Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

A minute later I see a second guy come out after them, buttoning his fly. No subtlety, no attempt to hide, just buttoning his fucking fly and heading down the road. How is it that America can say anything with a straight face? I watch the man and the woman turn one way, walking like sticks out of sight. The second man heads off in the other direction.

Withdrawing the needle, the skin slides closed, leaving only a tiny red hole.

Later I’m inside, the living room window just plain glass against the night. Phyllis, across the street, is at it again. She waters her flowers and yard at about eleven-thirty every night. She’s bent and rounded in the back from age, but she still looks feisty. She’s got her white hair in a sassy little bun on top of her head. Once I saw her march over to the couple yelling at each other on the corner and tell the guy he was just an arrogant loudmouth. He took a step toward her, and she didn’t budge, just stood there, all five-foot-nothing of her, with the eyes of a roach: You ain’t never gonna get rid of me, buster. I’m gonna live to be a hundred and ninety years old.

Next time I see them, I’m alone in the house, on the living room couch reading student journals. I tell my community college students to write about what scares them. The things they write about are deportation fears and meth-headed relatives and jail and rehab and being a parent too young. My heart is wadding up like paper when I hear the shouting. I look up. There they are. Just like punctuation. Her face cadaverous. Something in my chest lurching.

I fly out the door, waving at them.

They stop. What the hell does she want? they think. She’s not a man.

How much? I say.

What?

How much for her? How much for an hour?

Let’s get the fuck outta here, I hear her say.

Look. I’ve got a hundred dollars. I want an hour. A hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, isn’t it?

He looks down the street. He looks at her. She’s got Gimme a fucking break on her face. She doesn’t make eye contact with me once. He peers back down the street, thinks he sees someone, then doesn’t. Finally he turns back to me and waves toward her. She doesn’t move.

He yells something at her. She’s got Fuck you on her face. I’m back in my past, inside habits and mistakes, inside things that made me run into fire, but she doesn’t know it. Like a transplanted heart, I live on this street, in this life, always in fear of the body rejecting me.

Come inside, I say across the gap between us.

She climbs our wooden stairs and stands in the doorframe, bony arms in a knot across her chest. She has long stringy hair, permed maybe a year ago. Dark circles cupping worn-out gray eyes. Some sweater from 1992. Bell-bottom jeans. Denim jacket tied around her waist. You don’t want to look her in the eye, and you can’t help looking her in the eye. She looks back outside over her shoulder. I wonder briefly if she sees two lives, two bodies, like I did, like I maybe still do. She comes in, and I shut the door. I catch a glimpse of the man walking away like an ordinary person.

No names—we both understand this.

Sit down.

I don’t want to, she says. What the fuck do you want with me?

Sit down.

She sits down.

This is what I, a woman who teaches English all day, think looking at her, a woman who sucks dicks every night but right now is sitting on my couch. This is what I, an ex-addict reformed by something like love and given something to believe in because of books, think looking at her. This is what I, who could not stand to be alone in a room with just me, think: She looks like Mary. This is what Mary must have looked like after Jesus. No way for the body to bear the miracle, the burden, the unbelievable history of nothing, myth. When I see an image of Christ, I picture a Mary so drawn and gaunt and tired and angry and spent to the point of emaciation that she can barely wear her own face.

The Mary on my couch lights a shaky cigarette. What do I think I’m going to do, teach her?

Then she does something that disperses all my idiotic projections. She puts her cigarette out directly on my coffee table, spits on my throw rug. The Restoration Hardware coffee table I bought when I got tenure. The throw rug supposedly from Tibet, though I have my doubts.

I’ve got this woman in the house. I have one hour. Sometimes all the hours of our life rip open for an instant, then suture back up as if nothing ever entered.

Something in common: You can’t stare down a sex worker or a junkie. Either they look away, making you think you’re invisible, or they stare through your skull and out the other side, leaving a hole where your psyche used to be, and you’re left some hollowed-out moron afraid of crazy people, afraid of ghosts, afraid of your own relentless shadow.

Finally she says, Look, man, what’s this all about? You want something? Crack? Horse? Weed? You want me to do something? She takes another drag and quivers like an angel. No, not like an angel. Like an ordinary woman being eaten alive by her own heart, her own veins, her own cunt.

I say, Look, and I step toward her and put my hand near her neck and shoulder as gently as I can, and she says, I don’t fucking lick pussy. I’m not into that shit. But I’ll play with your tits if you want. I’ll finger you.

I look at her for a long minute, feeling stupider than I’ve ever felt. I drop my hand to its ignorance. How does one respond to words like that? Finally I tell her, I just wanted to give you a break for an hour. Rest. Eat. Sleep. Drink. Smoke. Do whatever you want. She looks at me like I’m out of my fucking mind. Her eye glances toward the door. I guess you can leave, too, I tell her, if that’s really what you want. It could be that’s really what she wants. It could be she’s hoping this is a way out or up. She stays.

I leave the room.

FOR EXACTLY ONE HOUR, nothing happens. Nothing. And aren’t you just a little disappointed? Weren’t we all hoping for something else?

Here is what I do: go to my computer and start to write. I don’t think I feel benevolent, but I’m afraid I might. I think of things I want to do for her, all of them filtered through my graduate school mind, and I write them down: play her Schubert, wash her hair, give her a foot rub, cook her a real French dinner with six courses, give her my vintage silk dress, watch European lesbian movies with her, read her stories by Colette, paint her fingernails, dunk her in a bubble bath, give her all the money in my savings account, buy her a plane ticket, take photos of her, hold her.

Then I cross every single thing off the list— stupid stupid stupid —shift my point of view like a writer should, and do a rewrite: play her classic rock, shave half her head and dye the other side blue, break into the neighbors’ house and drink all their whiskey and steal their prescription meds, get high and watch “Lemonade” on flat-screen on repeat, then take baseball bats to all the car windows lining my idiotic street, then run and keep running, tits to the wind.

There is a schism in us all. It shows up differently in every woman, or it dissolves into layers of skin and fat and homeownership, tidy haircuts and well-applied makeup.

I’m really rolling in there. Alone at my screen.

An hour later I come back, fevered with compassion, pumped up from my writing. I’ve got a character shooting out of me, a story emerging, perspiration lining my upper lip, and she’s standing there plain and unimpressed.

S’that it? she wants to know.

Yeah, I say, that’s it, trying to breathe like a normal person. And then she’s flinging open the door, she’s gone, he’s waiting down the street with another guy. They walk off, growing smaller and smaller in the window, as if they’re walking back to childhood.