Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“How does it work?” On-screen it was a gray day, and the camera bobbed through torched forests, past patches of fire and ember. There was the sound of footsteps and a helicopter overhead. Deb flinched at gunfire.

“You kill people.” He pressed so many buttons. “It’s the Vietnam War.” There was shouting in a hard, alien language (real Vietnamese?) and more shooting. A hand that was Simon’s reloaded his gun. An American shouted Grenade, get down! The color washed out, and the point of view fell to the ground, on its side. “Fuck.”

Deb looked at her son in a way he could feel.

“What? I died.” Already he was alive again. KILL ASSIST +10 flashed on the screen.

“Who are you playing against?”

“Uh.” His words came from far away. “It’s live, so. Just anybody.”

“Strangers?”

“Uh. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know them.”

—

Later he went to bed, or at least to his room, where, from the hall, Deb could see the strip of white light underscoring his door. Probably he was online again. Probably had never been off.

The box she’d left in their bedroom, under a blanket on the rocking chair by Jack’s closet. That was where it greeted her now, tipping a little forward in the current the window conspired with the open door to make.

you are tracing it with your two fingers, up and down, slowly. are you doing it?

my roommate is in the kitchen

you’re doing it

This Jack she knew. He’d said things to her, maybe not quite so dirty. People were less dirty in the nineties, or it felt that way. They weren’t typing it yet. But Deb remembered talking on the phone. She’d had a roommate then, Izzy, another dancer in the corps, who was always around, walking through her room to the kitchen, peeing with the bathroom door open to still see the television in their dark one-bedroom converted to two.

now put your fingers inside. get them wet. are you wet?

Deb wondered if he bit her too. This faceless girl, touching herself, who was she?

i’m so hard for you. i’ve got it in my hand so you can see.

And where was he, writing these words? Here, while she was in class and the kids were at school? i’m sliding in you. i slide right in you because you are so wet. He wanted to know about other men, how the girl touched them, let them touch her. did you like his cock in your mouth? did you suck his balls? These were the kind of questions he’d asked Deb when they were new to each other, when the memories of other men were still fresh in her mind. She’d tell him about a boyfriend who liked her to drag her teeth up his shaft or dance a finger around his asshole, and the next time they were together, he’d ask for teeth, for assholes. She thought it was cute, that he got jealous, and curious, that jealousy made him want it. “Don’t you want to hear my stories?” he’d ask. “Don’t you like hearing about things I’ve done?” No.

I’ll be a little late tomorrow, picking up Kay’s cake. Let yourself in, take off all your clothes, get down on the floor, and wait for me to make you cum. Deb saw smooth legs opening somewhere in Jack’s studio, on the drafting table maybe, and she saw the white skirt.

—

To call her mother, she went out through the yellow lobby, past Angel, who hopped off his stool, and into the early-summer air that cradled her.

“Hello?” Ruth always picked up. “Hold on a minute; let me turn off the set.”

Deb held, wandered the block. Dark around the First Baptist Church, where a woman she worked with at the college had gotten married. The outside was beautiful with its rose windows, stained glass rainbowed like oil in a puddle, but the little room where they’d had the ceremony had plaster walls and low ceilings. For two twenties Simon had helped videotape the wedding.

“Okay, hi, dear.” To Deb’s quiet she said, “What is it,” her voice weighted with every possible wrong.

“They know. The kids. About Jack.”

“You told?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Then what, Deborah? Slow.”

Deb told her, slow, passing under the warm neon of the twenty-four-hour burger place where they used to give the kids balloons. Deliverymen sat waiting at the green tables and chairs on the sidewalk.

“And you called David?”

Deb walked faster down Broadway, with a snap that suggested purpose. She crossed against the light. David Currie was the divorce lawyer she’d gone to in January, really a friend from high school who had grown up into a lawyer. “I just wanted so goddamn much to be done with it.” Her throat had closed up. Past the Korean grocery, where the grapefruits and green peppers outside seemed to glow. The streetlights were orange and red and swam in her eyes.

“I know.” Ruth sighed into the phone. “Oh, don’t I know,” as if she was thinking of her own past.

“I just can’t believe it. I just can’t fucking believe he did this.” That wasn’t true, so why did she keep saying it?

“He’s a son of a bitch, Debby. We knew this.”

“I don’t even want to fucking talk to him.”

“So call David.”

Back in January, what David Currie had told her was to wait. He had been through a divorce himself; they were long and sometimes people changed their minds. “You’d not believe,” he’d said, “what people get over.” He told her about a woman who’d stayed with her husband after his sex-change operation.

“I keep thinking about how someone might say it’s my fault. For not doing anything.” And because she did know what it was like to lose sight, behave badly, and she was afraid of bringing in the mud, the ugly, afraid of what might be used against her if she pressed Jack, and if he tried really to defend himself. “I should have, I shouldn’t have been—”

“But you did. You were. Honey, no good comes this way. Listen. Look. Lie down. Take a rest. He isn’t home yet?”

“I’m out.”

“Where are you?”

“Can’t you hear I’m outside?”

“What does it matter? No, I couldn’t hear.”

“I’m not coming over. Relax.”

“You could come.”

“I know, you’d love that. Look, I’m sorry I woke you.”

“I was eating.”

“Well, you shouldn’t eat so late,” Deb said stupidly. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Outside the Seventy-second Street subway station, sprinkles of people were gathered in pairs or posed alone against columns, waiting for other people. A red stroller rolled across the square, a woman with short hair leaned on its handlebars. A comfort to find life in other places, people who didn’t know him, who’d read his write-ups maybe, in New York or the Times, but who didn’t give a fuck about Jack.

That time the girl let herself into the studio, took off all her clothes, and got down on the floor, Jack was two hours late getting there. And when he did arrive, he couldn’t get in because the girl, in one of her moods, had fastened the last remaining lock, a chain he busted his shoulder getting through, charging the door like a ram. He found her at the sink, washing her hair. Bare from the waist up, that was why she’d used the lock, for peace of mind, and the running water was why she couldn’t hear him shouting.

So instead of fucking on the floor, he was on the couch, on his stomach, enduring the girl’s crude massage. You couldn’t relocate a shoulder if it hit you over the head. What are you trying to do, kill me? He left her there, in almost tears, to go home to his wife, with her years of physical therapy, who knew how to touch what felt broken.

But all that was, what, last fall? The pain in his shoulder had gone mostly away, though there were still no locks on his studio door. Especially risky because he’d found already, the time he forgot his building key, that by squatting he could unlock the downstairs without it, hooking his arm up and through the poorly engineered wrought iron.