by Greg Ames
I shook my head no.
“Come this way,” she said and sat us by a side window.
While we perused our menus, I asked Karen about River Glen. She said it was a rehab in New Jersey. I chose not to pursue the topic.
After dinner, we took a midnight walk through Prospect Park. It was okay but not especially memorable or passionate. We kissed goodnight before she drove home to her place in Canarsie. “I’ll call you,” I said, but I wasn’t entirely sure about that. A recovering addict was not exactly what I was looking for. But at least I had tried online dating and could tell Doug that I’d given it a shot.
The following evening Karen showed up at my apartment building with takeout Thai and a Scrabble board. Personally I believe one should always call first before showing up, but I let her in anyway. Surprisingly, we had a lot of fun that night. Karen crushed me with triple word scores. By her own admission, she had played a lot of Scrabble at River Glen. At the end of the night we kissed again, this time with a little more enthusiasm. When we ended up in bed together I suddenly remembered why people enjoyed sex so much.
In the morning Karen helped me to decorate my one-bedroom apartment, the modest lodging in Midwood I’d retreated to after my breakup with Mariana. It was true that I hadn’t done much to personalize the space since I’d moved in. I’d simply ignored its unloveliness. The thin, frayed carpet fell somewhere on the color spectrum between beige and turd brown. The walls were flat white and scuffed, unpainted during my tenancy. I had tacked up only one print, “Nude in the Tub,” by my favorite painter, Pierre Bonnard, who I imagined to be a private man, somebody like me. Karen brimmed with ideas about interior decoration. She was always knocking down walls in her mind.
My apartment featured a small washer/dryer setup. When she saw them, Karen was thrilled. “Are these new?” she said. The landlord had installed them himself the previous month. He had also raised the rent a hundred bucks, but at the time it seemed like a fair deal. “These aren’t even coin-op,” she said, hugging me.
Karen transformed corners with low tables, spider plants, and driftwood sculptures. Bright tapestries brought the walls alive. She even added a phone line for herself. I admired her creativity and enthusiasm. Day after day she continued to add little flourishes to the place. Plastic geraniums. Candelabra. I strolled around my apartment like a tourist. On my bare white walls Karen had hung photographs of herself having fun in not-so-distant locations. One showed her at Canarsie Pier, another at the cemetery. She stood next to fishermen and tombstones, beaming. I wondered who was working the camera. The unknown photographer’s shadow fell across her face, obscuring her features.
Karen was temporarily unemployed, so she did most of her interior decorating while I was at work. I’d come home at night to find another surprise waiting for me. “Isn’t it exciting?” she’d ask. Or she’d say, “It’ll grow on you.”
On the mantel above the fake fireplace I kept a black and white portrait of my parents: a wedding photo from 1977. Karen exiled them to the bathroom. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they laughed from their cold perch on the toilet tank. They watched me urinate and floss. But the mantel wasn’t barren. In Mom and Dad’s place stood a framed eight-by-eleven photograph of a man I’d never seen before.
“Karen, who is this?” I said, peering into the plastic frame. His ragged bangs looked like they had been trimmed with nail clippers.
Karen didn’t hear my question. She was power drilling a series of holes into the ceiling so that she could hang some ferns.
“Karen,” I called out in a louder voice. “Who’s this dude on my mantel?”
She turned off the drill, flipped up her protective goggles, and joined me on the opposite side of the room.
“Oh, that’s just Trang,” she said, taking my hands in hers. She kissed me. Then she trailed her lips across my cheek to my left earlobe. “It’s an old photograph,” she breathed in my ear. “It’s just there to remind me how awful he was.”
I took a closer look at that photo. He had a scar above his lip that seemed to connect his nose to his mouth.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “The stalker Trang?”
“He was so terrible,” she said, eyeing his picture on the mantel. “Such an animal.”
“Take it down,” I said. After all, I didn’t have any photographs of Mariana on display.
“It’s cute that you’re jealous, Wayne, but let’s leave it up for a few days and see if it grows on you.” She swiped a feather duster over the frame, hitting all four edges. “If you still don’t like it, I’ll take it down and you’ll never see it again. Does that sound like a fair deal?”
“It sounds insane,” I said.
My married buddy Diamond Doug, the reformed wild man, often talked about the compromises he needed to make with his wife Liz. Frequently he just gave in, surrendered outright, because he knew most things weren’t worth the fight. “You have to choose your battles,” he said. “Otherwise you’d be fighting over everything. Who’s got the energy for that? Just let her have what she wants. What do you care?”
Still, I had to draw the line somewhere. “No way,” I said. I took down the photograph of Trang and buried it in a drawer. It had been a test of some sort, I decided, and I felt like I had passed.
That week Karen and I made meals together in my kitchen and talked about our lives. She told me about her former addiction to cocaine, detailing where it had taken her and what she had done to recover. She considered abstinence one of her greatest achievements in life. I chopped onions on a cutting block and found myself comparing my experiences to hers, disappointed that I had never been arrested or locked up in a women’s detention center.
One evening, about three weeks after she moved in, I returned from work and found damp clothes scattered all over the living room. There were mounds of moist fabric on the steaming radiator, wet jeans draped over drying racks, T-shirts clinging to the backs of wooden chairs. Soggy gray underpants drooped above every doorframe, like mistletoe in a surrealist painting. The washer and dryer were both shuddering, rocking with the weight of their loads, but I didn’t recognize any of the clothes.
I waded through the humid air. Sweat beaded on my forehead. “Hey, Karen,” I called out, “it’s really hot in here.” All the windows were steamed. “Is the heater on? What’s the deal with all this laundry?”
“It is hot in here,” said a strange man seated on my couch.
I jumped back and raised my fists. “Who are you?” I said. He stared at me without speaking. From that distance I couldn’t see the scar over his lip, and he had a shorter haircut—high and tight, military style. I felt my jaw muscles tensing. “I asked you a question, man.”
“I suggested she open a window.” He waved his hand, indicating the futility of the request. “She wouldn’t listen.”
Karen came into the room carrying a sloshing pitcher of margaritas. Lime wedges seesawed in the yellow liquid like capsized boats. “Hi there, sweetie,” she said. She placed the pitcher on the coffee table and rushed toward me. She rammed her tongue into my mouth. “I missed you.”
I tasted Nicorette and tequila. I disengaged my mouth from hers and said, “Who’s that on the couch?”
“Hmm?” She followed the angle of my pointed finger. “Oh, him? That’s just Trang.”
“In the flesh,” he said.
“Actually he was just leaving,” Karen said pointedly. “Weren’t you?”
Trang shot me a big grin. “That’s news to me.”
He had one slender leg crossed over the other. He wasn’t nearly as big as Karen had described, but his narrow face suggested a fierce and nasty intelligence. Both of his ropy-muscled arms were slung over the back of my couch. His posture vaguely suggested crucifixion. “What’s up?” he said to me. “How was work? Nine to five, what a way to make a living.”
Karen squeezed both my hands in hers. “Oh, now, listen, before I forget: we really need to have that old dryer looked at. Honey! P
ay attention. Stop staring at Trang. What are we gonna do about the dryer?”
I wiped a rivulet of sweat off my cheek. “What’s wrong with the dryer? It’s brand new.”
Trang said, “This is a nice little pad you have here, Warren.”
“I told you his name is Wayne.” Karen stamped her foot. “Can’t you remember anything? Wayne.”
Yawning, Trang flicked a piece of lint or a stray hair off the armrest of my couch. He leaned forward and poured himself another margarita. Then he poured one for Karen. Both rims were crusted with salt. “Whatever,” he said. “You say tomato, I say Warren. Let’s call the whole thing off.”
“Shut up,” I said to him. “I’ll deal with you later.” I turned toward Karen. “Can you explain this to me?”
As I approached her, I felt my foot strike against something. Trang’s mouth fell open. At my feet a steel briefcase lay on its side. With astonishing quickness he leapt up and stood face to face with me. “You should watch where you’re going.” He picked up the case and hugged it to his chest. “This is off limits to you,” he said, and walked out the door. “You don’t touch. No touching.”
“What the hell?” I said. “What are you two up to? Is this some kind of scam?”
“Wayne, no!” She seized my hands again. “You and I are together. Trang is a distant memory. He just came over to drop off my clothes.”
As crazy as it may sound, I wanted to believe her. I really had come to enjoy Karen’s company. With her around I never knew what to expect. Every day promised a new dopamine spike of fear or elation. She laughed a lot and talked about things I’d never thought about before. She kept the apartment clean. She hung stuff on the walls. There was always a new development. Despite her eccentricities, Karen made the place feel more like a home.
Sometimes after sex, Karen blew gently on my skin to dry the sweat. Her long hair tickled my skin as she moved slowly down my body, cooling my chest and thighs and the bottoms of my feet with little puffs of breath. I liked that almost as much as the sex itself. No one else had ever done that before. It seemed to me such a tender, thoughtful act of affection. Even Trang’s presence didn’t sour me. On the contrary, I found myself even more attracted to Karen, knowing that another man was still in the picture. Her smile seemed brighter, her eyes more luminous. I felt the buzz that comes from competition.
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” I told her. “I was just surprised, that’s all. I mean, put yourself in my shoes.”
“I can’t even imagine,” she said.
After Trang’s departure, I retreated to the bedroom, where I resumed reading my Tolstoy biography. At least a week had passed since I’d last looked at it. Before I could read an entire page, Karen barged in and sat on the bed’s edge. “What’s the matter, Wayne? Are you depressed?”
“No, it’s just … well. Trang,” I said, my eyes still focused on the page. “I think you’re still in love with him.”
“You’re adorable!” She kissed my cheek. “Are you jealous?”
“I’m not going to be a watchdog in my own house. I don’t have the energy for that. If you’re going to screw around behind my back—”
“You’ll never see him again. He’s history.” She eyed the cover of my book. “The Russian Master: Leo Tolstoy. Did you ever read any Larry McMurtry? You should check out McMurtry if you’re so into Tolstoy.” She slid even closer to me, sucking her cough lozenge. “That McMurtry. Boy, he’s something else. What a way with words. Nobody can describe a cactus like McMurtry.”
I shut the book on my index finger to save my place. At the time I didn’t know why I liked Karen so much. Maybe it was something in her eyes, the trusting and childlike quality in them. Just beneath Karen’s coarse surface—the oval scar on her back from an ex-boyfriend’s cigarette, the tribal tattoos on her upper arms—there was a sweet girl who had trusted the wrong people along the way. She certainly didn’t need a guy like Trang in her life, a man who couldn’t recognize her true nature. She needed a more empathetic partner, somebody like me.
“McMurtry’s good?” I asked her.
She waved the question away. “Just read him. You’ll see. You’ll see what I mean about old McMurtry.”
After a moment of charged silence, Karen stood up and left the room. She shut the door quietly behind her.
For the next hour I read about Leo Tolstoy’s dramatic experiences in the Caucasus. He fought bloody skirmishes with mountain tribesmen. He went days without eating. He was a rugged, intelligent man who would change the course of world literature. I immersed myself in his story, trying to gain strength and guidance from it.
My bedroom door swung open again. “Knock knock, Lonesome Dove,” Karen said. She carried a stack of clean clothes into the room.
Humming a song under her breath, Karen yanked open dresser drawers and slammed them shut. “We—are—family,” she sang, wagging her head. “I got all my sisters and me.”
“Karen, please,” I said, not looking up from my book. “I’m trying to read.”
She approached the bed, sat down, and took a long look at the book’s cover. “You think Sir Leo Tolstoy liked to shampoo that big beard of his?”
I sighed. “I don’t know how Tolstoy behaved in the bathtub. And for the record, Tolstoy was a count, not a knight.”
My tone was more acerbic than I’d intended. But Karen didn’t seem to notice. She leaned closer to inspect the book’s cover. She tipped it back with her hand, preventing me from reading it. “What a beard, huh?”
I smelled her peach shampoo. “Karen,” I said.
She stroked the image of Tolstoy’s beard with her forefinger. “He looks crazy,” she said. “And I’ve seen some kooks, boy. He fits the profile.”
I looked down at the photograph or daguerreotype or whatever it was. He was in his most pious religious phase then, an old man wearing some kind of white gown and seeker’s sandals.
I said, “He was obsessed with God and vegetarianism and humility when that was taken.”
“Yeah, I bet he was,” Karen said, “but you know he spent some quality time on that beard each morning. Probably used a top-notch conditioner and some French oils, too. Scrubbed it up good.” She paused. “But you know Trang’s the same way. Some nights he’ll spend a couple hours polishing up those snow globes he carries around. He really takes his time with it.”
“Snow globes,” I said.
“He’s pretty intense about it.”
Karen walked out of the room humming. I couldn’t even enjoy my damn book after that. No matter what the biographer wrote about the Russian master’s selflessness and his boundless humanity, I imagined Tolstoy lathering his beard with imported French or Italian conditioner, smiling at his face in the mirror, while behind him Trang held a snow globe up to the light and dabbed at it with a cloth.
The following evening, during dinner, Karen informed me that Trang was on his way. “He wants to apologize for inconveniencing you,” she said.
“Couldn’t he call or send a text?” I said.
As if on cue, Trang walked in without knocking. “Hey, gang,” he said. I noticed he was holding a red Netflix envelope. “Oh this?” he said. “It’s a classic.” In his other hand he carried the snow globe case.
Karen explained in a loud whisper that the DVD was a peace offering. She said that it was very difficult for Trang to be friendly with other men. He was making a concerted effort.
I sighed. “What’s the movie called?”
“Okay, Curious George, I’ll give you a hint,” Trang said. “The cast includes such luminaries as Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, and Sir John Gielgud. Does that ring a bell?”
“No,” I said.
My couch seated only two people comfortably—it was more of a loveseat—and we had a hard time deciding who should sit where. After a brief negotiation, Karen decided to get down on the floor, which left Trang and me side by side on the loveseat.
“Cozy, no?” he said.
I
moved my knee away from his.
“This is the greatest movie ever made,” Trang announced. “Get ready to have your dangler knocked off.”
Early into the screening Trang took out his bowie knife and began to sharpen it on his stone. The scraping sound chilled my blood. He kept looking over at me and popping his eyebrows up and down.
It was a decent comedy, but hardly the best ever. Trang and Karen howled with laughter. They delivered lines in unison with the actors, warned me to get ready before funny scenes, and slapped high fives throughout. Afterward, Trang called it a brilliant socioeconomic parable, an allegory of man’s inhumanity to man. He walked out the door, still chuckling to himself.
“Karen, we need to talk,” I said later that night. We sat side by side on the loveseat that Trang had just vacated. “This doesn’t seem to be working out. I think we should break up.”
Karen buried her face in her hands, refusing to look at me. “And I’ve been so happy,” she said. “Please. Don’t do this. Don’t end this.” Her shoulders sagged. “Let’s just see where it takes us.”
“You’ve been happy?” I said, surprised.
“I’m in love.” She looked at me through the spaces between her fingers. “Can’t you see that?”
Alone in the bedroom, I thought about our relationship. What kind of future did we have together? I weighed the pros and cons. There was companionship, clean laundry, and Trang. Was it an ideal situation? No. I wouldn’t say that. But you had to expect a certain amount of discomfort when you shared your life with another person. Hell, I was no prize myself. I knew that. And if I wanted a romantic relationship to succeed, my buddy Doug kept reminding me, then I needed to understand the logistics of surrender and sacrifice. Nothing good came without a struggle.
I decided to stick it out for another week.
“Can I offer you piece of advice?” Trang said four days later. He was seated at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. He had the real estate section of The New York Times spread before him. When I didn’t reply, he forged ahead anyway. “You’re a pussy,” he said.