Part 5: The Fullness of the Lips
(part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4)
A deep-focus shot of a warm orange room: first the edge of the ottoman, a blotchy velvet street find of the kind you’d leave in a sealed bag for three weeks to ensure the bedbugs were dead before using it. Then the narrow view of the hardwood floor, lacquered cheaply at some point in the seventies or eighties to maintain some false semblance of pre-war glamour. On either side, bookshelves, towering with volumes retrieved from estate sales, giveaways, and sidewalk vendors. Two worn 1908 editions of “Cymbeline.” A rubber-banded cache of National Geographics from 1953. Last week’s New Yorker. At the rear wall, the couch, of a similar (but not identical) velvet to the ottoman, regally-faded in comparison to the ottoman’s ratty covering. Finally, the young woman herself, legs folded under her on the cushions, wearing a long heather sweater that came down to her knees. Brown wavy hair and a penetrating stare. Finally, nestled in her lap, a single black-and-white cat, its eyes closed contentedly as her long fingers stroked its chin.
“Only you, Byron Xu,” said Elena Malcolm, the Queen of Cats, her voice echoing through my tinny computer speakers. “I figured if you were calling on Skype you were either in serious trouble or bored out of your mind.”
“A little of Column A, a little of Column B,” I replied, holding the ice pack to the back of my skull. “To be honest I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t pick up so I could tell you the story in more exciting terms.”
“No, you did quite well,” she said, shaking her head. “It was adorable. I’d say I couldn’t believe one man could be so hapless, but, you know, here you are. You knew full well the spam-bots were getting more and more resourceful. Just because it spoke to you in Spanish, you decided to talk with it?”
“It seemed so real,” I growled, looking away. “I’m still not convinced on that one.”
“Or on your dear conservative friend?”
“She drove me home! She gave me her number! You really think—“
“If I’d hit a man to keep my secret safe after I’d stupidly given it away, I would convince him that he’d been mugged, too, as soon as he’d gotten up.”
“But they used my credit card at Best Buy, like, within fifteen minutes. I had to spend ages on her phone with the fraud division.”
“You were right next to a Republican meeting place. Do you think they didn’t take advantage of a literal free market?”
“Oh, come on, they’re not thieves, they’re… Republicans.”
Elena rolled her eyes. “You’re walking into a witty retort. You know that, don’t you? Do you want me to break out the signal flags?”
I adjusted the ice pack. A bead of cold water dripped down the back of my neck. I shivered. “Look,” I said, “I… I dunno. Why would she give me her number, then?”
Elena’s face registered a blend of pity and disgust. “I have a list of men in my phone whose calls I ignore. Not a long list, but it exists. I don’t even feel a twinge of regret when I let it go to voicemail. Men are easy to find, and easier to ignore. Even a young conservative would know the value of that sort of list, darling. Didn’t you go to a Thanksgiving ball of theirs? Did you see the meat market?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “So more of them come from the fat belt than usual. Maybe I’m intriguing to her.”
“I’m beginning to think that bump on your head has really caused some damage.” Her eyes flicked somewhere behind me, and I caught the flicker of a television screen reflected onto her pale skin. She stopped looking directly at me. “Then again, you’re one of those boys that does like their women to beat up on them. Probably something passive-aggressive. You should get that checked out when you go to get that bruise examined.”
“You know, you could at least turn the TV off before insulting me,” I grumbled. “Or move closer to the computer.”
“No,” she said, yawning, covering a smile with her hand. “I like keeping a respectable distance. Illusion of control and all. I take it you’re not going to San Francisco any time soon, then?”
“What? No, I mean, my brother’s fine with it.”
“Does he believe you?”
“I don’t know what he believes, but it doesn’t matter, my camera’s gone and by the time I woke up she was driving me down New York Avenue. He can run his article without pictures, and he won’t badmouth me unless he wants our folks, and his rent helpers, to hear that he sent me out to some godforsaken back alley in Northeast DC to get clonked in the head.”
“Nicely done. Though it sounds like some time deeper in Oakland couldn’t hurt the kid.”
“He’s twenty-eight. He’s past learning.”
“That’s a grim prognosis.”
“Yeah, well, I’m young and invincible and don’t need to learn from my mistakes yet, right?”
Elena shut her eyes, but smiled despite herself. “What a curious recurring theme with you, Byron Xu. Must be younger sibling syndrome or something.”
“So should I call her back or not?”
She put her eyes back onto the TV and sighed. “You have a steady relationship going, don’t you?”
“Who said anything about a relationship?”
“You didn’t, which makes me think you know it’s a bad idea but plan to pursue it anyway because you’re bored and unhappy with yourself and manifest it by taking it out on women, which I find symptomatic of Washington more than anything relating to genetics or upbringing or whatever.”
I thought about this for a second. “So what do I do?”
She looked back through her computer screen at me. “You want my honest advice? Clean your apartment. Get a cat.”
I looked around. She was right about the first part, at least. I sighed. “I just, I mean… I dunno. I felt like… like I had a choice, briefly. Like, a moral decision to make. That’s attractive. I had a chance to, like, make my own rules, and live with that decision.”
She was back to the TV, petting the cat with one hand and flipping through channels with the other. “Mmm,” she said. “So you’re addicted to choice now?”
“Pot, kettle,” I said.
“What?” She stopped clicking through channels, then looked out at me, then down at the remote. “Oh,” she said. “Cute. No, this is different, I’m just playing by the rules the cable company gave me. You had, however briefly, an actual choice that involved your own morals, yes, that’s true. Just because we went to college in Ithaca doesn’t mean you lived your entire life sheltered from that, does it?”
“Uh,” I said. “Have you ever hung out with a Chinese family?”
“I dated a half-Japanese man once,” she said.
“Elena. Let’s pretend you didn’t just say that.”
“Oh, you’re no fun when I can’t get a good rise out of you.”
I pounced. “You’re walking into a witty retort,” I said. “You want signal flags? Something like that?”
“Ooh,” she said, raising her hands. The cat looked up at her, displeased at this disturbance. “Touché, touché. At least Washington has given you a sense of proper repartee.”
I pressed her. “I don’t get what you’re saying, ‘addicted to choice.’”
She sighed and flipped the TV off. “Doing nothing is a choice too, you know. If you take every opportunity that walks in front of you, you’re going to get more unhappy and keep doing it. Men do this. They are dumb. So. Take my advice. Don’t. Also. Get a cat. Cats are honest. Clear?”
I shrugged, then winced. “Alright, alright,” I murmured. “Lemme think about all this.”
“Thinking!” crowed Elena. “If we get you to think about something this entire holiday season, I’ll count it a great moral victory. Now if you’ll excuse me, Bravo is showing some homosexuals marginalizing themselves by doing stereotypical and chaste things to help out unattractive straight women.”
“Have fun,” I said.
Elena went back to the TV and unmuted it, but I couldn’t make out the words, only the distorted sound bouncing off the long book-filled walls of her apartment filtered through the tiny speakers on the front of my laptop. Her eyes slowly glazed over, acclimating to the TV’s wavelength. I closed the computer.
The days were getting shorter, and the main room of our apartment faced away from the setting sun, leaving afternoons a long and shadowy affair. I undid my belt and leaned back in my chair, groaning as the blood rushed to the lump on my skull. Leaning back, I could see the sheet of legal paper I’d attached with a magnet to the freezer door, my wet fingerprints still on the bottom half. I stared at the numbers written in turquoise ink until my vision blurred like Elena’s in front of the TV.
After a moment, I struggled to my feet. A knife caked in dried peanut butter still stuck out of the jar on the kitchen counter. I wandered over to put it away. My jeans fell down. I tumbled to the floor, my arms flying out to catch the bulk of the blow, but I still yelped in pain as the bump on my head throbbed after my chin cracked the carpeted floor of the area between our table and the kitchen itself.
I rolled over onto my back and stared at the ceiling. Light began to fade. I spread my arms and dug my hands into the carpet, scratching at it half-heartedly. I glanced up at the refrigerator, then at the peanut butter, then at my computer, then at the mess.
“Well,” I said. “It can wait.”
The end.
November 30, 2009, 1:08am Comments
