As he reveled in the finality of his decision, the phone rang at the moment that he could’ve least cared what the voice on the other end had to say about his future.
MEI LING OPENED the door wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and faded jeans covered in damp streaks of clay.
“Ji Min told us all what happened.”
“Is she here?” he asked flatly.
“No.”
“May I come in?
“Yes.” She closed the door. “Yan Fang said you tried to continue something that started the night you came here for dinner.”
“And you believed her?”
“Well, no. But then Ji Min said you had sex with a girl one night in front of all these guys, and it sounded so unlike you, but it all added up to something, something I couldn’t make any sense of.” She sat on the couch, careful not to touch the fabric with her wet hands.
“We danced. I was very drunk that night at the bar, but I’m quite sure I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”
“And Yan Fang?”
“I didn’t start anything with her. Ever. You must know that.”
“I know you didn’t. I guess I knew it before.”
“You were upstairs when I knocked. What were you working on?” he asked.
“Nothing, really. I was fooling around, trying to make a plate, but I got bored with it. Too functional,” she replied.
“Show me,” he said, already leading the way upstairs.
The door was open, and Tetsuya noticed that the large white sheet that previously had covered the table was gone. All kinds of body parts were spread out on the table, like the recent findings of a mass grave during an archeological dig: a varicose thigh severed at a sharp angle, almost where one might imagine a short tube skirt had tightened its way around the flesh in a tourniquet; a pair of calves, one leaning toward the other, modestly; a foot in a perfect ballerina flex; the top of a bare head, lobotomized; a finger bent at the first joint and pointing down; and at the far end of the table, a lone breast, full and familiar in shape.
He saw an ill-formed plate on a work stool. It was bumpy around the middle and curved, wobbly, at the edges—a Frisbee perhaps or a large ashtray, something into which any clay piece easily could devolve. Mei Ling was undoubtedly an artist who needed a model; anyone could see that much.
“What’s the first part of me you noticed?” he asked quickly.
“Your arms,” she said. “Your strong arms.”
He took off his shirt slowly and encircled her hand around the peak of his biceps. “Do me,” he said, motioning toward a lump of fresh clay that lay next to the stool.
Mei Ling pulled his biceps toward her and tossed the plate onto a stained blanket in the corner of the room. She moved her hand up and down his arm, getting the feel of it, gripping it in a pressure of points. After she’d made some sense of it, she dipped her hands into a bowl of water and went after the clay as if Tetsuya weren’t there at all.
As he watched her work, he felt like he had, before this moment, only known a slight, unfocused, perhaps idealized, part of her. In the tapered light of the room, he finally saw something else beyond the shell he had worshiped. She seemed half caught in a searchlight, holding a rope and wanting to be tied to something—searching for an object to which she could devote her energy. Then she glanced up from the clay and stared at him discerningly, picking him apart with her eyes, separating the bones underneath the skin, from the muscle groups that connected in the fine maze that gave him shape. Baked and hardened to life, this was the piece of himself he’d leave behind.
The Gargoyles
THEY CAME UP with the names as the plane began taxiing down the runway. Sherry named herself Allura, uttering the name with a brief, smoky rasp that made the other two women draw closer to hear her. She had a pitted face with the signs of teenage acne along her cheeks and she emanated a mentholated smell, especially her hair.
Karen pulled one of her thick, graying dreadlocks to her lips like a microphone cord and whispered into her clenched hand in the rich, velvety voice of a late-night radio jockey, “Pheramona. You may now refer to me, ladies, as Pheramona.” Her laughter bubbled up from the pit of her stomach, then exploded with a vicious abandon. A flight attendant a couple rows ahead of them gripped a lap belt tightly as she modeled the use of its metal clasp, eyeing the women out of the corner of her eye. Another flight attendant, a handsome older man—a “steward” Karen might’ve been tempted to call him in another time—offered her a complimentary bottle of vodka. She felt like he might be treating her just a little better than the other passengers and she liked that. Certainly better than he did Sherry or even Lita whom men regularly followed around with a ravenous attention bordering on pathetic and rude, as if every other woman in the room were a potted plant or an extra-large traffic cone that was preventing access to her. “Here you go, sweetie,” the steward said with a wink.
Oh, he was gay. Karen was sure of it. Gay men loved her. They seemed to consider large black women to be their spiritual soul sisters or something. Oh, honey, we’ve both been held down, haven’t we, his eyes said to her. Here’s a little extra hooch to lubricate the way. An older couple across the aisle peered at the three of them with disdain; the wife creased and re-creased an already questionably bound paperback copy of The Thornbirds while her nervous husband studied the safety card. Karen noticed a young man peering over at them from several rows behind with a kind of hungry grin.
“What about me?” Lita asked, the only unknighted vixen among them. Her light pink jumpsuit clung to her curvy frame; it was the perfect traveling outfit. Karen patted Lita’s wheat-blonde bob and suggested some fairylike and rather unbecoming aliases: Pixetta, Pinky, Coybra, until finally settling, proudly, on Flirtatia. Lita repeated the name back to her, whispering it to herself at first like a giddy secret. Flirtatia. Then she said it louder, the name suddenly taking on a new sound, its own distinct meaning. Flirtatia. Sherry and Karen then chanted along with her until the new name had become a flotation device, lifting Lita out of her seat, knocking her inflight magazine and safety card to the lit aisle floor. The loose lap belt provided just enough give for her to arch her head forward, well over the row in front of her, and see the other passengers staring out windows and ready for takeoff, so that she might proudly proclaim herself.
“Flirtatia!” Lita screamed triumphantly while the other two women hollered and clapped from their seats, already buckled in. Karen poured herself another mini bottle of vodka on the rocks and then another for Lita, sloshing it on top of her watery orange juice.
A bald man seated in the row in front of them reached for the center console, searching for a button that might make all this stop.
THE THREE WOMEN worked together at a public relations firm downtown. Sherry and Karen sat at desks across from each other that flanked the entrance door. They had developed the habit of looking at the door whenever it opened, no matter who walked through and no matter what time of day it was. Karen would wrench her head away from her computer screen like a serpent, distressed and annoyed in a most affected way as if she wanted the person to clearly understand that they had just interrupted her most important work. Sherry would tilt her head from her monitor with a robotic click to meet Karen head-on like someone had just plugged her in, then she would flip around to stare as well at the intruder, less coldly, but with an equally questioning demeanor, her stare imposing silently, “Well, what do you want?” People in the office referred to them behind their backs as “the gargoyles.”
When Lita first walked into the office, the gargoyles had both thought she was maintenance or IT and treated her accordingly. She had, after all, done the impossibly stupid thing of dressing down for her first day of work. She wore baggy khaki slacks and some kind of a Payless boot, a cream waffle shirt that was too long in the arms and a silver balled chain like those used for displaying ID cards, yet there was nothing attached to it. She told Karen (who had looked up first as per their routine) that s
he was there to see Mr. Howell. They looked for a package, but she was only lugging around a purse with thick shoulder straps.
“And what business do you have with Mr. Howell?” asked Karen.
“I’m his new personal assistant.”
“The hell you are,” she muttered under her breath, but loud enough for Sherry to hear. The two women began staring her down, their eyes narrowing. “What are you wearing?”
“Clothes?” Lita said, the lilt in her voice turning the answer into a question.
“When were you supposed to start this morning?”
“Nine.”
“Good. It’s eight-thirty now. There’s just enough time for you to get something else to wear. I know a great place.” Karen wrote down the name of a salesgirl at a small boutique in their building. “Run along. Gigi will take good care of you.” If Lita were allowed to get through her to Mr. Howell looking like a common delivery woman, Karen would never have heard the end of it.
The two women watched as Lita quickly turned around and scurried out of the office, her little butt somehow pert even through the baggy pants. “Fuck her,” Karen spat.
“Yep,” Sherry agreed. She chewed on the cap of her ballpoint pen, all cracked and creased with spittle, then looked back at her monitor, but not before sharing a knowing glance with Karen. Fuck her, indeed.
•
LITA HAD THE one thing the gargoyles envied above all else and they could tell she had it right away. It wasn’t her youth or her apparent beauty they envied (although, looking back on it, Karen could’ve told Sherry that Lita had the kind of face that aged badly, a cute, perky cherub for a decade or so, if she was lucky, and then a slow descent into the face of a rabid chipmunk). No, it was nothing as obvious as that. What she had was a naïveté about her that seemed to almost guarantee upward mobility within their firm—an ingénue quality the two of them visibly lacked.
It wasn’t the cutthroats who advanced at this firm at all. The gargoyles had both shown their fangs once and no one had ever forgotten it. It was as if someone had taken a picture of them at the worst moment of their lives and then frozen it in time for all to see in perpetuity—there was no changing public opinion. The silent acquiescents were the ones who needed to be watched—those women who didn’t let you see the rungs on their ladders of ascension, those entrepreneurial acrobats, hurdling past Sherry and Karen, swinging with the greatest of ease into the positions that they deserved. They’d lost count of how many times they’d seen it happen: some entry-level pushpin walking into their office, flashing a little unassuming leg, bantering about with their quick, faultless wit and then plopping right down into the promotions that they deserved.
The last girl who’d come into the office, the reedy-legged and folksy Ramona, started out answering phones and coordinating meetings for the upper-level staff. Then one night two months into her new job, she stayed behind to take minutes during a brainstorming session in Mr. Howell’s office, upon his request. According to now-legend, Ramona offered one brief, but brilliant unsolicited comment and was miraculously, and in near record-time (for the gargoyles kept a ledger of these kinds of events), promoted to account manager and proceeded to move into her own office catty-corner to the gargoyles’ twin flanking desks. And if that were not enough to make them hate her, Karen was now forced to make her coffee, dousing it with the thick buttermilk she requested from the deli across the street. She winced daily at the glopping sound it made when it hit the surface and sank to the bottom of Ramona’s “Jesus is Coming: Look Busy” mug, the cream cutting through the coffee like detergent, a gelatinous pool of fresh sick.
WHEN LITA RETURNED to the office twenty-five minutes later, she was wearing a navy blazer and a white silk skirt with a drawstring, red pumps and a floral handkerchief. “How quaint, how patriotic,” Karen said as she rose from her desk to greet her. Sherry nodded and watched as Karen steered Lita down the hall toward Mr. Howell’s office.
When she arrived at the empty desk outside of his door, she stopped in front of it, and laid her hands down on top of it, scratching her long talon-like nails across the lacquer before turning around.
“Mr. Howell is an extremely busy man and doesn’t take to lots of frivolous questions. If you’re unsure how to do something, ask me or Sherry. Don’t take it upon yourself to guess.”
Lita’s smile, that same chipper grin she’d had when she first walked through the door, only slightly deflated. Karen thought it was possible she saw a hint of fear in her eyes. A woman could coast through life for decades with a look like that.
Karen gave a courtesy knock and then pulled Lita into the office to meet her new boss. He was on the phone, but waved them both in. “Conference call,” he mouthed to the women.
“Your new personal assistant has arrived,” she said quietly and closed the door behind them.
Turn her into stone and then we’ll see how fast she can climb, Karen thought.
KAREN HADN’T ALWAYS been a gargoyle. Far from it. She might have even considered herself a Lita at one time and the girls around her (and most certainly the men) had seen her that way, too. Her mama had always said that you don’t get ahead in this world just watching things zip on by you. You have to go out and take it for yourself.
Everything was so easy and fun once. When she was feeling low now, like how she’d felt when they’d first seen Lita walk through the door all innocent and polite, so sweet until she moved right on up past them, all she had to do was look back. Looking back was her pastime, something she enjoyed like other people had an affection for crosswords or going to the movies. For Karen it was easy because she could pull anything back up to look at it in her mind, like a catalog card. Anything that had been good.
In high school, she’d been the sexiest thing walking down the hallway. Even the teachers looked at her like they wanted to screw her. That lesbian Mrs. Shane in biology wanted to do her, too; she could tell. That old dyke with the fuzzy sideburns had given her the easiest fetal pig to poke and cut up. Had it all laid out just for her, already pickled and easy to slice.
Karen had tall, smooth caramel legs back then that went all the way up to her neck it seemed; a high and tight ass that wagged behind her like a little dog she was always walking; shiny straight hair that she thought must’ve come from her daddy’s side, whoever he was, because her mama’s was kinky and spastic, all unruly tufts of scattered black sheep on her big head. Boys, even the few white ones in school, looked at her like all they could think about was splitting open her cotton panties, finding her wet spot, and poking it in the back of the football field, right in that old shed where the coaches kept the cracked football stanchions and Western High hurdles. And she did. It was good times for everyone, all around.
And Karen was smart, too. All she had to do was look at a textbook page once and she could remember it to the damn letter, like she had a little picture of it in her mind. So breezy, all that memorizing (which was really only just calling up that picture), and looking up the trigonometry formulas and the shapes and figures in Mr. Baird’s geometry class and pi to the twenty-fifth decimal even when she never could figure out what pi was and why. The dates of Waterloo this and Emancipation Proclamation that. And she would recite for the football players—sitting on the bleachers in their scrimmage half-jerseys with the sweaty hair on their lower abdomens, slathered wet against their bellies, glistening in the late September sun—“The Worn Path” by Eudora Welty, her favorite story. Just by reading the pages in her mind. Not that the players cared what she said so long as she stood up there a few flights above them so they could maybe catch a peak up her skirt where her long legs ended and their happiness began. It was the easy life for Karen. It would never be that good again.
People who have fun in high school don’t have fun any other time. It’s sad, but true. Like a wonderful dream during a nap that someone shakes you out of and you hate them for it, the blissful-tight-and-hot, carefree Karen turned into someone else. She turned into the got-pre
gnant-after-high-school-from-someone-unimportant-to-her-and-got-rid-of-the-baby Karen. She still wanted to go to college. But then she got pregnant again and she was too far along with the baby (who would become Lulu) to get rid of it, so she gave birth. And then everything became about raising Lulu on her own and with just her paycheck. Everything became about getting Lulu whatever she needed and raising her right. She didn’t want her to be a loose, trouble girl like her, opening up her legs to whoever felt like taking a gander.
So that led to the ugly truth—and this was ugly, so ugly that even Sherry didn’t know and Karen didn’t like to think about it too much. The ugly truth was that she had once cleaned Mr. Howell’s toilet. And vacuumed up the little hole-punched holes littered around his desk. And she even had to wipe up on his fancy chair, getting all the bits of dandruff he left in there, in between the creases of the leather. She thought how could a man with so little hair leave so much dandruff? And there were no more boys looking at her in that way. In fact, the bigger she got and the rounder her belly, the more they looked away from her in disgust. And the women pitied her. She screamed to herself at night in her room, with Lulu and Lulu’s baby down the hall, because like mother like daughter—she screamed, “Goddammit, don’t you pity, me! I was on my way once! You don’t even know who I am. Bastards.”
It was in that office, past the two desks that flanked the door, where Mr. Howell found her cleaning one night and things got good again, maybe for the last time. They were instructed that it was rare to ever actually run into anyone in the office. The maid service she worked for had them clean after ten o’clock at night for a reason: they didn’t want them mingling with the people in the office. It was considered unseemly. Karen certainly didn’t care. She was tasked with cleaning the whole office and she sure took her time doing it. Mr. Howell’s office was the biggest, almost as big as her whole apartment. He practically had an entire living room in there with a couple sofas and a liquor service, African art mingled together in a flat bowl. The kind of shit she noticed that white people hung up to make it appear like they had a worldly appreciation. They could have the mask of the God of Destruction of all Blond People hanging up on the wall and not even know it. She didn’t like any of that crap anyway.
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