I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  Denis smiled, and smirked, and chuckled, and began to laugh, for the first time in a very long time. It possessed all of the therapeutic effects he had read about.

  Beth was laughing, and gazing at Denis with amusement and what seemed genuine affection. “Look at you. You’re naked. Cam, throw me my poncho.”

  A bright purple knit poncho flew into the front seat.

  “It’s okay. Really. I’m kind of hot, right now, actually.”

  “Put it on.”

  “I don’t see any need, at the moment, to wear a purple poncho.”

  “It’s fuchsia,” Beth said, spreading it in front of her coquettishly. “And it’s my favorite.”

  20.

  FOOL MOON

  IT’S REALLY HUMAN OF YOU TO LISTEN TO ALL MY BULLSHIT.

  SAMANTHA BAKER

  TREECE’S FATHER’S CABIN sat on Lake Hakaka, named by the Ho-Chunk after their word meaning “dead male bear,” for reasons that were not immediately apparent. It was one of Lake County’s lesser lakes, usually left off tourism materials and occasionally official maps; once the county argued, unsuccessfully, that it was in Wisconsin. The lake had water, though, and was private, being unpopular, and only smelled like a dead male bear from late July through early September.

  Three girls, a boy, and a ponchoed figure of indeterminate sex approached the cabin by the light of the setting moon.

  “Originally it was Al Capone’s,” Treece inaccurately related the cabin’s history. “He used it as a hideout, because if the police raided, he could just run into Wisconsin. And then the guy who played Bozo the Clown, not the main guy but some local Bozo, had it for a bunch of years, and threw these really sick clown parties up here. There’s supposedly a couple dead clowns buried in the woods over there. And then Sammy the Seal or Snake or some other S animal owned it, and that’s how my dad got it.”

  Treece turned on the light. She yawned. Everybody else gasped.

  Fowl and fauna lunged from the walls and coffee tables; animal skins draped all the woodsy furniture; the outside of a grizzly bear lay on the floor.

  Rich dropped the bag of snacks.

  “Feel the death,” Cammy said.

  Several of the animal cadavers came paired in death-throe tableaus: a glass-eyed owl with a flexi-formed snake “writhing” in its talons; a former fox tearing apart an ex-squirrel; and, holy crap, a tanned hunting dog retrieving a stuffed pheasant. Denis was by no means an animal lover; he consumed animals, he dissected them, but he didn’t hate them. This cabin felt like an act of revenge.

  “I think maybe animals killed his parents,” he said.

  “Oh, my dad just bought all this stuff,” Treece responded blithely, adding with a rare note of disdain, “He’s never killed anything.” She pointed to the fireplace, below a hunting rifle mounted between the heads of a mother deer and its fawn. “If anybody wants to make a fire…”

  She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle and frowned. “Weird beer.” She opened the freezer, and brightened. “Yodka!” she bellowed in what she supposed was a Russian accent.

  AN OLD BOOM BOX channeled Denis’s iPod:

  Here’s to the nights we felt alive

  The Eve 6 song, regarded as a graduation classic, was in reality from another venerable rock genre, the “Let’s Spend the Night Together and Then I Must Be Ramblin’ On” song.

  Are you cool with just tonight

  Nobody cared. The mood of the music combined with the crackling fire and the wilderness milieu to create an irresistibly maudlin setting. The five stood around a wicker Tiki bar, drunk and/or punch-drunk, as Treece poured generous yodkas into the only five available vessels:

  a ceramic pineapple;

  a pink coffee mug shaped like a breast;

  a monkey head carved out of a coconut;

  a Playboy toothbrush tumbler;

  and a World’s Greatest Dad Trophy.

  “There,” Treece said, and “Yikes.”

  She was looking at Denis’s face. And then everyone was looking at Denis’s face, in the light for the first time in a couple of beatings.

  “Pretty bad?” Denis asked.

  The eye had coagulated into bold concentric circles of red, yellow and black. The bruises from the boning and scrapes from the bushes provided a muted backdrop for other dramatically battered facial features: the nose a magenta bloom with rusty crust around the nostrils; the lower lip a fat purple sausage split open on the right.

  “Not that bad,” Beth said.

  “Better than dead,” said Rich.

  “Your lip looks great,” Treece said. “That stupid cunt Cheryl paid like two grand to have that done to her lips.”

  “Yes,” said Cammy, softening her usual deadpan. “You look totally hot.”

  “A toast!” Treece said, lifting the World’s Greatest Dad Trophy. “You know what’s weird? I didn’t give him this.”

  Everybody grabbed a drinking container; Denis, not fast enough, got the Titty Mug.

  “To…,” Treece said, thinking. “I know: Here’s to the nights we felt alive!”

  Beth touched her pineapple to Denis’s ceramic nipple.

  “Ching.”

  She chugged her shot.

  “I’m going out for a smoke.”

  With a tilt of her head, she bid Denis to follow. Denis, as always, followed, adding one last brushstroke to his chiaroscuro portrait of Beth Cooper, Girl in My Head.

  “She smokes.”

  BETH DANGLED HER LEGS off the end of the dock, lighting a cigarette. Denis sat down next to her.

  “No cancer statistics, please.”

  Every eight seconds, someone in the world dies from tobacco use.

  Every minute, ten million cigarettes are sold.

  There are 599 government-approved additives for tobacco, including chocolate, vanilla, prune juice, dimethyltetrahydrobenzofuranone and “smoke flavor.”

  Tobacco companies have also been adding ammonia, arsenic, formaldehyde and mercury to their cigarettes to help achieve that great taste.

  A 1998 study showed that smoking significantly reduces the size of the smoker’s erect penis.

  Smokers fart more than nonsmokers.

  “Oh,” Denis said. “I don’t really know any…” He slapped a mosquito on his forearm.

  Beth blew out a stream of carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and forty-three known carcinogens.

  “I always think the full moon is so pretty.”

  The moon, hanging just above the water, was waning gibbous with 93 percent of its visible disk illuminated. The technical full moon had been Friday. But it was, Denis agreed, pretty: golden.

  “It’s the Honey Moon,” he said. “The first moon of June is called that. It’s where honeymoon comes from, because people used to get married at the summer solstice, which is June twenty-first this year.”

  “It’s huge,” Beth said.

  “That’s an optical illusion. It only looks larger when it’s close to the horizon. The prevailing theory, used to be, was that it’s a Ponzo illusion, that we see it as bigger in context to the objects around it, but that’s been discredited. There’s a couple intriguing alternatives, but nothing proven.”

  “You know everything, Denis Cooverman.”

  Denis Cooverman was back.

  “Not everything. No, no. There’s things I don’t know. Multiple things.”

  “Here’s something you don’t know,” Beth said, sucking in some early menopause. “If a girl tells you the moon is beautiful, or that it seems really big, you know what you say?”

  “Not what I said, I assume.”

  She blew out secondhand smoke rings.

  “You don’t say anything. You put your arm around her.”

  Was Beth suggesting—

  “Just something for future reference.”

  “Thanks,” Denis said. “I’ll remember that.” He slapped his thigh. “For future reference.”

  “SAY ALLO TO MY LEETLE FREN…”

  Rich was u
sing the rifle from the mantel as a prop for his one-night-only one-man show.

  “Pacino, Scarface, ’82, DePalma…” The attribution was hurried and sloppy, an indication that he did not chug vodka often. He repositioned the gun, switched the accent.

  “Hasta la vista, baby—Schwarzenegro, T2, ’91, Cameron Crowe.”

  Treece and Cammy sat on the leopard, calf and sheepskin couch, passing the bottle back and forth. Treece giggled maniacally; Cammy chortled unironically.

  Rich held the gun straight up, bowed his legs and thrust back his shoulders. He placed a hand over one eye and swaggered his shoulders.

  “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!—John Wayne, True Grit, ’69, directed by some guy.”

  Cammy guffawed.

  Treece fell off the couch. “Uh-oh,” she squealed, “I’m peeing!”

  “It’s not that funny,” said Rich, clearly rattled by this level of positive feedback.

  “It’s funny,” said Treece, presumably no longer peeing, “because you…you—”

  “What?” Rich snapped. “Because I’m gay, or so you think? You think incorrectly.”

  Cammy smiled, almost kindly. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

  “Oh, like you know Shakespeare.”

  “Queen Gertrude to Hamlet, act three, scene two.” Then, in perfect mimicry: “1602, William Shakespeare, or possibly Edward de Vere.”

  Rich fell a tiny bit in love.

  “Just because we’re beautiful, it doesn’t mean we’re stupid,” Cammy said.

  “Yeah,” Treece added.

  THE HONEY MOON MELTED into the lake. Beth smoked, and Denis swatted.

  “Careful what you wish for, huh?”

  “Huh?” Denis scratched his neck.

  “So…still love me?”

  “What?”

  “Now that you know me. Am I everything you ever masturbated to?”

  “No. I never…not to you.”

  That was such a lie.

  Beth took a long drag, leaving a silence for Denis to fill with a truthful answer to her question.

  “You’re different than I expected,” he answered accurately. “I mean, you’re not—”

  “Perfect.”

  Beth Cooper was like a Persian rug, her imperfections proof that God exists. Unfortunately, that last vodka shot had knocked out Denis’s metaphor center, and he was on his own.

  “Not perfect, but better. You’re not…” He smacked his forehead. “You’re still great, and it’s…real. You’re real. A real kind of real.” Denis stared down at his knees, and the five mosquitoes feasting there. “I’m not good at talking…about things.”

  “Denis Cooverman! You’re a debate state finalist!”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We were going to go cheer for you. Well, we joked about it. But anyway, you were talking about how real I am.”

  “Well, one example: you’re pretty, but not like a picture. And you have a…personality.”

  “There’s a compliment.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “I don’t get accused of that very often.”

  “You are. And you’re interesting, and you’re smart—”

  Beth put her fist to her throat. “I am not smart, Denis,” she hacked. “I’m kind of an idiot.” She laughed, and coughed.

  Denis was prepared to argue but had no contradictory facts at his disposal. Instead he itched. Beth puffed her cigarette, coughed a couple more times, and puffed again.

  A few seconds passed like nothing.

  “You’re a lot of fun.”

  Beth laughed. “This is your idea of fun?”

  Denis looked at her, the unswollen parts of his face forming an expression of excruciating sincerity.

  “All my memories from high school are from tonight.”

  Beth looked away.

  “You need to get out more.”

  21.

  THE SEX PART

  FUCK ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW.

  HEATHER CHANDLER

  INSIDE THE CABIN, something was happening, and Rich suspected the worst. As if through telepathy or subtle hand signals, Cammy and Treece had agreed to play some game, and not only were they not telling him what it was, Rich sensed the game they were playing was him.

  Cammy sashayed up, revealing for the first time that she had hips, took a long suck on the vodka bottle, and handed it to him.

  “So, hetero-boy,” she said with, if this is possible, sultry sarcasm, “if you’re so not gay, why so un-chubby in the shower?”

  “I was just being cool.” He took a big swig of vodka to underline this. “And it was uncool of you to notice.”

  “And you pushed Treece away when she tried to service you in the car…”

  “I did?” Treece asked, simply curious. “That sounds like me.” And then realizing the grievous insult to her reputation, “Yeah, what is wrong with you? I’m really good at that! I’m known for that!”

  “You were asleep. So that was me being cool, once again.”

  “No seventeen-year-old boy is that cool,” Cammy said.

  “I am that cool,” Rich disagreed, and then lost interest in that subject. He picked up the bag he had dropped earlier.

  “¿Quien quieres las snaquitas?”

  “You know, Rich,” Cammy said. “The movie quotes, the bad Spanish. Not working. Too many shticks.”

  “It is kind of not ideal,” Treece agreed, “from a branding point of view. Unless you only quoted movies in Spanish. And there’s like, what, five of those.”

  Rich unwrapped a Suzy Q, considering the criticism. He sat between the girls on the couch.

  “Which shtick do you like better?”

  “Ooh, that’s tough,” Cammy said.

  Rich shoved the Suzy Q in his mouth and bit it in half.

  Cammy chuckled.

  “You, Richard Munsch, have never been with a woman.”

  “Whuh?” Rich said, creamy lipped.

  “I NEVER BOUGHT BEER BEFORE. I never went on a joyride, I mean, a reckless one; was never in a car accident; never, well, I’ve been beaten up, but never with that many spectators; never broke in anywhere; never skinny-dipped, and I almost did, I was going to; never eluded the authorities before…”

  “Never sniffed a girl’s panties before?”

  “I did not.”

  “You were down there a long time.”

  “I closed my eyes and held my breath. That’s how I lost consciousness.” He scratched his cheek.

  “Well,” Beth said, lighting another cigarette, “sounds like I really popped your cherry tonight.”

  Denis did not want to talk about his cherry.

  “You know, even if your grades and SATs aren’t amazing, you could still go to a good college. You could get a cheerleading scholarship.”

  “A cheerleading scholarship?”

  “They have cheerleading scholarships. Not at Northwestern. But there isn’t anything to cheer at Northwestern anyway.”

  Beth exhaled. She sounded a little tired.

  “Denis, it’s nice you’re watching out for me, but look: I’m not even that good of a cheerleader. You, you’re going to go on and become a doctor and cure cancer or whatever new diseases there are, but this, this is about it for me.”

  Beth seemed so matter-of-fact, so resigned.

  “I know high school wasn’t that great for you.”

  “No,” Denis said. “It was, some of it was…The last eight hours: pretty fantastic.”

  “I know about all the swirlies, and wedgies and all the nicknames…”

  “What nicknames?” Denis asked. “I know about Penis.”

  Beth chewed her cigarette. “Here’s the thing. High school was really great for me. I had a great, great time. But now that’s over. Everything from here on out is going to be…ordinary.”

  Denis couldn’t believe that, wouldn’t accept that. “You’re not ordinary. You’re beautiful.”

  “I may be pretty, but not
enough to make a living at it. Except maybe in porn.”

  The mere thought of this gave Denis the creeps, and wood.

  “I’m not doing porn, Denis.”

  “Oh. Good. It’s a limited field.”

  “Besides, I’m going to get fat.”

  “You won’t get fat.”

  “I’ll have to introduce you to my mom.”

  Denis knew enough about obesity and genetics to argue against, and for, Beth’s proposition. Instead, he sat there, slapping and scratching, and thinking about what she had said. He had never looked at his life the way Beth described it, as promising. It was obvious and true, but Denis had always been too caught up in immediate terrors and humiliations to look forward to anything; even his obsessive long-term planning was mired in worry over whether it was currently on schedule. And Denis had never given much thought to Beth’s life—her real life as opposed to the one he had constructed for the two of them (and even this life was more a matter of moments and scenes than a fully articulated existence). What Beth said about her own life was pessimistic but not inaccurate. Her family, her finances—she was always at that shoe store—her academic credentials, none of it augured well for the kind of future that guidance counselors talk about. Beth would do fine, Denis had no doubt, but her life was unlikely to get better than it was right now. That Beth knew and accepted this broke Denis’s heart, and impressed the hell out of him.

  It occurred to him: I’m the idiot.

  “You know, Beth,” he said, “for someone who claims to not be smart—”

  Beth tossed her cigarette in the lake. “You wanna mess around?”

  “You and me?”

  “I’m not gonna ask twice.”

  Denis was an idiot, but not that much of an idiot.

  He kissed her.

  She kissed him, right on his swollen, ruptured lip.

  “Ow,” Denis said.

  “Ooh,” Beth said, kissing an unbruised patch of his cheek. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Denis said. “It’s a good ow.”

  And it was.

  Sweetest memory

  Sweetest memory

  QAJE, THE GORGEOUS QUADRA-RACIAL SINGER who had once been or still was a man, filled the cabin with the kind of sensuous jazz-inflected pop that grown-ups like to pork to.