Sherman Alexie - Blasphemy - New and Selected Stories

“You must get some bizarre folks in here, right?” I asked.

“Not as many as you’d think,” she said. “I think even the crazy people are kind of freaked out that we’re open all night.”

“Even crazy people have standards,” I said.

“You’re funny,” she said, also without laughing. Then there was that quiet, charged moment in which a relationship’s romantic possibilities become clear.

“So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I do lighting for stage plays,” I said.

“For Broadway?” she asked. She was obviously excited by the thought of Broadway. Most people are. But they were thinking of the people in the spotlights, not the guys working in the rafters.

“I work Broadway sometimes,” I said. “But mostly for off-off-off-Broadway stuff. If it involves naked people dancing with puppets, then I’m probably lighting it.”

“Does that pay well?” she asked.

“Not enough to live in New York.”

“Nobody can afford to live here,” she said.

“And yet, there are millions of us poor bastards,” I said.

She pushed back my cuticles. She buffed my nails. She massaged some oil into my fingers.

“We get actors in here all the time,” she said. “Lot of night people in show business, huh?”

“There’s a lot of time between jobs,” I said. “So you have to fill it up. And a lot of us fill it with lonely.”

“Tough to sleep when you’re lonely,” she said.

“How long have you been insomniac?” I asked.

“I was a good sleeper until I took this job. And now, it feels like I’m always awake.”

“Me too.”

She massaged my hands. Her fingertips on my palms. It felt so good that I closed my eyes and kept them closed.

“I live in this one-room apartment,” she said. “I grew up there with my parents and three brothers. Six of us in one room. But my parents bought it. They owned it. Amazing, huh?”

“I’ve got friends who have a bathtub in the middle of their kitchen,” I said. “They throw a thick slab of wood over it and use it as a table.”

“Crazy. But that place is all mine now. My family moved back to Korea. Even my brothers. They were born here and lived their whole lives here, but they moved back.”

“Restless,” I said. “Everybody’s restless.”

“When I can’t sleep, I just walk around the edges of my apartment like I was in solitary confinement, you know? I’ve got this Murphy bed but I never pull it out of the wall. I keep this big couch pushed up against it. And I’ve got two other little couches. Three couches in a studio? I’m crazy, right? I just move from couch to couch. One couch after another. Trying to sleep.”

“Lucky couches,” I said.

“You’re a flirt,” she said. “How does your girlfriend feel about that?”

“How do you know I have a girlfriend?” I asked.

“All you flirts have girlfriends.”

I opened my eyes.

“You’re a flirt, too,” I said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Of course,” she said. “But he hardly ever stays at my place. He sleeps too easy. He can even sleep while I’m pacing around the room. Pisses me off.”

“Have you ever lived with another insomniac?”

“No,” she said. “Have you?”

“If two insomniacs fell in love, you know there’d be a murder-suicide.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not going too well with my girlfriend. She falls asleep two seconds after she closes her eyes. I hate it.”

“My boyfriend ignores me. And I keep auditioning for his attention. Maybe you should come over and light me up all pretty.”

“Mine teaches community college out on Long Island,” I said. “I never see her. Except when she’s sleeping and I’m not.”

Saundra rubbed some other kind of moisturizer into my hands.

“My boyfriend and I haven’t had sex in five years,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “Wow.”

I thought he had to be a gay man hiding in the closet behind the closet. Or maybe he’d been molested as a kid and couldn’t deal with it. Or maybe he was just a drone, one of those strange and lucky people whose engines are not completely powered by various body fluids.

“My girlfriend and I haven’t done it in six months,” I said. “And it was three months before that. I get sex twice a year, like Catholics who only go to Mass on Christmas and Easter.”

She laughed and slapped the table. And spilled a bowl of soapy water. As she cleaned up the mess, she blinked back tears.

“Why don’t you leave her?” she asked.

“Why don’t you leave yours?” I asked.

Neither of us had the answer.

I suppose I stayed with my girlfriend because I hoped we’d fall in love with each other’s bodies again. I wanted her to lust for me again. In bed, I wanted her to crawl on top of me and grind so hard that her sweat fell into my mouth. But I couldn’t say such things to her after so many years of honor and respect. I was too damn polite to tell her what I wanted. She might say no. She might laugh. And I was more afraid of being rejected by her than I was of dying.

“And now you’re done,” she said.

She meant that my manicure was finished.

“I live across the street,” I said

“Oh, that’s subtle,” she said.

“No, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Or maybe I did. I don’t know.”

“You have that creepy doorman, right?” she asked.

“He’s okay,” I said. “Except when it comes to you. Then he gets creepy.”

She looked confused.

“I’ve heard him talking to you,” I said. “I’ve been watching you for months.”

“Okay,” she said. “So you’re the creepy one.”

She rolled her chair back.

“You’re not a stalker, are you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m a night watchman.”

She didn’t say anything. She studied me, looking for signs of real danger, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t dangerous. And I think she knew it, too.

“Okay,” she said. “You can pay the receptionist. Tips are happily accepted.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t come back. And I’ll stop watching you.”

She just nodded her head.

I wanted to say something profound to her — give a name to our separate loneliness, a metaphor that described the abysses that can grow between people in love. But I had only my most basic desire.

“If I could only sleep,” I said.

“Yeah,” Saundra said. “I know.”

I paid for my manicure and walked back toward my building. As I noticed that my doorman was absent, I also realized that I’d forgotten my keys in the apartment. I’d have to wake my girlfriend. And she’d be angry that I’d gone missing and jealous that I’d been talking to another woman. My girlfriend wouldn’t fuck me but she didn’t want anybody else fucking me, either. After the inevitable argument, she and I would lie in the dark, with her worried that she’d be too tired to teach well later that day and me too terrified to reach across the bed and touch her.

I wanted none of that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen. So I stopped in the middle of the street. Amazing how quiet eight million people can be. I wondered if I should just walk over to that twenty-four-hour deli on Canal and wait for sunrise. But then I looked up toward my apartment and saw my girlfriend standing on our little terrace. I could see her through the dark. I wondered how long she’d been watching me. I wondered if she wanted me to walk toward her or to walk away.

Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film — how to construct a scene — my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, “You don’t have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If people are already in the room, the audience will understand that they didn’t crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience understands that a door has been used — the eyes and mind will make the connection — so you can just skip the door.”