Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

His first girlfriend bought the chastity belt as a joke. He couldn’t open it. They scrambled around, used the tin key that it came packaged with, opened her up, had sex anyway. Her underwear was thin and full of holes and the boy kept it that night in his bed, after they had parted, and thought about the way she butted her head into his shoulder like a goat. When they broke up, he walked to the bank and put the underwear in the safe deposit box right on top of that one piece of gold. His mother never said a word about it. The bank had changed ownership by now and had a new color scheme-navy and dark green-but the lock was exactly the same.

His father went to the hospital for the blindness. He told the doctor that he saw whiteness everywhere, as if he’d been driving in the snow for days and days, and that he couldn’t find his balance or his peace. The hospital gave him painkillers and sunglasses. The boy’s father sat in the kitchen with a cup of milk in a mug, his palm covering the opening so he wouldn’t have to look at its white flat top and he said, It’s not like I saw anything that horrible. The son said, Really? and the father said, Son, the truth is I can’t even quite remember what I saw. Is it bright in here? he asked. The son looked outside at the setting sun and the lucid calm of dusk.

The eighth key fit the cabinet at a weaponry store. He went there for his college war survey class to learn the difference between muskets and spears. The man who owned the weapon store had a big belly and cheeks stretched over his face like poorly upholstered furniture. He would be hard to make in clay. The man was reading a book called How to Meet Girls , and when the boy asked to see some stuff, the man said he’d lost the key to the back cabinet where the small revolvers lived. The boy felt his finger itching, walked over, and opened it himself. The man’s cheeks raised a full inch on his face, furniture renewal. The boy shot some targets and felt like a soldier and wrote a brilliant report. He read How to Meet Girls cover to cover.

His mother came to his college graduation. His father could not because the light of the sun blinded him and seeing people all dressed in one kind of uniform reminded him of the army and made his head feel like it would explode. I can’t stand it, he told his son. All those bodies on the lawn in black graduation gowns. It’s like one huge goddamn foxhole. His mother wore a dress she’d made in her sewing class, with contrasting patches of velvet, burlap, silk.

He went to France for a graduation present. He returned to the Louvre, deciding he wanted to play more gin rummy. He located the door, but when he stuck his finger in the lock, it didn’t fit anymore. They had apparently changed locks since his last visit. This made him feel unsettled, as if kicked out of his own home. He wondered if that finger would find a new lock now. He thought: Yes. And no. And I don’t know.

He met a French girl named Sophie, sitting in a yellow-and-brown wicker chair at a café, eating a butter-and-sugar crepe. He fell in love with her within a couple of days. She puffed her lips when she spoke, like the French do. In bed, he put his finger inside of her, the ring finger on his left hand, the finger that means marriage, as if to turn her inside and unlock her body. She came fast; she was loose and loving, and loud, and luscious, but she hadn’t been locked, either. I love you, she told him, after a week, with a thick French accent, lips puffing. He decided to stay for the rest of August. They made love all the time and he told her his “uncle” couldn’t see because he’d watched bad things in the war and Sophie said, What war? and the boy shook his head. I don’t know, he said. Some war somewhere kind of near here.

When he left France, Sophie said she’d write but she only sent one letter total. He returned to his hometown and found an apartment near his mother and father. He went to the man, still sitting around the kitchen.

Do you know who were you fighting? he asked.

Some other guy, said his father, stirring his tea.

What did you see? asked his son.

Not much, said his father. Some blood, he said. I think something got taken away from me, his father said. I think they took something from me but I never even felt it happen when they did.

The boy placed his right hand of keys into his father’s open palm: the security box, the neighbor’s car, the closet in France, the docent room at the Louvre that had been changed.

You say you’ve opened eight so far? said his father. Which is the ninth?

The son waggled his ring finger on his left hand. Well, go open some doors, his father said, squeezing his hand. The one you open with the ninth key will be connected to the woman you will marry. Maybe.

The boy took his hand back, and agreed that would be very sweet, if it worked out like that. He had been feeling a vague dissatisfaction at the mundane nature of the other eight keys. There was a report on the news that NASA had lost the key to the space shuttle, and so the boy called up right away and offered his assistance. The whole flight over he had the national anthem singing in his head. NASA took him straightaway to a sealed white room with serious people who shook his hand and had fierce eye contact, and members of the FBI lined the walls in case he was a terrorist in disguise. The boy tried all his fingers twice but none worked. The NASA people shook their heads, and he heard someone say, I told you so. He had a fleeting feeling of terror that the FBI might arrest him for something his father had done and an even bigger wish that an FBI man would arrest him, take him aside, and tell him what had happened. What is the greatest mystery of your family? he asked the older lady on the flight home, as they watched the movie without sound, and she looked at him thoughtfully but never answered. At home, he shoved his finger into every door he could see for a few weeks, but decided to stop, as it was starting to make him unhappy, and signed himself up for a sculpture class.

In the second class in the series on figure sculpture, the boy met a woman he wanted to marry. After a year, they married. They spent the gold piece in the safe deposit box on the wedding and did it up, and also did it dark so that his father could stand it. It was a night wedding. His father stood at the microphone and made a toast with his eyes closed. The son danced with his bride, luminous in her white dress; his father never once looked at the bride for fear his head would explode. That night, in the hotel room, the bride looked at the ring on his key finger and asked him what that one opened and he said he didn’t know. They made love in the big hotel bed with the strange-smelling comforter and fell asleep face-to-face, feet tangled together.

They went to Paris on their honeymoon and found the closet in the hotel that the boy, now a man, could open, and when the porter wasn’t looking, they snuck inside and made love. Due to the intrusion of the walls, sex was uncomfortable in the closet, so they ended up going to the front desk and getting a room anyway. There, on the bed in the hotel, the man told his new wife about his father and the war. He told her everything he knew which was very little but still, other than the quick “uncle” confession to Sophie, he’d never told anyone. He had to continually smother down a fear of the FBI busting into the wiretapped room and taking him to FBI jail as he spoke. The new wife was understanding but equally confused. We were at war then? she said. The man said, You are the first person I have ever really told. Her face was dim in the light of Parisian dusk, filtering through the windows and turning the room golden. He felt glad he’d married her. They went downstairs and had a feast of duck in apricot sauce in the hotel dining room and the porter, who was now significantly older, recognized him and gave him a free crème brülée. After dinner, the porter insisted he open the closet again, which he did, with embarrassment, because to him it still smelled like his wife’s desire and not like an abandoned closet in the least.