Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“You wore that the first time I saw you,” is what I say to her, but it sounds like “I love you” and I don’t even know if that’s true. I usually don’t know till much later, and then from the intensity of the loss after everything goes wrong. I said I loved Becks, and I can think of Becks now, place her in a day like this one. See Becks wrapped in the red wool scarf she used to wear, those worker boots she thought made her look more working class, the ones that went into the closet forever when she became a professional. I can see Becks stumbling ahead of me, giggling drunk, as we walked through the dark from the bars of Mumbles, ocean to the right, hoping for an available minicab somewhere in the buildings to our left. I remember seeing that sight, and knowing I loved her, that I loved a mousy-haired Welsh girl named Becky, and I remember that and feel nothing close to that now. I can live in the moment, but I can’t trust the moment. This moment, where Sun exhales and I see all the smoke and I, too, want to spiral around inside her, it could be lying as well.

When Sunita turns, it’s sudden and as deliberate and forced as the smile. The earflaps jump. The rest of the smoke inside her comes out of the forced corner of her grin, and the cigarette is flicked to the street beyond.

“Don’t worry, Warren, they can’t give you cancer if you sacrifice them to the sewer god.”

“We can just go now. We don’t have to go to this concert, you know? I’m tired. This was enough. Come with me. You could spend the night.”

“Oh, come on. Nobody likes a quitter. Didn’t you like your meal? I thought the food was fantastic!” Sun’s still smiling. She wants me to be smiling. If we’re both smiling, our lips will be too tight to verbally unpack what the hell happened in there.

“That’s Elijah? That’s the boyfriend?”

“He’s okay. He can be fun. Really.”

“Wow, so that wasn’t a joke. That’s the person you’ve chosen to be your real boyfriend. Okay.”

“Hey, I don’t have to justify him to you. My relationship with Elijah shouldn’t be threatening to you, Warren. It’s a separate relationship. It has nothing to do with ours.” It comes out quick. It was already prepared, loaded in her head, and waiting to be delivered.

“So you admit it. We have a relationship.”

“Sure. Fine. But I have one with him, too.”

“But he’s a self-centered asshole!” That I say this, more than the fact that the world is kind of fuzzy and unmoored, makes me suspect I might be drunk. When I follow with, “You don’t love him,” that confirms it.

“You don’t know me. We fuck, Warren. We fuck, and we talk comic books. That’s it. You barely know me.”

“But I want to know more,” I say, with far too much vulnerability. And it doesn’t matter because I’ve already pushed things too far into ruin.

Elijah laughs. Not at this, but at something Roslyn’s said to him as they walk out the door. Something he doesn’t like, something he has to mimic joviality about and add “You know, I don’t know if you know how funny you are” to complete his response. He walks right up to Sun and hugs her. Hugs, rocks back and forth, hugs. And then looking at me, Elijah smiles even bigger and goes to hug me. The man is hugging me. Really hard. His beard brushes against my neck. His ginger goatee. It reminds me of Becks’s pubic hair, wet from sweat, shaved into damn near the same oval. Oh look, Sun and I have similar tastes in white people.

They walk right in front of us, the two of them, the official couple. The couple licensed and approved by time. Roslyn takes my hand again, pulls me on. I grasp it, keep staring ahead. She puts a hand on my chin, and aims my face at hers.

“You are a beautiful mixed man,” Roslyn tells me. This is not true, but it is truly a lovely mantra. For I am a beautiful mixed man. “You are a strong multiracial warrior,” she continues. “Thank you” doesn’t seem enough so I give her a kiss on her cheek. The side of her face offers much-needed warmth as I watch Sun and Elijah entwined a few feet beyond.

—

There’s a small, hand-painted, black-and-white sign with a white angel playing guitar on it. Under it is a door, and through that door, steps that lead to the second-story loft above an empty Greek restaurant. All the Oreos are up there. There are so many Oreos, it makes me want to eat one. “It really is a delicious cookie,” I whisper in Roslyn’s ear, and she nods and smiles because it’s loud and she can’t hear me. It is a delicious cookie, really, it is clear to me now. The chocolate crust, the creamy white cloud on the inside. “How could it be an insult?” I ask Roslyn, and she says, “I don’t know. I believe it’s guitars and banjo. Or perhaps ukuleles.”

The space is a shotgun, with a stage at the back, a few couches already filled with people sitting on every available surface. Roslyn walks toward one of them, and I look at the people crowded around it and I know them. They are the faces of people I sometimes nod to as I walk the grounds of Mélange, and sometimes they nod back. And sometimes they don’t, because I have an angry face or they heard the gesture is called a nigganod and want nothing to do with it. But they are fully invested in her, Roslyn, the great matriarch of the new people.

“How’s that date going?” is screamed into my ear. I turn to see Spider smiling.

“It’s gone to shit. I thought you weren’t going to be here?” I yell.

“Came to see the aftermath,” he yells back, then wags his head right and left as he laughs. He takes me by the arm, pulls me farther away from the speakers, sits right on the floor, and leans against the wall. I kneel down knowing how hard it’s going to be to get back up again, deciding not to do so till the alcohol in me is ready to find its final resting place in the toilet.

“It turns out, I don’t understand Sunita,” I tell him. “I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, but I don’t get her.”

“Don’t feel bad. I don’t understand some women either, and I was born one.” Spider shrugs, offers me a swig of the flask he struggles to yank out his hip pocket. I’m looking at the bottle, a lovely steel job, shiny, curved like the edge of his leg. But I’m thinking, He’s serious.

“You really were a woman?” I lean harder against the wall. I push into it. I want the outline of my body to mold into the plaster so something in my life feels firm.

“Yeah man, I told you. Biologically. Never quite fit in any other way, though. So I did what I had to do. This is, like, what, fourteen years ago?” He sees the way I’m looking at him. Because I’m not looking, I’m inspecting. I’m checking the leathered folds giving parentheses around his smile, clocking the receding stubble of his hairline, looking for the bulge of an Adam’s apple under the ink that crawls over his neck from out of his shirt. “Testosterone. It’s a helluva drug,” Spider adds. Nothing is what it is or what it was.

“That’s the problem right there,” he responds as if he heard my thought. “You gotta change. With life. Life changes, you got to go with it. Or you get pulled apart.” I don’t know if he’s talking about me, or Sunita.

I close my eyes. I close out everything but the sound of a dulcimer. My dad used to make his own dulcimers. Cardboard ones mostly, but wooden ones too. It was a part of some hippie forecast of an apocalypse where knowledge of dulcimer construction would be essential. It’s the first time in decades I’ve heard one and its music is light and tinny and the sound of a tipsy Craig Duffy, pipe of Cavendish hanging from the corner of his mouth and bathing in a tub of good mood. I open my eyes to see the player actually does remind me of my father as well, except he’s younger and, of course, brown.