In the pink
I’d wondered about Pinky during those days following Porky’s betrayal and how after his return she managed so quickly to forgive her husband and to do so with dignity and a finality that declared the forgiveness irrevocable. She emerged from the rift a woman who would command greater respect from her husband than he had ever shown her before and an increased stature among her family and friends.
I didn’t have to wonder about Pinky any longer. As I watched her approach, I felt uneasy and hoped she wasn’t coming to yell at me. I hoped she wasn’t coming to tell me I’m a coward and a selfish person. After my fight with Maria, I feared everyone I came into contact with would declare this truth to the world. I let the dog run to greet her and she barely had to stoop to look him in the eye. Even when Simon tried to lick it off, her smile was joyful and easy.
“Hi Pinky,” I ventured.
“Hi,” she said, letting the vowel glide so that her greeting sounded like hi-eye-eye, “How are you, Roy? It’s so pretty here and all these doggies, so nice.”
“Yeah, it is nice. I’m surprised to see you here.”
“Tipton drove me here because I want to talk to you.”
“Sure, let’s find a place to sit down.” We walked a bit further and found a bench.
“How have you been, Pinky?” I asked. “I know things have been hard. I’m sorry about all this.”
“We didn’t like you, Roy.” This hardly seemed like an appropriate response to my heartfelt apology. “Arthur used to tell us about you, you know, the alcohol, the drugs and those loser girls you used to date. You know Arthur loved you, but he loved gossip even more!” She laughed as she shoved her hand into my chest in one of those coy but forceful gestures that used to send nascent film stars reeling into walls and mud puddles in silent one-reelers.
“You’re a loser but you’re a winner, too. I don’t know what we see in you, but Stinky loves you and so do I.”
“Stinky?” I asked
“Stinky, Maria, my difficult daughter.”
“Oh, my God – Stinky! – No wonder she didn’t want to tell me her nickname.”
“And don’t be sorry, Roy, about Porky, it’s not your fault. It was very painful but with God’s help I am strong. I been forced to look at my life different and I learn some hard things but good things too. Porky is just another man, I learned, just like anyone else. But he love me and even more important, I love him and I forgive him. We all make mistakes and only God can judge. I have prayed and prayed for him to come back to me and I cried and cried, I never thought the tears would stop but not one drop wasted because God has answered my prayers. And Porky know he in the dog house – one more mistake and I cut his balls off.” The two of us began laughing hysterically, tears flowing from our eyes, and not one drop wasted.
I phoned Maria the next day.
“What up, Stinky?”
“Oh, God, you’ve been talking to my mother.”
“She had me in stitches yesterday.”
“Laughing at my expense?” she said. Here we go, I thought, my hopes for reconciliation already shut down.
“No, no, not at all. I did a terrible thing; I betrayed your mother.”
“You did, yeah.”
“I’m selfish and I’m a coward…
“Look, I don’t need you to do this.”
“Do what?”
“To abnegate and humiliate yourself. I had a long talk with my mother – so what did she say anyway?”
“She said she loves me and so do you.”
“I don’t know if that’s true but I’m willing to give you another chance.”
“And I’m willing to take the chance you’re offering me and to do better by you and your family. I started drinking again; it’s a battle; I have a lot of chinks in my armor.” I immediately regretted my choice of words. Certain words like chinks and niggardly, though perfectly good words, raise alarm bells and eyebrows, especially in San Francisco. A few silent moments were endured, pregnant with alarm.
“Did you just call me a chink?” and then when I was at the proverbial loss for words, she laughed and said, “relax you are so uptight right now. Do I have to wear a big sign, “KIDDING!”
“I knew you were kidding,” I said defensively. “I knew you were kidding. We’re on the telephone, how would I see a sign saying “KIDDING!” on it?”
“Well, then, the chance I’m offering you comes with a condition – you stop drinking right now because I am not bringing a user into my son’s life, no way.”
“I’ve already stopped. I haven’t touched anything for over a week. My binge lasted two days and then I quit.”
“I like that you want to be a better person. You really do. I even love that you have struggled with it and you keep on trying to do better. And you have succeeded at that. You need to acknowledge that, too. That’s all I’ll ever ask of you, to keep striving and making sure that you succeed when it really counts.”
“Your mother thinks we should have dinner together. She’s kidnapping Adam from day care today and says she won’t give him back until we’ve made up.”
“That’s twisted.”
“You know we got to know each other in the heat of your dad’s, um….”
“My dad’s infidelity. Yeah, you’re right it was a big thing and so was your lying to me. But nobody forgives anymore – I don’t want to be one of those people. Everybody is so, “Done! Over it! Next!” and I don’t want to be that way. If we can get through it, we could be the stronger for it. Is that what you were trying to say?”
“Well, yeah, that but also something else. Look, I betrayed your mother and one of my guests largely for the money I saved when your dad ripped up his bill for the plumbing work he did but I also did it for another reason. Your dad showed me a letter……”
“From Celestine?”
“No, from way back; it was like forty years old. From a girl he loved in high school; it was a Dear John letter. She rejected him because he was Asian and she was white. It still hurt him and your dad said he had the same feeling for Celestine that he’d had for that girl. I don’t know, I just thought he should have a second chance.”
“Wow, I never knew about that. I already told you I was a little bit proud of him for getting all crazy over this but he loves my mom; they need each other.”
“I know.”
“Wow, I just had a great idea. Why don’t we very consciously sit down and go through all our issues. I mean we’ve already been through some of the big one’s: Your Alcoholism….
“Your Dad’s Infidelity…”
“Your Lying……”
“Ok, could we call it my truth stretching? You know, the truth as a protective coating that we stretch over our loved ones to shield them from ugliness and pain?”
“Ok, your truth stretching….”
“I feel like we’re really making some progress here.”
“I totally agree; we are making progress. You know, I’m thinking, we should sit down and discuss all the little things that are big things to us. I mean actually list them on a piece of paper and tic them off one by one as we talk about them. Let’s just literally lay it all out on the table.”
I thought for a minute.
“Hhmm…well…I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve never done that before, but, yeah, maybe that would be a good idea. Maybe we need to take a clear, cool look at who we are, warts and all. Under the microscope.”
“Let’s try it out now, you first.”
“Ok, let me see. Ok, how do you feel about dictionaries with photographs as opposed to line drawings?”
“I haven't even used a dictionary since, like, college. Who cares about stuff like that?”
“Duh?! I do. Just answer the question.”
“Photos are fine, I don’t care.”
“Ok, not a problem, we can have two dictionaries. Is it ok to introduce impromptu confessions in this forum?”
“Sure, as l
ong as you’re not expecting the confidentiality of the confession box. I run to my mother and tell her everything. Well, only the juicy stuff.”
“Sometimes I’m not very nice.”
“Nice is overrated.”
“Yeah, but sometimes I can just be nasty. Like the time this girl I was seeing came over to have sex. It makes me smile to know her car was stolen while I was fucking her in front of the window.
“That is so hot. Except maybe I’d like there to be two thieves and I was getting fucked by one of them while the other one warmed up the car.” We both giggled.
“I have one of those not being very nice kinds of things – who am I kidding, I have a number of them, but one in particular comes to mind. I made a date with this guy. For some reason, just before he was about to pick me up, I hid in the bushes. I watched him go up to the front door – I was only like four feet away from him – and ring the bell, knock on the door, he was perturbed and definitely confused. Meanwhile I’m crouching, but my leg is starting to hurt, so I start falling and making noise and then I see him staring right at me. “Maria?” he says. I was mortified and didn’t say a word but I came out from the bushes. Then he asks me if I’m ready to go. He asks me if I’m ready to go! Can you believe that?! He wasn’t even acknowledging the fact that he’d caught me hiding in the bushes of my own home while I watched him. How weird is that?”
“Oh, and this other time, I’d been cleaning out the garage and the yard; I was totally filthy and smelly. I had nothing in the house to eat so I decided to go out for food before cleaning up. I just wanted something fast, so I went to get a burger and fries. I wait in a long line because of course I had to get hungry just as every body else was and I go outside to eat, but the burger was kind of gross and the fries were limp, so in disgust I tossed it into the trash. Then I immediately regret doing it and decide that I should have just eaten it. So I reach into the trash bin to get my bag of food but the bag kind of falls lower, so I had to remove the lid and rummage around to find it and as I’m doing this a voice behind me says, “Maria?” I was like “Oh, shit.”
“Maria, is that you?” he asks. It’s an ex-boyfriend that had dumped me. So I reluctantly turn around and he has this weird look on his face. I had no idea what to say.”
“Hi, Peter.”
“What are you doing?”
“I dropped my food in here.”
“Do you want me to buy you something to eat?”
“No, you don’t understand, this is my food. I bought it.”
“It’s ok, I’m not judging you. Are you hungry?”
“It’s my food; I bought it. Look I have the receipt. So I start frantically looking around for the receipt like an idiot. I was so humiliated and I just cussed him out. I mean really bad, like people were staring at me, bad. He just walked away shaking his head.”
Rapprochement sexuel
Maria and I met that night for dinner and she came over to stay the night for our first round of pillow kisses and early morning hard-ons.
We left her building around nine and I sensed that the city was now bone dry, that all the juices had been sucked from it. We began walking up the empty, quiet street, the hard dried rind of the earth; a street sapped of urban zest, the street hawkers and sidewalk strollers, the shopkeepers and drunks. We walked close together and as we approached the car, we separated and forked around it, I to the driver’s side, she to the passenger’s.
I’m not that good at night driving. Blurred images in my peripheral vision seem to leap across the road causing me to stop and start suddenly while an actual being may be just a fast shadow lost in the voids between street lamps. Maria had a good amount of wine in her, so I was the designated driver, a permanent position for a recovering alcoholic. Slowly I drove her car through the foggy streets, it rocked and creaked before I carefully moored it to a broken parking meter. It was as romantic a ride as taking a midnight vaporetto cruising down the canals of Venice, but a desiccated Venice, one where the canals have been filled with asphaltum.
It didn’t take long for us to get naked and begin having make-up sex that was also our re-deflowering, after periods of (near) celibacy for both of us. The sex was great but not without a hiccup at the much-anticipated vagina unveiling:
“What is that?” Maria’s vaginal tattoo is a carnivorous plant.
“It’s a meat-eating plant.”
“It’s kind of disturbing.”
“Yeah? I got it during my angry ‘Ggggrrrl’ period. But it’s kind of funny, too, don’t you think?” Maria gave me Funny Look # 241.
“I don’t know. All those spiky things around the lips – I think I’m losing my erection.”
“Well, stop staring at it!”
“Ok. Can you tell me again what a bad, nasty Catholic school girl you are?”
Chapter XXIV: Dirty Laundry List
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