Jack took her with him wherever he’d go. She graced the routinized tedium of his days. He spent more time with Lily when she was away than when she visited. When she was in Palo Alto she had other friends to see. His mom wouldn’t let her sleep in his room, even though they slept together by Skype every night. When she was in town, he couldn’t go to the bathroom with her, or watch her put a tampon in; things she let him do by phone. In person, she was too embarrassed and uptight.
But when Lily was in Texas, she could be in her class and he could be in his class, and still their phones could be sitting in each other’s lap, almost as if they were holding hands. Via her iPhone, he could perch on the light green toilet tank in her condo near the jar of pastel Gulf Coast sea glass petals Cindy, her mom, liked to collect, while Lily showered and washed her hair, and still watch the 49ers on TV with the Things and his dad in the redwood-paneled family room. He could be splitting a Mission-style burrito on one of the benches downtown on University Avenue with his buddy, Kevin Choi, on a Saturday afternoon while Lily was getting a pedicure with some girlfriends in Fort Worth. Just last weekend, she and the girls were squealing in disgust exactly the way he’d hoped they would when he caught Kevin shoving almost his whole burrito-half in his mouth at once on video and all that chunky guac squished out.
“Oh, Kevin, oh, sweetie, don’t keep doing this to yourself,” Lily had said, turning bright red as she giggled. “You can take little bites. We don’t have to laugh. I’ll still love you.”
It made Jack feel like Lily was right there sitting next to him in the stadium to FaceTime when the ball was in play—they’d each high-five their respective screen with an index finger when Astrichan dropped down and gave ’em twenty.
Jack couldn’t see Lily’s face now, as he climbed the stairs to his room, as she was indeed bent over the cat, he could see that fluffy white dead tail, and just a sliver of the top of her ear, her blond hair so silky, that little pink half-moon sliced right through it, peeking out like a Japanese peach gummy candy just where she’d adorned it with the world’s tiniest hoop. Lily’s dad had sent it from Hong Kong four months prior at Christmas, although nobody knew why he was there. “A deal,” he’d said. “That’s his favorite word,” said Lily.
Before Hong Kong the dad had lived in Hawaii and before that he’d said he lived in Detroit, but Lily and her mom, and even her dad’s own mother, Grandma Rose, weren’t exactly sure if he was telling the truth; he was a deadbeat and maybe a functioning alcoholic, and he’d long ago given up his landline and refused to give them his address, or anything like that. The earring was what Lily had asked for, filament thin like an angel’s hair, with three tiny diamonds at the center of the hoop, almost like those bejeweled false eyelashes she’d bought at Dougherty’s Pharmacy and worn to a disco-themed high school dance, but less coarse (she’d gone with a friend, a chill gay kid named Rex; Jack had checked him out when he’d visited over vacation). She’d wanted the earring for a septum pierce. Her yoga teacher Stefanie had one and it looked so delicate and so pretty, Lily said, but Jack said no. So, she’d pierced the crown of her ear instead; using the tiny hoop to decorate the rim, and sometimes in the right light the piece of jewelry looked just like one more shiny golden highlight on her shiny golden head.
Lily’s dad hadn’t sent her mom any money in a long, long time, which is why they’d moved to Dallas, where it was cheaper—a lot longer than before Jack and Lily had ever hooked up, although he’d seen her around. They were in the same grade but they’d never had a class together, and she walked across campus like she was floating, slow and with her feet barely touching the ground, so that anyone with eyes knew who she was. Both of Lily’s parents were from Texas, and Grandma Rose still had the house Lily’s father had grown up in, and Lily’s mother had gotten a job through an old friend from high school, he knew the developer who had built the museum tower. The developer had sold it along with his consortium a few years back to the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System, which was working out all right—the job was; the tower not so much. Its glass skin reflected too much light on the museum below, wrecking some of the artwork inside. The new owners couldn’t get rid of the luxury lofts, because people who loved art were the people who were supposed to buy them, and people who loved art didn’t love the glare. Lily’s mother said her old boss was sick over it. He treasured the museum, which was why he built his tower right next to it. He’d trusted the architect. Lily’s mother was sick over it, too. She was still the “director of resident relations.” Her job was to give the tenants what they wanted—wine tastings, speed dating, helping them plan events for their charitable foundations. Lily had sent him the link on the Towers website. It read: “It’s Cindy’s mission to make your dreams come true.”
“It sounds like my mom’s a prostitute,” Lily said.
“She’s doing her best to take care of you,” Jack said. He was trying to be supportive. That’s what good boyfriends did. They were “present” and “loving,” even if they happened to be hundreds of miles away.
Imagine too much light wrecking anything, Jack thought. He was a fan of light. He liked illumination. Or was it the other way around, too much light, too much vision or clarity, being too much for anything or anyone to handle? At least Lily still had the earring from her father. She never took it off.
“Milo and Theo, no blood while I’m gone,” Dad called out. He was descending the stairs right by Jack, but his head was in his phone and he didn’t seem to see him. “Jack,” he yelled, his voice way too loud for the lack of distance, “keep an eye on them.”
“That means I’m in charge,” Jack yelled back from the threshold of his room, startling his father. He firmly shut his door behind him. He locked it and put a chair under the doorknob, just in case.
Lily gazed up from the cat. Her smile, her mouth, the way her tongue sort of pressed a little bit out between her teeth, her lips; all of it knocked him out.
“Which ones did you put in there?” Jack said. It had been a long day, he probably needed a shower, but she didn’t seem to mind the way he smelled, she kind of liked to cuddle up on his chest near his armpit even though she’d say: “pee-yew,” and she wasn’t exactly in the room anyway.
“The same ones I have on,” said Lily.
She got that look, he could see it on the screen, where she was far away and right there at the same time, clouds in her irises, lips parted, the way she looked when they had sex.
No one else knows that look but me, Jack thought; and his dick swelled again with pride, so heavy and thick now it felt like it was bursting.
He sat down on the lower bunk of his bunk bed. He thought about Larry Astrichan, his bald head bobbing, his spare tire hitting the ground first when he dropped and gave twenty. Thinking about Larry Astrichan was always good when Jack wanted to control his erection. Kevin said he thought about grapefruit, but Jack thought that was sort of pervy and pretty effing weird. Kevin never had a girlfriend, anyway. Jack teased him about it sometimes, but Lily told him to stop.
He tore open the top of the manila envelope.
“How long did you wear them?” he said.
“Two days, like you told me,” said Lily. And then she crinkled her nose. “Don’t blame me if they’re too stinky.”
Inside wrapped in red tissue paper were a pair of tiger and lace thong panties with a pink ribbon threaded through the waistband and a matching push-up bra. Jack took just the paper to his face and breathed in. It smelled like her. Sweat and soap and pussy juice, musky and piscine and spicy, the faintest scent of pee. He buried himself in it.
“Stop,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.” When he looked up, she was indeed pink with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll slow down. It’s just almost like having you here.”
“Almost,” she said.
“Better than almost,” he said. “But not the same as real.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because with the c
omputer and the phone, I can see you from every angle.”
She listened and set her teeth. The pink rising to purple on her cheeks. Then she said, “I guess you have it all figured out.”
“I’ve been waiting all week,” said Jack. He almost whispered it. “I think about you all the time. Come on, let’s light the candles and turn the lights down.”
“Why?” said Lily, kind of saucy now. “Because I’m shy?”
“Because you’re fragile,” said Jack, lighting the candles in his room and turning the lights down.
“I am so not fragile,” said Lily. She lit a ring of votives on the surfaces surrounding her bed—bedposts, shelf, night table. “Look who’s talking about being fragile. Look at your life and then look at mine,” said Lily. “You have two parents. I only have my mom, and she’s more of a teenager than I am.” With a clicker, she turned her white candelabra chandelier with frosted flame-shaped lightbulbs down to a simmering glow.
Jack looked. At her silky blond hair and her pink ear tips and her stuffed animals and her white shorts with the tiger and lace thong panties snuggled secretly away inside and her sweatshirt-gray tank top with the matching bra’s straps and her skinny arms, so thin above the wrist it wouldn’t take much to snap one; her pink-and-orange bed.
“I’m not fragile in the least,” said Lily.
“Okay, you’re not,” Jack said. “You’re sweet. You’re smart. You’re gorgeous. Let’s not talk about it now.”
She still looked pissed. Her hair fell over one eye as she sorrowfully shook her head.
“Not now, or ever,” Jack said. “Can you move your hair behind your ear so I can see your face?” He motioned with his hand. “Like this? Like the way I would touch you if I were there, the way I’d take that little strand of hair and I’d move it behind your ear.”
Slowly Lily moved her hair behind her ear.
“Then I’d take my hand, and I’d press it against your chest, above the neckline of your shirt, flat like this,” and he took off his T-shirt by pulling it up from the back of his shoulder blades and over his head, and then he laid his right palm flat across his bare chest. “And I’d feel your heart, and as I kept my hand on your chest your heartbeat would begin to race, can you do it, Lily? Put your hand on your chest. Can you feel it? And right now, there’s a heat in your chest and there’s a heat down there between your legs, and you want my hand there, put my hand there, Lily.”
She put her hand down there, between her legs, her fingers with her sky-blue fingernails pressed flat like a little fan, in front of her white, white shorts.
“I’m putting my thigh there. You are sitting on my thigh, facing away, and I’m pressing up hard and you are pressing down. And you begin to rock, you rock against my thigh and it makes you feel so good. So fizzy inside, down there and up on your mound.”
Lily turned pink. He didn’t know if he was still embarrassing her or if it was because he was turning her on, but he wasn’t about to risk it by stopping.
“Now I’m taking off your top, Lily. Take it off, take it off, sweetheart,” and she took it off, sitting on the edge of her bed in her tiger-and-lace push-up bra, her hand pressing against her white shorts, rocking, and Jack spread the bra she’d sent him over his face. He could smell her underarms. He could smell her perfume and her deodorant. “I’ve got my head between your breasts, Lily, and I’m kissing you there, in between, and as I kiss you, you wrap your arm around my neck so your breasts squeeze against my face. Squeeze me, honey.”
He didn’t even have to look up then, he had the bra pushed up against his face, the cups so thick and padded you could push a pin through them and it wouldn’t come out the other side.
“I’m reaching around behind your back and I’m unhooking your bra with my fingers, what a player, one handed! Go ahead now, take it off.”
What was so amazing about Lily was when they did this, when they had phone sex, she just obeyed him. In real life, she sometimes talked. In real life, she’d say, “You’re on my hair,” or “Your face is too scratchy,” or even something potentially dick-wilting, like “You’re so cute” while pinching that extra inch that sat above his hips, even though water polo had made him strong, thin, and bony. But on the phone, it was like she was in a trance, like she’d do whatever he wanted.
While she was taking off her bra, he pulled down his jams and his dick was tent-poling his boxers. When she looked up, she gasped.
He loved that.
“Look at what you do to me,” he said. He pulled his boxers up and away and then down.
“Okay, lie back now. Take off your shorts, too.”
She did. Now he had her panties in his hand. He said, “Pull them down,” and she did and kicked them off and he got a glimpse of her open pussy. “Pretend I’m going down on you. Use your fingers, they’re my tongue,” and Lily’s hand went down. “Wait, get your phone,” he said. She kind of rolled her eyes, but she did what he asked of her. “Put it down there, I want to watch my tongue on your pussy, put your fingers down there,” and she did and he watched and he took her panties to his nose and mouth and he breathed and even licked them as he got up so close with such a clear view of her cunt. With his other hand he started to beat off.
“I’m making you come, Lily.” She started to moan. He could hear her from the computer and from the phone. He could watch her fingers move around and around and around. Her back arched, he could tell by the way she lifted her butt and pussy up, for him, for him. Then he felt himself begin to peak, with the panties in his mouth now and his hand pulling hard and fast. Just as he rocketed, his dick pulsating, his jizz shooting out far over his bed, he whispered, “Lily, Lily, Lily.
“Come with me.”
* * *
Before Dan ever laid eyes on Maryam, he had been aware of her, her Internet presence. He’d been reading Maryam’s posts for a long time (he’d pictured her differently, less intense, not so crazily attractive) mostly on Fukushima.update, or Fukuleaks, or the Japan Times online. British nuclear watchdog websites. She was all over the net, covering “Fukushima Fog,” her coinage, somewhat akin to “the Fog of War,” which he’d looked up, the derivation, because why the hell not? It was originally a German term, Nebel des Krieges, and also the title of a documentary about Robert S. McNamara, the S. for “Strange,” his mother’s maiden name. Dan had actually seen The Fog of War on a date night with his wife in 2003.
“Only you, Dan,” Amy had said then, when he’d surprised her with the tickets. Not that she was wholly uninterested—they shared a leftist bent, sure; plus a love of history, a taste for documentary film—but come on. Even he, now in retrospect, had to admit the movie hardly qualified as a romantic evening, although it had indeed turned out that way. A long walk after, ice cream, stretching the precious time alone together. A bottle of red wine at home after they sent the babysitter on her way. The conversation never seemed to end in those days, except when it ended in bed. There had been nothing they hadn’t talked about, except maybe sports. Amy was a good date; she’d go with him to see basketball games and yell as loudly as anyone; but it wasn’t something she much liked to discuss. Statistics. Bad calls. Life got better for both of them when he finally had Jack to talk to; Jack loved that shit, too. Dan could go on and on. Amy was generous and indulgent. She was wonderful! She mostly listened then.
Their very first night out had been his choice as well, Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, at Theater 80 on St. Marks Place, in the brief period when they were both living in New York. Amy had had an internship at one of the women’s magazines and Dan was writing freelance for the Village Voice. In the film, all that women want is money and all that men want is sex. After, Amy, so cute in her miniskirt and knee-high boots—her hair lustrous and still rolling all the way down to her waist—had thrust out her hand for a definitive evening-ending shake, making it clear she would not let him kiss her good night, that night or maybe ever.
Ha. Over the past twenty-something years Amy�
�s lips and tongue had been on and in every available inch of Dan’s body and vice versa. Sure, he’d had to reel her in; she was so defended when he’d met her, but it was worth it. A Love Supreme. The John Coltrane Suite. They’d played the first movement at their wedding. The part where Coltrane chants the phrase, over and over again. The music, the poetry, gave some form of ecstatic shape to how he felt about her.
McNamara, the former U.S. secretary of defense, often referred to as an “architect” of the Vietnam War in the books and articles Dan liked to dig deep in, appeared in the film The Fog of War alternately denying his culpability and overcome by blistering self-recrimination. At one point, he’d admitted to complicity in mass murder during World War II, when as a boy-wonder strategist he had helped plan the annihilation of 100,000 civilians in Tokyo, using “conventional methods,” aka incendiary bombs, which meant they burned to death. The confession stuck with Dan. Was McNamara so disassociated from typical human feeling that for him warfare felt like a chess game? Although clearly he’d been haunted by his own actions the rest of his life. And how could the Japanese, sixty-some-odd years after the dual atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now find themselves in the bizarre position of self-radiating?
Dan would have to watch the film again to make sure he remembered it all correctly. There were a lot of things he remembered incorrectly. He had initially recollected the tattoo of a butterfly wing on Maryam’s long left foot as covering the entire surface of her instep when, in reality, upon the privilege of seeing it a second time—one night sitting next to her when she had been wearing some attractive gold sandals—it was actually a much more delicate thing, its lacy edges kissing the pinky toe side, the two stained-glass wings in profile, energetically gathered together, as if the butterfly were readying to unfold and take flight.
Come With Me Page 6