by Linda Sands
“No. But thanks.”
Guy started to say, “Hey, how is everything in Syracuse? Your folks doing okay?”
But Chamonix had already hung up.
She took a shower, making the water as hot as she could stand it, until she thought her bones would melt from the heat, then she turned the faucet to cold and waited for the switch to happen.
The instant icy-cold water touched her heated bones, she shivered with a rattle from her insides, like an orgasm. Her breath came shorter, in gasps. Every piece of her alive. This was what it felt like when she rode well—zipping down a hill, the buzz of wheel and air in her helmet, passing a pack in a road race, quads on fire, lungs and heart fully engaged. She was more animal than human in those moments and she sometimes wished she could keep that sensory overload and call it up whenever she wanted to. Like now, when she needed to finish the canvases, when she needed to add the blood. When she needed to kill.
She dressed carefully, digging in the back of the closet for the thrift-store bag, planning her backstory as she selected garments: a tight denim skirt, rock-and-roll T-shirt. Chamonix stood in front of the mirror and tried on a few looks, settled on a sneer and an arched brow. “Name’s Nat. What’s yours?”
Today she didn’t feel like a cute, vulnerable, Y-named girl. Today she was a lioness, a hunter. She gave herself red lips and Goth eyes, grabbed a marker and drew two tattoos, one on the inside of her left wrist, a Chinese character that meant purity, and another on her abdomen, a road. Someone would wonder where it led.
She rolled her bed away from the wall and pried up the loose floorboard, tugged on a string, and dragged out a black, zippered bag. She checked the contents: rubber gloves, plastic sheeting, baggies, lighter fluid, and a book of matches. Beneath that were things stolen from a veterinary clinic: a yellow cattle-syringe gun, four feet of tubing, and three empty blood bags.
She shoved the bag in her backpack, slung it over one shoulder, then pulled on a baggy sweatsuit over her tramp attire.
Two minutes later, with her dark glasses and her headset cranked up, she was pretty much deaf and blind. She pushed open her door, rolled out her bike, and slammed right into the guy from upstairs, knocking him on his ass.
“God, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” Chamonix asked, pulling the headphones from her ears.
His leg was cocked at an odd angle. He held a hand to his lip. It came away bloody.
“You’re bleeding.” Chamonix took off her sunglasses and looked around. “Shit.” She leaned her bike against the wall as he struggled to rise. She tried to help him up. He wasn’t as puny as he appeared. Chamonix managed to get him inside the loft and over to the couch.
“Hold on. I’ll get you something for that,” she said, motioning to his bloody mouth. She found an old towel in the bathroom, dampened the corner, and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.
“Be right there,” she called, wiping off the trampy makeup, smoothing down her hair, then hurrying back to the living room.
“Here. Use this.”
She shoved the towel at the guy. When he looked confused, she knelt beside him and pushed his head back gently, dabbing at his bloody lip. He had wonderful eyes, though they could never be described as baby blue or steely gray, nothing as cliché as that. They weren’t any discernable color, really. It was that his eyes had no veil, they just let her in like she was the optometrist on the other side of that machine and he wasn’t blinking.
“Hold that,” she said, putting his hand on the cloth.
She went to the kitchen and filled a baggie with ice cubes.
“If you ice it right away, it will keep the swelling down.”
His eyes met hers. Chamonix forced herself to look away.
Behind the cloth and the ice, he mumbled, “Um, if it’s not too much trouble? Could I have a glass of water?”
She stared at him, then blinked. “Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.”
In the kitchen, she forgot why she was there, and when she held her hand out, it trembled. Chamonix alternated between feeling disgust for her weakness, her lack of resolve and an insane desire to fall headlong into this odd feeling, to surrender completely and let it play out however it would.
Water. She filled a glass and brought it to him. He exchanged the bloody towel for the glass, but kept the ice. Chamonix took the towel to the kitchen, sealed it in a plastic bag, and put it in her freezer.
“So, you’re an artist?” he said when she returned and sat in the rattan chaise across from the couch.
“What?”
He pointed at the canvases, the easel, the drop cloth and splatters, her studio space.
“Oh. That. Yes. I am.”
He smiled, then winced as the skin stretched over his cut lip. “I’m Adam.”
“Chamonix.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Like polar opposites, as she leaned forward to get up, to see him to the door, to move away from this whatever-this-was, Adam leaned back, sinking deeper into her couch, into her apartment, into her life.
Chamonix said, “So, listen, if you’re all right . . . I was just . . .” She flapped her hands like they had the answer.
He looked at her. “Have you eaten dinner yet? Because that’s where I was going. When we ran into each other.”
“I really am sorry.”
“It’s okay. Accidents happen. But you could make it up to me. I’ve never been a fan of the whole solo dining experience.”
Chamonix smiled. “It sucks.”
“Yeah, it does. So you’d be doing me a favor and getting a meal out of it besides. What do you say?”
Chamonix looked at the clock. She still had time to finish the canvases before the courier came for them, and it might be weird if she said no. After all, she was responsible for him getting hurt. She surprised them both by saying, “Sure, why not? Let me throw on some jeans.”
Chapter 24
ARE YOU READY TO PLAY JAPANESE GAME SHOW, TEDESCO?
I turned down the volume on the radio, even though it was The Killers and I loved that band.
“Tell me again,” I said, when Tommy finally answered his cell phone. “Where is this place?”
I’d been driving up and down the same strip of two-lane highway for fifteen minutes, looking for the sushi joint where Tommy had just been dumped by his Scientologist boyfriend, Buck. Public break-up consoling was out of my realm. I had only agreed to meet him because I was hungry and curious about the place.
Tommy’s phone crackled, and I heard him sniffle. “Do you see the Dollar Store sign? Turn in there. It’s the second storefront.”
Of course it was. “Bunya’s” was spelled out in lights on a sign better suited for a Broadway theater than a restaurant. I made my way down the red-carpeted entrance and through a velvet rope queue, then pushed past thick gold drapes and stepped into the cool interior of the restaurant. A hostess stood behind a false theater box, complete with a listing of ticket prices and a scrolling marquee announcing showtimes.
“I’m here to meet someone. He’s—”
“Mr. Tommy, right? You’re Tedesco?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Follow me, please.”
Inside, Bunya’s was like most other sushi places, except for the stage, emcee, and big screen.
I’d heard of Japanese places offering karaoke on certain nights, and while I thought that was best suited to crappy romantic comedy films, I supposed some folks went in for that sort of thing. Personally, I liked my karaoke loud, drunk, and food free. But this was more than karaoke, this was like being in the audience of a successful talk show.
I passed the sushi prep area and a row of padded stools, following the hostess to a plush red booth. I climbed up two steps, thanked her, then slid my way toward my dining partner, who was hidden behind a tall menu.
“Nice place. Where’s Buck?”
He sniffled. “Asshole.”
“Nice to see you too,” I said.
“Not you. Buck.”
>
“And that surprises you why?” I asked.
There was the sound of a sigh from behind the menu. When it dropped, revealing a newly blond Tommy, I thought it was like when Brad Pitt went blond, only Tommy was more like Brad Pitt’s shorter double. From the back, from far away, if you squinted.
“I know. I know.” He ran his hand over his head. “At least it’s not permanent. Unlike my—”
“Jesus. Don’t say it.”
“Broken heart.”
“Shit.” I signaled to the waitress. “We need a sake and two beers. Make that a large sake.”
She shuffled off, bowing and nodding. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my backup ball cap from Furman with FU lovingly embroidered over the bill.
“Here.”
Tommy slipped it on.
I reached over to adjust the angle and said, “Better. Okay. I’ll give you three minutes to say whatever you need to say and then this goes behind us. Got it? No more Buck and good riddance to the Scientologists, right?”
Tommy nodded sadly.
I tipped my watch face, counted down, then pointed at him.
Tommy poked his chopsticks into the tablecloth as he said, “He is an ass. I hate him and I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”
“Is there something else you want to add?” I asked, alluding to the quote he’d memorized from a relationship book after the last three boyfriends hadn’t worked out either.
He stopped poking, looked around, then said, “I deserve better. The perfect person for me exists somewhere. I am open to possibility, open to opportunity, and welcome life with open arms.”
The sake arrived right on time.
“To chance,” I said.
“To opportunity disguised as misery,” Tommy chanted.
We drank. We ate. We didn’t mention Buck or his crazy group again. We played along with the game show—by trying to guess what was being made in a factory somewhere before the real Japanese contestants on the paused TV screen could.
We didn’t win, but that was okay because Tommy was back to being a single-minded employee. Uttering a tearful version of “cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” complete with hand motions for the deaf, Tommy swore off relationships—for a while.
As a friend, I knew I needed to keep him busy by offering him distractions. Distractions in the form of evidence that I was still carrying around from Smith’s apartment. I reached in my pocket. There was the ticket for the dry cleaner and the microcassette tape I’d found in the sock drawer.
I dangled the tape in front of Tommy’s face. “Two guesses.”
Tommy sloshed the rest of the sake into his tiny ceramic cup. “Illicit sex.”
I shook my head.
He swallowed another bite of a spider roll and followed it with more sake. “A bad mix tape from the eighties?”
“Close,” I said. “There’s a lot of background noise in the beginning, some stuff I can’t make out, then it gets garbled, but before the songs cut in, there’s a part where our boy Smith says his name over and over. Like he wants to be the next Howard Stern.”
“I wonder what that’s all about?” Tommy stared at the empty sake cup, then looked at me. It was hard to take the guy seriously, what with his buzzed eyes and that bleached-blond hair poking out from under the FU ball cap.
“The background check I ran on Smith said he was a retired pilot living off lawsuit money,” he said.
“No telling when the tape was made,” I said. “Or why he kept it. You should listen to it. Tell me what you think.”
I slid it over to Tommy, who carefully wiped his fingers, picked up the tape, and tried to slip it into his shirt pocket, but missed twice.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”
Chapter 25
TEDESCO, A DIRTY GIRL, AND A DRY CLEANER
A few hours, one We Fix Hair salon detour, and two pots of coffee later, I told Tommy about the dry cleaning ticket I’d found at Smith’s apartment.
We were at his house—a cottage-looking structure that he called a Craftsman. I had no idea what that meant, unless it referred to the fact that you should be some sort of craftsman to live there because something was always on the fritz or threatening to be. The house was just old to me. I’d never felt comfortable in it. There was too much history everywhere you looked. Too many ghosts.
Tommy scooped up a passing cat, stood her on the kitchen table, and began running a metal-toothed brush through her long, white fur. I had no idea where he’d been hiding the comb.
He had two cats. One was nice and one liked to bite me and piss in my shoes. I glanced at the heart-shaped tag on the rhinestone collar: dirty girl. She was the nice one. I reached out and tickled her under the chin. She turned her smashed-in face toward me and winked. I wasn’t a cat person, but this one seemed to forgive me for that.
Tommy worked his way from the front of the cat to the back, his words emphasized with tugging strokes that left deep parallel lines in the cat’s fur. Dirty Girl purred.
“Look, Tedesco. I understand. We have to run down all the evidence. We have to explore all the possibilities. We have to tramp down all the alleys in our hooker platforms. We must leave no bed unturned, no chocolate uneaten, no champagne uncorked.”
“All right. All right,” I said. “Enough with the analogies. I get it. We’ll check out the dry cleaner and leave the tape to your techie friends. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Yes,” Tommy said as he finished grooming the cat. He kissed her on the nose, then set her gently on the floor. Dirty Girl walked away, swishing her tail. A small puff of love emanated from Tommy not unlike the whiff you get when you pull the wrapping off a fragrant candle for your bathroom.
He stood and pulled the hair out of the brush, pitched it in the trash, then ran the metal teeth through his own hair—once again dark and shiny. “Come on. We have to see the dry cleaner.”
Somehow that sounded liked a whole new analogy, or was that a euphemism?
As I weaved the Lincoln across town through the city streets, I wondered why people chose white cars, why there weren’t more multicolored cars, and why a guy would go to a dry cleaner so far away from his apartment.
“Maybe he spilled something on a jacket and decided to get the stain treated right away.”
Tommy had this weird way of answering questions I hadn’t even asked.
“That’s something you would do,” I said.
“You’re saying Smith was nothing like me?”
I just looked at him.
“Okay. Whatever.”
He wriggled a little in his seat, finally cleared his throat, and started one of his Tommy monologues. This one was sans PowerPoint presentation, but I still knew better than to interrupt or to ask for any sort of clarification.
“My parents used a home pickup and delivery dry cleaning service,” he began. “One day I was home sick from school and the driver rang the bell, hung the order from the doorknob, and left. I was sixteen at the time, and in some kind of trouble. I remember thinking I’d get on my mom’s good side by putting all the clothes away. That was when I found some guy’s shirt mixed in with ours.”
Tommy stuck his arm out the window and did that air surfing thing with his hand. I was about to tell him to cut it out when he continued with his story.
“There was tag on the shirt with part of a last name and a phone number, so I called the guy, planning to tell him we’d send it back to the dry cleaner with our next pickup. The guy answered the phone. It never even occurred to me that he shouldn’t have been there, that he should have been at work, or that his wife should have answered, or a machine with all the kids saying their names before the beep. But I stood there with this guy’s blue, fitted, Geoffrey Beene dress shirt in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other and I felt something like love for the first time—or lust. I had something somebody wanted. And it was all under my control—whether the guy got his shirt, whether I gave him my
address, whether anything happened at all. It was about more than the shirt. I knew that too. I don’t know how I knew. I just did. Maybe it’s how women say they just know when they’re pregnant, or when their guy’s lying . . . maybe it’s like that.
“Anyway, he came over and he was good-looking. Really good-looking. Movie star features. Definitely the kind of guy people look at twice. I left the shirt in the kitchen before I answered the door so he would have to come in. He had to walk down the long hallway. He had to follow me. He had to look at my house, at my doors and the rooms beyond, at the back of my head and my ass, my sixteen-year-old body. In the kitchen, he didn’t have to, but he kissed me.”
Tommy ran a finger over his lower lip, then stared out the window.
I had to lower the volume on the Count Basie CD to hear what he said next.
“He was my first. Sometimes I think he might have been the best. I tried calling him once afterward, but he pretended he didn’t know me. I could hear a woman in the background, a barking dog, and a baby saying, ‘Da-da. Da-da. Da-da.’ I never called back.”
I might have said this before, but it bears repeating. I don’t care about another guy’s sexuality. I really don’t. Some guys like women with fat asses. I don’t get that either, but do I think it’s wrong? Nope. It’s what they like. It’s what appeals to them. And I’m not them. End of story. Because who are we to say what’s right and what’s wrong? What’s good and what’s bad? Who’d make the better angel? So I didn’t say anything.
Tommy lifted his commuter cup and drained his latte. He pointed to the radio with his pinkie. “Hey, turn that up.”
We listened to Jimmy Rushing backed by the Count as we wound through farm country on poorly paved roads that bore no signs. It was the only route I knew to Baldwinsville. I used to date a girl who lived there, back when I was a boy and still on the kick of finding someone younger. Before I figured out that older women were much more reasonable—and inventive.
We crossed a green metal bridge, tires whomping and singing, and drove into the center of the village.
Tommy checked the address. “Should be right up there.”