T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

LATER THAT EVENING after Charlie and Freddie left, Daron walked in on Candice in the bathroom, I just need the Vaseline. She was brushing her teeth, and waved him by with a winging elbow, grunting her okay, he’d thought. It was the scene he’d imagined so long ago at home in B-ville, couples sharing small spaces while attending to separate tasks, carpooling through life in defiance of physics. After a time, they hardly noticed each other. But he would never grow weary of watching Candice. Each day a gift of observation or revelation, or both. Two coughs and one throat clearing were only the beginning. Each day their lexicon would grow, their shorthandoffs to the heart: slang, ironic advertising slogans, winks, fingers grazing earlobes, book titles, film quotes, conspicuous lyrics, a tidal wave of desire surfing a wisp of a glance, their private language a suprasemiotic domain, a code not even Turing could crack. But when she slapped the Vaseline into his palm, spit a tangle of pink foam, and shouldered by him without wiping her chin, the enigma was his alone.

She’d been acting oddly ever since Charlie left. Was she raking because she wasn’t baking, as Nana said? Candy-Anne? he called. Candy-Bear, what’s wrong?

The bedroom door slammed in response. Stomping. I’ll study at the library, she called, that punctuated by banging the only other door worth slamming, the front door, shut with force sufficient that the windowpanes rattled in their mullions and the whole apartment felt to cough with embarrassment. When she returned later, sans books, it was not to watch the shows he’d DVRed and dutifully waited to view. And later, when he thought he heard her crying in the bathroom and tapped on the door — What’s wrong, Candy? — only a flush in answer.

Promotion politics! That’s what it had to be.

His father had warned this happened eventually with all women. Cohabitation, engagement, marriage, kids — not necessarily in that order these days, but each one is a rank, and the higher the rank, the more they demand and the less they explain. Your girlfriend is a private, your fiancée a captain, your live-in a lieutenant, your wife an admiral, your old lady a drill sergeant. Trick is to grant them privileges without promoting them. That’s the trick, all right.

They’d had this conversation in the garage when D’aron was in middle school, his father scooting around on his favorite creeper, inspecting the muffler and the CV joints under Maylene’s pickup. Her boyfriend was away at school: vocational training. As they conversed, D’aron watched his father’s Red Wings tap out the tempo of his speech.

How do you do that trick? he asked.

D’aron grinned when, before answering, his father dug his heels in and rolled out from under the car for emphasis, which meant hearing French. His father believed you had to look a man in the eye when you spoke French. (French was of course known about town as the Dirty Italian at that time because all things French were on the No Fly List.)

His father thought about it a moment. No damned idea, son. If I could figure that I wouldn’t be in the hotbox.

You’d be in the rib with the sleeves?

His father laughed every bit of air out of his lungs, as he had when an even younger D’aron asked how they knew it was French kissing if no one was actually talking. It was not a laugh of encouragement, no matter how many times his father apologized, said, I’m not laughing at you, boy, I’m laughing with you, only in advance of you gettin’ the joke. And so, with a keen awareness of his naiveté at hand, an awareness spiny and febrile in feeling and effect, Daron had always expected his initiation into the mysteries of intimacy to be a somber affair, but after that first flailing cocktail of sweat and desire, after they lay stuporous in an afterburn longer than the flight itself, only energy enough to inch over to the dry spot — her giggling, he in drunken delight at having a bedful of her — after walking his fingers across her sweet rise of thigh and into that acreage where legs swell with envy, after wondering if there was a name for that kiss of a crease under her ass, after recovering from his astonishment that the actual could be greater than or equal to the imagined, and while attempting to predict his refractory period, she yelped and nearly tripped over the sheets scampering to the bathroom, Bam! A minute later, she returned wearing his robe — Excuse me, but it says Hilton, Daron, Hilton! She stood with her fists clutched to her stomach, moaning, Something’s wrong, something’s wrong. Did the condom slip off?

What?

Look!

She guided his trembling hands to her navel. Through the terry cloth he felt a lump the size of a fist and hard as a skull. His first thought was C/cancer! (Ridiculous, he knew even at the time, but Big C was the guest star in every waiting room brochure and on every other TV show, not to mention all those pink ribbons. And everything caused cancer: balsamic vinegar, underwire bras, barbecue. Secrets even.) So his first thought was, C/cancer! until the node started to move, to roll. He jerked his hands away, cracking one of Candice’s nails in the process. She retreated to French: Ooh la la, Daron, relax, tranquille. Meanwhile, the lump — too large to be benign — rustled and moled down the folds of the robe. A baseball landed between her feet, the red stitches looking for the first time just that. She withdrew from the pocket two walnuts, smiling. We didn’t have marbles. We didn’t have a frozen chicken or hot dogs, either.

[As this happened, he had noticed that her chipped golden toenail polish highlighted a thread pattern in the carpet, a short weave called Berber, and he wondered why carpet, that most stationary of furnishings, would be named after a nomadic people. He’d also noticed that her fingernails did not match her toenails, or the Berber. He’d also noticed that the first image that stomped into his head without knocking or wiping its feet was Louis on the gurney in the morgue, and he feared for the first time that he and Candice could not be together, that the past few splendid months had been a period of tentative remission, a long kiss good night, and fate plotted in the wings to claim them all. {What if D’aron had not been Ron-Ron, had not been Philadelphia Freedom? Faggot? What if Daron had met her in the party, on the parquet, and asked her to dance? But… would they still be here?} Was Agent Denver right in ways Daron had not considered? When all four of them — Charlie, Candice, Daron, and Denver — had last met, Denver ended the session by announcing, It’s not over yet, but soon enough we’ll be able to go our separate ways. Daron said to himself at the time, Please go your own fucking way as soon as you fucking can, but us, we’re not separating for shit. Then this. God, what was going to happen to them? Nana would have known what to do.]

It was the first and only time Daron hawked Candice. She was never, he demanded, neh-vah to do something like that.

I wasn’t making fun of you, she sputtered, hand to neck, like the night they met at the dot party. I thought the sex ed story about the frozen chicken, baseball, and hot dog was cute, the way Quint told it.

Daron skipped a breath, winced his shoulders as he calmed himself, I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I mean scare me, said Daron. He explained what he’d thought, foolish as he knew it sounded.

The kiss that followed would take another book to describe. Their first time had gradually faded in his memory, and he hadn’t thought much about it until the night Charlie and Freddie departed, when he awoke to Candice’s face only inches from his own, her breath heavy on his chin. They lay head to head, her staring. Staring. Staring. Staring. When did she begin sleeping with her eyes open? Using a finger, then a hand, he windshield-wipered the air before her face. She muttered a word of which he heard only the end. Was it dammit? Frederick? Sheriff? Certainly not Sheriff.