Dwayne’s living room after the introductions were over. Dwayne’s wife was out somewhere, thank god, and he had tucked in his young son when they arrived, so it was just Dwayne and his thirteen-year-old daughter who stood before them, the two of them equally unversed, it seemed, in standard social usages — the girl, Emily, was actually his wife’s daughter by a former marriage, a very sweet kid whose father was from Uttar Pradesh or somewhere, with bright, intelligent, nearly black eyes. Frank did the introductions, since Dwayne, by his own description a Brian Wilson-level recluse, couldn’t manage it. Unaccustomed to playing host, no one knew to say have a seat, want a beer? or anything. The four of them stood there, smiling.
Dmitry decided the room was in need of regaling.
“I was about to begin telling Franky a funny story on the way here,” he said, “about a little weekend outing to Vietnam not long ago with a friend. We had gone to play a little golf and do, well, some other things — no sense being so jumpy, Franky, I am not going to divulge our entire itinerary, since there’s a young lady present — but there was one night during which — how to put —”
“Maybe we can save this one for later, Dmitry,” Frank said.
“Oh, Franky, don’t worry.”
“No, really.”
“Dwayne, don’t you find that Franky worries entirely too much?”
Dwayne shrugged. “I, well — in high school he really didn’t worry at all,” he said, trying to lighten things up. God bless him, Franky thought, he’s trying to make a joke to Satan. What he said was both true and not true: in high school Frank didn’t worry about grades, or teachers, or getting in trouble, because he was always in trouble. But he was as anxious as hell in general. Maybe with the pot nodding him out back then people couldn’t see it. His father in alcoholic rages, his mother — this he only realized later — almost comatose with undiagnosed depression, he was the walking wounded back then, the marijuana he assumed was active rebellion had in fact been inadvertent medical intervention.
“I can do this, Franky,” Dmitry said. “Utterly PG. Don’t be concerned. This young lady — what’s your name again sweetheart?”
“Emily,” she said, halfway between repelled and fascinated by this odd, enormous person with the funny accent. She never took her eyes off him.
“And how old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Precisely. And Emily you are exactly the kind of thirteen-year-old girl who knows quite a bit about what she does know and knows absolutely nothing about what she doesn’t, isn’t that true?”
Emily looked at him for a moment, and then she and Dwayne looked at each other.
“The thing is,” he went on, unmaneuverable as ever. “We had rented two motorcycles, and we weren’t particularly good drivers of the things to begin with, and what with our golf bags strapped over our shoulders we were considerably wobblier, not to mention that, speaking of wobbly, we had had a few beverages, and when I say beverages, Emily, I do mean the demon rum, something which you will never, ever partake of until you are eighteen — or is it still twenty-one here among you Calvinists?” he looked from Dwayne to Frank, got nothing, perhaps because neither of them could say what a Calvinist was, exactly, and went on, “ — and then you will have a dainty glass of sherry or perhaps a tiny Cabernet with your meal, but no more, not like your stupid Uncle Dmitry,” — Dwayne visibly winced at that appellation — “and stupid Uncle Dmitry had managed, by this point in our saga, to imbibe a couple of pints of that horrid Vietnamese gin — I truly believe it is dredged from the bottom of some industrial pit, it is vile stuff that not even the Thais will drink, and they will drink almost anything; I have a friend who says they would drink their own mothers’ urine if it was dashed up with a little caramel coloring and had a whiskey label slapped on it —”
“OK! Emily, time for bed,” Dwayne said.
“I apologize, my dear Emily,” Dmitry said, “for that friend’s horrid metonym, and of course it goes without saying —”
“Yes, good night!” Frank added. “Great to see you, Emily, and I apologize for my friend’s language.”
“Language?” Dmitry said. “Urine?”
“But, Dad!”
“Yes, but Dad! indeed,” Dmitry went on. “Truly, don’t worry, no more bodily fluid references — and so there we were, Emily, loblollied on our scooters, nearly knocking people over on the street, inadvertently crashing through the potholes with our golf bags, risking life and limb, and then it started to rain — not a prodigious rain, not the kind that even drunk people would know to get out of, but a light drizzle, a bit refreshing in our state, and I believe we started laughing, because, I’m sure you don’t realize this, Emily, but a motor scooter gets outrageously slippery in the rain, and we were now become unpaid comedians, slipping and sliding around in the mud, golf clubs flying everywhere, and all the people on the street — this is Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon to you, where people are, well, let me put it this way: the French think they’re rude — and they were laughing at us, at the spectacle of these two stratospherically drunk and uncoordinated Englishmen flailing about in the rain, and we were laughing like mad people along with them. You see, not to jump ahead too much, the moral of the story is one shouldn’t drink and drive — Dwayne? Franky? You will agree with that, yes? Anyways, as we thrashed about we espied, down a little side street, the unmistakable signs of a certain kind of drinking establishment — again, how to say — a bar that specialized in a certain type of entertainment, with a cast of, um, well, now we’re getting into territory that perhaps —” and to their surprise, he paused, turning his gaze from Emily to Frank and then to Dwayne. “Dwayne, have you had the talk with Emily yet about ladyboys?”
Up until that moment, Dwayne had been torn. He was such a sweet guy that although he dearly wanted Emily out of ear-range, he simply had no experience interrupting people. Now he moved into action.
“OK, Emily, bed, now,” he said, a hand on her shoulder.
“But, Dad! Franky’s friend is here! And there’s no school tomorrow!” It was a Friday night. Not much of a disciplinarian, Dwayne, as it turned out — he relied on his wife at moments like these — so, fatally, he hesitated, and meanwhile, of course, Dmitry kept going.
“Oddly enough, that isn’t integral to the story. What happened was that we went over to the stupendously seedy bar —”
“Excuse us, please, I’m sorry, Emily’s going to bed.” Dwayne put his arm around her and steered her out of the room.
“— and we were so paralytically drunk — is that a word, Franky? Paralytically?”
“But Daddy, I have to get a drink of water,” Emily said, twisting out of his arm and escaping across to the kitchen.
“The fact is that these ladyboys could have been beautiful courtesans or could have been lads in English schoolboy outfits, for all we would have known the difference. We had another pint of rotgut — there’s a great American word for you, eh, Franky? rotgut — and arranged for two of them to drive us back to our hotel on our motor scooters, finally and belatedly aware that we were incapable of keeping upright anymore, and then two more said they wanted to come, too, and we were, as you say,” and here he broke again into his gravelly Americanese, “ready to party, so we said sure, why not. And thus there we were, now another bottle of so-called gin toward oblivion, three to a motor scooter and a golf bag apiece, sloshing forbiddingly and yet comically across the city, making a motley scene and I’m afraid a rather blue racket, and miraculously arriving safely.”
Dwayne was pushing Emily toward her room, and it finally dawned on Frank that he wasn’t really helping. He grabbed Dmitry’s arm.
“Really, Dmitry, hold on a minute, will you?” he said, quietly, and he thought, convincingly.
“No reason to, Franky old boy, we’re almost done,” he said. Emily was leaning as far
back as she could, digging her heels into the carpet, Dwayne pushing her gently but forcefully along like she was a handtruck without wheels, she smiling at Dmitry and encouraging him with her open face to continue, and lord knows what, exactly, she was making of the story, maybe Frank hoped, just liking the slapstick. “So we get to the hotel, and you can imagine, the two of us blotto and dripping wet, looking like we wandered out of the garbage dumps of Manila, our muddied golf bags making a disgrace of the lobby, with four extremely, extraordinarily tarted-up boys in tutti-frutti miniskirts and ripped hose, and I swear, Franky, it wasn’t until that moment, seeing things through the eyes of the young girls at the front desk, that I noticed that they were in fact ladyboys, and not your standard Vietnamese prostitutes at all!” At this he started to sing, “She was a lipstick boy, she was a beautiful boy…”
Dwayne had Emily in her bedroom and shut the door.
“And then there was a great hubbub, since, well, I suppose you’d have to say it was a far more innocent time than our own, Franky —”
“When was this, again?”
“About two months back, it’s a figure of speech, for comedic purposes. As I was saying, we couldn’t see our way clear to a tranny-boy slap party, so we told them to leave, which, being whores, they were disinclined to do without remuneration. Don’t look so severe, Franky, Emily’s gone — you’ll notice I didn’t mention prostitutes until she was behind doors —”
“Yes, you did.”
“Anywho, we said we had to get money from our room safes and that we’d be right back. We went with every intention of getting them something but promptly passed out on our beds. I have no idea how long they waited. Obviously they were gone by breakfast.” He looked over at the closed door. “Whatever could possibly have become of your friend Dwayne?”
When Dwayne came back, he looked so pained that Frank made as quick a getaway as possible. He didn’t want to be there when Dwayne’s wife came home — she was the kind of woman Dmitry would have tortured, even if he didn’t do it on purpose, even if he did it the way he tortured most women, and a lot of men, just by being himself. They went to have dinner with the journalist, back from Seattle, and Frank expected the worst. Dmitry, though, was much less obnoxious, which little hint of discretion demonstrated considerably more couth than usual. He waited until she went to the bathroom to evaluate her as a comely little Jewess. He, she said later, as Frank walked her back to her car, was a truly terrifying swine. She hated him.
“It isn’t like we’re going to be neighbors,” Frank pointed out. “He lives in Hong Kong.”
She looked at him funny.
“Yes, I know,” she said finally, opening her car door. “He lives there for the pussy. Ugh!”
“I see him at most once a year.”
“Yes, but, still, that begs the question, doesn’t it,” she said, getting in the car. “Why even that? What the fuck!” She had a mouth on her. “You are fascinated by him! What sick part of you is there — which, by the way, you have up until now done a very good job of hiding from me — what sick shit within you responds to him?”
What could he say, leaning on her open door? Except that he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know.
“Sometimes you talk like an idiot businessman, too, you know,” she went on, all wound up now, starting the car. “But I always assumed that was all those years in construction, that the real you was the guy who rhapsodizes about the beauty of lumber and sailing and quotes Wharton and Cather to me.” She looked at him from a new distance. “With Dmitry, though, there’s no real human being in there, none. He’s nothing but a beast, raw, nasty, empty.”
Frank tried to defend him, mumbling, and she put her car in gear. Before rolling up her window, she leaned toward him and gave him, yet again, what felt like one of the most loving kisses he had ever had in his life. He clung to that as she drove away, trying not to feel completely doomed.
When he got back to Dmitry, waiting at the rental car, he was convinced that Patricia was right, that Dmitry was nothing but a sexist asshole and a hopeless pig. “And probably a wildly criminal one at that,” she had said, “because how else does a person get rich in two years?” And knowing Dmitry, she was right about that too.
“What do you even want, you asshole?” Frank asked when he got in the car, hotter than he meant it, the wine from dinner at cross-purposes with his attempt not to weep at the turn his life with the journalist might be taking. “What the fuck do you want out of life?”
“Ah, Franky it’s like old times, you sexually frustrated,” with the British accent on the second syllable, “driving me around, lecturing me on my morals, righteously angry like your ancestral Puritan clerics, my perfect guide to America and American thought. It’s quite wonderful, isn’t it, Franky, the sacred rage?”
“I have no ancestral Puritan clerics. My ancestors were Catholics who came here in the twentieth century from Ireland and Germany and Finland.” The Finnish ones probably weren’t Catholic, he realized. “Seriously, what do you want?”
Dmitry looked over at Frank and then out his side window, sitting quietly for a few moments, both of them watching the sad, nondescript Los Angeles streets go by.
“The thing is, Franky,” he said, finally. “I do know what I want.” He waited, his standard dramedic pause. “I would like to retire by the time I’m forty with a house staff of eight.”
“A house staff of eight.” Everyone wants to retire by forty. “Are you joking?”
“No, I met a man once, in a business meeting, and we were all talking about how in Asia we could all afford endless domestic help, and it’s called help, Franky, because they really help, they make your life much, much,” he made it sound somewhere between mootsch and mutsch, “easier and much more pleasant, and you can roll your eyes all you like, but try it my friend and see if you ever go back to washing your own skivvies or trimming your own hedgerows or driving around looking for a parking place, then throw into the mix that you could rumpy-pumpy with one of the cute little maids now and then, which you could, and then come tell me it’s a bad idea, and yes, go ahead, hitch up one eyebrow the way you do — I really wish I could manage that, Franky, that thing you do with the eyebrow, I feel it is just what I need to kick my communicative skills up to the next level.” Frank, fuming, turned on the ignition and started to pull from the curb, and Dmitry continued. “At any rate, this man said that he had finally hit upon the perfect arrangement to cover all the services the average person like me needs — you know, cooking, cleaning, laundry, driving, and I’d like a little garden, and running errands, and keeping my schedule, let’s see, that’s one, two, three — I can’t remember exactly how it all works, but if you sit down with pencil and paper it comes to eight.”
Something about the way he said this, with the slightest tinge of melancholy, suggested he might be hearing, as it came out of his mouth, how horrible and pathetic it sounded, out loud in the dark, glowing Southern California night, families of immigrants crossing the street and homeless tents under the overpasses. Frank realized it wasn’t fair of him to take his difficulties with the journalist out on Dmitry — he was right about that — so he let it drop. Perhaps it was his own lonely and lonesome life hitting him, nothing more. Besides, the next day Dmitry was going back to Hong Kong and Frank to Connecticut. As they drove, Dmitry kept repeating a little ditty:
“Drive boy, dog boy, dirty numb angel boy.”
“What is that?” Frank asked.
“Franky, you really need to catch up with the times. It was among the most popular songs in the world a decade ago. Underground.
“She was a lipstick boy, she was a beautiful boy.”
Frank had no idea what any of that meant.
He dropped Dmitry at his terminal before returning the rental, and standing on the curb, looking in the window he said, “Franky, I’m going to ask you to do something for me.”
“OK. It doesn’t involve a motorhome, does it?”
“Ouch, but no. And
of course you are right to be a little wary of getting into business with me again.”
“Oh, brother.”
“What I want to do, Franky, is open a bank account in your name, at a Japanese bank, and one at a mainland Chinese bank.”
“Why in the world do you want to do that?”
“Well, Franky, please believe me that I do, in fact, have my reasons, and that I will explain them all to you very soon, but there really isn’t time right now.”
“I have a couple minutes,” Frank said, taunting. “Give me a hint.”
“I’m not telling you the details for your own good,” he said. “But suffice it to say that if anything should happen to me, not having any heirs and assigns, I’d like to leave a little something for you, and this is one way to do it, since I will be keeping whatever reserve I may have from time to time in these accounts. That way, too, when and if the time comes, there would be no haggling with whomever over an estate, and it would all be free of income tax, which is the only way to save nowadays.” He winked.
“What do you mean? You’re young. Why this now?”
“Franky. A lot of money passes through my hands. A lot. A lot of it stays in my hands.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“These accounts will help me avoid trouble, Franky. They’re prophylactic.”
“Well, I don’t see why you’re even asking me. Can’t you go ahead and open an account in any name you want?”
“Well, no, Franky, not with these kinds of sums. Trust me on this; I know banking law, and I know it country by country.”
“So you want me to go open accounts in Japan and China?”
“No, don’t be silly. I just want to borrow your passport.”
“I don’t have a passport.”
“I know. Get one. FedEx it to me. I’ll FedEx it back.”
“So you are in trouble.”
“Perhaps. Trouble is a side effect of being ambitious, and I’ve always been ambitious. But like I say, this is a way — and again, you’ll have to trust me — to keep trouble at bay. You know how important to me you’ve been, don’t you, old buddy? All that advice and lack of consent, all that ball-busting — it had an effect, perhaps not one visible to the naked eye, but it did. And so I’m cutting you in on the spoils, old man. Fifty bucks for a passport, thirty bucks to FedEx it; it will be the best eighty bucks you ever spent. You don’t have a retirement account, right? You have nothing saved. This will take care of your old age.”