by T K Kenyon
Finally, a knock at the door. Leila kicked her nightstand drawer closed as she rolled off the bed. Her pistol clunked as the drawer shut.
At the door, Leila peered through the peephole and saw Conroy, holding booze.
Good. That bottle would put a dent in her looming bar tab. This weekend was always an expensive one.
She unlatched the locks in a drumroll of rattling bolts.
The brown bag in Conroy’s arms clanked as he set it on her table.
More than one bottle. Good.
“I feel like I’m contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” he said.
“That’s not funny.” Even if Conroy had pedophile or adolescent-o-phile—ephebophile—fantasies, she didn’t encourage shit like that. No cheerleader outfits hung in her closet. She swallowed hard to push down the shaking sickness in her throat and casually inspected bottles in the bag: whisky, beer, and vodka. “What, are you throwing a party?”
Conroy said, “I thought I’d have a beer. Maybe some vodka. What the hell.”
Leila recited, “Liquor before beer, in the clear. Beer before liquor, never sicker.” Someone at O’Malley’s party last night should have reminded her of that.
“Okay,” Conroy said. “Got orange juice?”
Leila’s fridge held towers of salad ingredients and two cartons of skinless chicken breasts. “Some pineapple-orange juice.”
“Sounds like a screwdriver to me.”
She poured one finger of the umber Macallan in a shotglass for herself and slammed it down—it burned so good, like a whiff of hellfire—and poured a jigger of vodka into Conroy’s glass of orange juice. She stirred it with a blunt table knife.
Conroy frowned at her. “Why aren’t you using a spoon?”
Leila poured herself another shot. “People sniff spoons when they’re looking for evidence of secret drinking.”
“You live alone.” Conroy turned her television over to the all-golf channel.
Leila handed him the pine-screwdriver and sniffed her own burning creosote-scented scotch. “It’s January twenty-ninth, and it’s even a Friday. Shall we raise a glass to my dad?”
From the couch, Conroy raised his glass to the height of her eyes.
Leila raised her shotglass until it eclipsed Conroy’s orange tumbler and his balding head and his blue, blue eyes. She said, “May he not be burning in Hell.”
Conroy’s glass dipped, breaking the alcoholic juxtaposition. “Your father passed on?”
Leila pounded the shot, and it burned, too, but less. “Yep.” Leila went back to the kitchen to replenish. Her next shot went in a highball glass with bottled water. New Hamilton tap water had a pesticidal, nitrogenous finish.
Conroy said, “My father passed away, too, when I was a ten.”
“I was sixteen.” Nine years ago. Leila’s arm fell in slow motion, and she guided it down to the counter. The honey-colored liquid swirled in her highball glass. She had bought good barware a couple of years back. Her father would have liked it, good scotch in good crystal. Pouring a shot on his grave would have been a fitting tribute, but he had been cremated, and flinging a shot into the Floridian waves seemed like a waste of good scotch, and she was nowhere near Florida.
“Heart attack,” Conroy said. “I don’t even remember much about him.”
“My dad was sick.” She raised her amber-filled glass. “This was part of it.”
“You should be careful about drinking. Alcoholism is genetic,” he said.
“Bullshit.” Her drink caught flickers from the blue glass chandelier above the kitchen table. “Phenylketoneuria is genetic. Huntington’s Chorea is genetic.”
Conroy looked serious, older, wiser, older. “A predisposition, then.”
“Tay-Sachs is genetic.” The glass-enclosed chandelier warped and wefted through the lens of scotch and water. The cups of stained glass walked on the ceiling like an upside-down octopus in round boots. “Sickle cell is genetic.”
Conroy was beside her, and he steered her toward the couch. “Your definition of ‘genetic’ narrows when you drink.”
Pressure on her shoulder, and she sat. She held her drink with cupped hands. “Thalassemia and albinism.”
Conroy set his drink on the coffee table. “I haven’t thought about my father for years.”
Leila didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to drink. “I think about mine all the time.”
Every time she saw the red gauze above her bed, morning and evening.
Every time her mother said he was burning in Hell.
Every time she drank.
Conroy shook his head. “You should talk to somebody.”
“Like who, a shrink?” A priest? Her stomach wrestled with the scotch.
“Me?”
“You are just about to leave.” In Leila’s hands, the dilute scotch seemed to permeate the crystal. It spilled into her hands and ran through the veins in her arms. “Jody’s coming over at seven. We’re going out.”
Conroy sat beside her and leaned back. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
“So am I.” She gazed into her amber drink as if trying to penetrate the mythical veil, the one that charlatans and mediums and psychics talked about, that separated the Living from the Departed, or Crossed-Over, or some other such euphemistic bullshit for dead.
The flavors in the scotch separated in her mouth. Her dad described the flavors in booze as smoke and fruit and berry, but scotch tasted more varied to her than food flavors. They were almost colors, and she resisted calling the top note honey, because that suggested bee clover honey, but it was rich and sweet, maybe more like honeysuckle, or honey-yellow silk, or cold gold coins. One of the compounds that registered on the back of her tongue wasn’t salty, but it had a mineral taste, cloudy-white like gypsum.
Conroy took the drink out of her hands and set it on the coffee table. She didn’t protest or reach for it. It was going to be a long night. There was plenty of time.
He said, “Tell me about your father.”
Leila retrieved her scotch. The anniversary was not for morbid reminiscences. The anniversary was for drinking and her own memories in her own head. Her dad had hated whispers and rumors and cattiness.
“What did he do?” Conroy prompted.
“Lawyer.” She sipped. “He moved to Florida when my mom divorced him.”
“Did you see him much?”
“Summers.” Three sunny months every year when she was freed from plaid and penguins and priests and to-do lists and the big, dry-erase schedule on the wall, scrawled with Mass, Youth Group, tutoring w/Fr. Sean, and piano. Those six years, she had been a divided soul, a multiple personality. “Read any good books lately? I’m reading Middlemarch.”
Conroy sighed. “I wouldn’t think you’d like George Eliot.”
Leila blinked, a darkness dropping over her apartment and lifting like sped-up night. “Why not?”
He sipped his pine-screwdriver. “All the women do is get married, and who they marry is of such importance. It’s practically a romance novel.”
“But George Eliot told the story.” Leila set down her drink and lay back on the couch, one arm above her head. She knew she was inviting being jumped on. “George Eliot was her own woman. She traveled. She lived with a man she wasn’t married to, then married a buck twenty years younger than she was. Even Virginia Woolf thought Eliot was cool.”
Conroy shrugged.
Fine. He didn’t get it, the philistine. “In Victorian times, marriage meant sex. Eliot was talking about sex. Women don’t want marriage. Women want sex. Middlemarch is porn.”
“Of course women want to get married.” Conroy was far too dismissive for a guy in a bad woman’s apartment. “It’s all they talk about.”
Interesting that he used the exclusionary they, as if no one present qualified as a woman. “Women don’t want marriage. Men do.”
He laughed more than just a snort. “That’s not true.”
“Women want sex. Women risk childbirth an
d death to have sex.” She rolled to her feet and picked up her glass. “Eliot was a pre-Raphaelite,” she muttered and walked into the kitchen.
“You didn’t tell me about your father.” Conroy sat on the couch, watching muted golf.
“My father has nothing to do with this,” Leila said. “Do you know why you’re here?”
Conroy looked from the television to her, wary. “In your apartment? Now?”
~~~~~
Conroy was at Leila’s apartment because he didn’t want to go home. If he went home, Beverly might be drunk again, or might have talked to that priest again, or might want to talk to him some more.
“On Earth and in my apartment,” Leila said. “It’s to pass on your genes.”
Conroy set down his drink and stared at her, somewhere between terrified and pissed. “You aren’t pregnant.”
“Christ, Conroy. I’m not preggers. Get a hold of yourself.” She sipped her scotch, which emphasized the point. “It’s all just to contribute genes to the next generation.”
Conroy looked back to the television. “Reductionist, like your genetics. I thought you didn’t like reductionism. Glorious big picture, and all that.”
~~~~~
Leila said, “You’re trying to pass on your genes before you die and are burned up or decay and your atoms reenter the carbon cycle. Even my dad passed on his genes. But let me tell you something.” Her voice fell, and somewhere her mind thought, don’t tell him this, he doesn’t even understand Middlemarch. “I’m opting out, like George Eliot.”
“No you aren’t.” He didn’t even look at her.
“I’m not having kids, any kids, ever.”
He sipped his drink and didn’t turn his stare away from the television. “You’ll want kids when you’re older. All women want to have kids.” The asshole was dismissive, condescending.
Condescending.
Con can mean opposite. Con-descending, the opposite of falling, so falling up.
Conroy, Con-roy, roy means king, so Con-roy means the opposite of a king.
“No, men want kids,” she said. He was treating her like a drunk teenager. She wasn’t a teenager.
“It’s selfish to not want kids.” He watched some golfer do something to grass.
She said, “It’s selfish to have kids, to believe that your DNA is so valuable that you should produce lots of kids to suck up resources and turn food into crap and keep passing on your DNA. It’s selfish to make babies so that your own death is less terrifying.”
“Baloney.”
“Come on, Conroy. A woman who doesn’t want children scares you. It’s unnatural.”
“It is unnatural. Everyone wants kids. Women want to be mothers.”
“No, Conroy. Women want sex. Women risk getting pregnant and giving birth that, except for the last couple of decades here but still in most of the world, is horribly painful and lethal a good percentage of the time, because they want sex. That’s how much women want to fuck.”
“Bullshit,” he scoffed.
He scoffed at her, the idiot. “It’s why men were against birth control in the early nineteen hundreds and why the pro-lifer leaders now are all guys. Two, four, six, ten. Why are all your leaders men? Men want children. Men want to get married so they can lock up the woman so they know the kids are theirs.”
Conroy laughed. “There’s an old saying, ‘Men give marriage to get sex. Women give sex to get marriage.’ That’s the way it works.”
Leila was betraying secrets to the enemy. He had put sodium pentathol in her scotch and he wasn’t even listening to her spill these secrets, the secrets that women even kept hidden from themselves so they couldn’t betray them. “Listen to yourself. Men run the Catholic Church. The Church is against birth control and abortion and sex outside marriage and abortion.”
Conroy shook his head. “I wonder which neurotransmitter you have too much of.”
“Surely you don’t believe there’s a God that dictates that crap.”
“Leila, you’ve had enough to drink.”
She couldn’t stop talking. This topic haunted her. “Consider gay men. Homosexual men are promiscuous and have anonymous sex in the back rooms of bars.”
Conroy nodded. “Because they’re men. Heterosexual men would have that much sex if women let them.”
“You’ve got it backwards.” She was almost yelling across her apartment at him, but she couldn’t stop. He was an idiot and he thought she was wrong when she wasn’t wrong, but she was too drunk to stop herself. “Gay men have a woman’s sexual appetite. They like men, and they like lots of men as often as possible. They also like good shoes and pretty clothes and antiques.”
“Leila, please stop drinking.” He stood.
“But lesbians,” she swirled the dilute scotch in her glass and thumped it on the kitchen counter, “who wear sensible shoes, have extended groups of lesbian friends, cut their hair short, and participate in team sports, they pair-bond for life and stop having sex within a few months. That’s men.”
“Lesbians stop having sex?” Conroy took her glass away. “You’re going to be drunk before you even go out.”
He still didn’t get it. “That’s why hetero men fear gay men. Homos aren’t the manliest of men, inhabiting an all-male society, unfettered by women. The gay underground is a matriarchy. Gay men admit it and call each other by female names, girlfriend, Mary, bitch.”
He set her glass down on the bar, out of her reach.
She said, “It’s why hetero men like lesbians and why women become fag hags. They can relate.”
“Leila, let’s sit down. You’ve had a lot to drink on an empty stomach.”
“I’m fine.” She couldn’t make him understand because it scared him. He was terrified and mocking her and she should shut up. Leila’s head swam. The digital clock on the stove said six forty-five. Jody would be there soon. “You’ve got to leave.”
“I can’t leave you like this.” He sighed. “You’re distraught.”
“Just another word men use to make women seem weak.” The room swayed so she held onto the kitchen counter.
“Okay, then you’re drunk.”
“Am not.” She reached for her drink, and Conroy moved it farther down the bar. Asshole, just because he was taller, he could win at keep-away. “Jody is usually early. You should leave.”
“Will you stop drinking?”
“Fuck, no.”
“I’m worried you’ll choke to death on your own vomit.”
“Oh, attractive, Conroy.”
“Okay, here,” he said and he handed her back her glass, but it was filled with water. She drank it anyway. His vacant, recessive blue eyes crinkled at the corners with laughter. “Besides,” he said, “you’re forgetting something in your drunken, feminist theory.”
“What,” she said.
“Keep drinking the water. Men put little energy into making gametes and make millions of them. It’s in our reproductive interest to spread our genes far and wide, hope a few take root.”
At least he was listening, even if it was only to get his way, to keep her from drinking. “But—” she said.
“Not done,” he said. “Women put so much energy into making one egg a month and then nine months gestation, and then eighteen years of child rearing, that it’s in their best interest to marry a guy who’ll help raise their offspring. That’s male competition and female choice, sexual selection. Darwin.”
“Old theory,” Leila said. “Victorian era theory. Most men don’t have the opportunity to spread their sperm far and wide, so they find one egg and guard it and the offspring that they think is theirs. Most men don’t have sex with thousands of women.”
“Rock stars do.”
The alcohol buzzing softened as her liver chewed the ethanol in her blood.
“Salmon exception,” she said.
The doorbell bonged.
“Crap. Jody’s here.” Leila tried to figure out what to do.
“Salmon, like omega-three fat
ty acids?” Conroy asked.
“Salmon, the fish that spawn.” Leila went over to her door and looked out the peephole. Yep, Jody was dressed in spangles and sparkling scales that confused the peephole’s fisheye lens. She yelled, “Just a minute!”
Jody called through the door, “If you’re not dressed, that’s fine with me.”
“Getting my purse!” Leila went back to the kitchen and Conroy. “Nope. Missed the point again, Con-roy.” She handed him his vodka pine-screwdriver, took his rough hand, and led him through her kitchen.
Enough ethanol laced her blood that Leila was too sharp, too clear, and she knew all the ways he was wrong.
So many ways, starting with fish evolution and ending with fucking Leila.
She led him to her hallway and said, “Male salmon come in two types: normal and rock star. When resources are scarce, they all turn into little male salmon that swim like hell upstream and have the energy to get there, and they find one female salmon, and they spawn exactly once and die.” She tugged his hand and pulled him toward her closet. “When there are a lot of little male salmon around and competition for the females gets hairy, a few males grow bigger, shinier, redder, with big hooked jaws and canine teeth and can barely make it back upstream. Testosterone poisoning. They’re too big, too heavy, and the bears can see them. It’s risky. They’re rock stars, and if they make it, they get all the chicks.”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“Look it up.” Leila shoved him into the dark closet between her hanging clothes.
He held the closet door open. His blue eyes bugged out. “Even if salmon do that, we’re not fish.”
Her head rocked forward and her eyebrows cocked. “Of course we are, Conroy. We’re nothing but bald monkeys, and we’re nothing but hairy fish.”
He held her clothes apart and glared at her. “But you’re not going to have kids. So you have no purpose, under your own theory.”
“On the contrary, I can do whatever the hell I want to.” She slid shut the closet door, and she mumbled against the wood, “I’m free. Not even evolution can trap me.”
~~~~~
Conroy waited in the dark of Leila’s closet. Light slid through the cracks between the closet door and the jamb, just enough so he could faintly see her clothes hanging around him. Her clothes smelled like floral laundry detergent.