Лидия Юкнавич - Verge - Stories

My heart like a fist in my chest. What did I just pay for? Was I trying to give her something, or did I just take something, like a fucking john? I eat four Advil and put on my running gear and sit down on my own couch.

TWO HOURS LATER my husband returns. By then my sweat is just sticky dumb odor. Do I tell him? Once a junkie, always a junkie. Turns out a sex worker and a recovering addict and a literature teacher each carry around the same question in their bodies: Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or to tell them?

I pour us each a glass of Pinot, and he starts on dinner. I like to watch his shoulders while he chops vegetables and sears meat. I like the way the back of his head looks, his long dark hair fastened in a braid or a ponytail like a woman’s. I love the spread of his shoulders, the onion and garlic aromatizing the entire house, the sizzling sound of food being put to hot oil. Most of all I love that it’s him, not me, in the kitchen cooking.

The nod, the rush, the flood of sensations overtaking a body, the my-god of it, the want of wanting it forever.

I let each sip of wine linger in my mouth before I swallow.

I close my eyes with the swallowing.

I’m holding. I haven’t felt this way in years and years.

I still don’t know what I’ll say or do.

We’re deep into dinner when it finally comes.

I paid the woman from the street today, I begin, watching his chewing slow, his eyes adjust to the sentence. It takes him zero time to figure out what I mean. We’ve seen them out our front window so many times. Watched them like HBO.

You gave them money?

Yes. I paid for an hour of her time.

Like, cash ?

Yes.

He considers this. He swallows his food. He puts his fork and knife down. It almost feels like one of us is confessing an affair. I mean, not at all, but kind of . Something dark and fast and filled with tension shooting up between us.

I pick up my wineglass and drink. I don’t know if my cheeks are flushed, but they feel like they might be. My eyes feel alive.

In the house, I say.

Wait, what? They were in the house ?

I feel his anger rising like quicksilver.

She was.

What the fuck? What the FUCK ? What the hell did you think you were doing? The questions hang in the air.

Did I think about what I was doing? All I remember is doing it. But I must have. I had the money ready, for one thing. Had I been thinking about it when I got the cash out of the ATM after a grocery store run? But then the drama of an ordinary couple swoops down on us, and he’s all, Jesus fucking Christ, do you realize you could have been killed or robbed or hurt—

But I wasn’t, is what comes out, and I watch my own arms and hands refill my wineglass, then his, with complete calm. Like I’m taking my chances.

Well, what the hell happened? Now he’s standing.

Nothing. I went upstairs and wrote, I came down an hour later, and she left.

He sits back down, almost as if someone has let the air out of him. You’re telling me this hooker was in the house today, alone , and nothing happened? His cheeks are definitely flushed.

Well, not nothing. Exactly. Come here. I move toward him, grab his hand, and walk him like a pet over to the coffee table. I point to the cigarette scar, and that’s when I see it. She’s carved something else into the coffee table: CUNT.

My mouth twitches.

Jesus! he says.

But underneath his voice, I can hear desire rising. Danger does that to people whose lives have become normal. It ignites something you thought wasn’t important anymore, now that you have a roof over your head and another mammal in the bed every night and enough to eat and wine and a coffee table.

Fear. Fear comes back into us for a moment.

I’m still holding his hand.

Fear + anger + desire = life.

Safely tucked into your house and home and life and marriage can feel dead.

Go down on me, I say.

He starts to grab my hand and head upstairs.

No, here. Right here.

We are on my side of the living room window. The curtains are open to the night.

I AM in the living room drinking Pinot. My husband is in his pretend studio, painting. She’s been gone a week. I am watching TV, trying to recognize something.

Then, through the window, I hear the murmur of low voices just out of range: the neighborhood watch. I turn from the images on the TV to the image of the walkers. They’ve all purchased some kind of DayGlo vests, matching orange caps, Nikes that glow like lowly beacons with every step. Their flashlights swing back and forth with exaggerated purpose. Women with children are packed into the middle of the group, men on the outside. They do not look afraid. They are perfect in their movements, synchronized, brutal. They will cover maybe five blocks north and south and five east and west. Manifest destiny.

I can feel wine bile rising up my throat. I’m about to go get my husband so we can watch them together, so I can puff up and judge them from inside my house and my life— Look at these idiot zombies, what they need is more fear in their lives, not less —and then it happens: As they pass directly in front of our house, one of the women in the pack—my god, is it Cherise?—spits with all her might onto our overgrown lawn.

Anger radiates from my face.

Who am I?

User.

Later that night, before bed, I return to the window. There is no one suspicious on the corner now. There is no one dangerous in the alley. The streets are still and empty, a few quiet souls lingering on their porches, no children on the sidewalks. It is the hour of safe and sound. The streets are clean and cured and uncultured—no, that’s not what I meant. Uncluttered, I meant uncluttered.

Bosch centers his vision on the forehead of the clock and says, Six, twelve, six . On at six, off at twelve, on again at six, off again, on again. Salmon and sea bass slide beneath hands, his hands palming and fingering the scales and the touch of slime, his breath in the sea and the guts of thousands of slit-open bellies.

There’s a new guy next to him, pimply, bleached-blond hair, fingers like an artist’s; he won’t last a month, or else he will, he’ll be reborn and vex his family . His thoughts curl around the young man like water. Bosch already wants to take him home. He can’t help it. In the small gray-green of things, the young man sticks out like delight. Bosch can smell his hair. His mind’s eye is envisioning the man’s head resting on his chest, he’s thinking of showing him the ropes, how to take care of his hands, how to sleep awake, how to turn the body to cruise control and let the limbs, hands, move themselves, thoughtless. Something about his face. How young in the eyes. How little membranes stretch over the blue eyes, like the film of a fish eye lensing over in sight.

The new man is smoking in the alley after the shift, his left foot up against the side of the building, the cigarette drooping from his lip. His hands are shoved down into his pockets so hard he looks armless. This is what a young man looks like, Bosch thinks, hunched and smoking in the night, his whole life ahead of him but his body resisting itself. Wanting but not. It’s too easy to offer him a drink from an inside pocket filled with warm surrender. Easier yet to take him home after maybe ten minutes of not saying anything, just passing the bottle back and forth, their breath hanging suspended in the white-cold night air there before them. Home to a one-room house packed to wood walls with one small black stove, one square white icebox, one makeshift bed, one toilet behind a curtain, one window, asking night.