The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories

by Steve Almond

  Paul will return to the kitchen and make himself a sandwich, but the meat will taste rotten and this taste will haunt his tongue, even after he rinses with mouthwash, and he will drink warm milk instead and take a sleeping pill, and then a second, until he can feel the convincing blur of his dreams. In the days to follow, he will swear off meat, a gradual transition, so as not to detect the notice of his daughter.

  But this, of course, is what lies ahead for them, as they race away from the hot center of themselves. Decent lives. Reasonable consumption.

  For now, they are still together. Her arms are around him, one hand on his shoulder, the other touching the padding of his waist. He is staring at the ring. Hunger is surging inside him as he sways with her, once, through the dimness of the room. What are they doing here, exactly? Who can say about such things? They are weeping. They are dancing. They are prisoners of this moment and wonderfully, terribly alive.

  WIRED FOR LIFE

  JANIE MET THE ELECTRICIAN Charlie Song in August. The AC adapter to her laptop had frayed and the connection kept failing. Thus she was forced to jiggle the plug until the current returned, at which point she would have to remain very still for many minutes at a time—she worked with the laptop on her actual lap, which was ridiculous, pathetic, but there you have it—lest the sadistic plug icon disappear and the machine revert to battery mode, which was supposed to last six hours but which ran down (and this Janie had timed) in seventeen and a half minutes. It was a little like being a hostage.

  Charlie Song’s shop was on a stretch of Mass Avenue that was constantly being torn up. Great chunks of asphalt lay about, while men in hard hats and dirty shirts murmured into cell phones. They were hostages, too, though they seemed somewhat liberated by their proximity to loud and senseless destruction.

  Inside the shop, dozen of computers had been disemboweled. The remains were so: dusty circuit boards, magnets, stripped screws, woofers like little black eggcups. Keyboards dangled from their cords. Had Torquemada worked in the high-tech medium, this would have been his style.

  From the back of the shop, Charlie Song emerged, weaving through the lifeless monitors. He was middle-aged, the color of a weak varnish. He smiled, shyly, as if embarrassed by the size of his teeth.

  You need help?

  Janie said yes and began to explain her situation, rather too elaborately, while Charlie Song nodded and blinked.

  Power broke?

  Right, Janie said.

  Charlie played the plug between the tips of his fingers. He licked his lips.

  Okay. We try. Thursday.

  Oh no, Janie said. I mean, if there’s any possible way, see, all my work is on the computer, I’m a designer and I’ve got these projects, deadlines, so if there’s any way, I could even wait—

  Charlie nodded. It was a complex nod, one that seemed utterly to dismiss Janie’s words and yet somehow (was it the mournful aversion of his eyes, the slightly injured stoop?) acknowledged the panic behind them. He carried the adapter to his worktable.

  A pair of pliers appeared in his hand. With these he snipped the cord and peeled back the black casing to expose the wires. The spot where the connection had frayed looked like a tiny copper fright wig. Charlie gazed at it and let out a sigh and played at the filaments with his thumb. Then he clicked on the ancient contraption at the center of his table, something like a whisk.

  Is that a welder? Janie said.

  Charlie Song said, Sadder.

  Sadder?

  Sadder. Sadder gun.

  Janie wanted to ask him what did he mean, sadder gun. She had heard of a warm gun, a gatling gun, even a love gun—and now she thought of Drew, her beautiful boyfriend, whose beautiful love gun she would not be sucking this evening, nor receiving inside her with delicious slow-and-hurried difficulty, but which would, instead, lie tremendous and pink across his thigh while she quietly pleasured herself and wept, there in the dark, quietly. Charlie pulled a spool of silver thread from his desk drawer. The label read: SOLDER.

  He grazed the shaft of the gun against an old sponge, producing a faint hiss. The tip came against the thread and the solder dissolved into a shiny glob and released a coil of white smoke. Charlie touched at the glob with great tenderness. It was a tricky business, coaxing the wet solder into the space where the wires had come apart. The muscles between his knuckles tensed. His tongue dabbed, a bit rakishly, at his upper lip.

  Janie felt she should use the occasion to learn a new skill. She might even fix her own adapter the next time it broke. But there was something else. It dawned on her, as Charlie gently replaced the solder gun in its holster and pressed the fused wires to the ohmmeter and watched the needles happily bounce, she was, how to put this, well, there was no other way—the flush of blood, the sudden moist warmth and down-below pulse—turned on.

  HE WAS SO PRECISE, Janie said. Like a surgeon.

  Drew nodded. Isn’t it amazing, he said, how hypnotizing the simplest repetitive motions can be? I used to watch my grandpa whittle for hours.

  He took a bite of fried dumpling and Janie gazed at his glistening lips, the boyish enthusiasm of his chewing, and at his sideburns, which she’d had to beg him to grow out. They looked devastating.

  Yeah, it was like he had this touch, you know. Janie paused. Almost like a sensual thing.

  She wanted to elaborate, wanted this terribly, but Drew had stopped chewing and his eyes began to narrow and she knew that anything more she said would be construed as an unacknowledged, passive-aggressive attack because Drew didn’t happen to feel comfortable, for now, expressing himself physically. Or, as Janie sometimes put it, after a glass of wine with friends: he refuses to fuck me.

  Three years ago, when she and Drew met, this had not been an issue. They’d had sex then, not as much as she would have liked (never as much as she would have liked), but she felt this was somehow only fair because he was so beautiful after all, even his cock was beautiful, venous, unwavering, with its soft swollen head like an Italian plum, and she so thrilled to the music of his body and the sweet painful inconvenience of love between them, and told herself that such gifts were not to be gone at greedily. He was a good lover, too, generous in the modern fashion, determined to bring her off, though he tended to shy from his own pleasure.

  All of which memorialized the occasions when he did come, when he would let her suck or stroke to the end, the prodigious and sticky end, which wrenched him free of his poise and brought the blood to his skin and the ooze of him down her chin or thighs and the final shuddering. He held her so violently in these moments she felt sure he would crush her ribs, that they would perish together, ecstatic and doomed.

  Drew was starting in on the cashew chicken, asking her if she wanted green tea. It’s good for the lymphatic system, he said, gesturing with the pot. His eyes were so lambent Janie wanted to poke one with a chopstick.

  Whatever it was, the danger of vulnerability, some past trauma, a chemical deficit—whatever—the sex had diminished. He had grown more and more uncomfortable with contact, until she wasn’t allowed to touch him in suggestive places at all; his body would go cold. She finally convinced him to attend couples therapy with Dr. Dumas, who spoke with great fluency about libido dynamics and intimacy paradigms and asked them to engage in tummy therapy (circle the lower abdomen, please, with just the tips of the thumbs) a ritual they both considered so humiliating that they had agreed, without actually discussing the matter, to stop seeing her.

  Now Janie worried this topic, the Drew-won’t-touch-me-fuck-me topic, all the time, on the phone, to her friends, and when she hung up, the cuff of her ear hurt. They always told her the same thing: get out, get out, get out, or, have an affair, call an old boyfriend, that one who used to play in the new-wave band, just to see, you’ve got to. They pleaded with her, keened at her, and she agreed with them, made little vows and planned her speech. But then she would actually see Drew, the cleft in his chin and the long, elegant hands, and this would completely fuck her up.
>
  She was becoming a person she hated.

  Besides, her friends, with their chintzy Cosmo-girl-empowerment shtick—she had seen them in Drew’s presence, the way they fussed and preened and found excuses to touch him. Is that a new watch? I never noticed that freckle. Once she had walked in on a scene in which Margo and Ali seemed to be asking Drew if he had ever seen their nipples, and would he like to, a charge they denied with much forced laughter.

  Janie was a set designer. It was her job to make things look perfect, and that was at least part of the problem. Drew looked perfect. When they entered a party, there was always a fleeting hush, a flurry of swung necks and murmurs.

  On Sunday mornings, he sat in the bay window with his tea and his cat, a stray he had named Clawed Rains, and the sun scrolled down the side of his face and Janie tried to determine if she would still love him if she were blind and the answer was, well, she was pretty sure. Drew was funny and self-deprecating and he could dance, he was graceful. (Often, as she set about a new design, she would envision Drew waltzing her under the houselights.) There was a decency about him. He designed curricula for at-risk kids, a little tiresome on the subject, yes, but committed. Noble.

  But the point, the point, she wasn’t blind, thank God, and oh dear God, he was good-looking. He was another species. He was Elvis, Elvis in his soldier days, with the Egyptian profile and the crew cut, only Drew was pale and something Janie wanted to call ruddy, kind of pink and splotched, which sounded bad, but on him, on his particular person, his face, and the veins that stood out on his inner arms and his calves and his ruddy, muscled ass …

  He was Scottish. Andrew Coletart, Drew. His people were ugly people, the Coletarts, mule-faced and benevolent. Every time Janie looked at Mrs. Coletart (whom she privately thought of as Mrs. Muletart) she thought: How could this be? How could this creature have sprung from your loins?

  This was how she managed the whole affair: she relied on her own shame, her inexhaustible shame, and converted his rejection into something bearable by assuming she was at fault, that she pushed too hard for his love or wasn’t pretty enough for him or smelled funny. He had asked her once why she didn’t wear perfume more and now she was convinced she smelled funny, funny down there, and washed obsessively and even douched, and it was odd, really, because her old boyfriend, not the new-wave bassist, but the one who taught preschool and whose fingers smelled of paste, he had told her how good she tasted, like the juice of tulips, and insisted that she taste herself on his tongue and yeah, it was hokey—the juice of tulips, Christ— but every time he said it she felt a damp surge.

  Drew had cleared the dishes and set a bowl of ice cream down in front of her. It looked like a lump of wet rust. Red bean, he said helpfully. He was into themed meals. Do you want hot fudge, babe? I can heat some.

  Janie knew somewhere inside her that Drew loathed himself or didn’t really love her enough or was gay (themed meals?). But this part of her remained unconnected to the other part, which gazed at him, in his beauty and bearable kindness and told herself to settle down if he didn’t want to do it for a while and quit being such a trollop.

  IN OCTOBER, THE adapter began fritzing out again. Janie spent a week jiggling the cord and remaining frozen, until some motion, a tick, a yawn, a sneeze, would cut the connection and she would curse very quietly, or sometimes louder, and once she even shoved Clawed Rains hard enough to send him thudding against the entertainment center.

  Back she went to Charlie Song, but she arrived too early and had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the road crew, still joyously ripping up the street. One of the men straddled a jackhammer and flipped a switch and suddenly the blade bit into the asphalt and the great tool sent violent shudderings through his body.

  Charlie Song appeared a few minutes later, short and disheveled in the clattering sun. Wisps of black hair lay across his scalp. The flesh around his mouth was finely creased. He was nonplussed to find Janie waiting for him and entered the shop with his hands brushing the air before him, as if to clear away cobwebs.

  Janie pulled out the adapter and Charlie began his nimble inspection; his eyes looked pained at the state of the cord, whitish at the rim of the coupler, like old licorice.

  How you hold? You use rough?

  Janie said, No.

  Charlie squinted. You hold funny?

  Well of course she did hold the machine funny, and this did lead, rather directly, to a severe bending of the cord. But she saw no reason to confess all this to Charlie Song.

  The receipt says your work is under warranty, she said.

  At the word warranty, Charlie shied away. His eyes welled into little pools of sullenness.

  October, he said.

  Janie nudged her boobs against the glass counter. The receipt says 90 days.

  Charlie smiled miserably. He did not look at Janie, nor especially at her boobs, but carried the adapter with its cord dragging behind and set it down on his worktable and disappeared into the back of the shop. He returned with his spool of solder and hunkered down before his sadder gun while Janie pretended not to notice. There was a delicious, excruciating aspect to the tableau.

  The components in Charlie’s shop seemed now to be replicating: resistors and volt relays and hard drives in their shiny silver antimagnetized baggies and tangles of taffy-colored wire. The display rack nearest the door was stuffed with CD-ROMs covered in—Janie was almost sure of this—bird shit. On one shelf sat a small portable TV monitor. There, in the watery green light, was a man hunched over a desk, with a young woman looming over him. It took a moment for Janie to realize she was being filmed.

  Charlie Song worked intently. He snipped the coupler and stripped the wires and his hands, his nicked, runty hands, moved with an extraordinary attention that seemed to Janie the most obvious and overlooked aspect of love. Charlie peered down at the thin silver bridge he had installed. The fissure was barely visible, but it was there, enough to cut the current. He let his fingertip linger on the spot.

  On went the sadder gun and Charlie jumped up from his desk. He returned a few moments later with a jar of water, into which he dipped the old sponge, and quite suddenly there was music in the shop as well, a Bach fugue, a mournful drift of violins, and Charlie dabbed the gun against the sponge and gathered solder at the tip and Janie felt a sudden trill in the place where her thighs met. She understood now what they had been up to earlier: a kind of spat, a kind of foreplay. Coils of smoke rose up from the dissolving solder. Charlie sneezed, delicately, three times in a row. Janie had to restrain herself from touching his cheek.

  THAT NIGHT SHE went back on the promise she had made to herself, which was not to touch Drew till Halloween, nor to entice or seduce or cajole, but to let him come to her. Earlier, at Taco Loco, Drew drank not one, but two beers, and his mood had been buoyant as he discussed a new funding source for his truancy seminar. She was preoccupied by his breath, its bouquet of yeast and poblano chiles.

  Now she slipped into bed in her camisole and reached out to touch the muscles along his spine. She was careful not to linger, to carry on her chatter, and Drew listened to her and did not tense up and he smelled sweet and gamy and his hair was just oily enough to shine in the dull light from the alley and he had, after all, drunk that second beer, so she let her hand slip down his back, then lip beneath the band of his boxers, at which point Drew murmured, Do you want to cuddle?

  This was his new ploy: cuddling.

  It technically fulfilled the requirements of affection while providing none of the actual benefits. For Drew, cuddling meant she could spoon him, or he could spoon her, but if certain unspoken boundaries were crossed—say, playing with his earlobe, or making a sudden grab for his scrotum—then this was no longer cuddling but had become pressure, which was bad, oh very bad that pressure, the source of all their problems. It caused Drew to tense and begin speaking as if he were addressing a grant committee.

  Still, she took the offer to cuddle. She took it and wrapped her body arou
nd his and stroked his shoulders in a manner she hoped would be deemed innocuous while simultaneously triggering the elusive chain reaction that would wake the blood within him. She hugged Drew from behind.

  Her pubic bone, her poor, neglected pubic bone, pressed against his tailbone. His hair smelled like an herb garden. She kissed the back of his neck and let her lips linger until she felt the shifting muscles. He was turned on. At last, he wanted her and she reached for him, tugged at his hipbone, and the straps of her camisole slipped free and her fingers skimmed his belly on the way down. But suddenly something clamped onto her wrist and she heard Drew say, Damn it.

  His body was a pale outline in the dark.

  We talked about this, he said.

  Get away, Janie said, sobbing a little.

  Which he did, of course, the clever bastard, and slept on the couch and in the morning sent Clawed Rains in as an emissary. Then he brought her breakfast on a tray.

  I don’t want breakfast, Janie said.

  What do you want? he said.

  She tipped the tray and watched skim milk soak her big stupid tits.

  Why are you doing this to me?

  Drew sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

  I don’t know, he said quietly.

  Are we ever going to touch again?

  Give me time, Janie. I’m going through some changes.

  What sort of changes? The sort that involve wanting to have sex with men?

  Drew ran a hand through his hair, which still smelled like herbs. No, Janie. Nothing like that. I just don’t feel … He mumbled a word that sounded like sassy.

  You don’t feel sassy? Is that what you said?

  Sexy, Drew said. He rubbed his face with his hands. I don’t feel sexy.

  Janie wanted very much to laugh. She wanted both to laugh and to run her tongue along the rim of his nostrils, which were flaring deliciously.

  Is this some kind of joke, she said. Not sexy? You can’t possibly, do you have any idea, my God, you are one of the most, honey, look in the mirror.