by Nell Zink
Tony grabs her free hand. She stands still, looking up expectantly, and he kisses her.
ON SUNDAY, PENNY VISITS HER mother in Morristown.
“You’re not going to believe it,” Amalia says. “I have a lover.”
“Oh god, Mom! Stop!”
“Why?”
“I already know. I know him. It’s Tony.”
“I never thought I would experience passion again. But passion is a part of me. It was there inside me all the time, and now I can express it. I am so happy. Be happy for me.”
“Matt must be relieved. I heard you met Tony because you were stalking Matt. That asshole! You treat me like a stepchild, and you’re in love with that asshole.” Penny wipes her eyes and blows her nose on a napkin.
Heavy sigh. Long silence. “Tony was in love with you,” Amalia says. “You know that, right? But everyone can make a mistake. The love is there inside you, and you meet the wrong person. Human beings are filled with love. That’s how it was with me. I loved the wrong man all my life—”
“Dad was the wrong man?”
“No. He saved me.”
“From what? Matt? Patrick told me about how Matt used to abuse you. Remember when he tried to rape me? Matt’s an asshole.”
“Why do you listen to Patrick? He hates me. Why do you think he lives so far away?”
Penny is silent.
“Patrick was a child. He thought love is holding hands.”
“You were his same age!”
“I had no family in Cartagena. I was a big girl, alone. Matt was a young boy. You say he abused me. What if it’s the other way around? What if I abused him? Think, my baby.”
Penny thinks.
She imagines Norm striving to make up for Amalia’s deficient upbringing. He and Katie serving her rich meals, giving her pretty clothes and a safe place to sleep, waiting for the light to dawn that children are fed and housed and clothed for free, simply because they are children. Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . Penny knows pictures of Matt from when he was young. Soulful, hunky teen heartthrob for Amalia’s first innocent schoolgirl crush. The ideal object—the perfect victim—for a girl struggling to act out how she was manipulated. Because that’s also love. Maybe no love is needier or more intense.
One reality, mutable as shadows on smoke.
She sees Norm rejecting Amalia’s advances because he was a good man, and Matt accepting them because he was neither good, nor a man. The paradox that makes her want men who reject her. The eternal conundrum of dating. She covers her face with her hands and says, “No. Yes.”
“In the end I married Norm because he loved me. You remember how he loved me.”
“That’s true,” Penny says. “He loved you.”
“I believed in him. He gave me a good life, and such a wonderful daughter. And it was him who saved me. I will never reveal from what he saved me.”
Penny leans back and shakes her head, as though shaking might make the fluff fall out. “Come on, Mom,” she says. “Tell me something I don’t know. I enjoy finding out what things were really like.”
“The past is gone,” Amalia says. “Norm taught me that all is one.”
“The facts are not all one!”
“Yes, they are. Even the facts are interconnected. There is conservation of energy. When they beat you and they rape you, they become bad and you become good. As long as there is life, the balance will not change.”
Penny has trouble following what Amalia is saying. She wants it to make sense. It sounds to her like straight-up prevarication, masked as mysticism, as though Amalia is talking around something big and solid. She suspects Norm and Jazz of having masked similar prevarications as rationality, but at least—she thinks—at least they made sense. She wants to hear things equally persuasive from her mother. That sense of insight she felt just now, when Amalia pointed to teenage Matt’s sexual inexperience: she wants it back.
“Life is like water,” her mother is explaining gently, “flowing to the ocean and up to the clouds to rain upon the hills. It can only consume itself. A river eats water. If it gets enough water, the river is a true river. Then it can carry many heavy things without pain.”
Casting about for facts to cling to, Penny’s mind flashes to an image of Norm’s body. Bloated and waterlogged, purple arm raised, it rocks back and forth in the shallows at the mouth of a seasonal river in western Peru. It’s not the image she wants. It’s extremely counterfactual, among other things.
Seeing her unhappy look, Amalia adds, “Do you see now? The river is life. That is the meaning of the cosmic snake.”
“What? The river is a snake?”
Amalia nods, and Penny shakes her head. She takes a deep breath and says, “Patrick told me about Katie.”
Amalia’s fuzzy solemnity gives way to bald annoyance. “Not that,” she says. “Katie was my true mother. Don’t mention her.” She stands up to take a tissue from a dispenser, and blows her nose.
“Did it happen the way Patrick said? She just disappeared?”
“What did he tell you?”
“I want your version first.”
“She took a taxicab. She waved good-bye. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“We had been fighting. Norm said she needed peace and quiet. Oh my god, he looked for her everyplace. And from the beginning we know that she is kidnapped or dead, because she loved us so much. The police didn’t help us. Colombia was very bad in those days.”
Amalia’s eyes are wet now, and Penny says, “I’m sorry.”
“We left Colombia right away, me and the boys.”
Penny takes another deep breath and casts her line out for another possible truth. “Some people say Matt is my father.”
“Ha-ha,” Amalia says, with studied sarcasm. “We never touched after I married Norm. I was a good wife. I loved him as a mother until Norm died. I never touched him for thirty years. But who cares about that garbage man? Let me show you something.”
She scrounges in her purse and finds the note to Matt on the back of the Best Buy receipt.
“Here, read this. My first love letter to Matt in all my life, on one subject only—how much I hate him. And you know why I hate him? Because I love him, but it’s impossible to love an asshole. An asshole like Matt you can only hate, unless you’re a worm.”
Penny reads the note. “Yeah, you pretty much hate him!”
“Compared to Norm, he’s a worm.”
“He’s a worm compared to most worms,” Penny says, giving her back the note. “When you said beating and raping—”
“Stop it! He was my lover, not a para! You think he’s bad for fucking stupid sluts from the Internet? It makes me angry, too. But it’s not evil. Does he kidnap and torture them? Does he kill their families? No. He’s not a bad man. He is normal. He cannot love anyone, and that is normal. Norm was a special man.”
Penny tries hard to think. Her mother’s words seem to lower the bar an awful lot, calling Matt normal because war criminals are bad. She wonders if this is an insight into anything but her own mind. “But you did love Matt, when you were young,” she insists.
“I was horny like a worm!”
The words carry an echo of a blanket condemnation of sex—though this resonance, too, might not be in the words at all, but only in her mind—and she goes on the defensive: “What’s so wrong with that?”
“You want to sleep with a worm? A squirmy worm, squirming around? Or a man who loves you?”
Penny frowns. She shakes her head. She opens the refrigerator and changes the subject to the immediate desirability of BLTs.
She slices some tomatoes, very thin.
JAZZ STANDS ON THE TERRACE of Matt’s apartment in the early evening, wearing her fetish heels and a garter belt. A breeze from the Hudson wafts her hair up and down and into her eyes and mouth (it is on the nineteenth floor, and the wind tends to hit the building and swirl) as she smokes. “Hey, Jazz, I want to try something,” Matt says.
&
nbsp; She looks inside. He is lying on his back on the couch wearing a blue morph suit, the 3-D headset, and a blue condom. His laptop, open on the coffee table, faces his crotch.
“You look ultra-pervy,” Jazz says.
“I took a Viagra to match my outfit. Sit on my dick.”
“And what will you see?”
“You, on my dick.”
“With what background?”
“Secret.”
She sits on his dick and transfers—she doesn’t hesitate, and Matt doesn’t resist—the headset from his head to her own. She sees herself sitting astride a black, scaly monster. The odd perspective makes her lose her balance. She dismounts briefly, exposing the cruelly barbed end of its outsize penis. “What are you?” she says. “Priapus the pangolin?”
“You don’t like scales?” Sitting upright, he turns the laptop so that she sees the monster’s head—roughly that of a wolverine—while he makes some adjustments. The scales vanish.
“Give yourself better fur,” she suggests. “Glossy, like a mink.”
“Why not,” he says. “I like you in that mask.”
“Is there a camera on the headset?”
“Not on this model. Should I get the one with a camera?”
“I don’t know,” she says, fucking him. “It strikes me as sort of—a novelty—item—unh.” The giant weasel’s arm enters the frame. Matt adjusts something, and it turns into the black, scaly monster. His hands press on her ears. She sees its jagged penis tearing her skin and its pelvis drenched in her blood. She closes her eyes, and Matt turns on the sound—piercing screams. She pushes upward on his forearms. She rips at his fingers. She can’t take off the earphones. Opening her eyes, she tries to slap the monster in the face and misses, blinded by the headset, her equilibrium gone.
She fumbles with one hand on the coffee table and slams the laptop shut.
Matt pulls the headset off her and drops it on the carpet. She shakes her hair loose and looks down. Though obscured by the morph suit, entirely blue, he appears relaxed. Amused.
In her mind, she senses absolute self-control. In her body, she tries to exhale and can’t. Her lungs quiver like they need a defibrillator. She feels palsied.
To him, she looks harrowed. It’s a good look, he thinks. Suits her. The look of impaled protoplasm, and he’s not even close to done. “Need a break?” he says.
He lets her stand up and walk to the balcony. Her eyes are wide. She grasps the railing in both hands and puts one foot up on a planter.
He sees what she’s up to and makes a lightning three-point landing. Before she can jump, he is inside her again, his dick pushing her into his arms. She fights and struggles to get away, over the railing, but he won’t let her go.
She’d rather die? Fine, let her try. He knows that would be the wrong choice, and he won’t let her make it. His body and his conscience are one person. It’s a kind of sex he has never known. Sex as a life-giving act—the higher, spiritual sexuality priests and rabbis are always talking about. The kind he never believed existed. He thinks back on the scene with the gun, when he thought there might be nothing hotter than killing, and he feels like Saul on the road to Damascus. He was so wrong. Life is hot. Death is not. He saves her life because he needs her alive so he can save her again. The rescue operation is as circular as breathing air so he can live to breathe more air. Pure, self-motivated ethical action. The categorical imperative. Virtue as its own reward. Love that gives life that gives love. The cosmic snake, nourished by its own tail.
By the time two minutes have passed, he can’t imagine life without it. He pulls her back inside the apartment where she is safe.
As they cross the threshold she relaxes suddenly, falling against him with a high moan, and the sound and the motion combined are too much for him. He comes so much the condom is awash in fluid. It caresses him like a soft-lipped mouth, high inside her body.
He imagines what it might feel like to get her pregnant. He holds that power. He could give her a life beyond her own. Or even several. He could give her descendants like the sands of the seashore.
“I’m breaking up with you,” she says after her shower.
“No, you’re not!” he says. “Are you crazy?”
MATT DROPS JAZZ OFF IN front of Nicotine. She runs up the stairs, opens her door, throws herself facedown on the bed, and sobs. It is 10:00 P.M.
Rob hears her crying. He puts down Jean Cocteau and peeks out the storm door. He puts on his striped summer bathrobe and crosses to her room. “Jazz,” he says.
“I’m such a moron. Why am I a moron?”
“You need to ask me a question that means something.”
“Why was I fucking Matt?”
“Did I just hear past tense?” He sits down and puts his hand on her back. “Did something happen?”
She turns over and says, “Please stay here for a minute. Lie next to me, like you did at DJD. Stay with me.” He lies down, and she stares into his eyes. “Rob,” she says, holding his head between her hands. She lowers her hands, turns her face downward into the pillow, and cries.
“What the fuck happened?”
“It’s hard to explain. But it was wrong. It was just wrong. The kind of thing, when somebody does it, you know he’s not right.”
Rob puts his arms around her and hugs her tight. “It’s okay. It’s over, and you’ll forget it soon.”
“I thought I was so hard-core.”
“No way! Not you. You’re the sweetest girl I ever knew.”
“And I’m turning you on.”
“Yeah,” he says, backing away.
“Don’t go. Stay. Make love to me, Robby.”
He backs farther away and sits upright. “That’s not a very nice thing to say! I’m too small to ‘fuck’ you like everybody else, but I can still ‘make love’? Should I blindfold you first?”
Hiding her face, Jazz returns to crying.
“Don’t cry!”
“Then don’t hurt me that way,” she says. “Don’t turn me into an evil creature that can only fuck. That fucks people and doesn’t love them.”
“I didn’t do that. Nobody could ever do that.”
He lies down again and embraces her. He is immediately hard, in his small way. She smiles, nuzzling her crooked nose into his bathrobe. They kiss each other. He looks around. “Where do you keep condoms?” he asks. “I don’t have any—”
“Don’t use one. Make love to me. I’m too skinny to ovulate, and you’ve never had sex before in your life, so who cares? I want to feel you, your skin and warmth, you know? Not to be poked with a medical device. I am sick to death of being poked with safety equipment—using lube so I can pretend I’m turned on enough to want to be poked with safety equipment—doing scenes and fantasies and role-playing to distract myself from the reality that I’m being poked with safety equipment!”
“You’re outraged,” he says. He hugs her again. He embraces her shoulders, her ass, her waist. He kisses her hesitantly and is soon short of breath. He trembles, and his heart races. She makes herself small, cuddling into his arms. They peel the underwear from each other’s rear ends, pull it to knee-level with their hands, and push it the rest of the way down with their feet.
Saying, “I can’t believe this is happening,” he kisses her and touches his bare penis to her vagina.
“Are you inside?” she asks.
He laughs and goes inside.
THAT NIGHT, MATT SUFFERS FROM insomnia—the sort of insomnia that saves a man’s life.
He is worrying intensely about a woman who wants nothing to do with him, and the more he worries, the more he feels he has a right to worry. That’s how love works. It grabs and takes and snowballs, an emotional ambition, and it’s nowhere more at home than in hell. He calls her over and over, but her phone is turned off, and of course it is, because she made him promise never to contact her again. But that doesn’t mean she won’t contact him, right? He thinks about having an Ambien and a nightcap, but he doesn’t want
to sleep. He wants his phone to make a sound that will be Jazz, saying she needs him.
It’s so quiet. The city that never sleeps makes its accustomed whooshing sound on the other side of the Hudson. Fort Lee hangs suspended above it, a concrete hammock filled with sweaty snorers. No sound but predawn traffic on the bridge and tunnel approaches, crows cawing, little babies. He gets up and dressed and behind the wheel of his car, where falling asleep would be life-threatening. So it’s a good thing he has insomnia.
He wants the city. He crosses the George Washington Bridge and drives down the West Side toward a strip club where he knows a hostess. He used to think she was wild. He breezes past it and makes a left on Twenty-Third, toward his estranged girlfriend’s dorm at NYU. He thinks of fucking her dull face while she fingers the pink vibrator in her rump and turns south again to take the Holland Tunnel to Bayonne. Why not just go to work? It’s four. The sky is getting light. The birds will be singing.
When he gets out of the tunnel, he finds he still has options. He keeps making choices. Negative ones. He says no to everything. No coffee, no diner, no impulse trip to Vermont. The car wheels in great arcs, like a hawk marking its territory. Then it lands.
MATT KICKS IN THE FRONT door of Nicotine.
He knows the quiet click the latch makes when it closes, so he is unsurprised to find that it breaks easily. The only sound is the splintering of the doorframe to a distance of about two feet above and below the latch.
Sorry wakes up. She hears footsteps charging up the stairs and shouts, “Hey! There’s somebody in the house!” Anka yawns, turns over, opens her eyes, and dials 911. Holding an empty wine bottle in one hand, Tony peers into the hallway. But Matt is faster, already sprinting up the last flight.
He strides across the roof and opens Jazz’s door. Rob stands up to face him, naked. A downy golden body, a mass of fluffy pubic hair like a hippie girl. That’s not what he expected to see. He opens his mouth to say something, bends his knees, and punches Rob hard in the stomach.
Rob falls down. Matt kicks him once near the groin. He picks up Jazz’s armchair, places it with one leg near Rob’s navel, and kneels on it.