Kim Fu - For Today I Am a Boy

All over the city, people were crowding under awnings and inside bars and restaurants, waiting out the storm. She must have been watching the rain flood the gutterless streets, race sideways with the wind. “I knew you guys were, you know, shy and effeminate. I didn’t know you don’t even fuck.”

“They do,” I said. Admitting that I wasn’t one of them, what she wanted me to be. Her yellow man. “Just not me.”

“I want to be fucked.”

“So go get fucked,” I said. “By someone else. And then come back to me.”

“I don’t do that. I’m an old-fashioned, one-man kind of girl.”

I thought this was a joke and I laughed. I caught the glint of her eyes in the dark. She wasn’t joking. “I’m sorry. Let’s go to bed. Please.” She turned back to the window. “We’ll play our games. I’ll be your little darling. You can dress me up. Bathe me. Beat me. Order me around.” I watched her solid back and realized that I was doing this wrong. I wasn’t offering her anything; I was begging for what I wanted.

The rain continued to fall in unbroken sheets, loud on her balconies. She came back. Sat beside me. Her white blouse radiant in the lamplight. “Stay the night,” she whispered.

I mistook the look in her eyes for tenderness.

I woke up choking, out of a dream in which someone was trying to crush my windpipe from above. The feeling was the same: that too-much shock, the need to escape. Tightness closing in. Only not in my throat.

I felt her weight pinning me down. Margie’s weight. Margie on top of me, her shirt gaping open, her hands on my abdomen. Her pubic bone cutting into mine.

The thing was inside her.

I shoved her off me, thrashing to get free. I fell sideways from the bed. I ran in a half-standing lurch and heard her call something after me. I heard the word enjoy.

Her house — all its diamond-patterned glass and Old World, mocking strangeness — blurred past. I got to the front steps. I leaned over the railing, naked, looking down the dizzying height at the wet grass, murderous traffic, morning commuters, buzzing flies, no storm, no rain, everything so terribly normal. I threw up.

I straightened up. I bent all the way back, chin to the sky. Margie watched me from the window. She looked the way the bile tasted in my mouth.

Later, I could barely remember walking down Côte-Sainte-Catherine in my kitchen clothes from the day before. Asphalt with no shade. I did remember going back into Margie’s house, forced by my nudity: Her voice coaxed, the words meaningless, when I refused to go farther than the front hall. I remembered being handed my bag, wincing when our hands touched. I remembered the newness of a room I’d seen only in the dark. Dusty wind chimes hung far from the door, so they never made a sound. Pictures of Dave as a child.

Bonnie’s bedroom shared a false wall with the room next door. The only natural light came through the narrow glass at the top of the partition; she had no real windows. Two of her roommates, neither of them Dave, were having a fight on the other side of the wall.

We lay in her bed, on top of the covers, far from each other. Like regretful lovers. Space enough between us for another person. I had cried myself inside out. We listened to the bickering from next door. The woman did most of the talking, too shrill for us to make out any words. The man kept saying, “Easy, easy,” as though his girlfriend were a horse.

I turned onto my side. “Has this ever happened to you?”

Bonnie was silent. And I felt a terrible, unexpected pride. A kind of sisterhood. A womanly rite of passage. What happens when you paint your eyes large, proffer glimpses of thigh: the assault the world thinks you deserve.

“Tell me about Helen’s house,” I said.

Bonnie stared into the middle distance as she spoke, at the space between her face and the ceiling, as though she saw something there. “It’s big. Bigger than Mom and Dad’s house. She has a wooden deck with a wooden roof made of slats, so you can see the sky through the gaps. There’s a garden box, though it was empty while I was there. And a barbecue, but Helen never used that either. A real backyard, not like that crappy little strip we had.”

“Is she still mad at you?” I asked.

Bonnie didn’t answer, a way of answering. “Helen is a lot older than me. Us.”

“Someday she won’t be.”

Bonnie smiled at that. I looked at the same spot, the same speck of dust, where her eyes were focused. We looked at it together. It was Helen’s deck. A hot day in California, sun breaking through the slats. Helen stands over the barbecue, cloaked in hickory smoke. Tomato plants in the garden box, some of the fruits a shy, blushing orange, some of them explosively red. Adele plucks one and slices it into a salad. Bonnie hands me a drink in a glass overwhelmed by limes. Mother, hero, friend.

FOR MOST MEN, I suppose, it can be slow agony. They watch their tonsured crowns grow or their peaks recede as if they were watching the tide go out and never return. My fanatical avoidance of mirrors allowed me to tie my ponytail lower and lower on my head without dwelling on it too much. I thought I was too young; it came on sudden and swift.

I caught the bus home to Fort Michel before dawn on a winter morning. I tried to sleep leaning on the window. There was nothing outside but pitch-black scrub and highway ditches filled with melting snow. The window reflected back the palest parts of my face, the whites of my eyes and the socket bones, while the dark centers were replaced with the blackness outside. The top of my head shone as though polished.

I was no longer balding. It would have been vain to keep using the word. I was bald.

The bus station in Fort Michel was in the middle of a row of Victorian houses on small lots. It had one counter, one bench of beige leather seats, and a vending machine that looked gap-toothed from empty slots. Slush and gravel had been dragged across the linoleum floor by passengers’ boots. I sat down before I remembered that no one was coming to pick me up.

Though it was eleven on a weekday, the streets were empty. The garage where Ollie worked was closed. New gas pumps sat out front. I peered through its window with my hand over my eyes. The waiting area for customers looked just like the bus station, down to the connected beige seats.

My mother answered the door wearing a bathrobe and a pearl necklace. On the shelf by the front door were three ivory statuettes I had never seen before. One was fat, bald, and cheery, like a laughing Buddha, leaning on a staff. The other two were old men with crowns and long beards.

Mother caught me staring at them. “Household gods. They’re good luck,” she said. “Don’t tell your father.” I realized Father must not leave the house anymore.

She opened their bedroom door and motioned for me to go in ahead of her. My father was sitting upright in bed with his back against the headboard and his hands in his lap. He wore crisp, brand-new pajamas. My mother had just combed his hair the way he used to do it for work, leaving the comb marks. But she’d used water instead of gel, and it softened as it dried.

“Hello, Peter.”

“Hello, Father.” I came close to the edge of the bed. “What did the doctor say?”

My parents looked at each other. I lowered my head to retract my question, to find a pose of respect and shame. My father lifted his hand and signaled that Mother should leave. I stared at the bedspread. The half-open blinds left a barcode of shadows on my father’s legs. I could tell, even through the blanket, that his calves were thin as broomsticks.

“Do you know what kills Chinese men, Peter?”

I shook my head.