All Roads Lead to Blood

by Chau, Bonnie;

  It was always a bunch of miscreants working in restaurants, herself included, she thought. She thought to herself, I am out of control. What was she even saying, used to having sex in restaurants. What was she even doing here? She had promised herself she wouldn’t work in restaurants anymore. Or, she had at least thought about it. This was what happened in restaurants. Sex messes. She had to get out of it. Get it together. Get something normal, proper, going for herself.

  *

  Since leaving California behind, since California-deserting, since moving to New York, Stevie has taken on a new shape. She has left behind the part of her life that is messy, and is now on a newfound, mess-free streak of life. There are many ways in which she can see that she has come a long way. There are many ways in which the negative space surrounding the shape of her life is now gaining a newfound clarity, a boldly defined outline. She doesn’t need strictly enforced rules, because things are just kind of falling into place, in a very natural way. She doesn’t even make her bed every morning, at least not well. But it is all working out, because it is all about priorities. She doesn’t live in a home, much less a city, that is cockroach-free. But she does have a non-restaurant job, working in a semi-respectable office, doing copyediting.

  Speaking of coming a long way, Stevie met a golden boy last month. She met Dave at a party. This is something they both do, she and him, go to parties. This is something that goes in the middle of the Venn diagram of the two of them. His hair, it is made of gold, soft. His smile is big, easy, like a wedge of hard fresh cheese. Everything about him walks the line of good, not mediocre, not pretty good, not so-so, not great, not extraordinary, but the solid hard line of good. He is smart, in a good way. He is funny, and witty, in a good way. He is interested in good things: sustainable living and the environment, traveling, non-profit work, playing his guitar, photography, scuba diving, hiking, rock climbing, frisbee, Buddhism. He drinks and smokes pot, in a good way, gave up cigarettes two years ago. His aura, it is golden boy gold.

  It is good for her, that she has found a golden boy. Yesterday, away from the golden boy, she spent the day walking around the city aimlessly connecting checklist dots. This is the coffee shop she goes to, on blank days like this, so she made her way over, had her coffee outside on a bench in the sun. The bench tilted forward, it was difficult to sit without feeling like falling. She stood up and walked to the train, took the train across the bridge, walked to the doughnut shop, had a doughnut on another bench, on a parkway. She stopped by the bookstore that she usually stops by, if in the area, and then continued walking north. She walked west, to the park, and sat in the dry fountain, until the sun slid below the skyline. She sat on another bench in the park, finished her doughnut, and then slowly made her way home.

  Yesterday, away from the golden boy, Stevie had a temporary lapse in the evening, spent hours smoking cigarettes with her roommate Conor, alternating between sending each other further into their respective bouts of depression, and making attempts to advise and uplift and encourage. Stevie thought she had left all the mess of her last life behind, but at any moment, it could get messy again. And Conor—he was totally a mess. Their lives were messes, and they were swimming in them, barely wading, drowning in manic words. She stood in her doorway, she leaned against the kitchen counter, she fixed them some eggs and ham and cheese on toast, they crouched in the wind on the roof trying to light their smokes.

  While this was going down, downward, the golden boy was at a birthday party. He had spent the day helping his best-friend-slash-business-partner move into a new apartment. He was then moving on to doing other things that did not involve losing your shit and getting your shit together and throwing things and not being able to do it and never being able to do things and unhappiness and general mania and crouching in the wind on the roof.

  *

  She goes to the golden boy’s apartment in downtown Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. She asks him about his family, about his undergraduate thesis, for which he spent summers researching tadpoles in the salt marshes of Rhode Island. She pictures herself spending next Thanksgiving at his parents’ house, a very model-home-, storybook-type of house. She puts her first name together with his last name, even though she is not the type of girl to ever get married, much less take her hypothetical husband’s last name. They sit at his breakfast nook, warm, white sunlight pouring in through the windows. They eat huevos rancheros off matching pale green plates, forks clinking on ceramic. They pause between mouthfuls to grin at each other. He reaches over to smooth back her hair. Instead of squinting joke-suspiciously at him, she smiles winningly.

  *

  On the morning of The Morning, the golden boy says to Stevie, did you read the book I...? Gave, you, the Zen one—those words would come next, one after another. Recently, Stevie has started to think, why bother in this life, to finish all these sentences, aren’t half of the sentences you say only half necessary, don’t you already know what words come next, wasted breath, wasted words, wasted time and this signal that you are only finishing what you started for the sake of finishing what you started? This is when you’re in trouble, when it’s not working anymore, when the decline has started, how it starts, with a few piddling degrees of a decline.

  As he tests her, the golden boy is waiting for his bread to spring out of the toaster. They have been living together for almost a year now. When they moved in together, he wanted to get a toaster that looked like a toaster, and Stevie wanted a toaster oven, which looks like an oven. It is hard to win, against a golden boy. The golden boy, he stands still as a statue. He is an Oscar statuette, all smooth hard curves. Nothing can get to him. Even without moving, he seemed to press forward, gently push her back. She swallowed, and backed against the kitchen counter, hit her back, had nowhere left to back. He had interests, interests, in the traditionality of waiting for toast, which is only rewarded—happiness, completion—only rewarded, by the springing ping of the toast popping up out of its slots. Rituals, triggers, traditions. Catalysts for catalysts.

  Once, at the beginning, before there were things like toasters sitting in between them, Stevie had thought they were more fitting. There was some complacent sense to this, once, a sense sculpted out of strange but insistent pathways in her thought. She was a golden girl with him, once, a girl made of sand, lifted from the southern California desert. She thought, once, how beautiful they would be together, why yes, why, yes, they would always have that beauty at least, the sensible beauty of a golden boy and a golden girl, pieced together into a terrifically golden bursting glow.

  I’m sorry, the golden boy said, finally, once they were already out in his car. It was the final moment, Stevie felt sure of it, that all there was of them, had been of them, had been leading to this, the terrible notion that now that you know the ending, there were so many nodes and notches along the way up, along the way down, that you could have grabbed at, that you could have taken to twist this into something else, to wring something, anything, other than this, out of this sopping soaking mess. To have squeezed hard, long, in anticipation of one last drop, and have the last drop be this?

  They sat hard, they sat so so hard, she thought maybe she would be ground into the seat, never leave, they would be immobilized and immortalized in this space, each staring straight ahead, out of the front windshield of his small green hatchback. The golden boy did not believe in apologies, so why was he even saying sorry? They had fought about this before, how to express sorrow then, how to take responsibility, how to begin to make amends, how to demonstrate remorse and sympathy? The golden boy, on his way to the gym, on his way to the rock-climbing wall, on his way out the door, did not even shake his golden curled head, would look affrontedly into Stevie’s eyes, would tenderly smooth back her hair, would readjust the shoulder strap on his gym bag, and would say, you work harder, to lead a cleaner life, one that doesn’t allow for the option of apology.

  *

&
nbsp; Can you make out the shape of Stevie? Can Stevie make it out? She wanted, at least, to make out the shape of the story, to be able to tell the story of her broken heart. Once, a golden boy broke her heart. He used the word “trampled” once, and so she uses it too now at the 38th Street Diner, for continuity, for a semblance of levity, for distance. Who? Some dude, she said. She has said this so many times. Some guy, some boy, some dude, some dude, she says. Tired, impatient. If it was broken once, it’s proof that it exists, she had one, she has one, even if it’s shapeless now. Trampled. Broken. Glass, shards, drops of blood. Shreds of flesh, a shredded chicken salad, cold, unappetizing.

  But, she finds that she wants to say these things, these words: heart, break, once. She wants to have lived it. She wants to have been alive enough. She wants to have held something out, some thing, held out like an offering in her palm, a true bloody story, held out like a blood-soaked sock. In such a story, Stevie wonders, when does the girl get to turn into something else, instead of the end-all being a slender and pure white princess? When does the transformation of the girl into a beast, a predator, something dangerous and fierce, vicious and sharp-edged, get to be not just a turning point, but the storybook ending? When does the girl get to be a great white shark, a crocodile, a wolf, a fox, a grizzly bear, a tiger, forever, not ever wishing to be something less messy? Stevie thinks she will say these things: break, tear apart, blood. She could do it, she could strike fear, into the soft pulsating hearts of golden boys and golden girls, everywhere.

  Her old friend, her old roommate, Alyssa, moved recently to Philly, and Stevie convinced her to come to New York for a visit. Sitting there in the diner, she looks across the table at Alyssa who is looking down at the menu. There is scaffolding outside, and this scaffolding has clung to this building for a very long time. She thinks of it less as scaffolding, and more as a symbiotic relationship: scaffold and diner. This is the vaguely optimistic way of putting it, instead of putting it the other way—like the relationship between her mother and her father, who have the opposite of a symbiotic relationship, a relationship in which both entities suffer a net loss. But, like the scaffold and diner, her parents’ relationship has existed in this fashion for too long to change. And yet when Stevie was twenty-seven, her mother told her it wasn’t too late, that she could still become an architect. She had looked at her mother then, and felt sorry for her. Perhaps her mother was not completely wrong though, perhaps there is not actually anything in her own life that has existed for so long that it is too late to change.

  When Stevie is done with her story, Alyssa scoots out of the booth to go use the restroom in the back. When she returns, as she is sliding back into the booth, Stevie makes sure that she is busy doing something, so she shakes some drops of Tabasco sauce on top of her pile of scrambled eggs. Then she works on arranging a very even pile of the eggs onto the wedge of toast she has left, and every time one curd or crumble of egg falls off, she carefully places it back on the pile until the shape holds completely steady.

  The Closing Doors

  Off Vestal Avenue, the front door of the bungalow had a glass pane bisecting the heavy wood. There was yellow light inside, a warm chorus of voices, transforming, and then transforming again. Inside, the woman walked directly to the table with food, looked at the table only, and not at anyone’s eyes. She did not say hello, or touch, anyone. There was already a man at the table—a man with a neutral look, unstyled pants, unstyled hair, a most regular T-shirt and running shoes. He was eating shrimp cocktail, a ring of them, plump, arched flesh.

  He looked at her, the shrimp, her shoulder, her body. The woman pretended not to see that, because she wasn’t sure she saw it, and instead smiled vaguely in his direction, politely, and looked over the party snacks laid out on the vinyl blue tablecloth. The orange cubes of cheese had taken on a plastic oxygenated coating. The woman sucked her teeth. She wanted shrimp cocktail but the man now had the entire black plastic tray in his hand. Perhaps he had brought it himself, for himself, a personal party snack.

  Hello, the man said. He lifted his body from the wall he was leaning against, and straightened himself, without moving any closer. The woman put her hand out in the emptiness between them, and said, Hello. She looked at him now, his face, his blue eyes, that were looking away. They looked away, but then not. She realized one eye was a lazy eye. She realized this in a way in which something moved inside her body, a flip, or click, but nothing moved outside. Outside, she was unmoved, gave nothing away, was smooth, like the tender and opaque skin of a silkworm. She observed the lazy blue-blood eye, in an otherwise very symmetrical, geometrical profile. The shapes of his face were angular, like the handsome weatherman she watched, with the sound off, in her underwear on weekday evenings.

  The man moved over to stand next to the woman. By not moving, she was choosing to be close to someone. His body stood very near her body, and he thrust his tray of cocktail shrimp toward her, pushing it just to her breasts. She didn’t know if he could see what he had done with those eyes—she had no idea what it looked like, the world, seen or not seen from those eyes—but surely he could feel that the tray had hit up against her flesh. He didn’t move. She pressed closer. It was her, the tray of shrimp, and the man with the lazy eye. He didn’t move back. He grinned at her, with his teeth, but his eye stayed cool, aloof. She picked up a shrimp, its cold plasticky tail, dipped its head end, headless now, deliberately into the red sauce in the bowl in the center of the ring. The shrimp had a cold, sweet, ocean taste. Her teeth sinking into its soft cartilage crunch, the woman felt opened, a memory of the first glimpse of a blue wedge of sea in the distance, after a long drive from the Inland Empire, toward the empty tangle of California coast.

  What’s your story, the man asked, his cool blue eye looking just slightly off, uninterested. It was so slight almost as to seem a figment. The woman was good at angles and spatial judgment and playing pool, though, and she knew that if she drew a sightline from one eye and then the other, the lines would not be parallel. At some point off in the distance—who knew when, but what did it matter when if it was inevitable—they would intersect. They were imperfect.

  I’m a cousin of a boyfriend of a sister of the roommate of the friend’s boss. The woman said this, and then looked straight at the lazy eye. The lazy eye looked back at her, the jokey her. Chameleons did that, had eyes that went different places. But on purpose, they had control.

  Yeah, huh, he said. She looked away, down at a book on the table. It had a clear, plastic protective covering, over a hard, tan cover.

  It’s the Bible, he said, in French.

  Why are you reading the Bible at a party? she asked, in French.

  To meet women, he responded, leaning back against the wall. His lazy eye winked. She saw it, she didn’t see it. She was beginning to feel anxious, her blood beating a course at random. She moved slightly away from him. She hoped not to wake him up to the fact that she was moving. Then she turned her back on him entirely and moved further away. She walked into the next room with a forward-moving intention, as if she were progressing through the logic of a haunted house. There were things to see, next steps, things you were not allowed to leave without experiencing. Room after room after room, and then, somehow, she seemed to be back at the first room. The man with the lazy eye stood in place, looking the other way.

  The woman sat down at one of the chairs next to the table. Most of the party had moved now to the living room in the back, and the patio. There were Marcel Dzama prints lined up on the white walls near the man’s head, of trees and people-trees, and branch-arms. Blank-faced people. Frozen-in-dance people. The man was still holding the tray of shrimp cocktail, maybe looking away, at the distance over her shoulder. The party moved back in a wave, a crowd of people pushing into her train car, even when the doors were trying to close. Good thing she had found a seat. She looped an arm through the straps of her purse, which sat unevenly on her lap. It
was heavy, there was an odd angle near the top, from a book she had inside, which was not the Bible. It was a copy of The Passionfruit Flower that she had stuffed in at the last minute, in case of emergency. Stand clear of the closing doors please, the pre-recorded voice intoned druggily over the subway speakers, and the doors pushed shut. People shifted, bodies accommodating bodies, until each one was evenly spaced apart. The woman finally lifted her eyes.

  There was a new man standing in front of her—she was eye-level with his crotch. He was wearing jeans fitted enough that she could see the protuberance of his penis, slanted slightly to the right. She swallowed, feeling sick, altitudinal. She looked to the left. There was a red-looking man, spilling out liquidly from his clothing, bulbous and drunk. The heat in the car was on very, very high. The woman slid a hand into the front of her shirt, and over her shoulder, to massage the back of her neck, sweating. The girl standing next to the man in front of her had on a baggy coat, and a scarf, which when she readjusted, revealed that inside, all she wore was an open-work lace and mesh top, and an operatic black bra. She had on a long gray billowy skirt, and no makeup. Sad eyes. Full lips. The woman looked back, deliberately at the man’s penis, imagining it under the denim. It was there. Her face was less than fifteen inches away from it. She thought she saw it move. She looked up, but the man’s face was blocked by the newspaper he was reading. All she had to go by was this.

  The woman looked around for something familiar, found it. The MTA New York City Subway map. She stared at the map, at the curved hanging penis shape of Manhattan, looked carefully, looked again. She was overcome with the desire to impale herself on it. It looked about the right size, the perfect size, on the map, just wide and thick enough to penetrate her every wall, dully heavy against every surface. Once she got that thing, that shape, inside of her, there would be no room for anything else. She would only feel the throb of 1.6 million people coursing through her. And what were those tiny protrusions, tiny piers sticking out the side of the southwest of the island? She could feel them press, like so many rough fingertips, dragging against her swollen vagina. She pulled the collar of her V-neck T-shirt down, down over her naked breast, bare, there. She stood among the throng, turned feverishly to the poster, pressed her nipple against the cock that was Manhattan. It was warm. It was hard. Of course it was hard, it was covered in plastic.