The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories

by Steve Almond

  He looked at me.

  “You did not write that,” I said.

  Nicole let out a puff of disgusted air.

  The author, Mandy Shaw, sat scribbling in her notebook. She was a sadistic little sex bomb with a tattoo on the small of her back of a fairy princess with blue hair and D cups. Sometimes, during conferences, as she sat across from me fretting over syntax, I imagined her body rendered on black velvet. The faintest hint of her body spray was enough to ruin my day.

  “Even the way the daughter is described. The way she rides the horse, like the way their bodies fit together. And the mom’s watching, remembering how her daughter’s face looked.” Brendan started flipping through the story again.

  “Let’s move on,” Nicole said.

  “Hold on, hold on. Here it is. ‘The look on Cassie’s face was one of unbridled ecstasy, as if her body were rising on some large, warm happiness.’ Am I crazy or does that sound kind of horny? Come on. Large. Warm.” Brendan looked for support to Teddy Leaf, his fellow burnout. “I’m not saying the mom doesn’t love Cassie or isn’t heartbroken or whatever. It’s just there’s all this weird, like, energy with the horses. Like this sexy horse energy.”

  This drew a few laughs and Brendan began to nod. “We all know about those girls, those horsey girls, who are all obsessed with horses. Going out to the barn and brushing them and washing their flanks and all that. Rubbing them down. Marie-Antoinette—she had sex with horses.”

  “That was Catherine the Great, you idiot,” said Rob Tway.

  “They had to use a crane to lower the animal down onto her,” Pete Fayne added helpfully.

  “Please don’t call him an idiot,” I said to Rob.

  “Who did?” said Teddy Leaf.

  “Her attendants,” said Fayne. “The dudes who help out the queen.”

  Teddy Leaf ran a finger over the scab on his elbow. “That’s, like, treason dude. Watching the queen fuck a horse is definitely treason.”

  “Why are we talking about this?” Nicole said.

  “Brendan’s just making stuff up to get attention because his parents didn’t give him enough when he was a child,” said Emily Givens.

  “I didn’t make that up,” Brendan said. “It’s history.”

  “Gross,” Emily said. “You are made of gross.”

  “You’d know,” said Teddy Leaf, and the class, the entire little circle of creative fucknuts, let out a lowdown murmur.

  All except for Ingrid Nunez. She was a strict Pentecostal who wrote stories about her love for the All-Knowing Creator of Man and, more recently, her devout hope that the iniquitous would burn in hell for the rest of time.

  “I do think we’re getting a little far afield,” I said.

  They’d stuffed us in the basement of Krass, in an airless little cell that smelled of chicken nuggets, which Teddy Leaf brought to class each week, despite my repeated implorations. I gazed out the window, at the parking lot with the Dumpsters. The nice classrooms, the ones with natural light and a view of the courtyard’s lush flower beds, were reserved for the business school, where it was assumed the students might someday become prosperous.

  “Wait a second,” Brendan said. “What’s so gross? Why are you guys all, like, ganging up on me? I’m just talking about what Mandy wrote in her story. I’m not trying to offend her. Mandy, I’m not trying to offend you. I liked the story. I wrote, like, a whole critique.”

  Brendan Mahoney was not a promising student. He was the sort of student whose intellectual life might have been titled Still Life with Bong. But now, on this gorgeous April day, the wick of insight had been lit within him and he came at us with the force of a crusader. He knew he was right, that he’d latched onto a little node of perversion below the story’s maudlin surface, and he wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Sex and death are related,” he explained. “The French, the French people, when they come, they call that dying. Sex dying.”

  “A little death,” said Rob Tway.

  “Right,” Brendan said. “The point being that both of those things, like, dying, like when you die, and when you have sex, they’re like the same thing in a certain way.”

  “A dead fuck,” Teddy Leaf said.

  “So like this mom, when she goes out to visit the horse, she’s trying to connect to her daughter, right? But when she thinks about her daughter she thinks about how she used to ride the horse and how her daughter used to be, like, all excited to ride the horse. And as she’s describing this, that’s when she starts touching the horse, like rubbing it all over and getting all this heat entering her body and so forth.”

  Nicole Buswell was glaring at me now, with her sharp white teeth, and Emily Givens had bugged out her eyes. Rob Tway said, “You don’t have any idea what Mandy had in her mind when she wrote the story—”

  “Yeah, but you can write something and not even know what it’s about until you, like, look at it later and figure it out. Isn’t that right, Mr. Lowe? That’s even got a name.”

  “Perversion in the service of the ego,” Emily Givens said.

  “I’m not trying to be a pervert,” Brendan said.

  “You don’t have to try,” Emily said.

  It occurred to me suddenly that these two had fucked and that it had ended badly, as it usually does at that age, and that this probably explained the extra erotic charge I’d sensed in class over the past few weeks.

  There were other factors. I should mention, for instance, that all this took place during the Lewinsky scandal, and as much as I hate to invoke that dark episode, it is relevant, because everyone back then, including the New York Times and the United States Congress was talking about blow jobs, was imagining President Clinton with his pants around his ankles and his naked Presidential ass pressed against his Presidential desk and his Presidential face all cragged up in bliss and Monica on her knees wrapping her big red mouth around his pecker. The Altoids hummer. The Cohiba up her snatch. The money shot onto the blue dress. This was our political discourse.

  And what’s more, it was everything we’d ever wished for, to see our big daddy Prez getting down with some chubby hayseed in the Oral Office. It was what we deserved. Our popular culture had prepared us exquisitely for the whole shebang. Practically everywhere you turned, strangers were preparing to have sex, or talking about sex, advising us on how to lick a woman’s private parts.

  I was one of the only adults who wasn’t having sex at that historical moment, because my wife had left me, though actually, we hadn’t had sex for a year or so before that because I had lost my desire for her and could not maintain an erection and while I had learned to compensate in various ways my wife had put two and two together and decided I was having an affair with one of my students, which, oddly, I was not.

  Brendan was still pleading his case. He had taken off his visor so that he could wave it around a little, and this had exposed a vibrant white band of skull. He looked—in his cargo pants and high-tops—like a vehement hip-hop mushroom.

  “Terrific,” I said. “You’ve made some cogent points, Brendan. Let’s hear from someone who hasn’t had a chance yet.” My glance settled, rather unfortunately, onto Ingrid Nunez. She was biting her lower lip.

  “What do you think, Ingrid?”

  “Brendan is going to burn in hell for the rest of time,” she said quietly.

  “That seems a little severe,” I said.

  “What about Mandy?” Nicole Buswell said. “She’s supposed to be able to ask questions at the end, Mr. Lowe.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Any questions?”

  Mandy was wearing the sort of lip gloss that made her look like she’d just gone ten rounds with a stick of butter. She’d settled on a conservative outfit for the day, which meant you had to imagine what her nipples looked like, using only texture as a guide. She looked down at her notebook and back up at me and licked her lips and smiled and began to run her bracelets up and down her wrist. There was nothing I could do about any of this. They hadn’
t come up with those kinds of arrest warrants yet.

  “Nope,” she said. “None.”

  This meant it was time for class to be over, which meant—given that I could no longer tolerate being on campus for more than one afternoon a week—that it was time for office hours.

  No one ever came to office hours except Rob Tway, who had always read something life altering and wanted to discuss its narrative arc and authorial stance and other issues of craft which I managed to avoid because I didn’t really understand what craft was, frankly, and because I no longer read anything written after the Civil War. I endured these onslaughts only by reminding myself that someday Rob Tway would commit suicide.

  “What are we going to do about this Mahoney?” Tway said. “It’s probably too late to put him on academic probation. But we could always ask him to withdraw.” Tway took out a pack of sugarless gum and whacked it against the heel of his palm. “We’ve got till April 15.”

  “I was thinking maybe of just letting it slide. Chalking it up to critical enthusiasm.”

  “That was harassment, Mr. Lowe. With all due respect.”

  Tway now launched into a lengthy discourse on Tristram Shandy, a book I might have actually read, except that I hadn’t.

  There was a knock on the door. This was a wondrous thing! A knock. On the door.

  “I’ll need to see who that is,” I said.

  Tway checked his watch and frowned.

  I opened the door and there stood Mandy Shaw. She had changed into a tank top and what looked like a pair of boxer shorts and her little scent cloud smelled of coconut and cigarettes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Are you, like, available?”

  “Yes. Of course. Rob was just finishing up.”

  “No I wasn’t,” said Tway.

  “Yes, you were.”

  Mandy flounced into my office and suddenly I was mortified by the decor—the antidrug poster clipped from a newspaper and taped to the door, the erotic renderings of Plato and Socrates. These had been put up by my office mate, a gentleman named Jeffrey Thist, whom I had never met and who was, apparently, a classicist in recovery.

  I watched Mandy settle into her seat. “How do you think it went in there?” I said.

  “In where?”

  “In class.”

  Mandy had bound her hair up with a chopstick and the loose strands kept brushing her cheeks. “How did it go?” she said uncertainly.

  “The critique of your story.”

  “I haven’t read them yet,” she said. “They’re in my backpack.”

  “Right. I meant the discussion.”

  “The discussion?”

  “Of your story. The discussion of your story in class. I was concerned that some of the comments may have been a little upsetting.”

  “Which comments?”

  “Well, for instance, the comments that Brendan was making.”

  “Brendan?”

  “Brendan Mahoney.” I paused. “Those observations he made about the mother in your story.” Mandy’s legs were crossed and one of her flip-flops was dangling off her toes, which were painted metallic blue. “I worried those might have upset you.”

  “In what way?”

  “Just that Brendan was saying that Susan, the character Susan, that when she thought about her daughter, how much her daughter loved her horse, that there was an erotic element to her, the mother’s, thinking.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you,” Mandy said.

  “Right,” I said. “Okay. Remember in class, we were talking about your story and Brendan read those lines about the mom and the horse. And he was suggesting that the mom might have had certain feelings toward her daughter’s horse. Feelings of a sexual sort. That she might have had some sexual feelings for the horse. I was worried this might have upset you. Because sometimes, as I’ve said, we write things and people might take them differently from the way we intended. Brendan was not passing judgment on you, or suggesting that you think about horses in a sexual way.”

  “But I do,” said Mandy Shaw.

  She had the face of a doomed starlet—small, round features that expressed a kind of contemptuous yearning. Watching her apply lip gloss made you want to grab God by the lapels and shout: Now, why did you have to go and arrange that? My fantasies about her, conjured during failed efforts with the wife, were sad and prosaic. Mandy on a bearskin rug. Mandy with whipped cream. Mandy insisting that I take my lashes like a man.

  “Oh my God, I used to think about horses all the time,” she said. “They’re so big and, like, strong, you know? I used to go out to the stables, like, this stable near my house, to wash my horse, Zeus. ’Cause when you ride, you know, you’re supposed to take care of your animal too. That’s a part of the whole responsibility aspect. So when you go out to the stable, I mean, you see certain things when you’re in the stables.”

  I made a noise then, a thoughtful little sure, I understand noise.

  “I think it has something to do with my dad,” Mandy said. “He was really well hung. That’s what my mom used to always say. Hung like a horse. You know that expression?”

  I started to wonder if this wasn’t maybe a practical joke. Or worse, if some undercover video–type show might have recruited Mandy. This was an era in which hidden video had become the hot new medium. Citizens found the authenticity irresistible. Real people. Real shame.

  “I think that’s where I made the connection,” Mandy said. “Like, I drew on those feelings I had as a girl. And then I thought: But what if I died? Like if I died in a terrible accident. What would my mom do? Because we’re, like, super close. Me and my mom.”

  I thought about Mandy’s first story, “Home at Last.” It was about a shy girl from Stamford, Connecticut, who arrives at college and feels lonely (“as lonely as a single pebble at the bottom of a vast blue sea”) because her roommates decide, for no good reason, that she’s a bitch and won’t include her in any of their activities. But then she meets some really cool girls from another dorm and gets transferred to their dorm and finally decides that “home is wherever people are willing to get to know the true you.” I looked at Mandy, who had just reached into her purse and would soon start applying lip gloss to her mouth, and started to sort of miss “Home at Last.”

  “I’m not interested in appropriate sex,” Mandy said. “That’s what the guy I was seeing was saying, the therapist. I always go for these older guys. I went for a couple of the teachers in high school. Well, one of them was a coach. It’s pretty shocking how easy it is to get them. I guess some teachers are pretty desperate.”

  I did not say anything. I did not think about Mandy’s tattoo or any other part of her. I did not watch her apply lip gloss. I remained very still. I remained very still and thought about the tapes of Clinton talking on the phone with one of his old flames. She asks him, “Do you like to eat pussy?” And he, the future President of the United States, answers: “You bet I do.” The shock jocks had this snippet on a continuous tape loop. What a noble answer! A president who goes down! It was sad to watch those dopes in Congress mugging the guy, day after day. Thirty years ago, when JFK was getting head from whores in bathtubs, nobody made a peep.

  “That’s what I like about college,” Mandy said. “The teachers are so much more, like, professional. And your class, especially. You give us a chance to express our feelings. Like how you talk about we shouldn’t be writers. We should just tell the truth.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Mandy folded her arms across her chest. “Is it always so cold in here?”

  “It’s central air. Sorry.”

  “Yeah.” She produced a shiver. “I’ve got, like, goose bumps.”

  “About the story,” I said. “I do think you’ve got something. Take a look at my comments—”

  “Can I ask you something, Mr. Lowe?” Mandy said. “Like a more personal question.”

/>   “Sure,” I said. “But you know what? Let me just check to make sure there’s no one else waiting.”

  Mandy looked me dead in the eye and I looked back at her and a couple of seconds passed, a couple of very long seconds, like perhaps the longest seconds in the recorded history of my life, extremely complicated, morally uncharted seconds, white-toothed, lip-glistening seconds, abject, wave-goodbye-to-certain-sacred-principles type seconds.

  Mandy nodded very slowly. “You should do that,” she said. “You should check.”

  So I got up and walked over to the door and as I stepped past her, Mandy grazed my thigh with her hand, swept her hand down the outside of my thigh, and a great current of hope passed through my body, followed by a frisson of dread, followed by more hope, such that I began to tremble a little, more than a little, and Mandy, sensing this physiological event, let her hand settle on my knee.

  She began gently to massage the anterior regions, as if checking for ligament damage, while I looked down into her face and tried to decide what sort of witness she would make in a court of law.

  “I can tell you like me,” Mandy said. She smiled and blew a strand of hair off her cheek. “And you want to kiss me, but you’re afraid I’ll say something to one of my stupid roommates and ruin the whole thing. True?”

  I dipped my chin in a manner that was both a nod and a plausibly deniable non-nod.

  “But why would I do that to my favorite teacher in the whole world?”

  Mandy closed her eyes and made her lips into a buttery little bow. She gave my trousers a prompting tug.

  Well.

  I suppose I bent to kiss her, just a glancing kiss, a swift brush of my mouth across hers, but Mandy needed more than that. She grasped my thigh and let out a stagy moan and shook loose the chopstick, so that her hair fell free. There was something in these gestures, a certain rehearsed quality, that made me sad. I felt suddenly, irretrievably sorry for both of us, for Mandy, who viewed her sexuality as a bright new user option only obscurely related to her heart, and for me, who was losing hair in clumps and couldn’t even give my wife a decent poking anymore. I wanted to have a good cry right then, preferably with my head nuzzled somewhere warm.