by Steve Almond
Drew shrugged. I just don’t feel it.
Well then let me feel it. I can prove it to you. She reached for his shoulder. We can take care of this right now. Please.
Drew refused to look at her. Instead, he began setting the overturned dishes back on the tray. That’s not how it works, honey. You have to feel it from the inside.
Janie wanted to tell him: No no. Wrong! That is how it works. Our sense of beauty comes from outside, from the world. We aren’t born feeling desirable, you lummox. Please. Let me help you.
But his shoulder had gone dead under her touch and now he was flashing her his adorable sulky underlip and asking: Can’t we just cuddle? Please, baby. Don’t give up on me. I’ll get it back.
JANIE WOULD REALIZE only later that she had provoked the third visit to Charlie Song. It was the holiday season, which meant naked trees and slush and a walloping case of seasonal affective disorder. She’d taken Drew to visit her folks for Christmas, which was really two trips, one to the Mother, the other to the Father, who, though technically cohabitating, lived on separate floors of a camp house on Squam Lake and did not, as a rule, speak.
Her mother had survived cancer, but the dark fog of decay had left her prone to eccentricity. She tottered down the shore flanked by her Shih Tzus, cussing at the speedboats. She despaired of the rustling spruce. Winter had flayed the mountains around the lake and layered the roads with mulch. The silver bass slept in beds of frozen mud.
Drew was magnificent. He chopped wood and beat hoarfrost off the granite shingles and helped her father manage the terrifying new gas heater. He lumbered about in a mackinaw and a stocking cap with a look of dumb radiant industry. Her mother and father adored Drew. They gazed at him with abject lust and competed for his attention and seemed to regard Janie as the lucky but not-quite-appreciative-enough recipient of a Lotto jackpot. They made loud dithering comments about future family vacations. Eagerly, creepily, they transitioned from potential in-laws to groupies.
On the day after Christmas, Janie woke to the whinny of floorboards. The Mother laughed like a loon, delirious, absurd. Janie assumed she was being tossed by dreams. But then the Father produced a groan and the song of bed-springs began and Janie decided she might just puke, that puking would certainly be justified in this instance. Drew lay on his back. His face was puffed a bit and softened around the cheekbones. She peeled back the comforter and watched his peaceful breathing. She imagined him flouncing through the Scottish Highlands in a kilt, with nothing underneath, letting the fields of heather fan across his lovely, pointless boner. Then she started packing.
Back in their apartment, Janie drank vodka tonics and tried not to cry. Clawed Raines mewed for attention and slid his gray gums along her knuckles. Janie tossed him away. But Clawed jumped back up and began to knead her lonesome boobs and rather than comforting her, this persistence made Janie furious and she flicked the cat, hard, with her index finger, right on his spongy little snout, which caused him to sneeze convulsively and this caused Janie to weep convulsively and it began to snow outside and the wind howled and the phone rang and rang. She yanked at the coupler that attached the adapter to her laptop viciously, rhythmically, while she made her choked little human sounds, until she felt the coupler snap.
Charlie’s shop was warm and cluttered. It smelled of cherry syrup or burned rubber, perhaps both. The man who appeared from in back was not Charlie Song, but a younger, stockier fellow with an optimistic expression, which Janie immediately resented. He spoke an earnest, hollow brand of English, customer servicese.
Where’s Charlie? Janie said. Who are you?
It occurred to her that she had had too much to drink, though she was, pleasantly, drunk enough to forgive this perception.
The young man pushed up his spectacles. Charlie’s gone. May I help you with something?
What do you mean gone? Janie said. What does gone mean?
He’s running an errand. My name is Fred Lui. I’m his associate. Perhaps I can help you with something?
This is sort of a personal problem, Janie said.
Fred cocked his head. Are you alright? he said.
Of course I’m alright. What sort of question is that? I just need a repair done and Charlie is the one who’s done it previously, twice previously, and he asked me specifically, if I needed further assistance, as I understood the arrangement, I was to see him. Okay?
Fred held up his hands, as if he were being robbed. Okay, he said.
So Janie sat down amid the dingy keyboards and casings and springs and watched the snow fall on the road crew, who had constructed, by this time, a small crater. The TV monitor was still on the shelf and she glanced a few times at the tiny chlorophylled world which was her world, in which she was tucked, pretty and sad, in a far corner.
It was past five when Charlie appeared and immediately Fred rose from behind the counter and began to speak to him in Chinese—she guessed it was Chinese—and Charlie Song looked utterly ruined, with red bags under his eyes and his worn-out teeth.
Charlie, she said.
He was wearing a cap, some kind of foolish brimmed cap, and when he pulled it off his hair rose up in black clefs.
Problem again? Why problem? I made good repair last time.
Janie straightened the hem of her dress. Yes. Of course you did. Charlie, please. It was my fault. I dropped the machine.
No warranty, Charlie said.
The flecks of snow on his coat had begun to soak through. Janie wanted to throw a shawl over his shoulders.
I was hoping we might discuss this—alone.
Charlie began shaking his head. No. No fix now. Very busy. You come back. January.
But Charlie, you know, I wouldn’t ask unless it was an emergency. I’ll pay you. I can pay in cash. Janie took a step closer and Charlie backed against the counter.
Holiday, he said.
Janie took another step forward, but Charlie ducked left, toward the back room, all the while shaking his head and saying: Comp USA. They have good technician there.
Please, Janie said. This won’t take long.
She began, then, to chase him, around the counter and through the thickets of zip drives and modems. Please. Charlie. Let’s not be like this. I just need you—
Something caught in her throat. She was certain her face was a shiny and lurid thing. She’d put on lipstick and too much mascara and she was wearing a gown, a fucking evening gown. The adapter was clutched to her bosom.
Fred looked on, mortified.
But Charlie, who was backed against a door that read EMPLOYE ONY, with his hand on the knob, peered at Janie for a long moment. It was not a look of pity, exactly, but of some larger human recognition. Charlie scratched his nose and glanced at the floor. He muttered a few words to Fred in Chinese.
Okay, he said to Janie. We do. But last time. Last time.
Of course, Janie said.
Fred muttered something plainly disapproving and put his windbreaker on and marched out of the shop. The two of them were, at last, alone.
Charlie went to his desk and stripped the wires and fired up his sadder gun and the snow continued to fall. Outside, the workers lumbered home and the air above the road took on a metallic shimmer and Charlie twisted the strands of wire and soldered them to the bridge. Janie pulled up a stool and watched him.
Can we listen to music? she said.
Charlie shrugged. He seemed to recognize that something deeply unorthodox was transpiring and ducked into the back room; a few moments later Bach filled the store.
Janie did not speak as he worked, but she imagined what Charlie’s life might have been like, how he came to this country on a boat, probably a very small boat, or else wedged down at the bottom of a very large boat, and how he had struggled to open his own shop and now sent money back to his family in a place like Kunming or Shenyang and how his wife had died, oh his poor wife, and this had left Charlie Song as a widower and he lived in a small apartment with very few windows and had to co
ok for himself and sublimated all of his erotic impulses into his stunning repairs of RAM drives and disk defragmenters.
And this life, for such a considerate man, this made Janie quite sad, for the alcohol inside her had begun to fade and left a yearning behind. Charlie was touching the wires to the ohmmeter; he didn’t notice Janie’s tears. She sniffed finally, and he looked up in alarm.
No cry, he said. We fix. Make good connection.
He began searching the drawers of his desk and the countertop and glancing back at Janie and he was a good man, an ugly man, true, but nothing a little dental work couldn’t fix. Or maybe she would leave the teeth be. They gave him character.
Charlie returned, cradling something in his palm.
New coupler, he said. Flexible. He pressed the device with his thumb. Now you wired for life. No cry.
Janie’s heart began to jump and she set her hand on Charlie’s cuff and he stared down at this hand while, with her other hand, Janie grazed his brow and brought her face close to his. She scooted her stool forward and took a lavish breath. Charlie remained very still, like a squirrel. The sadder gun was smoking and Janie thought for a second about Drew and his beautiful bum and imagined the terrible joy she might feel in soldering his hairless cleft shut, though you couldn’t really do that, could you?
Charlie was not moving.
Do you like me? Janie said. I like you, Charlie. Do you understand?
She felt the tremors in his arms.
Pretty. Very pretty lady.
Would you like to touch me? I’d like that. If you’d touch me.
Charlie swallowed. His throat revealed an immense suffering.
Married, he said. I have wife already.
Where, Charlie? Is your wife here?
No. Home. Wife home.
He leaned back, but Janie leaned forward and pressed her bundled breasts against him. Her hand settled onto his thigh and this too was shuddering and she set her lips against the damp skin of his temples, which smelled of burned solder, and then he was letting out sad little barks, and saying, Please, pretty lady, please no do that, in a tone of terrible confusion.
Now Janie saw what she had done and took her hands off him and she began to weep again. They were both there, on the green monitor, weeping.
I’m sorry, Janie said. I’m so sorry. I thought—my God, I’ve been so stupid.
Charlie Song could not stop weeping. His tools were all around him and his hands were at a loss.
I’m sorry, Janie said again. I had no right. Please. Will you forgive me?
Charlie took a minute to settle himself. He wiped at his eyes furiously, as if they were to blame. Then he did something quite wonderful: he gave Janie a gentle little touch, just the tap of a single finger on the back of her hand, or not so much a tap as a stroke, a soft little accidental stroke, in the hopes that she would stop crying, and he said, Pretty lady, pretty lady, don’t cry. I fix. Promise. Promise.
There was an electricity to this gesture, a hopeful twinge, which struck Janie in her gown and smeared face as a version of herself from the outside world, the stranger world, and communicated her worth in a way she might never have known without him. And though he couldn’t have meant so much in the one part of his gesture that was public, in the private part he was trying to communicate to her that she was a pretty lady and she would be touched and that all the happiness she desired would be hers in time, if only she could bear to wait a little, to forgive herself a bit more, and to answer, when it came again, the fierce, sweet alarm of love.
SUMMER, AS IN LOVE
I WANT TO SAY that it was high summer. I want to say that the hydrangeas were exploding, and that I was in love. None of these things was true, exactly. It was nearly August and the hydrangeas were tailing off, brown veins seeping in at the edge of the purple clusters.
But, you see, this was one of those perfect summer days, the kind that burns off all the inconvenient truths, and I was in Vermont with my new lover, Lil Thorn, and we had risen hot with sleep, slippery in the rude places, desperate to start rutting again.
Oh how we rutted!
Rutted and gasped and tried not to breathe our rotten breath onto one another. And then, toward nine, Lil shambled to the kitchen, with her big lovely strawberry of an ass bouncing after her, and fetched us some juice and we gulped that down and let the fructose rev our blood and licked each other until our skin turned ticklish.
It was summer, our first summer, our only summer, and the grass was the color of straw and the oaks on the hilltops wore skirts of black shadow and the lake down below us was an absurd milky blue. Eons ago, a glacier had passed through the surrounding valley, dug out an alluvial trough, which filled with runoff from the winter snows. The water was warm for one month a year, and we were in the thick of that month, lodged in the house of a friend who had left us his key with a note instructing us not to stain any of the furniture.
That was about our only agenda: don’t stain the furniture.
We were students of literature that summer, Lil and I, and we’d brought more books than clothing. Summer was the time to catch up on the reading lists. Our duffels were crammed with Stendhal and Gaskell and James. There was always some book we should have been reading, though we were in the thick of our inaugural lust, bulletproof and glowing with sun, streaked in tanning lotion and dried sweat.
We were still reading for ideas back then, for style. We hadn’t figured out what literature was for, actually, that it was mostly about loss, that without hope there was no risk and without risk there was no danger and that every story, in the end, is about danger. We still believed literature could be reasoned with, I mean.
LIL LOOKED LIKE this: tall, fleshy, with crooked teeth and a gently scalloped underlip. She’d found me somewhere, at some party, and showed me her tattoo. I was certainly ready for a major disruption.
Lil was just back from a year in Sierra Leone, doing relief work. She had the serenity characteristic of someone who has pushed past her surface fears, and this terrified and thrilled me, as did her decadence, her tendency to gorge on the sensual pleasures. The books could wait.
By noon, we had staggered down to the lake, down the steep rickety wooden stairs that led to the dock, with its quaint boathouse, where, of course, we had done it the previous day, Lil atop a bed of orange life preservers, the scent of rotting beams and boat fuel drifting down onto our sweet salty merger and the spiderwebs rising like faint scarves with our exertions.
There was a wooden float a hundred yards out, and we swam out there, with books held over our heads, Gatsby for me and The Lover for Lil. She was insatiable after doomed love, though she said she read Duras because she liked the way the author shaped her thoughts. I was stuck on Daisy Buchanan, winsome and cruel, gazing tearfully down at Gatsby’s shirts (all those lovely silk collars).
We lay on our backs and held the books up to shade our eyes. And we might have gazed at the pages, absorbed a paragraph or two, but that was it. One of us would shift our weight and the raft would sway and the other would reach out. We could feel the erotic intent, transmitted through the fingertips, and the books would fall away.
In the afternoon, famished, dizzy, we drove to the country store and bought smoked ham and rolls and chocolate bars, and Brie cheese, which we slathered onto a frozen pizza. Then we curled up and slept for a few hours and rose in time to watch the shadows of the trees drawn across the lake.
Lil wanted to swim. She ran down the stairs in shorts and one of my long sleeve shirts. I might have noted her precarious gait, the way she nearly stumbled on each step. But her tits were in an uproar, swirling all around; a little clumsiness didn’t strike me as any problem.
She landed on the dock, almost drunkenly, and pulled the shirt off and kicked off her shorts and she was naked there for a moment, tall as a tree and solid, before leaping into the water.
There was no one watching, no one who would have said anything. It was one of those lakes. Folks didn’t buy houses her
e to spy or complain, but to remove themselves from their duties to the poor.
Lil dove down and her body jackknifed. Her bottom broke the surface for a blessed moment. She stayed under for a minute at least, then rose near the shore with her hair dripping onto her chest. Oh that chest! That water! Those pale swollen hips, which shone against her sunburn.
I was astounded at my good fortune, mistrustful, unsure what I’d done to deserve Lil. I thought surely I would be the one who made too much of our affair, forget that it was summer, just a summer thing.
AND THEN DUSK fell around us and we were into the wine, deep into the wine, two Chiantis straight from the bottle and thick as blood. It was a kind of greed that Lil made essential. Perhaps she knew what was happening inside her, that certain crucial circuits were, even then, fizzing out.
What I remember, though, is the sunlight lancing down from the stubbled brown ridges, falling across Lil as she fell against the railing of the stairs. And down below the lake, burnished in gold, the color of nostalgia—I can see that now—though at the time it was only a dappled backdrop for our next sex act.
Lil took a sip of wine and her hands were trembling and she reached back to sweep up her fine mess of black hair, to show me the delicate blue butterfly tattooed on the nape of her neck, and to lift her breasts to my caress. She stumbled a little, her knees buckled; I thought it must have been the wine, the sun, our long day of ardor.
She was wearing my shirt again (it was one of my father’s old shirts, actually) and she reached down to undo the buttons and her hands were still trembling. She wanted to undress for me, there against the rail, and her fingertips played at the top button. She tried to coax the button through the hole, once, twice, three times. I thought she was being coy, prolonging the act. But then suddenly she was in tears and I said, What is it? What is it, sweetie? and she shook her head and said, No, nothing, nothing, I’m just so happy, and tried, once again, to fumble the button through the tiny stitched hole.
I reached out to help her, but she pushed my hands away and her eyes, for just a second, flashed. Let me do it, she said. I can do it.