by Jen Beagin
“I’m sick of stories.”
In fact she felt a little like Anna Sergeyevna right now, after she and Gurov have sex for the first time. Disgraced, fallen, disgusted with herself. Aware that her life is a joke. Anna gets all moody and dramatic, but Gurov doesn’t give a fuck, and just to make it clear how bored he is by her display, the watermelon is mentioned. There it is on the table. He slices off a piece and slowly eats it, and thirty minutes tick by in silence.
Mona laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“That’s who you remind me of,” she said. “Gurov and his watermelon. You don’t really care about me. I’m just your boring mistress.”
He rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you at least a little high?”
“I read your diary,” she said.
“Of course you did,” he said. “And?”
“I’m not your favorite island.”
“There are better places to be sober,” he said, as if continuing an old conversation. “In the next life I’ll have an Airstream next to the Rio Grande, a silver bullet with yellow curtains. I’ll wash my clothes in the river and hang them on a clothesline. I’ll have vegetables to tend, books to read, a hammock, a little dog named Chek—”
He nodded off, his mouth still twisted around the word. His voice, she noticed, had lost its teeth. She crept over him on the bed, carefully unbuttoned his pants, worried her hand into his boxers. What the fuck are you doing, she asked herself. He’s gone, you fool. It’s over.
* * *
FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS she mentally projected Mr. Disgusting’s face onto whatever surface she was cleaning, just for the pleasure of scrubbing it off. The procedure worked best on tiled bathroom walls. She lathered the tiles with Ajax, then, covering her mouth with the collar of her T-shirt to guard against bleach throat, she scrubbed out his left eye, obliterated his right with a furious scribbling motion, and then expanded her strokes to remove his mocking eyebrows and long black hair. She scrubbed vigorously, her hands sweating in the rubber gloves, her breath moistening her T-shirt. When his face was gone at last, she doused the tiles with water from the tap. Her mind often seemed to clear itself of debris, and in its place, she felt the pleasant but slightly irritating sensation of having a word on the tip of her tongue.
A month later her anger suddenly dissipated and was replaced again by longing. So he’d almost killed her and then told her she looked like a fish—big deal, people made mistakes. She was getting over it. Besides, he’d apologized profusely via voicemail, and on her doorstep he’d left a Japanese dictionary in which he’d circled the words for contrite, shame, repentant, confession, apology, remorse, touch, please, help, and telephone. That certainly counted for something.
It was spring now. No more shitty snow. People were pulling their heads out of their asses and checking each other out. Even her mailman, whose beard had been long enough to flap in the wind, was now clean-shaven and winking at her occasionally. Perhaps Mr. Disgusting had gone in for some spring cleaning himself? He’d been in rehab this time last year, and had given her that shard of glass as soon as he’d gotten out, and by the time summer rolled around they were rolling around on rooftops and feeding each other Goobers. Maybe this time she’d convince him to move to California with her and they could avoid another winter in Hole.
She dialed his number but his phone was disconnected. She stopped by the Hawthorne a few times, but he was never in his room. She checked his other haunts—the Owl Diner, the Lowell Public Library, and the Last Safe and Deposit, a bank turned dive bar—all without luck. Since he loved getting mail, she sent him a postcard of a Henry Darger drawing featuring little girls with penises. On the back she wrote, “How’s it goin? You’re prolly just hanging around, being rad. I miss you a super ton, dude. I’m like totally lost without you. I fully want to make out with you again.” He loved it when she wrote in her native tongue.
* * *
WEEKS PASSED AND HE DIDN’T call. She considered burning the Fat Fuck drawings, but fuck it, she liked them too much. She wound up burning herself, instead, with a curling iron belonging to one of her clients. Carrie Dailey, a divorcée in her forties, owner of a hair salon in Andover, lover of spider plants. The curling iron was professional grade, some newfangled thing with multiple temperature settings. She’d been staring at it for weeks without knowing why. Well, now you know why, she thought. Now you know.
It made a ticking noise as it heated up. Where to put it? The crack of her ass came to mind, followed by the backs of her thighs, the inside of her mouth, her scalp. Something along the hairline might be nice.
She spat on it. Four hundred forty degrees, the dial said, though she didn’t see how that was possible. Holding it loosely in her hand, she let it hover over her left forearm, felt the familiar giddiness in the pit of her stomach. Then she brought it in for a bumpy landing. It was so hot it felt like ice at first, and she could smell her arm hair burning. She removed it, watched her skin pucker, and then touched down again, closer to her wrist, and counted to three.
Very hot, indeed!
For the sake of symmetry, she switched hands and burned her right arm. Nothing serious, just a few baby burns. There was something missing, though, some satisfaction she used to feel. Maybe it was simply too blunt an instrument. With a razor she could dictate size and shape and depth—she had more control over the outcome. And, because it was more active, and there was actual penetration involved, she’d felt more . . . engaged. Present.
Still, she was satisfied enough to unplug the iron and went back to dusting the living room. She’d been dragging ass before, but now she felt light on her feet, relaxed, expansive. Even the spider plants didn’t bother her. “Though I prefer rubber plants,” she imagined telling Mr. Disgusting. “The simplicity of their leaves, their shameless way of showing themselves, how they can be pushed only so far before their leaves crack and bleed, how their blood looks like mother’s milk—”
That’s what was missing, she realized then. Blood.
On the way out she paused at the console table in the entryway, straightened all the magazines and mail, swept the loose change and keys into a drawer. She pocketed the cash Carrie had left for her and glanced at the personalized notepad lying there, the words “Mental Note” printed across the top. If Sheila were here she’d draw a smiley face on the pad, along with something like “Happy Solstice, Carrie! Hope you’re well!”
She wrote,
Dear Vincent,
You may have witnessed my little episode. I know you understand, what with that stunt you pulled with your ear. Please relieve me of my suffering.
Pathetic, she thought, and tore off the sheet. She crumpled it up, but she didn’t want to throw it away. She smoothed it out on the table, folded it into a small square, and then wandered around Carrie’s yard, looking for a rock to put it under.
* * *
TWO WEEKS LATER, ON HER twenty-fourth birthday, she received a large cardboard box in the mail. No return address, but she recognized Mr. Disgusting’s cramped handwriting and felt a flutter in her chest. At last, he’d come to his senses. And, he remembered her birthday. Not bad for an old man. No doubt he sent her something he’d found in the trash, but whatever—she’d take it.
She brought the box to bed and sat with her back against the brick wall. Inside the box were two smaller boxes, one much larger than the other, but each carefully wrapped in wrinkled maps of her native state. Nice touch. With a red Sharpie he’d drawn a heart around her birthplace, Santa Monica, and another around her hometown, Torrance. She wondered what had possessed him; he definitely wasn’t the heart-drawing type.
Inside the first box was everything she’d ever given him: love letters; purposely bad cowboy poetry; several drawings of her hands and feet; an eight-inch lock of hair she’d meant to donate to Locks of Love; a deck of hand-illustrated German playing cards; a small lamp made of Japanese silk thread; and a locket with a skeleton keyhole, the doors of which opened to reveal a photogr
aph of her very beautiful left eye.
The other box contained photographs of her box, photographs for which she’d reluctantly posed atop his bed at the Hawthorne last summer. He’d never showed them to her, but then she’d never asked to see them, either. She’d examined herself with a hand mirror before, but there was something about the pictures that unsettled and sickened her. It was like looking at graphic photographs of her own internal organs.
Happy birthday to me, she thought. Thanks for negating our entire relationship.
Perhaps she was more sentimental than she was willing to acknowledge. Never in a million years would she send someone a box like this.
Before the package, her plans that evening had been to order pho from the Viet Cafe and watch Liquid Sky on VHS. Instead, she opened a bottle of Cabernet, brought it to bed, and emptied the contents of the first box onto the comforter. She picked up a love letter. Her handwriting looked frumpy and reminded her of uncombed hair. She rummaged through the rest of the contents, and that’s when she found the note written on the back of a beaver shot:
My Little Wallaby,
I’m leaving the planet shortly. I apologize for the tragic ending. I always told you I wouldn’t make it past fifty. Please don’t take my departure personally. You know very well it has nothing to do with you. My pain is ancient and I’m tired of carrying it around. That’s all this is.
Enclosed are all the precious gifts you’ve given me. I only wish I could take them with me. I would have left them here, but I couldn’t stand the thought of these vultures picking through it. And I thought it would be nice for you to have both sides of our correspondence. How often does that happen? This way our biographers will have to do less running around.
Please don’t despair. I am toothless, dickless, and twice your age—be happy to be rid of me. You need someone younger and more optimistic, who can fuck you properly and perhaps get you pregnant someday.
Some unsolicited advice on my way out: get the hell out of here. You have no real ties here so it’s stupid for you to stay. The reason you’re so comfortable in other people’s homes, Mona, is because you don’t have one. Keep searching.
Go to the desert. I’ve always wanted to live in New Mexico, and I can easily picture you living in Taos, a small town I passed through when I was your age. Why not move there and start over? Rent an adobe casita. Paint some pictures. Join a healthy cult of some kind. Get a guru. Surround yourself with [illegible]. I really want you to be—
* * *
THE SENTENCE ENDED THERE. SHE flipped the photograph over, hoping he’d finished the thought, but there was only the graphic image of her vag in all its squishy, purple glory.
She didn’t believe he’d actually killed himself. He was too attached to his problems. She’d always maintained that if everyone were forced to throw their problems in the garbage, each person would show up at the dump the following day and sift through any amount of muck to find them again. He’d probably just moved out of the hotel, gotten his own place like they’d always talked about, only without her. Maybe he’d taken up with one of his whores. An addict like him. Someone who accepted him as he was, or whatever the hell. More likely he was still living at the Hawthorne, not having the wherewithal to secure real housing, and sending her this box was just his way of saying goodbye. Moving on.
Well, it would be easy enough to find out. All she had to do was walk down to the Hawthorne and look up at his window. If his blue curtains were still hanging, and his plastic goose lamp still visible, that would tell her something, wouldn’t it?
Plus, it was hydrangea season, so presumably he was “working” again. If she hurried she might catch him leaving. He usually killed a couple of hours at the Owl Diner before going to work at 1:00 A.M. She pictured him sitting at the counter in his uniform—forest-green ski cap, matching jumpsuit, oxblood boots with orange laces—drinking coffee and chatting up the waitress. Perhaps she’d sit next to him at the counter and order a lemon square. “You don’t take pictures of someone’s pussy and then send them back, you dumb fuck,” she imagined lecturing him. “And you don’t fake your own death to avoid seeing them again. I understand the impulse—who doesn’t want to start over from scratch? But we can start over together. I still love you. Didn’t you get my postcard?”
She fortified herself with two more glasses of Cabernet, retrieved her binoculars from a kitchen drawer, and then slipped into her skunk coat and zippered it to the throat. The coat was calf length and made of synthetic black fur with a jagged white stripe going up the front and down the back. It was one of the few items she had that belonged to her mother, who used to wear it around the house, probably to ward off sexual advances from Mona’s father, but now Mona wore it wherever she went. It worked—people generally steered clear.
The coat was too warm for the weather, but she didn’t care. She walked down Pawtucket Street, past her favorite pharmacy and the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, past all the funeral homes—O’Donnell, Archambault, Martin, Laurin & Son—before turning down Merrimack Street, crossing the bridge over the canal and cutting through Kerouac Park, where a group of dumbasses were hanging out, passing a bottle.
She could always smell the Hawthorne before she saw it—surrounded on three sides by a dry-cleaning plant, a sausage factory, and a Cambodian restaurant, it smelled like a combination of starch, chorizo, and fish sauce, which for some reason always made her crave donuts with maple frosting. She avoided the lobby, walked to the side of the building, and stood gazing up at his third-story window, where the goose’s belly was glowing, its orange beak pointing east, toward the river.
Aha, she thought. He lives.
There was something on his window ledge. A perishable item, probably. Since he didn’t have his own refrigerator and hated storing food in the community kitchen, he often kept things like milk and cheese on the ledge, when it was cold enough to keep from spoiling. This was only effective in winter, obviously, and it was now April, so chances were the item had been there for months, long forgotten. She stared at it with her binoculars and saw that it wasn’t dairy, but rather meat: a roasted chicken with a syringe stuck in it. She lowered the binoculars, mystified.
She felt eyes on her. After scanning the windows she saw someone staring down from the second floor. A tall, gaunt man. He waved at her. She waved back. Mr. Disgusting! He was probably renting his bed to Roxy, killing time in someone else’s room. She trained her binoculars on his face.
Unfortunately, it was only Ray, a deaf crackhead originally from Georgia and an acquaintance of Mr. Disgusting’s, who claimed he wandered out of a Carson McCullers novel. Ray accosted her in the lobby once; he’d been broke and base-crazy and handed her a picture of a dollar bill, which was his way of asking for money. When she indicated that she, too, was broke, he karate-chopped her on the shoulder and then ran out of the building, wailing. He later apologized by handing her a drawing of a frowning stick figure holding a gun to its head, with the word “sory” scrawled underneath. She’d framed the note and hung it in her bathroom, next to the toilet.
He was frowning at her now, in fact. She lowered her binoculars and he disappeared from the window. Could be he was coming out to greet her, and she wasn’t in the mood for a Ray encounter. She walked to the front of the building and turned south, toward the Owl. If Disgusting wasn’t there she’d order a slice of coconut cake to go and call it a night.
The Owl was on Appleton Street, where the hookers sometimes hung out, but the only people on the sidewalk were two Puerto Rican yo-yos.
“Yo,” one of them called out.
“Yo,” she replied.
“Yo,” the other one said. “What you need?”
“All set,” she said.
“You in business?” the other asked, looking her up and down.
She was surprised—she wasn’t exactly wearing business attire—and oddly flattered. “I’m closed on Fridays,” she said, and quickened her pace.
The neon sign read “OW
DINER,” the l having shorted out over the winter. She smoothed her hair down and entered the lopsided dining car. The booths were empty and there were only two people at the long Formica counter, a drunk with a dented forehead at the far end, and a dark-haired woman wearing bright-blue patent leather stripper shoes at the closest corner. No Disgusting. She wasn’t used to seeing the place so deserted. On Monday mornings, which was when she usually ate there, every table was occupied by old folks from the nursing home down the street—the Scrod Squad, she called them, since all they seemed to order was baked scrod.
She took a seat at the middle of the counter, ordered cake from the bored, pear-shaped waitress, and then sat there, stroking the fur on her sleeve and staring at the scratches inscribed in the Formica. The only words she could make out were “4-eva and eva”; the rest was chicken scratch.
“I smell a skunk,” the woman at the end said.
Mona raised her head toward the kitchen, where a gray-haired man was scraping the grill with a cigarette in his mouth.
“Seriously,” the woman said louder. “Something really reeks.”
Mona reluctantly looked in her direction. The woman sat hunched over a plate of half-eaten pancakes, the contents of her purse scattered all over the counter. Her black hair was teased on one side and she still had baby fat on her arms and neck.
“Roxy,” Mona said.
“Maura,” Roxy said.
“Mona.”
“Right. Sorry.” She stood and walked toward Mona, teetering slightly in her platform sandals. She was wearing her signature look—long shirt, no pants. Her hair wasn’t teased on purpose, Mona saw now, but rather tangled around a wad of fluorescent green gum, and she appeared to have something in her eye. Both eyes, actually. As she came closer Mona realized she was wearing about eighteen layers of mascara on fake eyelashes, which made her lashes look like furry little critters.
“I’m surprised you remember me,” Mona said.
“He had pictures of you all over his wall. I used to stare at them while I was—” She waved her hand and then reached up to straighten one of the critter’s legs. Mona noted her use of the past tense and felt her throat close.