3 Women Walk Into A Bar
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Candy read it, then looked past me toward the door. “I gotta go. Some of my regulars are here. But listen, if there’s anything else you need . . ?” She slipped a card out of the pack of cigarettes and handed it to me, then bent down and pushed the pack and lighter back under my chair, her breast grazing my thigh.
I watched her saunter over to the newly arrived group of men—bankers or money managers, white-bread guys with power ties—then left with Candy’s card in my pocket: Susan Harrington, Realtor, Your Lakefront Property Specialist.
Chapter 19
THE WAY IT HAPPENED, OR MEMORIES IN JIMBOLAND
Jimbo knew there was a lake nearby, from the way he could hear those ducks—no, loons. James had been keen on explaining the difference. Damn things creeped him out, yodeling like that. Fucking made him wish he had a shotgun.
“Jimbo does not like loons,” he mumbled, pacing the wall of windows. He had to stop talking about himself in the third person. He had to stop thinking of himself as Jimbo. That wasn’t his name-o. He had a week to become James John Smith, the new James John Smith of New Hampshire.
The guy had been a total loner. Single, never married, no children, and no family in the States. He had worked as a commercial freight pilot most of his adult life—until the crash. When he pulled out of the coma six months later, he got news that his parents had died while skiing The Alps. The hits kept coming. The doctor ordered him to never fly again, and that was followed by a visit from his company’s attorney, a man with some paperwork that he said would make Smith very rich if he’d just sign on the dotted line.
Smith signed away, cashed the check, and bought up all the empty land around his house in the White Mountains. It quickly became his hermitage.
He became dependent on delivery drivers, satellite TV, and the Internet. Packages piled up on the porch, food was left at the door. He paid all of his bills through a global trust account.
This was a man no one would miss. He would be leaving a world where no one could tell one James John Smith from another anyway. They were like Mexicans to black people.
Jimbo had come to New Hampshire with a plan, and—except for the sex part—it went exactly as he’d envisioned it, like some sort of divine karmic happening without the robes or Kool-Aid.
From the moment Jimbo invaded James Smith’s space, he was in control. Borrowing a line from Calloway in The Third Man, Jimbo whispered, “You were born to be murdered,” as he limped into Smith’s mountain home.
“What’s that?” the man said.
Jimbo answered, “I said, ‘You sure have a nice place.’”
“Thanks. Don’t get much company.”
The rest of the conversation might have gone something like this:
“I’m Arnold. Sorry I fell and twisted my ankle while trespassing on your land, but thanks for putting me up.
“No problem. Somehow my Internet connection and phone lines have gone down and I am lonely and hopped up on pain pills and welcome the company.”
“So what do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
Or maybe it didn’t go like that at all.
Jimbo liked to think of the whole ordeal as one of those action-packed extraction movies. Injured hero swoops in, surveys the land, picks off the bad guys, befriends the rich man and his money, then saves him and moves on. Just insert con man with self-inflicted shin wound instead of hero, and kill instead of save.
“This all you ever do?” Jimbo-acting-as-Arnold had asked James as they sat reading one day.
“With the Internet down and the cable out, it’s about all you can do. Besides, I like it. It’s quiet and I can go anywhere in my head.”
“You can go anywhere, for real, can’t you?” Jimbo-Arnold asked.
“No.”
“Sure you could, James. I mean, I’ll bet you could.”
“I guess I could afford to go anywhere, I just don’t think I could handle it physically. I’m not as strong as I used to be.”
Or as thin, Jimbo thought. “Nah. You’d be fine. Look at all these travel books. Pick one. Where do you want to go?”
They’d been playing that game for two days, the where-do-you-want-to-go game when James told Arnold-Jimbo about his online poker addiction, the Syracuse bar, Flannigan’s loss, and Flannigan’s impending Tibetan trek.
Jimbo swore he heard angels sing. He said, “You ever meet this guy, or been to Syracuse?”
James shook his head. “Nope. Not much for the bar scene. Thought I’d just sell the place, or put it up in another game. Sweeten the pot, you know?”
“I hear that. Hey, you want another beer? I’m heading that way.”
“Sure. Thanks. You’re a good listener, Arnold.”
“That I am,” Jimbo-Arnold said, reaching for James’s empty beer bottle, brushing the man’s fat fingers as he did.
Jimbo played another game while James slept. It was the watch-me-shed-my-old-life-for-this-new-one game. He wrote the name James one hundred times. He practiced answering the phone as James, made miscellaneous calls imitating James’s voice and walked around James’s house, making up anecdotes about all the things he saw.
“Oh, that chair? I brought it home from Mexico, as a memory of my night with Ensenada Juanita.”
He stood in front of a poorly executed painting of a red barn in a wheat field, posed as though he had a glass of Chardonnay in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“That? I picked it up in a little shop in Boston. Pathetic, isn’t it? I like to close my eyes and imagine my grandmother rocking on the front porch of a farmhouse as grandpa painted beside her. God, I loved my granny.”
Jimbo flicked his imaginary cigarette, then downed and tossed his fake glass of wine and moved on to the next knickknack in the room.
“Oh, this old thing?”
He picked up a wooden implement laced with thick rope, turned it in his hands. “I don’t even know what the fuck this thing is! But it charms me.”
Jimbo never lasted long at that game. It wasn’t that he wanted to become James John Smith of New Hampshire, he simply wanted what James had. Sure, they were both Smiths, but they couldn’t even have passed for distant cousins, much less the same guy. Where Jimbo had stringy, lean muscle and a hungry tiger, urban cowboy kind of look, James was more pasty and flabby, in a retired opera singer, puffer fish kind of look. And in the end, Jimbo figured the game didn’t matter because he wasn’t planning on hanging around—or inviting anyone to visit.
His own life as James John Smith V, had been easy to leave, easier than he would have thought. There was freedom in living for the moment, in refusing to plan for a future that you had no control over anyway. It seemed so simple to Jimbo. Like those brilliant ideas that came to you in your teenage years, revealed in a pot-induced stupor. Peace equals cool. Less is more than more and better than nothing. Water is good for you. Feet are necessary.
But Jimbo knew this feeling of harmony, this carefree lifestyle couldn’t last. There were downsides to every good thing, but he fucking refused to think about that. Instead, he loaded up a day’s worth of porn on James’s computer, opened a bottle of wine, and made himself a frozen pizza.
By the time the week was out, Jimbo emerged as an improved version of James Smith of New Hampshire. Formed by the pieces of people he’d never met—film noir movie stars Richard Widmark and John Dall, and some people he wished he’d never met, like Randy Amis, the handsome bully in grade school—the new James was sly, charming, and sexy with a mysterious allure. He no longer thought of himself as Jimbo, but as James, the new owner of Flannigan’s bar in Syracuse, New York. He could almost see himself inserting the key in the lock and placing a Help Wanted sign in the window.
“Trust me. I’m doing you a favor,” Jimbo said just before he shoved James John Smith off the cliff. “Only thing you had to look forward to was gout, Type 2 diabetes and a slow, lonely death.”
If the fall, bounce, and tumble down the moun
tainside failed to kill James immediately, the fat fuck might have survived for weeks, his body feeding off itself in a bizarre weight loss regime.
Jimbo forced himself to look over the cliff. His namesake had landed on an outcropping of rock and lay broken and tattered, staining the snow crimson—a chilled meal for a passing carnivore family of four.
Chapter 20
BEAUCOUP DE CHAMONIX
The blood stored in her refrigerator was still deep red, thanks to the oxidizing procedure. You could learn anything from the Internet, especially when you befriended chatty doctor types who suffered from insomnia. Chamonix pushed aside orange juice and a Chinese takeout box and reached for the Tupperware container. Inside were two baby-food jars of blood, one marked “R,” one marked “J.” There was less than an ounce in each. Chamonix never used much in her paintings. It might be the stripe of an umbrella, the shoes of a girl waiting in line at the library, a Frisbee dangling from a tree in an abandoned park. She always tried to pay homage to the donor, but in an obtuse way. She wasn’t one of those guilty criminals asking to be caught, wanting to pay penance. She was an artist.
The way she had worked in Seattle in the beginning of her career was different from the way she painted now. She’d been less controlled, more passionate. Dumber. Now, living in Syracuse via Vegas via Shreveport via unnamed towns she’d rather forget, she was the retooled model of the original Chamonix. Smarter, calmer, more self-assured. She painted with more purpose than passion. Instead of the roller-coaster thrill of the past, she began to feel satisfied when a canvas was completed, like the moment after you scratch an itch.
Some days, Chamonix wondered if her feeling toward her art could change. What would be next? Her feelings about food or exercise, her desire for sex? Would that become mundane? Forgettable? Skippable? Chamonix was afraid she’d wake one morning and decide to buzz her head or wear muu-muus or speak Italian or raise Shetland sheepdogs in Utah. What if she lost herself? Surely not everything could go away? What if she lost the first kiss? That was the one magic thing Chamonix felt everyone could agree on.
The first kiss, when it’s real—not the trial kind—when you’re testing the chemistry, but the true first kiss when you can feel the electricity, that’s the kind of kiss novels were written about, futures planned upon, those were the kisses immortalized in songs.
If that kiss had magic, Chamonix would feel it expand into a rolling patter, releasing a line of tension, a drumming at the base of her spine, touching her in all the places the nuns had said were bad. If the kiss was too wet or too hard or too tight or too stiff or premeditated, if she couldn’t feel the man behind the kiss or if she peeked through her lashes to see him staring over her shoulder, then she’d shut her synapses down—pull the plug on the kiss and anything it might have led to.
A kiss could make her feel foolish, as if she was exposing herself, especially if it wasn’t reciprocated. Chamonix didn’t do vulnerable. She didn’t do soft. She didn’t give herself away. She understood why hookers never kiss, and how you can have sex without kissing and call it sex, but if you kiss—even once—it’s making love. Unless it’s rape and the kiss was one-sided and made you spit afterward.
Chamonix was thinking all this as she coasted downhill, returning from her morning bike ride. She’d logged over forty miles and would have gone more but she couldn’t shut off her brain. She tried again to get lost in the music, cranking the volume on her iPod, easily matching the rhythm of her pumping quads to the bass beat of “Suicide Blonde.”
She was smiling when she turned off Main Street and onto Bonanza, raced into the pseudo-courtyard of her building and yelled, “Hold the door!” to a guy in navy peacoat.
The guy barely had a second to react. His first instinct might have been to let go of the door and jump out of the way of the bike, but when Chamonix called again he turned, pulling the door open wide.
She barreled past, hunkered down over the handlebars, and zipped into the building’s foyer. Standing on the pedals, she charged the bike up the stairs, hooked it around at the first landing, and skidded to a stop in front of her loft door. The guy followed her inside, staring up at the place where she stopped.
Still in the saddle, she unclipped her helmet and grinned. “Thanks!”
He raised his hand to wave, but she was already rolling her bike inside.
“Hi. I’m Adam,” he said as the door closed.
Chamonix stripped, leaving her clothes where they fell—shoes and helmet in the entry, jacket, T-shirt, sports bra in the hall. She was nude by the time she entered the white-tiled bathroom. She pulled the elastic from her hair, releasing a long ponytail. She shivered as the strands of hair swept across her back. Pipes clanked before the cold stream warmed. Hot water sprayed from the old nozzle, halting and jerky, something she’d talked to the landlord about—twice. The guy was only interested in the shower if Chamonix was in it. Asshole.
Twenty minutes later, wearing coveralls splattered with dried paint, wet hair dripping, Chamonix stood in front of a painting. The background might have been Cape Cod, or any seashore with sand, surf, sea grasses, and a dilapidated fence. She uncapped the jar marked “J,” held her breath against the sharp scent, then dipped her brush and gently touched it to the canvas, adding a bloody line to the horizon, an accent to the setting sun. The transformation was instantaneous, turning an ordinary seascape into a tainted memory.
Chamonix eyed the rest of the painting. At the forefront, a swimsuit-clad couple lay entwined, their beach blanket twisted beneath them, a bottle of wine tipped, spilling, while at the water’s edge two children stood holding hands, throwing elongated shadows across the sand. She added a dash of red to the spilled wine and the hair of the girl, then capped the jar of blood and reached for the polyurethane spray.
Chapter 21
WHEN HARVESTING DOESN’T HAPPEN ON A FARM
Cress checked her watch. Early for her nail appointment, she was killing time on a bench at the park. A woman passed, furiously texting while pushing a stroller/carseat contraption. Cress stared at the ignored baby who was just as furiously attempting to grab a toy dangling just out of his reach. Across the path, mommies pushed toddlers in swings, kids hung from monkey bars. They chased and taunted one another. Children.
Cress touched her stomach. Most days she could convince herself some other girl had done it, could look in the mirror and believe it. Another girl made those children. An ugly girl. The kind of girl who studied the data and knew the facts: every female baby is born with one to two million eggs, eggs that are gradually destroyed so that by the time a female enters puberty, she may only have four hundred thousand. With puberty came menstruation, which released another thousand eggs a month, with the chance of only one being fertilized. That was where the importance of the million-egg difference came into play.
Cress had been given too many eggs. Like a collection of antique salt and pepper shakers stored in a glass display case, she had an abundance of something valuable she never planned on using. Her eggs were her true inheritance. Unlike her grandparents’ mines that went dry, this gift could change lives.
Not just for Cress, but for barren women on their knees in candlelit churches. Cress might be their answer, a paper-gowned girl in a sterile room acting in a totally anonymous and generous way—her own version of God Almighty and the Virgin Mary. Cress donated young, fertile eggs. Babies for all.
That was how she preferred to look at it. As a donation. Not her potential child, or her eggs, because all of that sounded too personal, too important to ever walk away from.
It was interesting to her only in a vague, cinematic way, that out there somewhere her biological child might live and thrive, a kid who looked nothing at all like her, but might turn to the light and for a moment remind Cress of a childhood better forgotten.
Once, she allowed herself to wonder if one of her eggs was born a girl and one a boy, what would happen if they hooked up? How could anyone stop that from happening?
When she read about the man who had donated so much sperm he fathered three thousand children and the doctor who used his own sperm in all the women he was treating instead of their choice of the Swedish triathlete’s, the Italian duke’s, or the nuclear scientist’s, she couldn’t understand why the new mothers were upset. They had wanted a baby—they got one. Their dream came true. Or did it?
As if she could read her thoughts, the manicurist paused in her filing and looked Cress in the eye. “My sister-in-law still can’t get pregnant. Says she’s going to look into surrogacy.”
“I think that’s a fabulous idea,” Cress said. “A surrogate mother. There should be an award for that.”
A woman at the next station laughed. “What would they call it, The Belly? The Uterus? Come on. I think sometimes people do it just for the money.”
She was right. People did do it for the money. Donated eggs. Rented out their uterus. It was business, wasn’t it? Albeit a secret business. Cress had only admitted her actions twice. Once, in the therapist’s office, she’d whispered the truth like a child in a dark confessional: “I harvested my eggs for thirty grand so I could change my face.”
The therapist said some consoling words, but none were as impactful as what her new family at Flannigan’s had told her the second time.
“There are worse things,” Chamonix said.
Roxie, pouring them another round of beers added, “Yeah, at least it was better than using the money to buy a new ass, right?”
“Right,” said James, who had been listening from the doorway.
He crossed the room, reached for Cress, drew her into a hug. “You did what weaker people couldn’t. Your actions changed someone’s life. Don’t ever look back with regret. Trust me on that one.”