by Jen Beagin
“What are those bandages?” she asked.
“I’d rather tell you about it at your house,” he said. “How’s eight o’clock?”
The kettle whistled. He snatched it off the stove and doused the grounds. She watched his hands carefully. He’d punched a lot of things in his life, but he wasn’t on drugs. She could always tell by a person’s hands.
“MORE LOVE,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Is that what you want?”
“It doesn’t match the tone of your other work,” she said, referring to the only other tattoo she could see, A Steady Diet of Nothing, underneath his collarbone.
“I used to starve myself, in a sense,” he said. “Now I’m . . . famished.”
“You’re a sex addict?” she asked.
He looked confused. “Haven’t you thought about me?”
She couldn’t answer. She scanned the tiles around her feet. There, near the sink, she’d missed a spot of food or dirt. She would have to leave it. Something else seemed out of place, though, and she realized it was Dinner. Why was he cowering behind the recycling bin?
“I’d rather be deaf than blind,” Mona said at last. “And I think about you all the time.”
“Me too,” he said.
He opened a drawer and took out a pen and a pad of paper. Old-fashioned.
“Write down your address,” he said.
* * *
BECAUSE HE’D BEEN FORTY MINUTES early, Mona had answered the door wearing a full ivory slip beneath a long kimono with a chrysanthemum motif. Her face was masked with green clay.
“I’m slightly early,” he said.
“I have clay face,” she said. The mask brought out her eyes, and if she could have gotten away with wearing it all the time, she would have. “Since you’re so early, help me pick out what to wear for my date.”
He looked startled. “You have a date?”
“You,” she said. “You’re my date.”
“Then don’t change anything,” Dark said.
He was in her living room now, sitting on her orange leather couch. He didn’t look around much. She wanted him to admire her stuff: a collection of art by developmentally disabled adults, a collection of framed airline barf bags, and the series of drawings she’d made of vintage Eureka vacuums. Instead, he looked down at his feet and began unlacing his boots.
“Could you bring me a wet washcloth?” he asked.
When she returned with the wet cloth, he was barefoot and flipping through photographs of the Grace graffiti from two weeks ago.
“Cool,” he said matter-of-factly.
Didn’t he think it was weird, her taking photographs in his house without permission?
“There’s a story behind those pictures, but I don’t know what it is yet,” she said.
She handed him the wet cloth and sat next to him, hoping he’d share his insights about this Grace thing, but he put the photographs aside and wiped his face.
“Thanks,” he said. “I really needed this.”
She laughed. Emboldened, he straddled her and then calmly and methodically removed her mask. He had a great touch—confident, a little callous—and kept his eyes open as he kissed her, alternately gnashing his teeth against hers on purpose, with just the right amount of pressure, and then sucking her lips and tongue.
“When you do that thing with your teeth,” she said, “I forget my name.”
“Let’s go break the bed,” he said.
She hesitated, but only because he would have to return to Rose. She’d never wanted anyone to stay before. She allowed herself a few soul-mate thoughts, which embarrassed her, which made her want a drink. She rolled off the couch, walked to the kitchen, and opened a bottle of red.
“Or we can break . . . bread,” he said, as she handed him a glass. “If you prefer. But I’d rather take you to bed.”
He took a couple of tentative sips and then chugged the rest. She told him her period had started.
“Bleed on me,” he said breezily, and removed his shirt.
His smell charmed her into a trance. She felt she’d do whatever he wanted, even if it was awful, disgusting, or illegal.
“Do you work with wood or something?” she asked. “You smell like a pencil.”
“I make coffins,” he said.
“I want to hump your armpits,” she said. “And maybe your hair.”
“Great,” he said.
In the bedroom, she saw that his chest was covered in scars—the familiar, self-inflicted kind—but the fresh injury looked more like a puncture wound. She decided to ask later and pulled off his pants. He wasn’t wearing underwear.
“Were you raised by animals?” she asked.
“French Canadians,” he said.
His cock was the perfect color. So were his balls, strangely. It was like gazing at her favorite vacuum. She put him in her mouth and closed her eyes. She wondered if blind women gave better blow jobs, and were better at sex in general. Like, more sensual, more in their bodies—
“Open your eyes,” Dark said suddenly.
They switched positions. He kept pinning her with his LOVE hand and doing things with his MORE hand, things that made her writhe around on the mattress, and then he’d fuck her, and then it was back to MORE LOVE. He repeated this for a long while. He made her feel beautiful and hideous, male and female, dirty and clean. He made her feel old. Not over-the-hill, but ancient and pre-human. He made her feel desperate, horny, and deranged. She betrayed her instinct to be silent.
“You make me feel . . . Spanish,” she said.
His eyes smiled at her. For once she didn’t laugh or look away. She held his gaze like it was a part of his body and he came thirty seconds later.
“I love your maybe-Spanish eyes,” he said, catching his breath, and she wondered if that was because they were seeing eyes. “And your maybe-Spanish skin.”
“What happened to your chest?”
He didn’t answer at first. He rolled away to face the wall and pulled her arm around him so that she was the outer spoon. “I just got back from Sun Dance.”
“The film festival?” she asked.
He laughed. “It’s a sacred Lakota ceremony that takes place in Nebraska every summer.”
“What sort of ceremony?”
He kissed her hand. “You dance,” he said drowsily. “You dance on the open plain for four days and nights, rain or shine, without food or water. You pray, and you have visions, and at the end, you make a sacrifice. It’s a four-year commitment.”
Like college, she thought. She tried to visualize his dancing. It was hard. “Is it like a mosh pit?”
“You march in a circle to drums,” he said. “There are no specific moves. You also spend many hours a day in a sweat lodge.”
She touched the strange sores on his chest. “What are these from?”
“On the last day, a medicine man pinches the skin above your nipple—a healthy pinch, one or two inches—and pushes a scalpel through it. The scalpel is replaced with a cherrywood peg, several inches long, the ends of which are looped with rope, and you are tied up to a tree.”
“A tree?”
“A young tree,” Dark said.
“So, you’re just hanging from a tree, twisting in the wind?”
“There’s no wind,” he said. “And your feet are touching the ground. You dance while attached to the tree, pulling against the ropes, and eventually, after many, many hours, you break free.”
“The ropes break?”
“Your skin breaks.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “Sometimes people need help breaking free, and someone will get behind them and pull.”
“Did you need help?”
“No,” he said.
She asked him why he participated and he told her another story. This one was a love story.
Other than Rose, he’d only been in love one other time, with an Inuit woman he’d met in Alaska many years ago. Her name was Lucinda. They met while working at a cannery i
n Ketchikan. He’d worked in the freezers. He rolled huge beds of salmon into the freezer on casters, and once they were frozen he’d drill a hole into them and take their temperature, and when the temperature was right, the fish would be shipped to Japan or wherever.
Lucinda weighed the salmon, though she rarely needed a scale, he said. Her hands were scales, and so were her eyes. In a glance, she could weigh and measure anything she looked at, including him. Only twenty-two and very cautious, she joined him for a drink after work or visited his boardinghouse. They didn’t talk much. In fact, Lucinda often communicated in gestures he either misread or missed altogether. Her touch changed him, and slowly, over a period of many months, he fell in love. Because it was slow, his love seemed more real, and more permanent. Together they rented a cabin outside of town. She read a lot and he painted pictures and they both kept working at the cannery.
“Four months later, she fell out of a tree,” he said.
“And?” she said.
“She died,” he said. “In my arms.”
She felt a sudden and familiar pain tugging her nipples from the inside. Her instinct was to cover her breasts with her hands. Instead, she lay still and imagined her chest pierced and tied to a tree. She imagined herself circling on tiptoe while pulling against the ropes, and the pain subsided a little.
“I never talk about Lucinda,” he said.
“Why was she in the tree?”
“We were on mushrooms—my idea, not hers,” he said. “She went to some dark, faraway place. I tried to get her down when I saw how high up she was. I started climbing. She fell right past me and landed on a jagged rock. There wasn’t any blood, but she kept making these gasping noises. I panicked and carried her up a hill to the main trail. I laid her out on the trail, but she was gone by then, and I couldn’t get her back.”
“Were you alone?”
“I think so,” he said. “I don’t remember getting help, or the police coming, or the ambulance. I only remember seeing her for the last time. She was lying on a table in the hospital, and I asked everyone to leave the room so that I could be alone with her.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes were closed and he was very still.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“She had a tube in her throat, so I removed it and threw it on the floor,” he said. “Then I chewed off some of her hair because I didn’t have any scissors.”
There it was again, stronger, tugging hard from the inside. She felt the urge to break her skin, to give a little blood, to make her own kind of flesh offering. Ordinarily, she would have waited until he left and then she may have cut herself. But that was too easy, and too familiar, and not as satisfying as it used to be. And besides, she didn’t want him to leave. Ever.
“I try to visit the tree once a year,” he said. “That’s where I was headed when I ran into you at the bookstore.”
He kissed her and slipped his hand between her legs. She wanted MORE LOVE, but she also wanted MORE ROSE. Or maybe not MORE, but SOME.
“When did you meet Rose?” she asked.
“Three years ago,” he said.
“Is Rose’s father Chloe’s father?” Mona asked.
He frowned. “Rose’s father is in prison,” he said. “He’s been in prison forever.”
“For pedophilia?”
“Transportation of marijuana,” Dark said.
“That’s it?”
“It was a ton of marijuana,” Dark said. “Literally. Two thousand pounds.”
“Who’s Chloe’s father?”
“She doesn’t know,” he said. “She never saw him. He was a tourist. It was a one-night stand.”
“Does Rose know you’re here with me?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’s part of our agreement.”
“Why the open marriage?”
“Rose’s idea,” he said. “But I’m not opposed. We’re like siblings, really.”
“So, no sex?” she asked.
He intuitively rested his MORE hand on her stomach, which had been in knots. “I want to hear about you now,” he said. “Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “It would take another three hours and would feel like the longest year of your life.”
He asked for broad strokes. Perhaps he was trying to find out if she was interesting enough for him, or if she’d suffered enough.
“Well, I’ve never been to prison,” she said. “I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve never given birth. I’ve never jumped out of a plane. I’ve never done quaaludes. I’ve never read Tolstoy. But I talk to Terry Gross in my head, even while I’m talking to other people, and I’ve been around the block a couple dozen times.”
“Are you talking to Terry Gross right now?”
She shook her head. “Terry doesn’t talk when you’re around. She only makes noises occasionally.”
“Is she making noises now?”
“She just grunted.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Have you been arrested?”
“Once.”
“Have you been raped?” he asked.
“Twice.”
He winced. “Therapy?”
“Many times.”
“Have you gone under the knife?”
“Only by my own hand.”
“Threesome?”
She smiled and held up one finger.
“Fallen in love?”
Two fingers.
“Pick one,” he said. “And tell me the story.”
She didn’t want to compete with or diminish the stories he’d told, and so she opted for levity.
“Well, it’s a little close to home,” she said, and pointed at the brick wall in her bedroom. “The couple in question lives on the other side of those bricks. Nigel is a tall, malnourished British man in his forties, and Shiori is Japanese, so who knows how old she is, but they’re like twins. I call them Yoko and Yoko.”
“You fell in love with your neighbors?” he said.
“Of course not,” she said. “This is the threesome story.”
“Tell it slowly,” he said.
She took a deep breath. “This was a few months ago, when the weather turned warm. They were weeding the garden and arguing. I was observing them from my kitchen window. They have this very deliberate way of speaking that drives me insane, and they were wearing matching linen tunics that looked like cheesecloth. Nigel resembled a large, hard piece of pecorino; Shiori, something smooth and spreadable—Brie, perhaps.
“At one point I heard a single, forlorn fart escape Shiori’s square bottom, which touched my heart, and I found myself thinking about her pubic hair. In the Asian porn I sometimes watch nightly, both the men and women have huge bushes, and I wondered about Shiori. At any rate, they must have intuited something, because suddenly they were tapping on my kitchen door and asking if I wanted to join them for some ‘guided meditation.’ I suggested guided gin martinis instead. Shiori looked confused—she’s probably never had a drop of gin in her life—and Nigel inserted a pinkie into his ear and wiggled it, which meant he wasn’t in the mood for—”
“Okay,” Dark said, and laughed. “Maybe not this slowly.”
“Fine, I’ll jump ahead,” Mona said. “When I entered their side of the house, the shades were drawn and the lights were off. Their furniture had been pushed aside and they were sitting on a Turkish rug. In the center of the rug, a low table topped with a single burning candle. They sat on two pillows and invited me to sit on a third.”
“Uh-oh,” Dark said.
“Yeah,” Mona said. “I was scared. I asked if the meditation would involve a lot of talking or measured breathing or the opening of chakras, and they assured me that it would only involve staring at the open flame, which seemed doable. They instructed me to relax my eyes and to fix my gaze on the candle. Gradually, my peripheral vision fell away, and it was jus
t me and the candle. I had become one with the flame, and it was all I could see. It was peaceful, honestly, and I felt connected in a way I’d never experienced before. I heard Shiori’s voice telling me to focus on the blue of the flame and to let the blue into my body. The blue sensation traveled up my spine and out the top of my head, and then I felt this subtle pressure on my shoulder blades and a pair of thin arms circling me. Shiori was hugging me from behind, and I could feel her breasts on my back. Then I became aware that Nigel was missing. I hadn’t heard him get up, which was strange, because his bones creak. I saw that he was off in the corner, holding a dreadful bongo between his legs. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Shiori was completely naked. For over a year, I’d been fantasizing about burying my face in her boobs, and here they suddenly were, looking better than I’d ever imagined. ‘Where are your clothes?’ I whispered loudly. ‘Are you on drugs?’ Nigel said, ‘We’d like to try some tantric meditation with you, if you’re ready and amenable.’ And I said, ‘With both of you?’ And Nigel said, in that deliberate way of his, ‘I will remain here, in this corner.’ ”
“So, he just watched,” Dark said. “Like a creep.”
“I think he was trying to be respectful. He softly played his bongo while Shiori and I messed around on the rug. She did in fact have a tremendous bush. She let me put my face down there for about five minutes, and I swear she tasted like ginger and lychee.”
Dark looked away then and closed his eyes.
“Was it racist of me to say ginger and lychee?”
“It’s descriptive,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to talk about pussy with you, though. I mean, not in any depth.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be bros with you, Mona,” he said.
* * *
HER APARTMENT BECAME A LOVE bunker on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights. He brought books, booze, and weed; she supplied food and flowers. They smoked spliffs and drank bourbon in the kitchen. They ate cheese and spilled their guts. Turned out their fathers were both dreamers, drinkers, and amputees. His father had lost his foot on a fishing rig in Alaska. Her father had lost his arm in an explosion at a gas station. His father wore a fake foot. Her father, a hook.