“Isuzu really saidthat ?” I say. “That I’m like a god?”
“Well, like Jesus, anyway,” Robert says. “You know, being her savior and all.”
I smile in spite of myself. Maybe…
“So, Robert,” Rose says, picking up the slack left by yours truly, “any idea where Suzi picked up the Karen Carpenter routine?”
“Excuse me?”
Rose—my angel, my tombstone—delicately shoves a good part of one hand down her throat in demonstration.
“Oh,” Mr. Little says, apparently feeling even more like his name than just a few seconds ago. “Um,” he ums. “Well,” he wells.
“Um, well,” Rose echoes. “Yes?”
“I guess it was kinda me, I guess.”
Rose’s smile is sutured in place, and I can see what I didn’t see before: that she worried that maybeshe was the source of Isuzu’s bull-something. The hinge of her jawbone shifts as if chewing, and her lids drop over the black marbles of her eyes—a willed, deliberate blink, accepting the new information, sealing it away.
“And you guess thatwhy ?” Rose asks, opening her eyes on the last word, aiming all that shiny blackness at our little guest.
“She started it,” Robbie says. “She asked what it was like, knowing in advance you’re gonna be vamped. I just told her what I went through, is all.”
I look at Rose; Rose looks at me. Isuzu has asked both of us similar questions over the years. Like: What would we have done if we’d known in advance? Followed by: What did we miss most about being mortal? She asked the same questions over and over—in part, I think, because our answers kept changing. I remember saying once that I missed the feel of resting my head on a cool pillow—missed being able to register that difference in temperature, no matter how fleetingly. Other times, it was sweating. Other times, it was smoking. Or a good dump, a good piss. There was food—obviously, there was food—but I mixed it up with other stuff, too, like sunshine, and birds, eyes that saved you the trouble of confessing what you couldn’t put into words. Time, as something that mattered. Death, as a motivator.
“If you askedme,” Isuzu says, suddenly appearing there in our midst, “which no one’s bothered to, by the way. But if you asked me, I’d say all this talk about where I got the idea from shows a pretty low regard for my ability to think for myself.” She pauses to reveal all her blunt teeth, gritted together in a forced smile. “But what the hell do I know?”
“Oh, hey there, Suzi-Q,” Robbie says, slithering an arm around Isuzu’s shoulder and pulling her in for a quick, fangless peck on the cheek. “We were just talking about you.”
Isuzu looks at me and crosses her still-crossable eyes—it’s just you and me, Marty, just you and me—before returning Robbie’s perfunctory kiss.
“So I heard,” she says. “Did you hear me?”
“Of course not,” Robbie says, giving her a bear hug that lifts Isuzu off her feet. “You know I live to ignore you.”
And then—I swear to God—hewinks. Atme.
“He just winked at me,” I say.
“Figures,” Isuzu says, still airborne in Robbie’s embrace. “He winks at everybody.” Pause. “He even winks in his email. You know, that semicolon followed by the parenthesis? I think he averages about two or three per message.”
“I donot,” Robbie insists, and then winks at me again. After which, Isuzu winks. And then Robbie winks. And then they kiss an inch or two deeper than a peck, Isuzu still in the air, her legs folded up and back. I get uncomfortable. Rose notices me getting uncomfortable and can’t stop herself from smiling, not that she’s trying very hard.
Finally, Isuzu and Robbie undock, disengage, decouple as he lowers her back to the floor. And then they just stand there in their relative youth—smiling, waiting, daring me to say something parental.
Me, I’d like to return to the subject of puking, and where the idea came from. Because, if you askedme —which no one has, by the way—but if you asked me, I’d say looking at that happy loving couple standing in front of me right now, yeah, that should do it. Plenty of gastrointestinal inspiration, right there.
But before I can confess to any of this, or anything else equally incriminating, I find myself in the not unwelcome position of having a tongue lodged firmly in my cheek. Not my own, of course, but Rose’s prehensile, curlable darter, squirming around, underneath and over my own. Our lips lock with our vampire suction on high, our cheeks cave in, except for here and there where our wrestling tongues push back.
Take that!
I can’t usually read minds, but I can read Rose’s just now, and that’s what she’s thinking. I know this because I’m thinking it, too.
Isuzu and Robbie clap politely, the flats of their fingers tap-tapping the opposite palm.
Robbie: “Touché.”
Isuzu: “Bravo.”
Tit has apparently met tat, and now it’s smiles all around. Followed by bridge-partner glances, shoe inspections, the silence of nobody knowing whose turn it is, or what to say next.
Finally:
“Hey,” Isuzu says, “how many vampires does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
We of the pointy teeth shrug.
“None,” she says, smiling her blunt smile. “Vampires prefer the dark.”
We of the pointy teeth show our pointy teeth in polite grins that say:
Ain’t that the truth…
One of the problems with our vampire-ruled world is we’ve never come up with a social catalyst that works as well as dinner used to. There’s no main course to compliment, no aromas to trigger anecdotes, no seating arrangements planned for minimal or optimal mischief. Sitting around drinking blood just seems pathetic by comparison. You’re finished before you even start, and then it’s just a bunch of suckers, sitting around the table, excuseless, waiting for someone to suggest we take it to another room, at which point the pairing and cliquing starts and the whole “Let’s all get together around a table” thing sort of falls apart.
There’s cards, I suppose. A lot of vampires use poker as an excuse for getting together, but it’s not the same thing. Dinner is—was—about communal nourishment; cards are about winning and losing. Plus, Isuzu’s never really taken to card games other than her favorite, slapjack. And the image of four adults all hovering over a pile of cards, their right hands raised like they’re getting sworn in or something…well, a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving it ain’t. For one thing, waiting on the jack is a conversation killer if there ever was one. And without the conversation, what’s the point?
The alternative I’ve come up with is bad movies. Bad, vampirically incorrect movies. On DVD. Bad because, well, good movies are good for conversation only after they’re done, but a bad movie can’t help but be improved by talking through it. My selection for meet-the-parents night isDracula, the Bela Lugosi version. Isuzu, Rose, and I have laughed our way through it a dozen times already, and I’m counting on the count to give me a peek at thereal Robert Little.
Bad movies can act as barometers to the soul. Will the other person laugh at the same dumb things? Will they go for the easy joke? Will they laugh when you spring the sincerity-test joke—the one that’snot-funny on purpose, to flush out the fakers and kiss-ups? Will they make some inspired observation, or go inexplicably teary-eyed, connecting some nothing moment on-screen to some something moment in their lives? Will hidden depths be revealed, or true shallowness plumbed?
Or maybe they’ll just sit politely throughout the movie, knowing they’re being watched and watching us back in return, letting out little laughs for those things only one of us finds funny, and bigger laughs for those moments more broadly agreed to as laughable.
Like: the little pause between “drink” and “wine.”
Like: the dry-ice fog, the flip-floppy bat on a wire, the cobwebs, candelabra, and cape.
Like: the inevitable peg-o’-my-heart moment.
And then there are the bits we’ve developed for ourselves, like shouting “Renfield!
” all together whenever Renfield appears on screen.
Me: “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”
Isuzu: “Only one? Ido apologize…”
Rose: “Ba-rump bump.”
Robbie flinches the first time we do it, but catches on, just like he catches on to our habit of adding “bator,” sotto voce, every time Renfield uses the word “master.”
And then Robbie shows me something I wasn’t expecting.
“Oooo,” he says, all on his own, “that’s gonna leave a mark,” winning giggles from Isuzu and Rose, but for me…For me, he’s done the one thing he really shouldn’t have—reminded me of those scars on my little girl’s thighs. I look over at him, over there, on the other end of the couch—beaming at having scored points with two-thirds of the audience, twining his fingers between Isuzu’s fingers, both their hands resting in her lap, a quick squeeze, and a quick squeeze back.
I click off the video and it goes back to regular TV. And what’s this? Familiar eyes in a younger face, beaming, beaming, beaming. Is it reallythat time already? And there they go, those familiar eyes in their older face—caught, snagged, utterly wrapped up in their younger incarnation, there on the screen, coming to us “live,” in quotes, from some safe somewhere, or so the story goes.
Oops.
Oops, and…see?
Not that it’s premeditated—just because I thought about it in advance, this little peek into the shallow heart of Little Bobby Little. Just because I imagined his elbows propped on his knees and his chin plopped on his fists, staring into his younger mirror with undisguised affection. Just because I imagined the disgusted glance Isuzu tosses at him, and its gradual turning into a disgusted stare as the seconds tick by and my little girl gets increasingly ticked. Just because I imagined it exactly the way it really played out—that’s no reason for saying I planned it.
I’m just a good imaginer.
A good imaginer who liked the way his life was going before Little Bobby Little took a big bite out of it.
“Robert?” Isuzu says. “Robert, honey, we can all leave if you’d like to whip it out for a crank.”
“Huh?” Robbie says, turning reluctantly away from the screen.
“We’ve talked about this,” Isuzu says, grabbing the remote, clicking off the object of Robbie’s affection. “It’s not an attractive side.”
“You’re right,” Robbie says. “I’m sorry. It’s just…” He pauses. “I remember this one. May I?” he asks, palm out.
Isuzu reluctantly surrenders the remote, her whole body warning that whatever he’s remembering better be good.
“Thanks.” Robbie clicks the TV back on. “See that shadow? See how I keep looking away from it?”
We nod.
“That’s the director. It was a puppy that time. I’ve got my Snoopy sweater on, so that means it was a puppy.”
“What was a puppy?” Rose asks.
Isuzu, I can tell, already knows—has known, in an abstract way, for a while, but hasn’t put the information to the actual face, recorded as it was happening. Me, I’ve already skipped ahead a few moves, to the part where I lose this round.
“My incentive for being cute,” Robbie says.
“They promised you a puppy for being cute?” Rose says.
“No,” Robbie says, and there it goes—Isuzu’s hand is already cupping his shoulder. “No,” Robbie repeats, resting his hand on top of Isuzu’s. “They promised me adead puppy fornot being cute.” He pauses, staring into the screen, waiting.
“There,” he says. “That twitch? That’s me, not being cute enough.”
The “again”—when it comes—comes out a little strangled. Wholly apropos—I’m guessing—under the circumstances.
Before I joined the service, I met a goofy girl named Dorothy. Dotty-Dot, the other boys called her—Dorothy LaMore-or-Less. She wore braces—that,apparently, was the crime that earned her the reputation for being undatable. That, and a laugh that contained no small amount of snorting. Me, I hadn’t signed up yet—hadn’t been whipped into shape, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Dumplingesque. Big-boned. Truth was, I was just too short for my appetite. Based on hunger alone, of course, I should have been banging my head against clouds.
Based on hunger alone, Dotty-Dot didn’t seem so undatable to me.
And so we did. And we did. Our dating was a furtive, secret thing, conducted in the shadows and in-between times. Before church, after church, pressed up against shaded bark, shaded brick, my tongue scraping over all that machinery and wire work, Dorothy sniffling, her nose running like she said it always did whenever she got excited. So I was fine with it, fine with the salty taste of snot in my mouth, because for a big-boned, too-short guy like me, that was about as close to making a woman come as I was likely to get for the foreseeable future. Later, in public, Dotty-Dot wore scarves to hide the little red blossoms dotty-dotting her neck, while I wore my shirt collar open for the whole world to see.
“None of your bee’s wax…”
“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell…”
“Loose lips…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jackie Parisi says, sucking so hard on a bottle of Coke, it actually pops when he pulls it away. “Loose lips suck dicks. But the question on the floor is whose ‘loose lips’ we talkin’ about? Fess up, Kowalski. Or you been playin’ with your mom’s ’Lectrolux again?”
I pull a zipper across my lips and shrug, after which Jackie Parisi gives me a black eye. Which I’m fine with—just like I’m fine with the purple blotches dotting my neck—because the shiner and the hickeys are all about the same thing: love, and its various price tags. Frankly, I can’t wait for Dot to ask about the how and why of my black eye, because the answer—defending her honor—well, hell, I can taste the snot already.
There’s another side of the black eye I don’t mind—the fact that it puts off for a few more weeks the thing Dot has been pressing me on lately. The coming-over-for-dinner thing. The meeting-her-folks thing.
“You don’t want ’em to think I’m some sort of juvenile delinquent, do you?” I say.
Dot’s lips part and then close, over and over, letting out little silvery brace glints like somebody sending out a distress signal. You can tell she’s not sure what she wants ’em to think. There’s a part of her inside that’s all squishy at the thought of other people knowing she’s got boys fighting over her. That’s the part that speaks in single-word sentences, like:
See?
Yes! (and)
Finally…
But there’s another side, too, one that’s sensibly afraid of bruises it hasn’t inflicted, regardless of the supposed nobility of their acquisition. “Yeah,” that side says, finally. “I guess you’re right,” it adds, sniffing once before pulling a sleeve across its nose.
“But once that heals,” Dot warns, smiling a cold, metallic smile that finishes the sentence.
And I nod, of course, like a good, secret boyfriend—already imagining what it might take to arrange for my next beating.
Ihaven’t thought about Dotty-Dot or the parents I never met in a decade’s worth of decades. But now, sitting next to my would-be daughter’s would-be beau, I can’t help thinking about that Buick grille of a smile, or of all the fists it took to put an ocean between me and her parents’ inevitable disapproval. Despite what I might think of him, despite what I might like to believe, the truth is, Robbie showed up. Something I never had the balls to do.
You’re a better man than I was, Robert Little. That’s what I should probably say, as the three of them sit there still mourning the offscreen death of some anonymous puppy, the quiet of the living room longing to be broken in some dramatic fashion.
But then I’d have to explain why, and I don’t really want to. For one thing, anecdotes about extreme emotional cowardice might make good fodder for a stand-up routine, but it’s really best not to share them with anyone you want to keep loving you. I know; I’ve tried; I’ve gone to bed alone.
So I decide to
give the nod in a subtler way.
“Suzi, could you…,” I begin, and before I can finish, all three heads have turned my way.
“What did you call me?” Isuzu asks.
“Suzi,” I say—all innocence.
Isuzu blinks her hold-nothing-back eyes.
“I know, I know,” I say. “I’m getting used to it. Thought I’d take it out for a spin.”
“Okay,” Isuzu says, a little dubious.
“Change happens,” I observe. “Change is good.”
“Change isgood ?” Rose echoes.
“Well, it’s okay,” I clarify.
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