Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

She sits down. The baby on her lap is blue-eyed and has light hairs on its arms, unlike Debbie, with that black hair we still dislike intensely. The older child, also a girl, lolls behind her, looking at the stand-up menu. She is wearing expensive clothes and something about her mouth is very ungrateful.

Why did you do that? Debbie asks simply.

The waiter comes and retrieves our change, annoyed by all the linty pennies. Anything else? he asks dryly. The baby burbles.

We stare at Debbie’s baby, who looks like it is from another person’s body. Boy? we ask. Girl, she says.

It’s Debbie, right? we ask.

No, she says, wincing. My name is Anne.

Oh.

We can’t think why we have always been sure she is Debbie. Did she change her name?

I don’t know, we say. I don’t know why we did it. Sorry? we say again.

She shifts the baby like a sack of flour.

Everyone I tell the story to says you must have been feeling pretty awful about yourself to do such a thing, she says to us, gripping the top of our chair with her hand.

We listen and nod. We realize now that it has been a good story to tell people. She must get a lot of sympathy, and she has always enjoyed sympathy. Suddenly we feel she must owe us a thank-you for giving what would be an otherwise fairly dull life a little bit of texture. She stands and holds the baby close, and the baby starts to cry.

It was a good time, we say. We do not mean it in the shocking way. We just mean it was a good time, then, high school. We appreciated that time.

Debbie leaves. She doesn’t say goodbye. She has more fodder for her insulted self; she has a new way to tell her old story. We give up our table which is being eyed by new customers. Cars toil at the stoplight. We glimpsed sympathy for Debbie, yes, when we stood at the wall after our lover left us. We found ourselves hungry and desperate in the pit of the stomach, revolting to ourselves. Then we got over it. We don’t go by that wall anymore. Sure, we think of our old gal sometimes but unlike Debbie, we know what should be kept to ourselves, not available for public consumption. Sure, we still keep the tear vial in our car, even though we understand how it could be perceived as creepy. Most of it has evaporated anyway. If we ever happen to see her again, though, we like to think we could prove to her that she cried in our arms, just in case she is pretending to have forgotten. We hear, through college acquaintances, that she married some man. Of course. She always was predictable. We hear she is possibly pregnant. All we know is that her nightmares were intense and we were very comforting then, and we said smart things, and when she was crying in the middle of the night we were paramount, and that sort of connection does not evaporate. We own her, we think, as we walk west down Wilshire, toward the tar. The sky is an easy breezy blue. Perhaps, in a way, we own Debbie too. Perhaps, in a way, if anyone cries on us, we then own them, a piece of them, forever. Perhaps the vial is redundant. It seems nice, to think this. We begin the long walk home feeling refreshed. We look for who we can see crying, because after all, crying is not an endangered action. There are endless tears to hunt down and possess. To provoke or extract or soothe. We are delighted with this new world, this world full of possibility.

The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities-Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicago, Betsy’s lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Los Angeles.

“I fuck mothers,” he said to anyone who asked him. “And I do it well,” he added.

He was also reasonable; he didn’t fuck married mothers, only available ones who wanted to date and who’d lined up an appropriate babysitter for the child that’d made them a mother in the first place.

He wined, dined, danced, romanced-martinis and kisses on the neck, bloody steak and Pinot Noir-the word “beautiful” said sincerely with a casual lean-back into a booth. He asked pointed, particular questions. By midnight had most of them in bed, clothes off in a flash, the speed of a woman undressing changing rapidly over time, faster and faster, and he was a very good lover, attentive and confident, a giver and a taker, and the mothers lined up to see him, their babysitters growing rich, twenties stuffed in those tight teenage pockets.

He never liked any of them for longer than one or two times. Or, he liked them but not enough to keep calling. I love all women, he told himself. He liked to try on hats in stores.

One afternoon, he was at a fancy Bel Air party on a damp lawn talking to some damp-and-fancy people. They stood in groups of three and four, stirring lemonades laced with vodka, that liquid shark swimming among the yellow feathers of their drink. The motherfucker wandered across the lawn to the starlet, famous for her latest few films, wearing the red straw hat and matching red dress, the one watching her four-year-old play on the lawn chairs, the one whose husband had left her for a man, or so said the newspapers. Everyone else was afraid to talk to her.

She had shiny hair under her red hat and was drinking nothing, hands still at her sides.

The motherfucker told her he liked her hat. She said, Thank you. He asked about her son; she said, He’s four. The kid rolled in the grass, collecting stains on his clothes like lashings from a green whip.

“I think you’re a good actress,” the man said. “Why do you always pick such sad characters to play?”

“Me?” she said. “Sad characters?” And she flashed him her teeth, the long white ones that had been photographed a million times by now, each tooth a gleaming door into the mysteries of her mouth.

The motherfucker said yes. “You,” he said.

He stood with the starlet for a while and told her he was a graduate student at the school for emotional ventriloquists. She raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. “No,” he said, “it’s true.” She laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s true. You throw your emotions on other people in the room,” he explained, “and see what they do then.”

“So what do they do?” she asked, keeping that perfect eyebrow halfway up her forehead.

“It depends,” he sighed. “Sometimes they lob them right back at you.

“Turns out life,” he said to her, “is a whole lot like tennis.”

They walked to the gazebo. The party was ending, and the sun was going down and the grass had turned a softer shade of green. He knew he needed to do something to make her remember him so he stood there with her in the gazebo, watching her son, and put his hand on her famous shining hair, just for a second, lifted it off her back and let it down again. She jumped.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh,” he said, “your hair was stuck.”

Then he didn’t touch her again, not for weeks.

He got her phone number from the host. Motherfuckers have their ways. It took only one lie and he left with those ten numbers, one dash, and two parentheses tucked with care inside his shirt pocket.

At home, he put in a call to crazy Heddie from Butte. He asked her a half hour of penetrating questions and then tried to have phone sex but found he couldn’t really muster up the gusto. His mind was elsewhere. The next day, he called the starlet and asked her to dinner.

She laughed. She sounded even prettier on the phone. “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. “After all, I am a movie star.” He said no, he wasn’t afraid of her, he thought of her as an interesting, attractive woman who happened to have a very public job. She said that was sure a new way to put it. They set a date to meet at an Italian bistro on Vermont, and there she signed twelve autographs and he asked about how what she did as an actress and what he did as an emotional ventriloquist were similar, but she said they were in a restaurant and it was too distracting so they should talk about something light while they were there. “Maybe you’re afraid of me,” he said. She looked closer, eyes green and piercing. “Maybe I am,” she said, and the rest of the dinner was quiet. The waiter asked for an autograph on a napkin, and by the time they left, it was already hung up by the host’s podium with a red thumbtack, next to some signed black-and-white photographs of other stars, many of whom by now were regular people or else dead.