by Jen Beagin
A night to remember: Sugar Ray Leonard knocked out Thomas “The Hitman” Hearns in the fourteenth round, after which Mickey insisted on giving her a boxing lesson. “Punch me in the stomach as hard as you can,” he’d said.
Everyone stopped talking suddenly and stared at them.
“Leave her alone, Mick,” Tom said from the couch. “The poor kid’s tired.”
“Hey,” her father said. “You leave her alone. I’m trying to teach her something, Fucknuts.”
She hesitated at first, but ended up punching him in the solar plexus. His face turned bright red and the room went quiet and still. “I told you to punch me in the stomach,” he said, after catching his breath.
Before she could fake an apology, he slapped her. He missed her face and hit the top of her head, messing up her hair, which made her feel stupid, and also ugly. Tom quickly got to his feet and gave him a good shove. Mickey lost his footing and fell onto the coffee table, landing on the plant aquarium her mother had left behind. The glass shattered and he made a strange yelping noise before rolling off the table and onto the maroon carpeting.
There was a lot of blood. It was coming out of an artery in his wrist. Thin, fake-looking spurts. It hit the wall, the ceiling, a nearby lampshade. “Whoops,” he said. He clamped his wrist to his chest and held it there with his stump. Fat Jim wrapped a T-shirt around it, but it was obvious he needed stitches.
The emergency room was crowded, and they would be waiting awhile. Mickey told them to head in while he finished his cigarette outside. She and Tom found a seat in the waiting room and Mickey staggered in a few minutes later.
“Help! Help me!” he screamed.
The makeshift T-shirt bandage was gone and he had his good hand cupped over his stump, which was covered in blood and looked recently severed. The two front desk nurses stopped what they were doing and gaped, along with everyone else in the waiting room.
“My arm, oh, God help me, my arm,” he whimpered.
“Gurney!” one of the nurses yelled, and rushed over to him.
“I can wait,” she heard him say. “It doesn’t hurt that bad.”
* * *
SHE PAGED THROUGH THE REST of the journal. Tom, Tom, and more Tom. Funny, she hadn’t recorded his rejection of her, but she remembered every detail. It had been late in the evening, after ten, and they were in the living room of the old house on Newton, sitting side by side on the leather love seat. Her father was passed out on the other couch, mouth open, snoring softly. Tom was shirtless and had his bare feet up on the coffee table and a beer bottle between his legs. This was her last chance to declare her love; in a few days, Tom and Mickey would be moving to Sacramento to start another plumbing business.
They were watching Cat People on cable and Tom kept making fun of it, but he didn’t turn the channel. During one of the racier scenes, she placed a tentative hand on his thigh. He didn’t seem to mind so she moved it closer to his crotch. She could feel his leg stiffen suddenly—a good sign, she thought.
She was mistaken. He picked up her hand like it was some dead thing and dropped it back in her lap. “You’re eleven—”
“Twelve,” she said.
“You’re just a kid,” he said, and took a swig of his beer. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“You can put your hand in my underwear,” she whispered. “I don’t mind.”
He gave her a startled look and glanced at her father, still out cold. She watched him drink most of his beer in one swallow and set the bottle on the coffee table. He turned to face her and leaned back against the armrest, placing both of his hands behind his head, like the police tell you to do. He looked at her as if she were a bunch of numbers he was trying to multiply.
“I’m not a virgin,” she said, trying not to stare at his armpits.
He took a deep breath and seemed about to say something, but then changed his mind.
“I’ve been to third base,” she said. “With someone your age.”
She watched his neck redden. He didn’t look impressed. He asked who it was and she just shrugged. He glanced at her father again and cleared his throat. “What’s his name?” he asked.
She shook her head. She felt stupid, stupid for not knowing, stupid for bringing it up. He removed his hands from the back of his head and crossed his arms. She stared at the tattoo on his bicep: no picture; just “Rat Patrol” in old-fashioned letters. He was frowning at her. She could tell he thought she was being cagey, but she was telling the truth.
“Where was this—school? Was it a teacher?”
“Here,” she said. “After a party. He came into my room.”
Now something was happening to his mouth. His lips curled and bunched up.
“It was dark,” she explained. “I couldn’t see him.”
He winced and put his head in his hands. She thought he might be jealous.
“But it wasn’t like that,” she said quickly. “It’s . . .” She shook her head. It’s you I love, she wanted to say. I want us to get married. She touched his shin with her fingers. I even love your shins.
“When was this?”
“A while ago, when Mom still lived here.”
He took his hands away from his face. “Where was I? Was I here?”
She nodded. “We danced that night.”
He blinked at her.
“Three whole songs,” she added.
Fleetwood Mac, the Tusk album. She could tell he didn’t remember, or didn’t care, that his mind was somewhere else, and she wanted to remind him that it had been the weekend she’d lost Spoon and Fork, they were gone, gone, disappeared to fucking Idaho, and she’d been crying for something like twelve hours, and her eyes were all puffy and her parents were drunk, really drunk—her father passed out on the patio, her mother on the couch, and it was over between them—and she remembered seeing Tom carry her mother to bed, which had made her wild with grief, like those angels in Gothic paintings, and she’d wanted to scream and beat her fists on the closed door and maybe even tear out some of her hair, but she’d poured herself a drink in the kitchen instead, her first ever, and choked it down like medicine, and then she’d gone around and drunk from half-empty cups in the living room, and after a while she noticed that she’d stopped shaking and felt pretty good, so she offered to massage Ed the Electrician’s shoulders, thinking it would make Tom jealous when he was done with her mother, but when he finally came back he simply ordered her to bed. She remembered asking, “Will you carry me? Like you did with Mom?” And his face had softened a little and he picked her up like she weighed nothing. She circled his shoulders with her arms and he spun her around a couple of times and said, “Where to?”
“My room,” she said.
It was only fourteen steps away, but he’d taken them slowly, carefully, pausing between each one, long enough for her to feel little again, and safe, and unsinkable.
In her room he flipped on the light and laid her down on the bed and then stood there for a minute, swaying slightly. She was hoping he’d lie down next to her, and then maybe on top of her, that he would kiss her and grind against her like she sometimes did to her favorite blanket. Instead, he told her that a million anchovies had turned up dead in the marina that morning. “They swam into the marina in the middle of the night and got lost,” he said. “A million of them. They couldn’t find their way out. Eventually they ran out of oxygen, and now there’s this huge floating mass of dead anchovies in the marina.” He kept raising his eyebrows at her, as if to say, “Are you getting this?” He seemed to be trying to warn her of something. And she’d smiled and thought, I’m getting that you’re drunk!
She’d never seen him like this before, wasn’t sure how she felt about it, and before she could say anything he clumsily draped a blanket over her and then shut off the light and stumbled out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
She woke to someone tapping on her window. The house was otherwise silent, asleep. She figured it must be him, but wh
y was he outside? Did he sleepwalk out of the house and get lost in the marina? Was he running out of oxygen? The tapping was confident, insistent. And then suddenly he was there in the room with her and she realized he’d been tapping on the door, not the window, and the way he was tiptoeing around made her think that he wanted her to be asleep, was counting on it. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands, and when she asked him what the matter was he stuck his hand under the covers and immediately started searching for something in her underwear. Something he’d misplaced. That’s what it felt like: hunting for keys in a drawer in the dark.
Except his fingers felt like keys—the wrong keys. They were thick and rough and had teeth. When she tried to move away, the pressure changed. Now he was reclaiming something she’d stolen from him—something vital—and she felt a little guilty, because he seemed to be having an attack of some kind, what with all that ragged breathing. She’d said his name and told him to slow down, and that’s when she realized it wasn’t Tom at all.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tom asked. “Or your dad?”
“Well, because I thought it was you at first,” she said. “I wanted it to be you.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. “What did you do—did you . . . scream?”
“No,” she said slowly. Screaming had never occurred to her. “I pretended I was dead.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked.
“For what?”
“For not screaming,” she said.
He shook his head. “Of course not, Mona. It wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
“I like you,” she said. “I love you.”
She hoped he would pull her toward him and kiss her, but she knew the mood was ruined.
“I wish I was going to Eureka with you. I’m going to miss you so—”
“Listen, Mona. I like you, too, but I’m way too old for you—don’t you get that? If you were my age, you’d realize that you don’t really know me. I’m actually not as nice as you think. I’ve been to prison—a few times.”
“What for?”
“All kinds of things. I was in a gang with a bunch of . . . awful people.”
“Bank robbers?”
He smiled. “Not quite. I wasn’t very nice to my wife, either, and I ended up in jail. It took a few years, but I realized that all of my bad qualities were just, uh, I don’t know. They were like fat and gristle clinging to a bone, but the bone was the real me, and the real me was strong and perfectly good. I just needed to have that rotten meat cut off me, burned away.”
If she were a bone, she thought then, her father would be the fat and gristle.
“It was him,” she murmured. She made no move to indicate who she was talking about; she didn’t glance in his direction or nod her head or point a finger, but he seemed to know who and what she meant.
“Jesus, Mona,” he said sadly. “That might be worse than the thing itself. Your dad is a pain in the ass but he loves you, and he’s been good to me. He gave me a job when no one else would and made me his partner. I owe him a lot.”
* * *
SHE FELT HER FACE FLUSH. Perhaps she didn’t have Daddy issues, as Sheila always claimed, but rather Tommy issues. She wished he were here right now so that he could devour her, chew off her awful fat and gristle, and she closed her eyes and became aware of a low hum, felt it vibrating inside her, the memory of his voice.
For the next several hours Mickey chased her around the living room in the old house. He was naked and angry, but she couldn’t tell if he was after her, or the slice of pizza she happened to be holding in her hand. His stump looked pink and warm and it wiggled as if it had a mind of its own, a large, recently severed earthworm squirming around in the dirt, searching in vain for its other half. She took a bite of the pizza and discovered it wasn’t pizza at all, but rather a piece of the carpet in Henry’s office.
She woke up hungry and confused. The dream seemed Significant. Henry, Henry, her only source of income. She got out of bed, ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and made a vow to stop snooping in his house. No digging, she told herself. No scouting for imaginary evidence.
* * *
YOKO AND YOKO WERE IN agreement. They were back from their workshop in Italy and full of fresh pearls. She’d spent an evening with them presenting her case against Henry. They’d been alarmed by her snooping, but she said it was warranted by reasonable suspicion, i.e. the shrine. They said that wasn’t reasonable at all. She pointed to exhibits A (the drugs) and B (the incest porn). The burden of proof—wasn’t that what it was called? Besides, she knew a thing or two about perverts, she’d said, and she told them a few stories about Mickey. “He used to let his junk hang out of his shorts,” she said. “On purpose. In the supermarket.”
“Embrace your personal history,” Nigel advised patiently. “Then put it behind you, where it belongs. Your past does not drive the train. Aren’t you tired of carrying it around? It’s old, it’s rotten, and believe me, it reeks. I can smell it from where I’m sitting—”
“Okay, okay, Nigel,” she said. “I get it.”
* * *
HER GOOD BEHAVIOR WAS REWARDED: over the next couple of months she received a dozen service calls, all of whom became steady clients. Six of them were referrals from Henry. She showed her appreciation by buying him an African violet for his kitchen window, along with a rubber plant for his entryway, and by continuing to keep her nose out of his drawers and closets.
But not her camera. She didn’t photograph the contents of his drawers and closets—nothing like that—but she’d recently resumed her life’s work, which was to take pictures of herself cleaning and/or pretending to be dead, occasionally while wearing an item or two of his clothing. No big deal, she told herself, because she’d stopped snooping, stopped hunting for additional proof. This was called putting her past behind her. Moving on. And his house was hard to resist. Roomy, well lit, filled with objects that photographed well in black and white—all that wood and leather and animal fur, all those mottled vases and large, abstract prints; that tiled floor, that fireplace.
In fact, she was setting up her camera and tripod right now because she’d just purchased a new leopard-print apron and wanted a few shots in the living room. Her photo shoots generally took under eight minutes. In and out, no nonsense. She had the steps down to a science: extend tripod legs, adjust tilt handle, mount camera, turn it on, check framing in viewfinder. Set timer to five seconds. Get into position. Three, two, one: leap off the couch with enormous Clyfford Still print in background.
Repeat. Move your arms this time. Really kick your legs out.
Action shots were a new thing.
She checked the results. Nice blurring effect on her hands and feet. Perfect lighting, as usual. Her teeth—she was always smiling in the action shots—actually looked kind of white.
Reset timer. In position. Three self-portraits with face buried in feather duster.
Again reset, in position. Sitting on the couch—
Henry’s head in the doorway—fuck!
She ducked as though he’d thrown something at her and then scrambled behind the couch on all fours.
“Hello?” he said.
She heard his leather slippers shuffle in her direction. They stopped near the coffee table. He was looking at her camera, no doubt. She remembered rehearsing this moment in the past—way back when, in Lowell—but she couldn’t remember any of her lines. Hiding behind the couch obviously wasn’t the way to go. What the hell was he doing home?
“I see your foot,” he said.
She moved her foot and groaned.
“Mona,” he said.
She waited a few seconds and then peeked at him over the back of the couch. He had bed head and was wearing a pair of reading glasses and a cashmere bathrobe she knew very well, having posed in it while holding a butcher knife in the kitchen once, a month ago.
“What are you doing?” he asked,
peering at her over his glasses. She got to her feet and stood there, blinking, trying to think of something to say. It’s over, she thought miserably. Over!
“What is this?” he asked, looking back and forth between her and the camera.
She felt her mouth hanging open. “Well, this is gonna sound a little strange,” she said, her voice quivering. “But I love your living room. The lighting, I mean.”
“You take pictures,” he declared.
She looked at the floor.
“And then?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you do with the pictures?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “They’re just for me, for my records.”
He removed his glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his bathrobe, then looked around the room. She watched his eyes land on her cleaning bucket.
“Records?”
“You know, like a diary,” she said.
He seemed to perk up slightly at the word “diary.”
“A housekeeping diary,” she said.
“Mind if I look?” he suddenly asked, pointing at her camera.
Well, yes, she minded. It had been well over a month since she’d emptied it, so there were perhaps two hundred photographs on there. Before she could respond, he expertly removed the camera from the tripod and started fiddling with the buttons. She flashed to that series of her lying on his bare mattress, naked except for her silly French hostess apron, her long hair fanned over the pink ticking. And those ones of her scrubbing his shower walls, wearing one of Zoe’s blue wigs. She hoped those shots of her pretending to fall down the stairs weren’t on there, but the bathrobe–butcher knife shots definitely were, not to mention all the pictures she’d taken at other people’s houses over the past few weeks. People he knew, no less. His friends.
She watched his mouth tighten as he scrolled through. This was really, actually happening. She closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry. He would probably erase everything. All that work, down the drain. And then what?