“It’s freaky,” he said, as they downed the last of their onion confit—they could not figure out what “confit” meant, exactly, but they ate everything—and anchiote salsa. “She takes one look at you and you see her thinking, You have been bad. You have no eat rice I told you. You have not stare at forest. But she does not ask, or say anything. She knows. It’s as if her whole being is attuned to your misbehavior—”
“Well, that is sort of her job, right? She sticks needles into the Kewpie doll of your bad ways. She’s the Wendy.”
“She’s beautiful, man.”
“Let’s go.”
“Put on your Easter suit. You are going to church with your mother.”
The college-teacher boy thought this a remarkably bright note to come out of the horn of a boy with an eyeball as seriously bad as the bad-eyeball boy’s eyeball was bad—a note of great cheer from a possibly dying man. He was seized by a great happy expectation himself. He had no Easter suit, but he took the bad-eyeball boy’s meaning and got a haircut and polished his shoes and looked altogether spiffy for their appearance at the dungeon. He had a cottonmouthy shortness of breath which he could not remember having since taking out girls in high school alleged to be willing who weren’t.
But the prospect of the dungeon was not sexual so much as it was penal; he regarded the Chinese woman—for reasons not clear to him—as a maternal warden who was going to correct him with benign but iron authority. He thought he might could have used this kind of correction as a young man, at which time the military would have been indicated; now he was older, more ruined, less resilient, more of a slob, when you got right down to it, and the therapeutic forces to right him would have to be subtler than boot camp. He had been a long time away from good mothering. He could not wait. The opportunity to have a good mother who was not your own and who was so expert she could restore you to yourself seemed too good to be true, and in knowing that it was, the college-teacher boy lowered his expectations, or was prepared to, so that whatever she was, as long as she was honest and weird and deft with the needles and the ear-lobe wringing, she was going to be true enough.
True enough: he was entering the Great Relativity Period of his life. It was the kind of period that if you entered it early you properly stationed yourself, a man, in Life. From the vantage of your law offices or your showroom floor, later, you had no occasion or call to visit a Chinese woman in a dungeon. If you entered the Great Relativity Period late in life, and suddenly accepted or even embraced theretofore unacceptable oxymoronic notions such as Relative Truth, then you looked even more like a boy than you had, proved yourself even less adept at inhabiting law offices (except as a client, perhaps), and had great occasion and call to visit Chinese women in dungeons. The college-teacher boy felt as if he were going to his prom, which he had of course as an inveterate boy not gone to in his time. This was the ur-prom, it felt like, and he had the ur-date: the head chaperone herself, the great wise corrector. It wasn’t black-tie, it was black poison. There was no Purple Jesus to drink in the parking lot; there was green tea to drink in the dungeon. There were no expensive corsages to pin on girls who did not like you. There was a woman going to put pins in your ear who maybe did like you. Things had, withal, improved. The silly prom had become—for the bad-eyeball boy at least, and the college-teacher boy felt there was something deeply (cellular-deep) awry (trauma) in himself as well—a not so silly dance of life.
The dungeon was not below grade but it was unofficial enough to count as rebel ground—it was a fort. The Chinese woman was in Western clothes, which made her seem more uncomfortable and more menacing than she would have been in a kimono, if kimono is the right term—it occurred to the college-teacher boy he didn’t know one thing Asian from another, not a people or a dress. She reminded him somehow of a jockey.
She greeted them and promptly set to on the bad-eyeball boy, putting a knee in the small of his back and lightly striking the back of his head with something that looked like a ruler for about a half hour. Ordinarily there would have been joking between the boys, but here there was not. It was a profanation even to boys to make fun of a woman looking like a jockey hitting one of you with a stick, seriously purporting to rid you of cancer thereby. It was so preposterous that it could not be a trick, could not be merely a woman hitting a boy with a stick. So they watched and felt the Chinese woman beat the bad-eyeball boy with her bamboo-looking splint until the college-teacher boy had time to reflect how similar this business was to a certain boyhood torture called the redbelly, and to notice odd stains on the cheap carpet and not want to allow himself to reflect further on odd stains on the carpet where women redbellied men in the head with a stick, and the Chinese woman was saying something soothing and low with a demonstrative note in it, and in the bad-eyeball boy’s ear that was facing up was a black ooze. It was not unlike but considerably less funny than the oil that bubbled up out of the ground when Buddy Ebsen as Jed Clampett shot his land in Appalachia and became a millionaire in Beverly Hills. An’ up thru the ground come abubbalin’ crude! The college-teacher boy was resolutely calmly terrified and sat there resolutely calm to disprove it.
He thought the matter was just beginning, that the ooze would require now a more involved and protracted dealing with the emergency of its emergence, but he was wrong. The woman handed the bad-eyeball boy a tissue and let him up and turned to the college-teacher boy and said, “You.” Then she waited. The college-teacher boy looked to the bad-eyeball boy for help, but the bad-eyeball boy merely twisted the tissue in his ear and shrugged.
The college-teacher boy felt eminently foolish and he felt if he talked down to this woman he would deserve to feel foolish, so he let her have it: “My wife is obsessed with another man. She has not become his lover yet, but does not conceal that she would like to. I have offered to facilitate that and get out of the way, but she says no. She dreams about him and writes to him and writes about him. He writes to her. I stand around in the lee of L.U.V. I am not entirely clean. I have hurt my wife similarly, maybe worse. I am due some punishment. I am not a good boy.” He looked at the bad-eyeball boy to see if this played any better than it sounded, and the bad-eyeball boy, who was examining his tissue, gave him a thumbs-up, so he continued.
“She can have the son of a bitch—he’s a ‘man of principle’ and tall and dark and strange and handsome, and I am none of these, as you can see—” The Chinese woman here blinked very slowly and looked directly at the college-teacher boy, a perfectly inscrutable blink that said either “This is true” or “No, this is not true.” He waited for her to intrude with her meaning and she did not. Of course she did not. They had come looking for a good mother, and they had by God found one. The bad-eyeball boy had stretched out on the floor for a nap.
“I do not care if the man is in my wife’s life. She should have that. Fifteen years of only me is enough for anyone. But I want him out of mine. I want this Turk out of my head. He is in it constantly, every waking moment, not in every sleeping moment only because I am too disturbed to dream, I never dream, I would like to dream, if my wife can dream I might deserve to dream myself.” The bad-eyeball boy opened one of his eyes and looked at the college-teacher boy as if to comment on the excessiveness of this last speech, and in fact the college-teacher boy had in making it lost some of his resolute calm. He was nervous that in his silliness he had put the woman in a perfect position to do the perfect prototypically mothering thing—“Grow up!”—and for this he need not have come down to the dungeon and witnessed an ear-blackening head redbelly or anything else.
The Chinese woman had unwrapped a cloth roll of needles and showed the college-teacher boy to a chair. The last thing the college-teacher boy managed to say, warily eyeing the roll of needles and allowing the Chinese woman to rather roughly push him into the chair, was “I need a doctor.” This elicited another thumbs-up from the bad-eyeball boy, who opened neither eye.
The Chinese woman firmly held both the college-teacher boy’s should
ers against the back of the straight chair and then released him with a slow, cautionary withdrawing, as if instructing a dog to stay. He stayed. She put one of the needles in her mouth and sat on his lap. He glanced at the bad-eyeball boy, who was apparently asleep. With the needle still in her mouth, the Chinese woman began to trace the contours of the college-teacher boy’s face. The needle was so sharp that despite the woman’s fine touch the college-teacher boy was certain he would have hairline cuts from the tracing and look like an old china doll when this was over, and this idea, coupled with a sexual nervousness that the woman’s sitting on his lap engendered, made him giggle, which he thought would evoke a reproof from the woman, but it did not. She smiled, holding the needle with her teeth to do so, and said, “Git.” The college-teacher boy took this to mean “Good.”
With the point of the needle the Chinese woman worked his face with such attention to surface that the college-teacher boy, already in a transport of erotic tenderness, could only think of the way he’d once seen overbred beagles work rough terrain for rabbits in a field trial. The dogs were so meticulous, sniffing every pad print of the rabbits, that they made virtually no forward progress. The “best” dog in this venture was the one necessarily the farthest behind his prey. This kind of field trial, in which the game was forsaken for a process itself, was happening on his face.
His face felt sweetly and wonderfully on fire, as if he were bleeding tears. She went on and on. She walked the needle in a crenellation between and around his very eyelashes with such dexterity that he did not even squint. She departed for an ear and he stole a glance at the bad-eyeball boy, who was looking at him with one eye, then the other. He could not recall which of the bad-eyeball boy’s eyes was bad, and neither of them looked worse than the other, and there was a tired smile on the bad-eyeball boy’s face that suggested he didn’t know which eye was bad, or care, either. They had come to a fort with a weird woman in it, and it had worked. The Chinese woman detailed the needle from pore to pore in a way that stung now so badly and agreeably that the college-teacher boy began to wave, in a vision, to his wife. He began to look at the skin of the Chinese woman. He was excited where she was sitting on him, but she acknowledged nothing in this respect. She slowly pulled back and away with the same dog-stay order as before and put the needle back in its roll carefully. The college-teacher boy sat breathing easily, upright, alive, bleeding and weeping without bleeding or weeping, waving happily to his dimming, diminishing wife—it was the way things went. His wife had said of her unforgettable time with her Turk, “It was light, delightful, without promises.” But the Turk had kissed her, and there was promise inherent in a kiss, and the Turk would break it, as he, the college-teacher boy, had. He was going to get out of the way of the bull and let the bull break his promise. Without any means of applying those long, colorful barbed darts he could never remember the name of, or of otherwise bleeding the full hump of the bull’s exotic lust, there was nothing to do but quit the arena. Capework was silly.
The Chinese woman shifted and was suddenly at his ear with warm breath. She nipped one lobe and crossed before him, brushing him with her hair, which looked fine and black but felt as coarse as broom straw on his face, and nipped the other lobe. She exhaled a long, hot, slow breath in his ear. The college-teacher boy had begun to hold her, to hug her, with what little purchase he had, sitting back as he was. She made no protest or adjustment. He held her still, aware now that he was holding her. She let another hot breath into his ear. Then she said, “You fine.”
And he was.
About the Author
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997, 1998 by Padgett Powell
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-4160-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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PADGETT POWELL
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