Pretend I'm Dead

by Jen Beagin

  He turned up early, too. Halfway into her second vodka tonic, he waltzed in and sat directly across from her at the bar. He still looked tired, but more alert this time, and wore a pressed cowboy shirt. His hair was wet and pulled into a ponytail and he was chewing gum. He gave her the once-over but didn’t seem to recognize her. Then he ordered dinner from the bartender and proceeded to ramble about some motorcycle he was planning on buying.

  His dinner arrived and she watched him work on a plate of ribs. He briefly examined each rib before chewing the meat off quickly and unself-consciously, sucking on the bone a little before tossing it in the bread basket. He licked each of his fingers before wiping them on his napkin. She wondered if he ever even thought of Betty. Her instinct said no. Something—the finger licking, perhaps—told her he was a present person, untormented by the past.

  It was strange knowing so many random facts about him. She knew his middle name (Michael), his sun sign (Cancer), his moon sign (Gemini), his brother’s name (Daniel), his favorite dessert (Ding Dongs), where he was ticklish (just above the knee). She also knew about his fetish for underarm hair on women, a fetish Betty had indulged while they were together.

  She’d never seen someone so engrossed in their meal. This is your chance, she told herself. Don’t be a pussy. She removed her camera from her purse, turned it on, and made sure the flash was off before setting the camera on the bar. She took several pictures while pretending to fiddle with the settings. Then she felt Johnny glaring at her. He’s onto you, dumbass. She put the camera away and invented a story for herself: You’re a healthy, well-adjusted twenty-five-year-old who enjoys socializing and interacting with others. It’s Friday night, so naturally you’re waiting for your date. Your date is . . . late, unfortunately, goddamn him. She looked at her watch and pretended to be irritated. Johnny finished his meal and took his seat at the door, but he kept squinting in her direction. Look busy, she told herself. She rummaged through her purse for a pen and wrote a list on a cocktail napkin:

  Deposit cash

  Buy string mop, vacuum bags, ice cube trays, mustard

  Dye hair, pluck eyebrows, moisturize

  Buy new bra

  Paint some pictures

  Join healthy cult

  “May I?” A stranger sat next to her before she could answer. Your date has finally arrived. Act happy. Get rid of the dorky glasses. She crumpled up the list and deposited it in her purse, along with the glasses, which were giving her a headache.

  The man had a handsome face and very hairy hands and forearms. He was probably hairy all over. You’re okay with hairy dudes, she told herself.

  “Looks like you’re ready for another,” he said, nodding toward her almost-full glass.

  “Yep.”

  He ordered her another vodka tonic and a Chimay for himself. Damn, a yuppie, she thought. His name was Anthony, he said, and he was from New York City. He’d come to Taos for two reasons: to attend a wedding and to hike some famous trail.

  She hated serious hikers. For starters, they had terrible taste in footwear. She glanced at his shoes: brown leather slip-ons with perforated sides—tolerable. Then she noticed his beige nylon cargo pants—unacceptable.

  “How long you in town for?” she asked.

  “I leave tomorrow morning.”

  Clothing aside, his attractiveness immediately increased by 40 percent.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a cleaning lady,” she said.

  He smiled and blinked a couple of times, apparently waiting for the punch line.

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m a designer.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “What do you design?”

  She took a long sip of her drink. Interiors, she almost said. “Hats,” she said instead. “And luggage occasionally.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. It’s a very tricky market.” She was suddenly envious of her imaginary occupation. “What about you?”

  “I’m trained as an architect, but I design fire escapes and elevator shafts for office buildings.”

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Not really,” he said, and laughed. “What do you do for fun?”

  “I drum,” she said. “I’m a drummer.”

  He nodded. “I can totally see that.”

  If only it were true. She felt tears well in her eyes and quickly looked away, waiting for them to recede, and noticed Johnny standing at the door, talking and laughing with some locals. Poor Betty was more than likely in her living room watching  Judge Judy reruns, surrounded by her deaf cats and thinking of  Johnny every ten seconds.

  “You have beautiful hair,” Anthony said, apropos of nothing. “Are you Spanish?”

  She turned and looked at him. “Mick and spic,” she said, and smiled. “But mostly mick.”

  He looked at her squarely. “You realize that’s racist, right?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Just checking,” he said.

  She drained the rest of her drink. “Are you a spic?”

  “Wop,” he said.

  Which explained the gold horn and serpent chain under all that chest hair.

  “You look a little like Frank Zappa,” she said.

  He was visibly offended, as if she’d told him he resembled a tree shrew.

  “I meant that as a compliment,” she said.

  He shrugged. “You don’t look like anyone.”

  “No?”

  “Also a compliment,” he said.

  Two hours later he invited her back to his hotel room. She was drunk by then and having difficulty seeing out of her left eye, so she said yes. On the way out, she photographed Johnny openly. He covered his face with his hand like a celebrity. “I like your face!” she yelled.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE ARRIVED AT BETTY’S the following monday, Betty was sunbathing on the hood of the Caddy in a green paisley bikini two sizes too small. She was slick with oil and looked like one giant freckle. Mona noticed red hair curling out from her bikini bottom and averted her eyes. Betty hopped off the hood and gave her a greasy hug.

  “You’re awfully chipper,” Mona said.

  “I took the day off.” She blotted her face with a towel. “Let’s go inside and see how you did!”

  Betty covered her throne with the towel before sitting down. Mona dropped her cleaning bucket in the kitchen and joined Betty in the living room. She handed Betty an envelope containing her work. Betty flipped through the photographs, staring hard at each one. “Oh, Maura. These aren’t very good,” she said. “Three of them are blurry and the rest are too far away.”

  “Well, what were you expecting—Sears portraits? He works in a bar. It’s dark.”

  “I thought you said you were a professional.”

  “I said I majored in photography. I never said I graduated.”

  “Well, these aren’t worth fifty apiece.”

  “Fine,” Mona said. “But you should at least give me some money for all the alcohol I had to consume.”

  “That’s not what we agreed on.” Betty thought everyone was a closet alcoholic, and she refused to be an enabler.

  “I would have died of boredom otherwise. I spent, like, fourteen hours in that bar.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

  “Fair enough, I guess,” Mona said. “Listen, I’m sorry the pictures aren’t what you wanted, but the good news is I got laid on Friday night.”

  Betty looked surprised, but that was because Betty wondered how brunettes with B cups ever got anywhere with men.

  “The bad news is he had the smallest dick I’ve ever seen. It was like, this big,” Mona said, holding up a thumb. “In fact, I felt like a child molester when I, uh, touched it. But it’s weird, because he had very large hands—”

  “Ooh! I just got chills when you said ‘child molester.’ ” Betty shivered. “Something in your voice.”

  “Was I a pedophile in a
past life?” Mona asked. “That might explain a few things. Anyway, lucky for me, he made up for it in other areas, if you know what I mean.”

  Really, it was Mona who’d made an ass of herself that night. In his hotel room Anthony had undressed her carefully, tenderly, and then asked if he could put his face down there. “If you insist,” she’d said.

  “Thank you,” he’d said soberly, still fully dressed.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “I don’t know how, uh, fresh—”

  But he already had his mouth on her. Not just his mouth, but his whole face. What was he doing with his nose? Something incredible. Or wait—was that his chin? She sat up and looked down at him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  He opened his eyes and stopped moving. “Please just let me do this.”

  She lay down again and studied the drapes. He was handling her cunt deftly, as if he’d designed it himself, and she thought back to their conversation in the bar. An architect, he’d said. Fire escapes and elevator shafts. What do you design, she imagined asking him now. “Vaginas,” he would say this time. “For office buildings.”

  In fact, for many months now, her body had felt like an office building—neutered, utilitarian, without ornament—but he seemed to be remodeling it. His left hand cradled her fire escape, and the fingers of his right hand were inside her elevator shaft. His tongue—or was it his thumb?—kept grazing the elevator button, over and over and over. She tried to move away at one point, but he had her pinned. He seemed to be using his upper jaw to hold her in place. She couldn’t remember when exactly the inappropriate laughter started, but she could feel it bubble inside her for a while. Then it began to leak out steadily, filling the room. It felt as natural as the sweat from her pores, and stopping it was beyond her capacity. It reminded her of the time she’d put Palmolive in someone’s washing machine. Thankfully, he seemed amused and carried on with the business at hand.

  This was before he’d revealed his tiny member. She’d managed not to laugh then, thank Bob. In any event, it was the first time she’d been in the sack with someone since Mr. Disgusting. At least it had been uncontrollable laughter rather than tears. At least she hadn’t clung to him and talked about her feelings.

  “Anyway, small package aside, he didn’t have squinty eyes or walk with a cane, so we’re probably not getting married,” Mona said.

  Betty didn’t answer. She was staring at one of the photographs. “He needs a haircut,” she said. “And a shave. But God, I miss those hands. And those eyes!” She looked ready to cry.

  “I had a feeling this wasn’t a good idea.”

  “I’m fine,” Betty said, composing herself. “Just do what you need to do in here. I’m not going to keep you company today. I’m too upset.”

  Mona went into the kitchen. Thirty minutes and you’re out of here, she told herself. She washed the eight cat food dishes and wiped down the counters, then headed for the bathroom, where she spent an additional fifteen minutes. Without Betty looking over her shoulder, cleaning the trailer was almost pleasurable.

  As she was vacuuming Betty’s bedroom she saw something sticking out from under the bed. It looked like a bone. She crouched down and lifted the bed skirt. It wasn’t a bone, but a porcelain limb—an arm. The arm was attached to one of Betty’s creepy porcelain dolls, except this one didn’t fit in with the others—she had brown hair instead of blonde, and brown eyes instead of blue or green, and she wasn’t dressed as a bride. Instead, she wore a Mexican-style red dress and had a mole painted on her cheek. Evidently, she wasn’t Betty’s type, so she’d been banished, separated from the rest. Mona dusted her off with a clean rag and wondered how long she’d been living under the bed—years, probably. Her dress was tattered and smelled vaguely of cat piss. “I’m getting you out of here,” she whispered, and placed the doll in the bottom of her cleaning bucket. She covered her with rags, and then finished vacuuming.

  “Leaving already?” Betty asked, as she was gathering her things. She was still sitting on her throne. Her mascara had run and her hair was a mess. She looked like she’d just lost an important oil-wrestling match. One of her cats sat at her feet, licking her ankles.

  Mona shrugged. “Cleaning this place twice a week is overkill. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “I’ve been thinking about whether or not to tell you something, Maura.”

  Uh-oh, she thought, another goddamn confession. She probably hacked a baby to pieces with that machete of hers. Her own baby.

  “Can I see your palm?”

  “My hands are dirty,” Mona said.

  Betty made an impatient gimme gesture. The poor woman’s wrecked, Mona thought. Show some mercy. She sat down on the couch and offered Betty her palm. Betty put on her glasses and traced one of the lines in Mona’s palm with a red fingernail.

  “This is difficult for me,” she said. She petted Mona’s palm a few times with her oily hand. “Even though I’ve been doing this for thirty years.” She removed her glasses and looked Mona in the eye. “It’s your life line, Maura. It breaks at around age twenty-seven.”

  “Okay,” Mona said slowly.

  “Now, sometimes a break can signify a divorce or some other crisis—the death of a parent or child—but yours is permanently broken. It doesn’t pick up again. See?” She pointed to the line in question. Mona peered at it. It did indeed appear to have a permanent break.

  “Oh yeah,” Mona said. “I can totally explain that. When I was little I placed my palm on a very hot iron. The line probably burned right off.”

  Betty looked at her like she was deranged. “Doesn’t work that way, Maura. Look, ordinarily I wouldn’t tell someone their life line ended before age thirty. It’s just too terrible to hear. But I feel close to you. I consider you a good friend. And if it were me, I’d want to know.”

  Unbelievable, Mona thought. “So you’re saying I have roughly a year to live? What about my two husbands and two children?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Betty said with her chin in her hand. “Maybe I was seeing one of your past lives. I’m guessing it was the one immediately before this one.”

  Mona felt a laughing fit coming on. You can’t laugh right now, she told herself. Do. Not. Laugh. She put a hand over her mouth and breathed deeply through her nose.

  “You’re in shock,” Betty said. “Which is understandable. You have a lot of thinking to do. I just hope you don’t hate me, Maura. I’m doing this out of love.”

  Mona stood up. “I don’t know what to say, Betty. I’m going home.”

  “Let me pay you, at least.” She reached for her pocketbook and handed Mona a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. “Listen, you don’t have to come on Thursday if you don’t want to, but would you mind taking a couple more pictures of Johnny? You can say no, of course. And I’ll pay you fifty per picture no matter what. It’ll be good for you to get out there and have some fun. Maybe you’ll get lucky again.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Mona said, avoiding Betty’s eyes.

  * * *

  LITTLE DID BETTY KNOW THAT Mona welcomed an early death. The thought of checking out early had been her pacifier for many years, something she’d always sucked on in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. If Betty had said her life line ended at age ninety-eight, or eighty-eight, or seventy-eight—that would be cause for alarm. Granted, twenty-seven was a little young to die. Perhaps that’s why her hands were trembling. Then again, a lot of great people die at that age. Not that there was anything to worry about, as Betty was a total charlatan. And a sadist, now that she thought about it. She obviously just ended their relationship. Did she really expect a dying woman to clean her toilet? She wondered if Betty engineered the whole thing on purpose. If so, she’d just taken passive-aggressive to a new level.

  At home she showered and then wandered around her apartment in her bathrobe. She entertained the thought of death in a year, which made her pleasantly drows
y. She’d sleep well tonight. She stared at the various things she’d collected in the nine months she’d lived in Taos. If Betty was somehow right, Mona had far too many possessions and, with no husband or children, they would all end up in the trash. The idea disheartened her. Perhaps she could arrange for an Egyptian burial. Or perhaps it was time she started paring down and purging. Although, without all her stuff, what the hell would she do with herself? She spent huge amounts of time simply admiring her knickknacks. It occurred to her that she wasn’t so different from Betty. They both lived alone and were companionless, and they both found solace in surrounding themselves with useless objects. The difference was that Betty collected things that were ostensibly worth money, while Mona collected things of value only to herself, like empty frames, broken watches, vintage handkerchiefs, bird figurines, and throw pillows.

  Which reminded her: she had one of Betty’s precious dolls. She retrieved the doll from her cleaning bucket. For some reason this doll didn’t repulse her as much as Betty’s brides. “You look Spanish,” she said. “I bet your name is Carmen or Maria or Sofia.” Avoiding the doll’s eyes, she carefully cleaned its face and limbs with Windex and spot-cleaned its dress with Resolve. In the bathroom she shampooed and conditioned the doll’s hair in the sink. Carmen-Maria-Sofia was creepy—there was no denying that—and Mona imagined waking to find the doll standing over her with a miniature butcher knife in her porcelain hand. Stop with the drama, she told herself. This doll’s your friend. You need a friend. Why don’t you get out of the house for once and take your little friend out for ice cream?

  They headed to the Tom-Tom Room instead. Mona decided she would indeed take more pictures of Johnny. Why not? She’d get right in his face this time. What was he going to do—beat her up? Her new tactic would be to photograph the entrance from outside and make sure he was in the frame. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. This business of going inside and getting shit-faced was counterproductive. If she simply photographed him at his post, he would be stationary and likely in focus—not that it mattered. Betty had said fifty no matter what.