by Jill Malone
“It’s different from what I’d imagined—nearly empty, really.”
“I’m not a collector.”
“Not of things anyway.”
He grinned at me. I handed him a beer from the fridge, unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off, the sleeves catching on his wrists. We edged backwards toward the futon but collapsed onto the floor by the kitchen table instead, his pants peeling away like skin from a mango. I wiped my face on his shirt, mopped it across his body—our skin slick with intention. My body: a slide for desire. We dragged through the room, tumbling candles, Latin texts, CD cases, attempting to excavate each other’s body as if to recover something precious.
“Don’t move your hands,” he said, his hips punching into me.
He rolled me onto my stomach, pinned my arms behind my back and struck me—a quick slap. My impulse to laugh quelled by the second slap, the third; his palm hit repeatedly in the same place, until the skin numbed and burned, until I bit into my lip to keep from screaming, until my head dropped forward and he pushed into me deep enough to taste.
Something was agreed to that night, something decided, and Nick left knowing he’d return, knowing that now I wanted him to. As I ran a bath, I thought about my routine, all’s well meeting with Dr. Adams earlier that week. Before the meeting, I hadn’t bothered to reflect on the tremendous fiscal strain throughout the university, its effect on our department, and particularly on Dr. Adams. After the discovery of my mother’s journals, I’d become obsessed with adapting her methodology to my second-year course, and in my enthusiasm I told Dr. Adams, imprudently and at length, that the prescriptive nature of the current course, the unvarying, unutterable boredom of the curriculum, were impediments to the study of Latin at U.H.—impediments easily overcome with a bit of ingenuity. She’d laid her pen down deliberately on her desk, fiddled with a steaming cup of tea, and finally glared at me:
“And what do you propose, Dr. Elliot?”
“I think a little variation to the lessons—something besides routine grammar and translation exercises—would really invigorate the students. The course can be rigorous without being dull. What if we had them perform a play, or even write one? It would be exciting to put Latin to practice, wouldn’t it?”
Dr. Adams took a sip of tea, arched an eyebrow, and said wryly:
“Dr. Elliot, I don’t think you are purposely imperceptive, so I will only comment that I can’t afford any dissent in this department at present. We are facing a real crisis—not a theoretical one—at this university and crises are not the time for experimentation. Your role is to ensure the students perform at the eminent level we have come to expect from this department. If this were a time of plenty, Dr. Elliot, an exploration of alternative teaching techniques might be appropriate. As it is, however, this is rapidly becoming a time of famine, and I refuse to let any of us—staff or students—starve.”
Even in the hallway I felt the wariness and displeasure that had fluttered between us like moths in the evening.
XXIX.
At Duke’s Canoe Club, two corpulent Samoans, a guitarist and bassist, in bright red luau shirts played contemporary Hawaiian music, their harmonies sailing into evening outside the open-air bar in the high octaves of a boy choir, their fat fingers fluid on the fret boards through frequent solos. Drinking scotch, Emily and I sat on the outer edge of the bar where the music faded to background noise and Diamond Head loomed in the darkness beyond us like the hull of a great ship.
She’d called me at work, her voice pitched higher than usual, her sentences jostled together like train cars, to invite me to Duke’s for drinks. We hadn’t been out together since I’d returned from my weekend in Maui.
On our third round, I finally relaxed enough to look at her: hair pulled into a precarious bun, jabbed with chopsticks; purple lavalava halfway up her thighs; scar painfully white against her tanned face; her brown eyes glazed with alcohol and excitement actually meeting mine for the first time in months. Still gorgeous.
“So I have a plan,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Body piercing.”
She paused, eyebrows raised, mouth agape, expecting me to appreciate the scope and grandeur of this plan. I grinned at her.
“Can you tell me anything more?”
“Nipple piercing.”
“Ah. It’s starting to click now.”
“What do you think?”
“For you?”
She nodded. I thought about her nipples.
“They’ll be off center.”
Emily laughed, head tossed back, throat exposed like a displaying bird.
“Aren’t you afraid of the pain?” I asked.
She held her glass up, “That’s what the scotch is for.” “You’re doing this tonight?”
“We’re doing it.”
“I don’t want my nipples pierced.”
“No, but you’re coming with me. I can’t go alone. You have to be there to hold my hand.”
I almost asked why Ray the bartender wasn’t going, but the selfish part of me didn’t want to know. It pleased me to think I was the one she wanted.
“OK. So where do we go?”
“Hole Punch, where I got my bellyring done. I made an appointment for nine with Jai. We have time for two more rounds.”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“You probably shouldn’t now.”
This seemed logical, amazingly, and I continued on my shot diet until we left (slightly wobbly) for Hole Punch. Along Kalakaua Avenue the storefronts were a carnival: Japanese tourists in garish fluorescent colors, loud tinny music, cheap T-shirt racks draped with plastic-flower leis; the obese haole family wearing visors and sunburns gathered around the obligatory white guy shouldering a parrot for tourist photos, as though parrots were indigenous to Hawaii. Ten minutes from Duke’s, the shop was on the second floor of a Samoan-styled bamboo building, shielded from the neon strip by a palm tree studded walkway.
Inside the shop a longhaired chick lounged behind the counter, four silver hoops through her lips like fangs. Her halter-top revealed the tattooed body of a dragon swiveling its body up her chest and over her shoulders. The walls were cluttered with photos of various body piercings: the ball piercing with or without chain, the nipple rings, the penis stud. And ring displays of gold and surgical steel: small, medium, circus-sized.
“Jai.”
“The belly looks good.”
Emily nodded, waved at me by way of introduction, “My support.”
Dragon-girl gave me a look, and then told Emily, “$160. Cash only.”
Emily gave her $200: “I want the silver hoops with the blue stud—12 gauge.”
“I’ll measure your nipples to make sure 12 gauge will work.”
We followed her through to a sparse room with a single yellow table and more photos. The dragon continued over her shoulders and plunged down her back; what appeared to be a tongue flicked beneath her left armpit.
“Shirt off; stand straight.”
Emily stripped her shirt and handed it to me. Her tits looked shockingly white compared to her tanned surf lines. Jai measured the circumference of each nipple and nodded.
“12s will work. So, your nipples have to be hard. I can do it, or you can.”
After Emily pinched her nipples hard, Jai marked each one on both sides.
“OK?”
Emily checked the placement and nodded.
“Have a seat, I’ll put the clamps on and grab a needle.”
Dragon-girl swathed Emily’s nipples with betadine before attaching the clawlike clamp. I started to feel distressed. Emily’s fingers cinched my hand and a tightness passed across her features as Jai maneuvered the needle into position.
“OK, it’s important to keep breathing.”
It was like a birth scene. I kept thinking I should be coaching her to relax her jaw and make open-throated sounds. Jai thrust the needle through and stoppered it with a piece of cork. Emily had made a low grow
l, then gone mellow.
“Breathe,” I said helpfully.
My fingers were blue where Emily clenched them.
“You ready for the second one?”
Jai went on without waiting for an answer, repeating the thrust and stopper. Several seconds later, Emily gasped, “Ow!” in a surprised way, as if the pain had finally climbed through the haze of scotch to her brain and started kicking her nerve sensors. Focusing for the first time, she looked up at me: “Are they bleeding?”
I nodded. A couple of streams of blood slipped down her torso, and Jai used a swab to wipe them away.
“Em? You have to breathe, OK?”
“I had a fainter in here last night,” Jai said. “Tongue ring. He looked fine and then he fainted in the doorway there. You can still see the blood on the doorjamb.”
Crouched beside Emily, I put my hand on the back of her neck and leaned my face against hers.
“Em, you have to breathe, baby. It’s almost over. The hardest part is over.” I looked up at Jai, “Right?”
“Yeah, we just have to thread the rings and seal them. A quick tug you won’t even notice.”
She pulled a ring through the hollow of each needle and closed each ring with a blue ball.
“So, you’re looking at a six-month healing curve. Use betadine to clean the piercings at least three times a day. I hope you brought a bra.”
She hadn’t, so I slipped mine off and helped Emily secure it. Her nipples looked raw and grotesque, still viscous with blood. Wrapped in her shirt, she huddled toward the door.
Jai grabbed my arm, “Help her get some ice on those. Makes everything easier.”
Outside beneath the palm trees, I steadied Emily, and looked her over. Completely sober now, I’d realized that I had no idea how we were supposed to get home.
“Should I hail a cab?”
“That really fucking hurt.”
“It certainly looked that way.”
“How do they look?”
“Too early to tell.”
“I want to see them.”
“You should wait until I can get you home.”
“You have to help me with this shirt.”
She squirmed like a child from my grasp.
“Be reasonable. Wait until I can get you home. Just let me hail a cab.”
She stopped struggling, leaned over, and hurled against the nearest palm tree. Straightening slowly, she spat and took the first deep breath in forty minutes. A street lamp blinked out.
“Jesus, that fucking hurt. I parked the truck at Duke’s. You can toss your bike in the back.”
“I’m driving.”
“I fucking hope so, honey.”
That night, all the high school kids on the island were cruising Waikiki in their tricked-out Japanese sedans, and low-rider paint-brushed trucks. We sat in traffic at every light, creeping along while the pedestrians outpaced us, and the hookers stalked past in their pantyhose and heels.
“I came closer to loving you than anyone,” she said.
The jeep next to us, packed with five blond navy guys, swayed as they leaned out to harass the hookers. A six-foot gumball machine took up half the sidewalk outside the truck window, where three small boys had gathered as if in homage. We’d drunk enough scotch that night to last a crew through to Antarctica. I thought of her butchered nipples.
“Well, that’s something.”
“It might have been. It might have been something.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Don’t change the subject. I may never be able to say this again.”
She edged across the bench seat so that I’d have to shift into her leg if we ever moved from this stall. What good would this conversation do us now?
“Fuck, Em, maybe you shouldn’t.”
“You’re in love with him?”
“Who’s changing the subject now?”
“All this time and you’re still afraid to talk to me.”
“Don’t try to bait me. I’m not afraid.”
“You’re in love with him?”
“I doubt it.”
“But you were in love with me?”
“Yes.”
“And you weren’t comfortable with me seeing Ray?”
“No.”
“Even though we talked about it beforehand?”
“I thought you should be able to do whatever you wanted—I still think that. My heart just isn’t as rational as my mind.”
We drove through two lights, then stalled again. Another obese family trudged past, wearing thick-soled thongs and chartreuse shorts. I wanted to punch the horn, drive around the coconut trees on the sidewalk, and get the fuck out of Waikiki and this truck and this conversation.
She laid her hand on the stick shift, swaying it back and forth in neutral.
“It felt like you might never trust me,” she said.
“I trusted you.”
“Not enough.”
“Em, there’s no point in doing this, really. It’s been a tough night.”
Traffic picked up again and we fled through the city, snaking between low-riders and sedans, blitzing yellow lights, until finally we cruised into the compact neighborhoods of Manoa. She’d left her hand on the stick shift, her arm moving in a jerky rhythm with mine. I pulled into the carport and cut the engine.
We sat in the dark cab and I understood that if I leaned over and kissed her, careful not to brush against her chest, that she’d kiss me back. Her wide mouth like a place of extinction I kept returning to, looking for evidence, for precedent, for some archaeological proof of my existence.
“I’ve been so angry with you,” she said.
“I know.”
“You were my only secret.”
Reaching across her face, I smoothed her cheekbones with my thumb, sketching her nose, eyebrows, the soft curve of her eyes down her jaw line to her throat. She’d closed her eyes and tilted her head. I pulled the chopsticks out and let her hair tumble, sweeping it back from her face until my hand caught and I stopped, waiting for her eyes to open, for her to look at me.
Leaned over her, I brushed the outside of her thigh so that she trembled into me, her mouth wide like hope as my hand skirted higher. Even then I might have withdrawn, terrified of her new wounds and my old ones, wanting for each of us something better than this—something nobler than a drunken fuck in the cab of a truck. Her eyes opened then in the darkness, and I kissed her—went on kissing her until my mouth nearly bled.
XXX.
I’d been carrying one of my mother’s journals in my bag for nearly a month before I finally caught Delvo in the office at noon. Amidst escalating uncertainty about the strike, she’d started teaching an afternoon class—rudimentary composition three afternoons a week—at the Women’s Correctional Center in addition to the evening classes she taught there. How Delvo could brave a prison when hospitals paralyzed her with terror didn’t calculate for me, but certainly these were lean times. Hair frazzled, rasping heavily, she greeted me with an eager embrace—I tried not to recoil when she inadvertently pressed the marks on my back—as if we had been apart for years. She wore a rather nasty fuchsia stretch top with her blue jeans.
“It’s my day off from teaching at the prison. I feel like an actual human being. Next week we begin a new session of composition classes—the three-paragraph essay. It’s pure joy, I promise you. Pure joy.”
I handed her my mother’s journal, opened to the page I wanted translated. She eyed the script assiduously as if I might have presented her with some rare black market forgery.
“How accomplished is your Japanese?” I asked.
“My reading is quite good, my understanding more so. My pronunciation is dreadful. Wait, I need my glasses.”
After rummaging in her bag, she put on the thick lenses and began to read the page before her.
“Beautiful script here. Beautiful. God is half altar, half say.”
“Yes, I can read that part at the bottom. It’s in English.”<
br />
“The Kanji symbol next to the English bit is the Japanese word for god, which is, in fact, composed of the symbol for altar and the symbol for say. It seems to be unrelated to the text above, however.”
I moved behind her desk and watched over her shoulder as she ran her finger across each line of text. My mother’s Kanji characters were drawn in the ancient, fluid style, the words themselves art.
“Hand me a piece of paper, Elliot. Yes, I know this. This is a poem. It’s a translation of a poem.”
She translated the first stanza into English, and began on the second. Muttering in a deep, random grunt as her pen halted repeatedly across the piece of paper. I watched as the poem took shape on the page before us.
“The title is Going Blind,” she said triumphantly. “Do you recognize it?”
I read the first two translated stanzas and shook my head. “No?” Delvo shook her head sadly, “And to think you were educated by the Irish.”
“Is the poet Irish?”
“Good Lord, no. This poem is by Rilke.”
She continued translating and finally arrived at the last stanza. I mouthed the words as they appeared:She followed slowly, and she needed time, as though some impediment slowed her way; and yet: as though, once she was past it, she would no longer merely walk, but fly.
“This is intriguing, Elliot. Where did you find this journal?”
“It belonged to my mother. She used it for lesson plans and reading notes.”
“Quite a skilled translation. She taught languages?”
“English, Spanish, Latin, Tagalog, and Japanese.”
Delvo took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and smiled at me.
“So you come by this naturally,” she said. “That is a great relief to me. I hate the idea of drastic leaps in evolution.”
“Oh, for Christ sake. You don’t, either.”
“I do, I assure you. Sometimes when I’m teaching my class at the prison—these young women who can’t conjugate verbs in their native language or spell rudimentary words—I feel the distinction of education keenly. But radical evolution skews all of our notions of progress. Random genius is one thing, but a division is growing—a very real division, Elliot—between those who conceive a ritualized world of guns, gangs, and exploitation, and those who craft language and mathematics in search of truth and beauty. How long before the rituals swallow up the craft and we relive medieval times?”