“So, um.” Yuki realized she should have laughed. “I should go.”
He had a real school somewhere else. Whatever their promises about Rothko, this was a place people brought butterfly notebooks. Yuki crumpled her drawing in her fist and pushed out the fire doors, scuttling downstairs and into the cool night.
Over breakfast, toast again, Lou said, “On Saturday, I’m having some people over.”
“People?” In the month since she’d moved in, he’d never had friends over.
“The Guys. I want the apartment looking nice.”
“It’s always nice. Or as nice as it can be.” Neither of them owned enough to make a mess.
“Yeah, okay, but don’t leave your underwear lying around.”
“When do I leave my underwear lying around?” She cleaned more than he did, swept his cigarette ash off the windowsill and de-scummed the toothbrushes.
“Okay, fine.”
“Do I embarrass you?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Have you told them your girlfriend lives with you?”
He took a vicious swig of coffee and some sloshed over his bottom lip, narrowly missing his shirt and dripping onto the table. It fell soundlessly, darkness spreading into the grain of the wood. They were sitting side by side, lined up like two passengers on a train. But he turned, swiveling in his seat. He moved his face toward her, within kissing distance. Yuki didn’t know why she was needling him. It was like scratching a mosquito bite, she shouldn’t, but he was the only person whose life she affected. He put his right hand under her chin, tilting her head back. Blindly, she grabbed for a paper towel and, having obtained it, reached up and dabbed the corner of his mouth.
“Butter on your face.”
He laughed, dropped her chin.
“Of course I want you there, kid. I want to introduce you to The Guys.”
Saturday morning, Yuki woke, hunger clenching her gut. Once she’d shared the ache with Odile, but now she had someone to eat with instead. The flames of his hair flashed from above the white sheet. She touched the very tip of one, following the curl with her finger. She’d scramble him some eggs, and they could eat them together in bed, full of butter-soft smiles.
She walked to the fridge. It was almost empty. A lone Mason jar of iced coffee sat cooling on the top rack. No problem, she’d go out to the store. She’d get eggs, and things for that night: beers and chips for his friends. Maybe some sort of dip? Lou would be pleased that she was there. But as she eased open her drawer to pull out her jeans, he sat up in bed. He stretched his jaw from side to side.
“Where you going?” He scratched the side of his face where orange stubble glowed in the morning light.
“You’re out of food,” she said.
“Eggs?”
“Eggs. Bread. Sausages. All finished. A girl can’t live on coffee alone.”
“I’ll go.”
“No, it’s fine I’m almost dressed.”
“Nah, let me get my lady breakfast. How about a bagel?” She nodded; the corner deli had excellent bagels—salty but also just a little sweet. “Sesame and lox, right?”
“Always.”
“I’ll just be a minute. It’ll still be toasty.”
“In this weather, sure.” Summer bore down on the city. He flickered his fingers through her hair and swung out the door.
She searched the drawers for something to tide her over. Some water crackers, dried noodles, uncooked rice, half a cookie. She moved away from the oven. Somehow her search became more general. In his yellow raincoat, she found a dime, a red pen, and Leaves of Grass, the spine fenced by strips of yellow tape. In his sock drawer were postcards written in an illegible hand. In the top drawer of a filing cabinet, she discovered a baseball scrawled with blue marker.
The bottom drawer made her forget her hunger. She knew what the writing was before reading it. Poems: typographic skyscrapers, each floor four or five words wide. Pages and pages of poems. Her first guess was love poems. Several of Lillian’s more sensitive protagonists had been poets, although more were soldiers. The gold stripes of office were more dashing than wobbling lines of ink.
Lou’s poems weren’t love poems. There wasn’t any mention of lips or sighs. Some of the words weren’t words but noises. He’d used as much of the page as the typewriter would let him, barely any margin at top or bottom. She spread the sheets out, until the floor was entirely hatched with white and black.
Lou strode in holding a paper bag, the top folded in a lazy curl.
“Hi,” she said.
He deposited the bag on the table. Silently, he bent, picking up pages, stacking them, smoothing the edges of the manuscript. He came right to her, still silent, and eased the last sheet from between her fingers, tapped the pile three times, and dropped it back in the drawer. The drawer clattered as he punched it shut. He crouched, eyes level with Yuki’s.
He hit her—not hard, but she was unprepared. She fell, landing on the point of her elbow. Her limbs went loose. She slid across the floor. His nail had caught her lip and she tasted blood. Out the window, she saw airplane trails. And she didn’t move. She lay and watched them decay. How many times had she heard Lillian stagger and stumble?
Curled on the floor, mouth full of the taste of rain, she knew that any idiot could have seen it coming. How had she thought she was somehow more blessed than Lillian? Better? It was arrogance. She heard running water, the sound of china clicking against china. She ran her tongue against the vein-stippled underside of her lip. On the other side of the open window, the wind had shattered the plane-tracks. A clack sounded close by. Next to her head was a bagel on her favorite plate. A folded paper napkin lay next to it. A single red rose was printed on the napkin. She sat up and pressed the paper to her mouth.
Lou ate his bagel in five swift-toothed bites. A cream-cheese moustache flourished on his upper lip. It looked cute, funny. People who hit you are not supposed to have dairy facial follicles.
He crouched down, and offered her a hand up. “We’re going to have to establish some boundaries.” His voice was coaxing. Her head hurt too much to think. She just wanted things to go back to normal. Normal. What was normal? She touched the dot of cream on his chin. “You have a smoosh.”
He looked in the postcard-sized cracked mirror that hung next to a wooden crucifix on the wall. The picture nails stuck awkwardly from the white plaster. He smiled. His hand swooped toward her. She ducked, her stomach clenched, her fists tense. But what she felt was cold and smooth, slipping down her chin. A cheese goatee. She laughed, and a sharp pain jabbed her face. Her bagel tasted of rust.
Just like that, it was an easy Saturday. Lou bought four papers, and he passed her the fun parts of each. All her horoscopes were looking up. The single difference was that she’d been knocked out of herself. A screaming ghost girl, with teeth of orange glass, hovered above the body. The body made coffee in the large French press. The ghost girl gnashed, cutting her mouth on her own teeth. The body poured one sweet black coffee for Lou and one milky one for itself. As the light moved across the sky, the ghost girl wailed and watched the body go about its business.
When the doorbell rang Yuki had forgotten about his friends.
The Guys introduced themselves at the door with knowing smiles. They expected her to have heard of them. Their individuality was lost on her. In Lou’s stories they were simply The Guys. The body smiled at them, and felt the chip of pain in the cut on her lip.
The Guys did not ask if she was okay. Her face had not bruised. The cut must look only accidental.
Each man gave her his wet coat. She was wearing one of Lou’s white shirts, and where the rain from the coats pressed against the shirt, pinpricks of translucency appeared. Yuki felt pierced all over by needlepoint nakedness.
Lou and The Guys were thinking of starting a literary magazine. But they couldn’t agree on a name. Connect, Yawp, Green Light, Gertrude, The Meat of It.
“How about Meatballs?” The Guys gu
ffawed. Why did the male IQ divide rather than multiply in groups? The ghost girl didn’t hate Gertrude. Gertrude sounded like Maude’s scarier older sister, a woman who made a mean casserole and no one would dare hit.
Nor could The Guys agree on what should go in the magazine. Poetry was certain, they all seemed to write one kind or another, but beyond that? One of them thought fiction was dead. The purpose of writing was to be political. Politics was dead. Should there be reviews? Or should it be original content? What was originality?
The ghost girl hissed that these men certainly didn’t know. Between them, The Guys had three moustaches, three facial tics, two beards, two pairs of tortoiseshell glasses and one attitude. They leaned back in their chairs so that the forelegs lifted off the ground, and then slammed the chairs down on the floor when they wanted to make a point. They drank their beer straight from the bottle.
Yuki sat next to Lou. He put his arm around her. It was heavy. It pressed down on her spine, curving and compressing her. As if he might squash her. The body let itself be pressed into a slump.
“What about art?” The words—were they from the ghost or the body or some other nameless part of herself? But the lips moved. “Will your magazine have art in it?” It was the first time she had spoken since her introduction. The Guys turned to look at her.
“Well,” said the one with hair that swirled upward like bubbles in champagne, “it would be more expensive.”
“It could be interesting. It is an essential part of the conversation,” said the thickest moustache.
“So is music.”
“We could include a record.”
“Let’s be realistic . . .”
They were off again.
The doorbell rang. Food. Lou handed her his battered wallet. The Guys didn’t offer to contribute, but she supposed they paid at their own apartments. The body ran down the narrow staircase. It was raining. Unclean city rain that smelled of old pipes, old men, old dogs. The summer seemed as if it would stoop over her for ever. After the men left, Lou would want sex. The sweat would drip from Lou’s chest and fall on her as the rain was doing now.
The door opened on to a bedraggled Chinese delivery boy. Her father had hated the rain and often waited up to twenty minutes under shop awnings for it to pass. This boy looked nothing like Yuki’s father, not even like the sepia boyhood photos of her father. The eyes were different, the nose, the ears. It was only in this strange life that he reminded her of her father. She wondered, what was she doing here with all these white men and their moustaches?
She tipped the delivery boy an extra dollar. The bill was old, nicked at the corner. She appreciated the way money softened with age. He snatched it, clearly having no time for anything as luxurious as the texture of currency, and hurried away into the night, pale blue plastic bag tied around his chin like a babushka’s headscarf. She hugged the warm bag of food. The grease soaked through the brown paper and tickled her arms. The Guys’ patter dripped out the open window. In a minute they’d wonder where she, or rather their oil-choked meat, had got to. The ghost girl shouted: Leave! The Nothing told her there was nowhere to go. The ghost girl said, she could sprint away down the street and she wouldn’t have lost much. She had food, Lou’s wallet, herself and the vacuum of new night. She had started again twice now. How tough could it be a third time?
But there was no place she could imagine being happy. The body walked back upstairs.
At work on Monday, the girls snubbed her. It was hard to tell if that was for moving out or just that their general disdain had reinstated itself, now there were no new checks to look forward to. She’d paid through the month for that overpriced closet. She wondered what they’d say if she asked for her deposit back. Or if she asked to be forgiven, to be allowed to curl up in the mold-moist room? To try again to breathe the lonely air.
Yuki nursed her ache. Sometime in the night, the ghost girl had sunk back into the body. Yuki wondered how it was possible to be lonely when you had so many voices in your head. She touched the office phone, and thought about calling home. No matter how red her father turned he had never hit her. He’d rapped her fingers with a ruler for her own good, he’d never looked at her like he wanted to maim her. No good Japanese college would take her, so what? There must be some quiet man who would marry her. She saw herself painting inky mountains and pink cherry blossoms. It wasn’t too late. She touched the phone. Would The Paper notice a single long-distance call?
Lou swung through the door, and her shoulders jerked upward. She crossed her feet. It was impossible for him to read her thoughts. Her father had once said that the Japanese believed red-haired men to be the sons of demons.
“Hi,” she said as if he was a stranger.
“I’m going out for coffee. Need anything?”
“No. Nothing.” She smiled, fearful as a child caught shoplifting.
Lou planted a kiss in the center of her hairline, and she had to resist the urge to curl into her chair. He returned with his coffee and an apple. The apple was small like a child’s fist, smooth yellow skin flushed pink at the knuckles. Biting down, juice swelled between her lips.
“I picked the shiniest one,” he said, “for my girl.”
His voice lingered on the my, dragging it out. My girl. His. She knew then that she would stay. He was the one human in all of the State of New York who belonged exclusively to her. It might never happen again. She was not Lillian. She was not difficult. All she had to do was not look at his poetry. She tilted her face up toward the concerned eyes.
When he kissed her, this time on the mouth, it tasted crisp and sweet.
Lou was extra gentle. In the morning, he brushed her hair, careful not to tear or yank. The comb’s teeth massaged her skull, her spine relaxed and her feet arched in the cottony nest of their bed.
Yuki couldn’t cook but for a week she made sandwiches, cutting off the crusts. Framing the triangles of bread, she arranged potato chip hearts.
The first time she did it he said, “What did I do to deserve you?”
“You chose me, of course.”
“You’re such a good girl.”
And if he didn’t ask why she had no sandwich and no potato chip heart of her own that was okay. If he didn’t ask why the fried potatoes jammed in her throat that was okay too.
But she just couldn’t forget the poetry. The next time she was alone in the apartment, she knelt in front of the bottom drawer. The wind roared in protest and rattled the window frame. She flexed her hands. This was stupid, and she should leave it be. The runners were sticky, and she had to brace her right foot against the wall. After an initial metallic yelp, it slid open. Yuki didn’t risk removing them from the drawer, but she stared at the top sheet and then slipped her finger under the corner of the page to read the second page in shadow, and the third.
No matter how long she stared at the blottings and corrections, Yuki couldn’t find meaning in the linguistic snarl. Whatever he was so determined to hide from her was immune to her spying. The words were so nonsensical that it took her a while to realize that, daily, they were changing. Did he come back to the apartment while she was at work? Did he do it while she was sleeping?
She had thought that the Nothing had gone with Odile. Strange to find it back looming over her shoulders.
The Nothing came for her on even the clearest mornings. Lou handed her a brown mailing envelope and said, “This is for you.” It was unstamped and bore only—“Yuki”. “It was in the mailbox.”
The envelope’s glue gave way easily. Yuki slid out a folded piece of onionskin paper on which was typed
Please return the key, as requested. If I do not receive it in ten days, you will receive a bill for the locksmith.
Sincerely,
Lillian Graychild
There was no mention of Lou. The translucent paper bore not a human mark, only the stamp of the Olivetti’s keys. Lillian must have touched the page, but she’d left no prints.
“It’s Lillian.”
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Since leaving that apartment, Yuki had not seen Lillian. She hadn’t known what to say: Hi—I’m living with your ex-boyfriend. Sorry? They’d never shared confidences. They were not friends, nor relatives, only people who had briefly lived together.
“Oh?”
He took the page from her and said, “Give me the key. I’ll deal with it.”
She had meant to give the key back, but had forgotten, and then going back had seemed harder. He put it in his back pocket, where it ridged the denim. When he came home from work, his pocket was smooth. Yuki tried to imagine the talk. Where had it taken place? Had he shouted? Had Lillian thrown her shoes at his head? Had his hand moved toward her face? Strange how the only person who might have been able to give Yuki advice worth having never would.
Still she had hope; as she waited on a laundromat bench, watching the washers spin, she thought that whatever violence was in Lou might be washed away if she could just find the right stain remover.
Just as her machine stopped, a dryer emptied. The timing was perfect. She reached into the metal cave and pulled out—a ball, gray as a brain, fabric curling in on fabric. The giant organ plinked water onto the laundromat floor. Lou’s new indigo jeans were wormed inside what had once been his mother’s white sheets. Water dripped on Yuki’s shoes, and down her own flares.
A woman heaved a rainbow pile toward the empty dryer. Quarters clicked into place. The woman clicked the door shut, and smiled at Yuki a bright, Fuck-you-I-was-faster smile. Yuki stood holding the oozing brain. She hugged it and felt the water slipping past her shirt and clinging to her ribs. A full fifteen minutes, she stood ignored and damp. Another dryer freed up, and she put their money in. What else could she do? She had no other sheets to put on the bed. As she stretched them out over the mattress, the gray-blue mark looked like nothing so much as a giant bruise.
“Those belonged to my mom. My mom. Are you a moron? Those sheets are older than you.”
How old? She wanted to ask, but didn’t because it was the wrong thing to ask, because his face was as red as his hair.
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