by Chris Stuck
“That’s funny,” she said, mildly slurring. “I feel like that’s all I do.”
I said, “Me, too. Fools everywhere. Fools aplenty. Ships of fools.” It was the best I could do.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence, both of us nodding really at nothing. Then it just sort of happened: She looked at me. I looked at her. Like two horny cats, we pounced on each other and proceeded to ineptly hump with the lights on, even the bathroom light, at her insistence. “Tell me if it’s too bright,” she said.
I was a little occupied at the moment, but I did say it was kind of like a hospital room in there. “Can we turn them down a little?”
She dimmed the overheads. “I just want to show myself.” I stopped and looked at her, was almost flattered, but then she added, “Oh, not to you exactly. Just to prove I can do it. It’s for me.” She shoved my face into her cleavage, smearing my makeup over her surprisingly smooth chest.
“Right,” I said, between gasps. “I get it.” I peeled off my pants over my shoes and asked if showing herself was part of her therapy.
“Sort of,” she said. “My therapist said if I went on this trip, I should at least get laid. It would be a milestone for me. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Your therapist sounds like a very wise person. You should get me a referral.”
The sex barely lasted a few minutes, but even in that short time we mapped the geographies of each other’s skin. We surveyed each other’s wounds or blotches like children comparing scabs. Some of hers were as tough as leather. Others were so soft and on the surface that they looked as though I could peel them off like stickers.
Though I’d been successful in life, I understood wounds. Racism, no father, endless ex-wives hating me. Like anyone, I had injuries only I could appreciate. It was probably why people thought I was a creep. It was probably why she had trouble connecting. I hoped we were realizing this about each other as we entered the second minute of our escapade. We turned over, and she climbed on top. She moved her pelvis back and forth. She gyrated and then climaxed without any help from me. As she shuttered above me like a defective droid, I realized I’d stumbled onto a version of the opposite sex I’d never encountered before: the damaged woman. Given some of our similarities, I wondered if I was a damaged man. Who knew? Maybe she was thinking the exact same thing about me and was doing all this because she pitied me. Who cared? I was fine with us being malcontents taking from each other what we needed at the time. With the contention we’d had earlier that day, it was a miracle she was fine with it, too.
* * *
We saw each other every day after that, a fact that amused Tommy. The next morning, while he and I were pumping iron in fitness room 6 and Zarrella and Deirdre were on the ellipticals across the gym, Tommy started dancing around, singing a song whose childish lyrics were “Melvin got some booty. Melvin got some booty.”
Naturally, I looked at my watch and asked when he’d grow up.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How about a quarter past never?” He lay back on an incline bench and pressed two 150-pound dumbbells for so many reps I lost count. When he was done, he tossed the weights to the rubber floor and sat up, breathing easy. “So, how’s it feel to be part of the club?”
“Which one is that?” I lay back on the bench and started my set with 30-pound dumbbells.
“The coochie club.” He snickered and stood on his hands beside me, correcting my form.
“It just happened,” I said. “I don’t know how anything feels.” I was only on my second rep, struggling already.
He looked across the room at Zarrella and Deirdre for a moment. “What’s to know?” he said. “She likes you.”
“Maybe.”
“Man, there ain’t no maybe about it. I can tell.” Tommy looked at them again and then slowly at me. His face softened into one of those Neblitt looks. “What do you say we don’t mess this one up, okay?”
I told him to shut up and give me a spot.
Since losing my job and my color, since I’d awakened that day, I’d begun to realize I’d been transitioning. As impossible as it sounded, I may have even been a bit unstable without knowing it. Throw a woman into all that, and I was at sea, figuratively and literally. I kept reminding myself that we both had lives before the cruise, that this was just a fluke. It wouldn’t go anywhere. So, don’t even think about getting attached. I was self-aware enough to know that probably wouldn’t happen.
As we sailed on toward Belize, for some reason she was the one who got serious. She actually said, “I want to unpack my marriage history for you. Would that be okay?”
“Unpack?” I said. “Um, okay.” It was midnight, and we’d sneaked over to the Southstar right off deck 12. It was one of the amusements, a large crane-like arm hanging off the ship with a jewel-shaped capsule at the end. We were in the capsule, just the two of us, hanging thirty feet off the port side, three hundred feet over the water, drinking G&Ts under the stars.
It really didn’t take any prying from me. She rattled off the starting lineup of her deadbeat husbands as if she’d been waiting all day to tell me. Her first one, Larry, was, according to her, “an ultimate prick.” He knocked her around, cheated on her, the whole enchilada. Though she didn’t hold back on the details, I wished she had. It was outside my realm, but I listened for once, especially when the word “abortion” was mentioned a few times. It turned out her therapist believed she had paternal issues. I asked why, and she said, “Well, every one of my exes looked exactly like my father,” which sounded like a whole other ball of wax. It didn’t stop there. Larry the Prick died, appropriately, and she got with Butch, another prick, who did the same thing. Her third prick, “who shall remain nameless,” she said, “He was—” and then she stopped there. I didn’t ask, suspecting that was where the injuries came from. How? I don’t know. Why? I didn’t want to imagine. She’d been through hell, with the burns to prove it.
“What do you think of all that?” It was such a depressing story that she rightly viewed overcoming it as a triumph.
I stirred the lime in my drink. My exes, all of them high-profile successes, had always put a hurting on the world, not the other way around. Thoroughly out of my element, all I could think to say was, “Sounds like Cleveland’s a crazy place.”
She looked away, disappointed. The gin had brought out a brooding side. “I’m serious,” she said. “Say something that means something.”
I thought of the things that broke up my marriages, how they were so unimportant, so entitled, on both sides. “Your relationships make mine sound like nursery rhymes. And I’ve been married more times. I don’t know who’s luckier.”
She shook her head. “That still didn’t mean anything. All you do is crack jokes.”
The Southstar capsule was in a reclined position, which made me feel like a baby in a crib. The sky was a big black dome salted with stars. Zarrella looked away at a cluster of long-dead constellations to her right. After a lengthy hush, I said I was sorry.
“For what exactly?”
“For everything that happened to you.”
She looked at me but didn’t say anything, which was no help. She was seeking compassion and understanding. Though we’d been intimate, I didn’t feel confident putting my arm around her just then. It wasn’t like that with our kind. I did peer down at her hand, her scarred one. I thought of taking it in mine, but I don’t think she wanted to give me the satisfaction. She hid it in her pocket before I could make a move. Then she slowly turned back to the stars, and so did I.
* * *
Wednesday, in Belize, we spoke of none of it. We spent the day investigating a massive cemetery, and on the way back to the ship, we toured the markets. The previous night, and its accompanying hangover, were behind us. We breezed around effortlessly, the locals not batting an eye at the multitude of unseen souls who had just flooded Belize City. Since I wasn’t that far removed from the land of “normal people,” I was sure they’d think the freaks had escaped the asylum.
But the Belizeans were unmoved. Zarrella and I fondled trinkets and weird vegetables at the markets, dodged the odd pickpocket. At lunch, we dined on ceviche, and after, I bought her a carved rain stick that she didn’t really want but graciously took anyway. Occasionally, I caught myself wondering what it would be like to actually live with a woman again. I was feeling unusually open and spread out, maybe a bit upside down. We’d been sampling exotic liquors and home brews all day. By the time we were sitting outside a café that served beer and rum, I began taking stock of my life, my makeup, my blackballing Party, my being pink. None of it seemed that bad.
Zarrella was there. We were getting along, satisfied with each other’s presence. Though I’d never been much of an animal lover, I even petted a three-legged dog that was using our table for shade. The dog was missing its front left leg and had to pogo around on his front right, but the animal was still young and agile. It had adapted. I stroked the mangy pooch, lit on Belikin and Travellers. I mentioned how funny it was that deformities in animals were seen as endearing. “But in humans,” I said, “they’re disgusting.”
Zarrella nodded, giving me a pat but kind of grim smile. “Just now figuring that out, eh?”
I sensed some sarcasm in her tone and asked if everything was all right.
“Sure.” She took off her hat and her shawl, her burns there for everyone to see. She weaved her hair into a french braid and let the end curl over her shoulder like a snake. I thought she’d put her hat back on. She seemed to think about it, but then she gave me a funny look. As if out of spite, she just left the hat where it was. She suddenly had the air of a nicotine addict who’d finally quit the butts. Distracted by that, I patted the dog’s rump so much the beast gave a displeased groan and limped away.
I looked up at Zarrella as she stared off. I watched her blink a few times and then asked if she was happy.
She swigged her beer and shrugged, as though it wasn’t a question she wanted to answer. “I guess,” she said. “You?”
With some trepidation, I said, “You kidding? I’m always happy.”
* * *
She was cooling on me. I was fairly certain. After we boarded the ship that evening, she was different. She walked around hatless and unencumbered, which was a little unnerving. Not her burns. I’d seen enough of them in the few days I’d known her to accept them. For me, they were becoming invisible, but for other passengers, even those who had way more hideous shit wrong with them, they still triggered a double take. Zarrella suddenly couldn’t care less. Whereas before she was shy and misanthropic, covering herself up, now she was proudly defiant. She was exposing herself in a way I couldn’t. To say all that kicked it up a tick on the weirdometer would’ve been accurate. And that was saying a lot, since all of it, the entire cruise, was just weird anyway.
On a trip for people with “conditions,” you inevitably got to know how your fellow passengers came to be that way. Some, like me, were born with their problems, but others suffered from accidents. Tommy, a master welder, was fusing beams on a skyscraper one day and took quite a fall. Deirdre, a former farmworker, had a very unfortunate incident with a wood chipper and never saw her hands again. Dave, a passenger who sat with all of us at dinner that night, was missing both legs and arms. He whizzed around in a state-of-the-art voice-controlled wheelchair. He said he’d been run over in quick succession by a car, a bus, and then a trash truck.
When someone asked what had happened to Zarrella, she said, “A domestic accident, a few of them,” in such a dark, discomfited way that it was like someone farted. Nobody said a word.
With those terrible histories, I was sure my ailment and the fact that I covered it up seemed a bit cheesedick to them, even Zarrella. When Dave’s wife, Rita, who accompanied him, cutting up his food and feeding it to him, doing other dirty work, I was sure, responded to my condition with “But you look so normal,” Zarrella said, “It’s the makeup. He wears it on his face.”
I looked at her. She looked away. Everyone looked at me and gave piteous nods, as though I were someone’s slow child. Everyone except Dave, who compensated for not having limbs by being a prodigious asshole.
“Makeup?” He giggled like a villain. “Well, lucky you. Because let me tell you, there ain’t no makeup for all this shit.” He gestured over his limbless body with his chin. “Mascara can’t cover up not being able to wipe your ass, tie your shoe, and oh yeah, have arms and fucking legs.” Rita stuffed a piece of food in his mouth to quiet him.
Of course, just as we were having this conversation, another Black man with vitiligo, who didn’t wear makeup, happened to pass our table. Granted, unlike me, he was in the early stages. Barefaced, I looked a bit like a raccoon, since the color around my eyes hadn’t left me yet. His face was still pretty well splattered with his original brown. He nodded politely and said, “How y’all doing?” in a viscous southern drawl. The entire table smiled back, watching him go. Then they all looked back at me.
* * *
That night, as Zarrella showed me some makeup tips, I asked what she thought about our dinner conversation.
“What exactly?”
“The fact that I wear makeup and no one else can.”
“You mean the fact that you can cover your condition while others can’t?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
We were in my cabin, sitting at my vanity. We still hadn’t done anything else sexwise, but the possibility was in the air. I was at least trying not to mess it up. She was putting the final touches on my brow area. My eyes were closed. This was the third attempt that night, and she wanted to get it perfect. I almost wondered if she’d taken on my makeup project in some vicarious way since, short of plastic surgery, her skin was irrevocably changed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do what you want. You’re not hurting anyone, so who cares?”
“Yeah, but would you wear makeup if you could? If it made you look normal?”
I heard her fumbling with makeup containers and brushes. She was deliberating. “I don’t believe in normal,” she said. “Makeup would never make me look how I used to look anyhow. There’s no point.”
“But if it did?”
There was another silence. She took so long to answer that I did it for her. “You wouldn’t. That’s why you outed me tonight.” I opened my eyes. She was looking down at her lap. “You didn’t even wear any of your garb.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’re moving on,” I said. “I have a sense for these things.”
“I don’t think you do. We just met. You don’t know me.” She motioned toward the mirror. “Take a look.”
I didn’t. I wanted to keep talking. “You’ve bought into all this, haven’t you? You’re one of them now. You’ve been converted.”
She stopped for a moment. “Have you ever thought that instead of suffering fools, maybe we’ve been suffering ourselves? Maybe I’m just tired of being angry and cut off from everything.”
“Therapy talk,” I said. “You’re an Independent. I should’ve known you’d say that.”
She snorted, but it was hard to tell what it meant. “And you’re a conservative who’s lost his mind. Big surprise. Now look.”
I waited for a sign that she was still into me, that she really wanted to be there. It didn’t come. She was humoring me. I was sure of it as I turned my head toward the mirror. Unbelievably, my old face was staring back. Unlike me, Zarrella at least had a clue with makeup. I moved closer to the mirror and turned my face side to side, up and down. I brought my hand up to touch it, but I didn’t want to ruin it.
She’d gotten the tone right, the foundation and concealer just so. I didn’t look like I’d been rolling around in Nestlé Quik. For the first time in six months, I looked like me. But as soon as I saw myself, I had a terrible realization: I could never reproduce it. Like a brick on the head, it hit me, what I’d secretly felt but couldn’t admit: I was wearing a mask. I had been since I’d started with the m
akeup. If I indulged the fantasy any longer, it probably wouldn’t be good for my brain. I’d be like some denial-ridden toupee wearer who couldn’t let go of his rug, no matter how ridiculous it looked.
“What do you think?” she said.
I didn’t want to think about any of it right then. I said it was great and touched her hand. Boldly, I leaned in to give her a kiss, but she moved away.
“Sorry.” She wiped her lap and put all the makeup away.
“I guess I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It’s okay.”
“So, our night together was a one-time thing, I take it.”
She kind of nodded but kind of didn’t.
I slowly began to wonder if her change in attitude was due to me. Maybe she recognized a part of herself in me and was so frightened by it that she forced a change in her outlook. I felt something catch in my throat. I took a long time clearing it away. Eventually, she said we could still hang out for the rest of the cruise. I said, “Sure.” She let herself out, and I sat at the vanity, looking at myself in the mirror one last time, my old life somewhere in that face. I took out my wipes and rubbed them over my cheeks until they turned from white to brown, until my face turned from brown to pink. I dropped the towelettes into the vacuum toilet and watched the suction pull them away.
* * *
I’d fallen for women too hard before. I’d turned many a woman off, too. I was a habitual divorcé. I’d been renounced many times. With Zarrella, it wasn’t a total bombshell. I could detect the signs the way an animal could detect an impending earthquake. Bringing all that up, though, would’ve just caused problems. I had no idea what was going through her head, and I knew for sure I didn’t want a repeat of my embarrassing breakup with Deb.
Not long before our divorce, she’d been on a tear through the DNC, ascending like a launched rocket. In the RNC, I was descending like a wounded duck, my influence waning. I began to feel as though her success would compel her to forsake me. I falsely accused her of more things than I cared to remember. I even dared her to leave. She said I better be careful. “Keep saying it, and I’m gonna believe it. Or I’m just going to leave so I don’t have to hear it anymore.” Ultimately, she was right. She left for both reasons.
