Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

He tries forcing her down, getting his leg behind her knees to fold her there so that she crumples partway and then dropping her. She lands, lightly and solidly, on her back, breathing in the old smell of sweet hay and manure gone stale. Teko stands over her for a moment, and she brings her foot up, kicking him in the balls. As Teko doubles up, grunting and panting over the reverberant drumming of the rain, she sees in a corner near the yawning door the two upturned milk crates where she had sat, studious and compliant, learning the People’s tongue.

Teko straightens up, puts his small, shriveled penis away. Then he falls upon her, a collision that expels the reek of his stale sweat. He grips her jaw in his hand and shakes it.

“Do that again and you’re dead. Dead.” He shakes her jaw roughly, then pops her hard in the chin with the heel of his hand. “Dead.”

Finally Teko rises. On his face is all the dull satisfaction of having definitively uttered the last word. After a moment she moves, lifting her ass off the floor and removing a BB that has embedded itself in her soft flesh. She holds it between her thumb and forefinger and lifts it so that she can examine it.

Teko looks as if he were about to speak, and she knows that what he is going to do is he is going to raise the issue of the unsweptup BBs. For the first time since she entered the creamery she experiences true anger, anger undiluted by fear or confusion. She glares at him, angry now beyond the assault: at the daily harassment, at the man’s inability ever to quit while he’s ahead, at the last three months she’s spent enduring him and his bitchy hag of a wife.

Her limited concept of him has been — well, it hasn’t been broadened. Say infected with foreign impurities. The perception of him as a man frail with unhappiness and self-doubt, a man capable of these emotions, gained brief admission to her consciousness, drew her to the creamery in curiosity and wonderment and baffled sympathy — and he’s made her pay. There’s a new complexity to her hatred; that’s what’s broadened. Perhaps reading some sign of this in her face, angry and pale against the broad boards of the floor, Teko backs off, stands in the doorway under the shelter of the roof that shakes and pings in the siege of the rain before he leaves without having uttered another word.

Joan sees Teko’s face, flat and expressionless as an aluminum pie plate, through the kitchen door. They are gathered around the table again: Kearse with his arm draped over the back of Yolanda’s chair; Yolanda in turn inclined toward Kearse, one hand resting on his thigh. Joan sits across from them, smoking. The conversation simply expires as the door swings open and Teko walks through it, drying his eyeglasses on his shirt, into a room he fills with his own spent hostility. Not that the abrupt quiet has everything to do with Teko; the same silence fell when Joan entered, the first to pop the insulating bubble of Kearse and Yolanda’s complacent lust.

“H’lo,” says Teko.

“Evening, General Field Marshal,” says Kearse. “Good run?”

“You looked like maybe you lost your way when we saw you,” says Yolanda. Kearse starts, jolted with a quick, silent laugh.

All that moves in the kitchen then is the smoke rising from Joan’s cigarette in the ashtray. The sight of it curling dumbly up from the burning cylinder annoys her all at once and she reaches to stab the cigarette out. Like Tania, she feels Kearse’s presence as the unbalancing of an equation. She experiences nothing like sympathy for the little man, who now goes to wash his hands in the kitchen sink, the stream of warm water loosening and washing away the soiled bandage that covers his forgotten injury, only disgust with Yolanda and her resolution to test, now, the strength of this one particular “revolutionary conviction” and with Kearse for assisting her, for casually coming in here and planting his lackadaisical sneakers all over their painstaking equilibrium. And with Guy too, while she’s at it. What the fuck’s he thinking? Sending them guests like this is Martha’s Vineyard. What trouble it all is.

She asks, “Where’s Tania?”

“I left her in the creamery,” says Teko.

“Ahhh, the creamery.” Yolanda giggles. Kearse starts again, rocked by his silent gestural laugh. Funny stuff. Lots of fun sitting around with these comedians all afternoon. Lots of fun today with Gary and Yolanda, and lots more to come, Joan can just tell. Everybody in the whole wide world is full of shit, Joan thinks sourly.

“Think I’ll go see her,” she says. None of the others, each of whom has an idea about who does and who does not belong in the kitchen, objects.

She finds Tania sitting cross-legged on the creamery floor, massaging her jaw. Some ugly dishevelment might have signaled the entire story to Joan, flashed it neon-bright into her brain, illuminated a whole territory she’s sometimes seen when she and a man’s anger have overlapped. But she sees only her friend sitting in an odd place on a dark wet afternoon. When Tania’s eyes roll around to focus on Joan, though, she sees something’s going on.

“Are you OK?” she asks.

“I’m actually pretty good, I think,” says Tania.

Joan comes closer. “What happened to your jaw?”

“Teko did it.” A shrug. Then she laughs, a little. “I kicked him in the balls.”

“Good girl,” says Joan. “Next time kick him once for me.”

Guy AND A YOUNG man sit at the table and chairs Guy has dragged from inside the house and set on the grass. The young man is the journalist Guy has recruited to help write the book, an overweight guy sweating in the dwindling heat of the August evening, carefully dressed, as if for a job interview, in tweed jacket and gray slacks. Guy is in a particularly jovial mood, Tania sees, trading on his neuroses, exaggerating them for comic effect, charming their guest. She wonders: Does he have to?

“Fortune tellers?” Guy is saying. “I love ‘em. Tarot, psychics, palmystics, crystal ballbusters. They’re a diversion and they’re a habit and they’re surprisingly rare, a comment incidentally on the prejudices lurking behind local zoning laws. Let me tell you about the all-time number one fortune-telling experience of my life. I go to a chick who’s got this tiny closet of a stall on Church Street in San Francisco. Looks and sounds just like Maria Ouspenskaya, a schmata on her head, earrings the size of hula hoops. Minute I sit — bang! she starts telling me all about myself. Where I was born, what happened to me when I was a kid, all that jazz. Great, I mean, really on the ball, but what do I need to know all this for? Tell me the things I don’t already know. So she says, ‘This you don’t want to know? About what you want to know? Who it is has it in for you? Who your true love is gonna be? What’s that pain going a boom-a-boom in your side right about here? What it is will become of you?’ And I say shit, no. I say I’ve been eating all this crappy food for like two weeks straight, and what I really want to know about, the issue pushing itself to the forefront of my thoughts is, What kind of things have I unknowingly been eating all these years? I read this thing in the Bay Guardian about what the FDA allows in prepared foods. They have special Filth Labs that analyze foods for what they call defects. What’s in Fig Newtons alone is enough to put you off your feed for a couple of days. So, I just want a sampler — so I know what I’m up against. You know? All you have to do is read the papers to know that these are bad times, dark times, nutritionally speaking. So she takes a deep breath. Passes a gnarled old hand over the crystal ball. ‘You are certain?’ she says. Of course I’m certain. Think I’m walking in here just for the good news? Save it for the tourists, baby. You’re the real thing; well, I’m the real thing too: a haunted man. Desperate, or curious at any rate. So she passes the hand over the crystal ball again and then hunkers down over it.