Miranda July - The First Bad Man

“I thought you , of all people, would”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“know how to be nice.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” She pointed to her face as if she was actually covered in something.

I thought of different numbers — seventy-three, forty-nine, fifty.

“Always,” she said. “This always happens.”

She turned away, and because she had no room of her own she went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

The map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. I hung it back up slowly. Her feelings. I had hurt them. She had feelings and I had hurt them. I stared at the bathroom door, one hand against the wall to steady myself.

RUTH-ANNE SAID TO JUSTstick with it. To not worry if the song was working or not working — just sing it. I’d have a few chaste and hopeful days, but something always pulled me down again. Once I began dreaming Clee was in Phillip’s shower, mutual soaping, and when I woke up I pretended I was still asleep while I creamed. Another time I shoved his stiff member into her mouth for a second just to prove I was the boss of me and I could do it once without falling back under the spell, but it turned out I was not the boss of me, the spell was, and doing it once meant doing it fifteen more times over the next two days, swiftly followed by a bog of shame. And she knew — now she could somehow tell when I had recently creamed on her. She talked with Kate on the phone about how much more money she needed to get her own place; it wasn’t much.

Sometimes I could only mumble, “ Will you stay in our Lovers’ Story? ” but it worked best if I really gave it my all, belting it out with full deep breaths, either mentally or in my car at full volume, “ If you stay you won’t be sorry! ” If she wasn’t home, I did it with some tai chi — like movements that seemed to bring the practice into my consciousness more deeply. Some work was being done on the sewer lines out front; they sawed the pavement with a deafening screech, and each time their yellow vehicle backed up it had to beep, beep, beep, beep. It took incredible concentration to mentally sing and maintain the rhythm of the song against the opposing rhythm of the beeps. I sang over the beeps three days in a row, five to seven hours a day, before finally marching out of the house. The yellow machine was quite formidable up close; its claw dwarfed me. And the man it belonged to, its master, was proportional to the claw. He was drinking Gatorade in big gulps; his head was tilted back and sweat was running down the sides of his enormous, meaty face. This was exactly the sort of man whose member I loved for Clee to suck.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know how much backing up you’ll be doing today? I live in that house. The beeping is very loud.”

“A lot.” He looked behind himself. “Yeah, a lot of backing up today.”

A cool breeze moved past and I knew how nice that must feel on his sweaty face, but that was all. I didn’t know how anything else would feel to him.

“Sorry for the noise,” he added.

“Don’t be,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’re doing.”

He straightened up a little and I waited to see if his embarrassed dignity, so ripe with potential, would stir Clee. But no, nothing — the spell was broken. I had sung the song hard enough and often enough: now I never had to sing it again. I walked back to the house, noticing the neighbor’s orange tree for the first time. It almost didn’t look real. I breathed in the citrus, the ocean, the smog — I could smell everything. And see everything. My breath caught in my throat. I dropped down to the curb, bludgeoned by the vision of a middle-aged woman who couldn’t keep her hands off herself. Cars passed, some fast, some slowing down to stare and wonder.

She didn’t attack me for the entire month of July. Or talk to me. Or look at me. I was the vulgar one, I had dirtied her , not the other way around. How had it come to this and how could I clear my name? I was ready to throw myself into penitent acts as soon as an opportunity arose, but none did. Instead the hours limped by and each working day she was a little closer to moving out of my house. This would probably be for the best, though the thought was gutting, absurdly so.

On the last day of the month a blanket of heat descended in the middle of the night, waking every living thing and setting them against each other. I stared out the kitchen window into the moonless night, listening. An animal was being mauled in the backyard, possibly a coyote attacking a skunk — but not well, not deftly. After a few minutes Clee padded out from the living room and stood a few feet away from me. We listened to the squeals change as the animal approached death; the pitch had entered the human register, every exertion contained a familiar vowel. If words began to form then I would go out there and break it up. Words, even crudely formed ones, would change the game entirely. Of course they would be accidental — the way a tortured human might accidentally make sounds that were meaningful to a pig — but I would still have to step in. We both listened for a word. Maybe help , maybe a name, maybe Please no .

But the thing died before any of that, an abrupt silence.

“I don’t believe in abortion,” whispered Clee, shaking her head ruefully.

It was an unusual way to think about it, but no matter: she was talking to me.

“I think it should be illegal,” she added. “Do you?”

I squinted into the dark corners of the yard. No, I didn’t. I had signed petitions making sure of that. But it seemed like she was referring to what we had done just now, or hadn’t done.

“I’m definitely on the side of life,” I said, meaning not that I was pro-life, just that I was one of life’s fans. She nodded several times in full agreement. We walked back to our beds with a formal feeling, like two diplomats who had signed a treaty of historical import. I wasn’t forgiven, but the air in the house had changed. Tomorrow I’d ask for directions. Do you know where the nearest drugstore is? I saw her smiling with relief, as if I’d asked her to dance. Everything forgiven.

TOMORROW BEGAN WITH A PHONE CALL.Suzanne was outraged.

“I want no part in it. And I don’t feel guilty about that. Did I wake you up?”

“No.” It was six A.M.

“If she was keeping it, I would be mad but I would feel I had to participate. But according to Kate’s mom that’s not the plan. It’s just false stupidity. She’s doing it so she can feel like a trashy Christian girl, like Kate, like all of them.”

There was a little tickle in my brain, like the feeling of being about to remember the word for something. I knew I would understand what she was talking about in just a second.

“You have my permission to kick her out immediately — in fact, I insist on it. She needs a taste of reality. Who’s the father? She can live with him.”

The father. Father Christmas? Feather, farther, fallow? Was there liquid running out of my ear? I looked in the mirror; no liquid. But it was interesting to watch my face as it happened. It gave a very large, theatrical performance of a person being stunned: the mouth fell open, the eyes widened and protruded, color vanished. Somewhere a large soft mallet hit a giant cymbal.

The word for the thing we were talking about was pregnant .

Clee was pregnant.

Were there many ways to get pregnant? Not really. Could you get pregnant from a water fountain? No. My ear was being so loud I could barely make out Suzanne asking if I knew who the father was; even my own reply was hard to hear.