Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

“I’m not going to think you’re ugly.”

“You’ve never even seen my face. I could be completely deformed.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’d love you even if you were deformed.”

I guess that was a mistake. After I said it, she got really quiet. Then she said something weird. She said, “All my life I’ve been looking for my man. I think I finally found you.” I think that was the moment, for both of us, when we realized it wouldn’t happen. It was the next day, I think, that she started to tell me something about her mother being sick, but I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. Besides, I had already bought a ticket.

On the train, I kept telling myself to just be myself. I had a prescription for a low-milligram antianxiety medication, as well as a mild beta blocker, and I kept going into the bathroom to take more — I wanted to get the mixture right. After I took a pill, I’d check myself in the mirror, and I’d always be surprised at what I found. I kept expecting to find a monster.

At the station I checked my phone, and she’d left me this message where she just said my whole name, William Wei. She sounded completely freaked out. I knew her pretty well by this time. I could tell from how she sounded, it took everything in her not to run.

She was waiting across the street from the terminal. Just standing there, in front of her old car. She had on a green army coat and paint-splattered corduroy pants; her features were something like I pictured — wide eyes, Frida Kahlo — but she was more beautiful than I expected her to be.

When I got over to her car, before I could say anything, she said, “Are you nervous?”

“Are you?”

“We’ll go to my house and relax.”

In the car ride, she kept switching the tapes in her tape deck, and peering at me while she did it. I could tell she didn’t like what she was seeing, but I didn’t know what to do. I thought she had already seen me. I thought I was the one who was permitted to feel some disappointment.

She lived on the top floor of a converted flour mill. The sleeping area was the size of an ordinary bedroom, divided from the main area by ten-foot industrial shelves full of record albums — the inventory from her brother’s store. He was itinerant and sometimes wrote to her, asking her to sell so many feet of albums. Her bed was a queen-size mattress on the floor. She pointed to the rotary phone beside it and lifted her cat to introduce him by name. Then she led me through the center portion of the loft, past a sliding glass door that connected to another apartment, a place rented to someone named Douglas. He was gone for the weekend, and so I didn’t think much about him.

I don’t think I will describe her kitchen or her work area, except a photo on the fridge. It was of an old man in a top hat and tails. She told me that was Douglas. I was about to tell her a story that the photo reminded me of when she handed me a piece of banana bread, a glass of milk, and two pills.

“What’re these?” I said.

“My mom sent them to me earlier in the week. Something about her bowels.”

“What?”

“She can’t have opiates.”

“They’re opium?”

“Percocet.”

I ate the pills and broke the bread into pieces. What I wanted was for the two of us to go and sit by the window and listen to record albums and get soulful, but Koko turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until she found a documentary. When that was over, she got a couple more pills for us and found a medley on a different station. We got takeout from a delivery service, and around eleven, her hair had fallen down, and her cheek was resting on her hand so the top of her head just touched my shoulder. I still have the shirt I was wearing at that time. It’s hanging in my closet. I turned on my side to look at her body, and she pretended to keep watching TV.

I said, “I like your shoes.”

“Those?” She lifted her head and turned to look at her feet. “Those are ballet slippers.”

“I like how you are wearing them as shoes.”

“Everyone does that.”

“Everyone does what?”

She shook her head lightly from side to side.

“Everyone does what?” I said.

“I travel business class.” She pointed a finger in the air. “Un momento, por favor. Muchas gracias, señor.”

She was singing along with the television, but I stopped her before the next line. I mean I kissed her. It was a bit like kissing a doll, or a timid old lady. I mean that she didn’t kiss me back, but I don’t know if you know this. That can be very attractive. Later, Koko and I were together in haze, and her shirt was off, and she told me how she often induced men to love her and then abandoned them. She said, “Didn’t you notice how I forced this on you?” I said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and she said, “Yeah. That’s what I’m telling you.”

So that was where it ended. Or really, it ended in the car, the first time we looked at each other. I mean, she thought I was ugly, and I could see that. But the thing about a dark truth is it is indistinguishable from doubt. And so — since I couldn’t just go home — I kept approaching the dark area. Not by anything I said, but by what I did, and by watching how she reacted. She was nice at times, but at others, when her kindness drew me in, she was sharp, and I spent the weekend confused. I kept thinking, “But she already saw my face.”

The next morning I was buttoning my shirt in the mirror when Koko opened her eyes. She yawned and smiled at my reflection and said, “You have a nice face.” Then she pushed herself up onto all fours and shifted her butt in the air. She rested her cheek sideways on her folded arms and said, “We should go and eat eggs.”

I wonder why I didn’t say anything to her then. Like, “Why are you putting your butt in the air?” I guess it was because I didn’t know what was going on. I had gotten clammed up, by the stuff the night before. I was shaky from the pills.

The restaurant was walking distance away. It was one of those local-ingredients places. It had polished stone floors, and the polish was so high that when the hostess led us into the dining room, I thought there was a step up, but there wasn’t one. It was just a trick of the light.

“What’re you doing?” Koko said.

“I thought it was a step.”

“You were like,” she galloped one leg in imitation.

Everything I did made her angry. After we had our omelets, she pointed to a place between two of her teeth and said, “What’s that thing there?” I have a large filling between two of my teeth about where she was pointing, so I told her that—“It’s a filling”—and she said, “I can see it when you talk.”

We went for a walk around the neighborhood. It was starting to feel like spring. We crossed into a residential area. On the sidewalk, one leashed dog was meeting another dog, and he got so excited he lost his footing and fell down on his side. An old suburban house was up for sale, and we let ourselves into its backyard to have a look around. One of its windows had been broken from the inside, and the pane lay in four pieces in the soil of a flower bed. I brushed my hand against Koko’s, and she whipped her head around and said, “Do you want to take mushrooms?”

“What?”

“I have ten.”

They were mixed into chocolates. They had been given to her by a friend, a photographer for Playboy . She said that several times, Playboy . She ate two chocolates and I ate one, and then we split a fourth. We got into her bed, and when I opened my eyes an hour later, the world was brilliant, alien, and unformed, and Koko was talking on the phone in the voice of a transistor radio.

“I’m fucked up,” she said. “I’m on mushrooms. I’m on drugs. Yes, he’s here since Friday. No, I don’t think so. No. Not anything like that. Hold on.” She pushed the phone aside and said, “I’m talking to Douglas.”