Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “By the time I heard that, though, I was also rehearing Yuli saying I’ll handle this, and finding it more resigned than assured. I immediately started banging on the door to be let back in. Nobody answered, so I rang the bell and then the phone. The butler finally answered through an intercom and said that Yuli was not at home. Come on, Lat Sen, I said, you know as well as I do that I left ten seconds ago and that she is still there.

  “I’m sorry, sir, she is not at home. Any message? And then I realized that he was already taking a different tone with me, incredibly smug. I hung up and waited for Yuli to call.

  “But she didn’t, Franky. Not that day, not the next. If I phoned, Lat Sen claimed no one was home. I started straggling outside the tall, sloping, white-washed walls, ready to pounce and intercept anyone coming or going from the family compound. The gate would slide open each morning as the father was driven to work, and I would run alongside the car screaming, But I LOVE her! while he calmly refused to acknowledge my manic presence through the glass. Finally, two weeks later, Yuli’s younger sister, Amarya, overcome with the romance of our dilemma, found a way to sneak out and talk to me.

  “She became my confederate, the little nubbins, running notes back and forth, awash with girlish intrigue and blushing fantasy. I wrote missives in which I pledged my undying, unalterable love — these were Amarya’s favorites — and Yuli wrote back telling me to calm down, that she had decided how the situation would be rectified. She would get an abortion. She loved me, she wrote, but she couldn’t shame her family this way. She couldn’t have her father resign from government, although there was fat chance of that, frankly — he would throw Yuli under a train first. She knew her parents would come around, say in a year. Did I love her enough to wait?”

  Dmitry was so overjoyed to see some road back that he agreed with everything, and on the appointed day for the abortion, having been given all the arrangements by Amarya, he met her at the hospital and they devoured each other in the examining room until the doctor entered with his nurse. They rearranged their clothes and looked at him, somber.

  “He was one of those doctors that look too young for the job, like Doogie Howser,” Dmitry said. “You realize this is a very serious decision you are making, young Doogie said, using English, as always happened when a European was in the room, while the nurse took Yuli’s blood pressure.

  “Of course, we both answered.

  “You are the father? the youngster asked.

  “Yes, I said.

  “The doctor looked at me as he would a noxious bug. And you want to end this pregnancy because why?

  “It would shame my family, Yuli said.

  “Because he is bule? the doctor asked, in Indonesian this time, as if I wouldn’t understand even the one word every foreigner learns, the word for foreigner.

  “In part, she answered, But also because we aren’t married.

  “Are you in love? he asked Yuli in Indonesian again, ignoring me, and we both answered y’a, thus proving that I understood Bahasa, upon learning which fact, he switched back to English. Funny how people do that. Well then why not get married? he said, with that scrunchy face, you know, like he had a little acid reflux problem. But I thought, with true excitement, he’s right, why don’t we?

  “Because, Yuli said. Because my family’s honor would be destroyed. And the doctor said, Family honor! Listen to you! This is the year 2009! Be serious! Nobody believes this business anymore.

  “I felt like the tape had speeded up and I’d gone from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first in an instant. But Yuli said, We don’t believe it, but my father does!

  “And because he is a dinosaur you will destroy your own baby? the doctor said. I am leaving. You two should get married and have your child. Then he looked at me like he was reconsidering. If you decide to go through with this procedure you can make another appointment.

  “I wanted to kiss him. He turned and left, taking his nurse with him, and we sat for a moment in silence. OK, Yuli said quietly. Maybe he’s right, maybe we should get married. And this is the funny thing, Franky, I said Darling! like I was in a 1930s film, like I was William Powell, or some character from a Noël Coward play. Darling! Why do we turn into stock characters at moments like that, Franky, why?”

  Frank knew he didn’t want an answer. They had pulled up to the curb at the Bradley Terminal at LAX.

  “Well to make a horribly long story short, we agreed it had to happen that very day, her only stipulation was that I convert to Islam, since that, for her father, was non-negotiable.

  “I’m not sure if you know this, Franky, but converting to Islam is quite simple. All one need do is say Allah is great, or Allah Akbar, three times, preferably facing Mecca, although that is not entirely necessary, and then, shazam, one is Muslim. Providing, that is, one is circumcised. As you know, I was not. So there I was, a half hour after coming to the hospital to get my girlfriend an abortion, strapped to a gurney down the hall, having Little Dmitry’s head chopped off. Funny, isn’t it? Life?”

  They got married. Her father died a year later, never reconciling, but never resigning from his post, either. By that time her mother already seemed acquiescent, and after a while none of it mattered.

  2000

  Paul, oblivious as always, never realized how inept Dmitry was, and Dmitry’s sense of humor left him perplexed. After a couple of early headscratchings, Paul gave up and assumed it was all nonsense, which most of it was. Margie, though, had become allergic, and took every chance she could to insinuate that he should be replaced. The first time, standing in what would be the dining room, looking at the view from various angles, she was trying to figure out something to complain about, and Dmitry walked through with some studs for the upstairs closets. As he left he farted, loud and shameless, for a full one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand count.

  “Disgusting,” she said, furious, as if she were having an actual dinner party when it happened. “How can you stand it?” She locked eyes with Frank, sneered, and shook her head, like she’d found herself reasoning with a strange dog, and walked away, saying more to herself than anyone, “I thought he was temporary.”

  “He’s here another five weeks,” Frank said, which made her turn around and come back.

  “Can’t you use someone who’s not such a horrible pig?”

  “Bring me his replacement, Margie, and he’s gone,” he said, confident she wouldn’t know where to start looking, and that if she did, he could use a third person anyway.

  She shuddered. “I wish this dining room window was a little bigger,” she said.

  Frank walked out as if he hadn’t heard. Her wishes were not his problem until Paul made them his problem. And in this case, he was safe. He knew what the next size up would cost. Paul was whipped, but cheap, and the window was big enough that it had already maxed out any resale value. He would agree to whatever she said but forget to tell Frank, or wait it out and then blame him. Whatever, it wasn’t his problem.

  From that day on, Margie was never on-site without saying something nasty about Dmitry. “Grotesque,” she would say, any time he walked by. He treated her the way he treated anyone whose skin he wanted to get under, faux-polite, overloading her with high-toned manners, smirking the whole time. It drove Margie nuts, being a queen of etiquette abuse herself, and it provided Frank with mild comic relief in his own secret battle with her.

  “I’ve decided, Franky, what I’m going to have embossed on my American baseball jacket,” Dmitry declared one day as they sat having depressing sliced-turkey sandwiches for lunch yet again. Frank was in the middle of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, occasionally listening in on Dmitry’s harangue. “And by the way, Franky,” he went on, not needing any response, “I will take this moment to remind you that although you promised to help me find a baseball jacket shoppe, you have taken no steps in that direction whatsoever, a grievous error I feel it is in your power to correct even this very afternoon, perhaps — wait, is embossed the right w
ord? I believe the shoppes that sell these jackets have endless supplies of letters and logos they can sew onto the felt and even onto the leather sleeves, although I prefer, I think, to leave the sleeves in their virginal whiteness, and then, on the red felt back, because I’ve decided it is to be red, Franky, I want these two phrases, the only two phrases one need ever use to navigate the entire American social terrain, the linguistic equivalent of the unified field theory that has so bedeviled the physicists, the Rosetta Stone of the American language, or the Rosetta Pebble I suppose — one of the phrases will be in a circle, with the top arc reading HEY YEAH and the bottom arc NO REALLY and then, in the middle of that, in a different font or style, Gothic maybe, yes, Gothic, on three descending lines:

  The Fuck

  The Fuck

  The Fuck

  Because with those two phrases you are ready for anything one’s fellow or non-fellow Americans might throw at one, or anyone in the world, really. In fact —”

  “That’s three phrases, not two.”

  He thought about this for a minute. “No, Franky, it’s two, but you bring up a bit of a design quandary, perhaps. As you know full well, the first phrase is hey yeah no really and I think it should be clear, as when FITCHBERG HIGH is on the top arc, and FIGHTING MUSKRATS is on the bottom arc, that it is all of one piece. But for the second phrase, the fuck, the fuck, the fuck, do you think I should put commas after each the fuck?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “HEY YEAH NO REALLY can’t have any commas, because its felicity as a phrase is all bound up with the fact that the punctuation can go anywhere. More importantly, the inflection can go anywhere. If someone says My father died yesterday, which if what you were telling me about Freud last night is true, we all would love to be able to say, still, the proper response is hey, yeah, NO, really” — he said this as if consoling a widow, with a long, sad no in the middle — “while if someone says, Excuse me, sir, would you like some free pussy?’ the proper response is HEY! YEAH! no, REALLY!? — which you’ll notice, Franky, is a perfectly symmetrical set of examples, emphasis-wise,” after which he kept repeating it, inflecting the phrase by turns comic, sympathetic, aggressive, noncommittal, despondent. “And when all else fails, and you can’t figure out how hey yeah no really fits the situation, you say, the fuck, the fuck, the fuck.”

  “Nobody says that.”

  “Hey yeah NO REALLY, they do. The fuck, the fuck, the fuck is a direct quote, Franky.”

  “From who, Al Pacino?”

  “You, Franky, yesterday, about the subfloor.” The lumberyard was supposed to bring a load of three-quarter-inch plywood on a boom truck and lift it up onto the second floor, but instead dropped it on the ground while they were out grabbing lunch, which meant they had to spend half a day huffing the heavy motherfucking pieces up themselves, one by one. Maybe he did say that.

  “You say it all the time.”

  “The fuck.”

  “You see?”

  “But not three times, just once.”

  “Franky, you really don’t understand humor at all, do you…”

  Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he had a tragic view of life. They were coming to the end of the framing, and soon they’d sheath it on the outside with plywood and cover it inside with sheetrock. People said to him all the time: it must be nice doing your work, because when you’re done a building exists that wasn’t there before, material evidence that your labor came to something, you don’t just shuffle paper, or manipulate numbers, or sell crap, or talk to people about their problems — at the end of our day we have nothing but a paycheck, while you have the thing right there, in front of you, what you made. When he looked at things he built, though, he always saw some glaring flaw or other, and even if not, they looked like backaches. All done and trimmed out, the buildings and additions just sat there, minor economic miracles, but they never felt like his offspring or legacy or anything. They weren’t his.

  And they never thrilled him the way bare framing did. The work of framing, the work itself, the three-hammer-stroke sinking of a 16d nail, the wood still a little juicy, was a deep pleasure. Monkey-hanging, upside down, to counter-nail a corner joist, or the Amish barn-raising thrill of walking a new section of wall up into place, or sliding along the ridge plate, forty feet in the air, tacking in rafter after rafter as someone nails them through the notch below — that’s pleasure. That’s happiness. Looking up, as the sun sets, and seeing the perfect, planed, plumb wood, and knowing how ludicrously strong it was, seeing the multiply buttressed, yet somehow ephemeral, soon to disappear, sturdy house bones against the dusk: delectable, electric, poignant, profound.

  “I have an enormous favor to ask you, Franky,” Dmitry said as they were taking their pond-bath one evening during his last week. The late-summer twilight world was flourishing, with lightning bugs roaming, insects and frogs chirping, the sky like distant steel, the black water warm. “I have been researching” — this is what he called going online at the public library for a half hour — “the availability and costs of land yachts in the vicinity. As you know they are beyond my current means, and your short-sighted, untrusting, parsimonious American bankers seem reluctant to loan money to a marginally employed foreigner who plans to leave the country in a matter of weeks.” He had gone to the bank, even though Frank told him he didn’t stand a chance.

  “I told you.”

  He shrugged and held up his hands, like this was hard to understand or condone. Frank grabbed the soap out of one of them.

  “Therefore,” he said. “I have a business proposition for you.”

  “No.”

  “I propose that you invest $7,000 in my travel company, with a guaranteed return at the unheard of rate of fifteen percent per annum.”

  “Dmitry, first of all, I don’t have $7,000 dollars, and what travel company?”

  “Ah, Franky, I knew you would smell a good deal when you saw it! Let’s cut to the chase as you like to say.”

  “I never say that,” he said, ducking under to rinse his hair, taking his time, hoping to miss some of the pitch, but Dmitry waited until he surfaced.

  “I was using the collective you. Like all good capitalists, Franky, your investment will consist not of your own money, but a bank’s. You take out a loan for $8,000, the collateral for which will be a land yacht I have had my eye on. It is worth $9,500 according to the most reliable source, the Kelly’s Blue Book, and it is listed for sale in the Hartford Courant for a mere $8,000. An identical model is for sale in the Boston Globe for $9,500, and that one has 10,000 more miles on it — proof positive that the Hartford Courant proposal is quite good value. I will take our land yacht to the West Coast and back, picking up hitchhikers for a moderate fee along the way which will subsidize my petrol expenditures, and I will return here in precisely six weeks, sell the yacht in Boston for $9,500, and return to you your $8,000 plus your interest of fifteen percent per annum, prorated to the six weeks.”

  “No.” Frank had stepped out and was drying himself. As usual Dmitry was taking twice as long.

  “Don’t you realize, Franky, that the entire business world — ie, the entire world — lusts after the grail of a fifteen percent return on investment? Except, I should say, pharmaceuticals and certain financialization schemes, which do somewhat better.”

  “A. Fifteen percent of $8,000 is like a thousand dollars — prorated to six weeks makes it what, 100 bucks?”

  “$132,” he said.

  “B. There are other costs — insurance, tax when you buy it, the ad to sell it, registration fees, repairs, servicing, who knows what all else, and maybe you can’t sell it at all. Forget it. It’s a terrible idea.”

  “You are right to mention the other costs and the risk. I would of course also reimburse you for the insurance.”

  “Reimburse me?”

  “The money-making machine will be in your name, you’ll need to put it on your insurance. It will only cost $143 for six weeks.”

  “How do you know that?”

&n
bsp; “I called your agent, said I was your assistant, which technically I am. The risk, though, Franky, is very minimal. I have over $2,000 now, which means it would need to sell for a mere $6,000 for you to get your investment back.”

  “Stop calling it an investment! You’re going to give me $132! That’s like taking me to dinner!”

  “You are right to bargain, Franky, because you see that I am set to make much more than you, though it is all your capital. You’re right to demand more.”

  Dmitry was so intent on conning him that Frank saw an opportunity to hurry him up. He started walking back up the hill, and Dmitry hopped to it, drying himself as they walked, and continued apace, unremitting. “So I propose this: I will pay all expenses, foreseen or unforeseen, and we will split any profit fifty-fifty. If I am right, that will net you more in the neighborhood of $750, or a spectacular seventy-five percent per annum. Really closer to eighty. We’re talking Cosa Nostra interest here, Franky, Russian petro-mafia returns.” He looked genuinely pleased with himself.