by Kelly Link
Thank you.
The Shadow You Cast Is Me
Henry Lien
The first JPG of my wife comes out blurry. Because I was so afraid that she would wake up. My hands were shaking so badly that I almost dropped the phone on her.
The second JPG of her comes out clearly. She is so beautiful, it hurts to look at her. She is sleeping with a little knit in her brow. How many more nights will I get to sleep with her next to me? A hundred? Fifty? Only tonight? I will want this photo, after she leaves me.
The third JPG I barely recognize. It has been months since I have seen that nipple. Almost twelve months since I tasted it, but I will never forget. Like a firm little shrimp on my tongue. Why is it firm now? Whom is she dreaming of now?
The fourth JPG I do not want to take. But I need it. So much. She will not understand. She will call it a violation. But I am not touching her. She will think I will want to use it somehow. But I only want a reminder of what I had, here, after she has left.
As if I ever had her. As if she were ever here.
I look up at her face. Her eyes are wide open, gaze darting between my face and the phone in my hand. She says nothing. She shows nothing.
We are locked, like predator and prey in a close den, trying to figure out who is the predator and who is the prey.
She tells me she wants me to go out and do whatever I need to do to satisfy my needs. She wants me not to fall in love with anyone else. She wants me never to leave her. She wants me never to tell her about what I am doing.
And she wants me never to bring up this conversation.
She recites them in a list. She even numbers each item. She does not even try to pretend that she has not rehearsed this.
I awake to the sounds of cooking. Mei-Ching always wakes up before I do. Even from the third floor, you can hear everything going on downstairs in these open floorplan lofts.
The room is too bright. Frosted windows with no curtains means that you rise with the sun.
It looks like we finished the bottle of wine last night. Mei-Ching said it was the good stuff. When you are surrounded by oenophiles, you never bother to learn anything about wine. You just shadow them and enjoy it. But it looks like it knocked us out.
Then I remember the conversation.
It did not happen. I dreamt the conversation because I wanted it to have happened. I am certain of it.
I think.
As I trim my beard over the sink, I ask myself, do I want this? No. I want her. She is all I have been waiting for.
Then I think of the time that she caught me trying to put one of her tampons back in its wrapper, so she would think it was new and put it inside her, after I jacked off onto it, after we had stopped making love, six months after.
I do not know why things changed. Because they did not for me. Does anyone ever know?
By the time I have finished showering, I admit to myself that I want her, but if I cannot have her, if this is the only way to save our marriage, I need to do this. She knows that. She gave me permission.
Right?
I throw on my sportcoat and go downstairs to breakfast.
I am driving to UCLA with the top down. I hit the best part of Sunset, in Beverly Hills, where the road banks back and forth and your car feels like it is on rails. I step into the accelerator.
Behind me comes a MINI-Cooper. Red with a Union Jack painted on top. It zips around me like a go-cart defying physics. Some asshole rich kid. Probably headed to the film school.
We meet at the light at Beverly Glen. He rolls down his window. It is not a guy, it is a girl. Young. Could be one of my students. Though I would have noticed her. Definitely film school. Short, dyed black hair. Elfin face. Perfect, ghostly skin. No makeup. Laughter bubbles out of her throat. She says sorry, but she just could not resist. Then her smile dials down a little as she sees what I look like. She is liking what she sees. I can always tell. The light changes. She says that she will see me around. Confident that she will. And her little British car is gone like a rocket. My breakfast sits uncomfortably in my stomach, but then settles back down.
When I came down to breakfast, it was far too hot to eat in my sportcoat. I only wore it for her. Women love a stylish man. At least she used to.
She was in the kitchen, dressed in one of my dress shirts and her panties, French cuffs flapping around as she worked the kitchen like a DJ, sucking pensively on her fingernail as she plotted out her moves. Why was she dressed like this? When she was telling me no every night? Was she just so good at bringing attention to herself that she did not know what to do with it when she got it?
I sat down. She made the breakfast appear on the table like she was tossing her hat at the couch. It was vegan, low-fat, and sublime. As always. Nothing was difficult for her. Anything could be tried and quickly mastered.
Nothing on her face indicated that the conversation last night happened. She was beautiful and alive this morning. Radiant. But exactly as alive as she was every morning, as radiant as she was at anyone, always.
After class, I walk far from the film school towards Royce Hall to have a cigarette. I do not want my students to see me smoking. Even if most of them smoke. I love those kids. Their cockiness and uncertainty and constant concern about their rank. If puppies could talk, they would be like my students.
I sit down on the bench and watch the gay guys coming in and out of the basement entrance of Royce. Pretending to be just hanging out. As if everyone on campus does not know about that bathroom. Royce is like a hundred years old and made of brick. When the big one hits, all those gay guys are going to get crushed in that basement. One big gooey pancake of meat and blood and sperm.
I look through my phone contacts. The folder marked “*** Students ***”. The girls always find an excuse to give me their cell phone numbers. Some of the guys too. I scroll through. Shi Ru-shen. Definitely remember her. My “Gender Representations in the French New Wave” class is always filled with beautiful girls. Sexy topic, I guess. She was a Mainlander. Apprenticed with Zhang Yimou before coming to UCLA. I never wore a tie that quarter and rolled my sleeves up no matter how cold the air conditioning got because I loved how she stared at my chest and arms. She had probably never seen a hairy Chinese man before. A quarter of the world’s men, and I was more man than any of them to her.
She was beautiful. Talented. And she worshipped me.
What is her ripe date? I open her contact entry on my phone and look at my notes.
She graduated last quarter.
My thumb hovers over the text button.
Did Mei-Ching really give me permission to do this?
But then, I feel my foreskin begin to roll back, my cock start to fill with blood. I stick my hand in my jeans and do a little pocket play to readjust.
I feel a quarter in my pocket. I bring it out.
Heads, I text this girl. Tails, I finish my cigarette and go back to class. I toss the coin.
Tails. I stare at the eagle. What an ugly design.
I flip the coin again.
Tails.
I flip it three more times.
Five tails in a row.
I look behind me.
The mid-day sun leaves the scene behind me shadeless and bare. The gay guys cruising the bathroom slouch like strange birds in a landscape.
I close the girl’s contact entry and turn off my phone. I stub out my cigarette and go back to class.
I did not say a word all throughout breakfast. There was nothing for me to contribute. She was chirping on about how she had decided not to take the anchor job. She left journalism for a reason. I was glad because it would have meant that she would have to work out of Atlanta.
But I had a fantasy that I would fly out there. I would sneak underneath the desk where she would sit during broadcasts. When she took the seat and discovered me hiding there, she would not be able to do anything about it. The cameras would be rolling, and she would be broadcasting live. And I would push up her skirt. And pull down he
r panties. I would secretly lick her while she read the news to America. I would clean her out with my tongue while she was broadcasting live to millions of people. That is my wife. My. Wife.
She went on and said that her agent got her on Ellen next week. She would be talking about her new film and also about being arrested for the protests at the Japanese Consulate over the Taiji dolphin massacre. She told me that she was going as Jodie’s guest to a gala benefit tonight for the people who made the documentary about the massacre and k.d. lang would be performing a song she wrote for the dolphins. I did not have to ask to know that I was not invited. Then she was going on about how she heard Kate Hutton, the dykey seismologist from Caltech, on the news about the string of 3.5 quakes we have been having.
I wanted to grab her wrists and tell her to shut up and ask her if the conversation last night really happened. If she really wanted to stay married to me. If she really wanted me to go out and satisfy my needs with other women.
But I could not. Because if it really did happen, she said she never wanted to discuss the conversation again. She said she could not bear it. She said it would destroy her.
I think.
I have the whole afternoon to write at home by myself. I am on the third floor deck. Our new loft building towers over the junky remnants of pre-gentrification Hollywood. The sad little shack behind our building is the bane of all the other loft owners. They are constantly calling the police in their war on the trannie hookers who live there.
I see the girl on the roof of the building behind ours again, pacing back and forth, a cell phone cradled in her ear. The bamboo never grew high enough to block her out. When we first bought our loft, I would see her in her bedroom, cradling a baby. She was so young that I thought she was taking care of an infant sibling.
After two years of watching her and hearing her talk on the phone, I pieced together that she is a single mother. Korean, I think, but with an Australian accent and a tattoo. She works as a bartender. Her little mixed-race child is autistic or something. The child has terrible fits at all hours, but Mei-Ching and I never call the cops. I would just hold Mei-Ching when we heard the child screaming from behind our building and not speak and thank God that it is that girl’s life and not ours.
She talks a lot on the phone and usually cries when she does. It hurts to see that. She lives so close to us, we could have strung tin cans. Or hung out the window with our arms crossed, exchanging village gossip. But we never talked. Only looked. Sometimes I would catch her holding her crazy, nightmarish child, looking up at our bedroom window. And I would crank the handles of the frosted windows and close them.
I watch her now, pacing the roof, crying softly into the phone, covering her mouth to stifle her weeping. When she is done with the call, she just stares at the phone, as if staring could force some response out of it. I stand up and come to the edge of our deck.
She abruptly turns and looks directly at me. I feel naked and silly, shirtless and pretentious with my iPad working on my script on the third floor deck of my loft.
And this girl, making her way in the world, alone, stares back at me, unshifting, never breaking her gaze.
With the smallest gesture, she takes the phone that she has been clutching in her hand and faces it to me.
I look behind me. Into our sun-filled bedroom. Of course Mei-Ching is not there. She is filming today. And then the dolphin benefit with Jodie tonight.
With my fingers, I signal my cell phone number. 3. 2. 3. 3. 5. 1. 4. 5. 5. 1. I do it quickly, hoping she will not catch it. Let her be too far to catch it. Let her be too dumb to catch it. Please.
I see her thumb tapping at her phone.
My phone chimes. I look at the text. It is only one word.
“Yes”.
The last time we made love, Mei-Ching told me about her little sister with the cleft palate who died as an infant. And how she cried for her, but was ashamed since no one else in the family was crying. Then, we made love, and it was so beautiful, I cried. I told her that I loved her, I told her that I had been waiting my whole life to meet her.
In response, she patted my shoulder. And looked at the clock beside the bed.
That hand, patting my shoulder, kindly, patient, indulgent, pacifying.
When I arrive at the girl’s door, it is open a crack.
She is standing at the back of the room. The whole apartment is just a room. Her child is not there, but children’s things are everywhere. Alphabet blocks are lined up A to Z on a bookshelf like a train.
She is silhouetted against the drawn blinds. She is skinny and fair. One arm is folded over her breasts to clench the elbow of her other arm. She clutches the phone in her hand.
I close the door and cross the room to her.
We do not speak. I cup the curve of her jaw with one hand, and she melts into it in a way that tells me it could be any man’s hand. But I do not care.
A little noise comes out of her throat as I bend in towards her. I can smell her hair. It smells like sweetgrass and milk. She smells like a child.
I lift her chin to kiss her.
And the room begins to shake. This is more than a 3.5. This is at least a 5. Or perhaps it just feels worse because of the cheap construction of her building.
The shaking stops. She buries her face in my chest. The room is not too badly shaken up. Even the train of alphabet letters is still standing except for four blocks that have fallen to the floor.
The room begins to shake again. Even worse. It begins to feel serious, dangerous, angry. As the rest of the alphabet blocks cascade off the bookshelf, I blink, and try to retrieve an image I just saw but did not understand yet. It is no longer before my eyes, but it was just there. My mind tries to rewind the frame. Wait for it. Wait for it.
The shaking finally stops. On top of the tumble of blocks and items on the floor, I can see overlaid the memory of the image that I saw of the first four blocks that fell to the floor.
E. F. I. W. Backwards. W. I. F. E. Narrating our tableau like subtitles.
It was there. I saw it. I am certain of it.
I think.
I peel the girl’s arms from around me and pick my way through the fallen clutter and leave her apartment.
I am lying in the dark in our bedroom. Mei-Ching is still at the dolphin benefit with Jodie.
I lie there, my arm stretched over to her side of the bed, my phone where she should be, her pictures glowing in my hand, my thumb licking the screen as I scroll through the JPGs, faster and faster, trying to piece the snapshots of her into a whole. It is no use, they refuse to come together as her. So I look at them as parts, pieces of her.
The fourth JPG of her makes me wish that she could come home to me and find me asleep and that there were some way that she could rape me and take whatever she wanted from me, because then there would have been something she had wanted from me. But dreams do not always come true.
The third JPG reminds me what it was like to nurse on her, as if she could give me nourishment. When she comes home to me, I will ask nothing of her. I will cherish whatever she gives me. Even if it is so much less than I need.
The second JPG I do not want to look at too often. Because it hurts to look at how beautiful she is and I do not want it ever to stop being able to do that. I want to save the feeling. I tell her picture that I will give her my everything. Even if it is useless to her.
The first JPG is obscure, a smear of brightness and shadow, fading into a beautiful blur that I cannot read, that I have never been able to read. The most accurate portrait of her of all. This is how she looks as she disappears from me. And when one day she is all gone, I will be able to say that I was married to her once. And I will have our JPGs. And together, that will be enough.
Because one of us always walks in light, and one of us always walks behind. Always.
That is marriage. That is love.
The Virgin Regiment
Gillian Daniels
I told him, “Your mouth is a ros
e, rain-wet and sweet.”
Despite very little reading and no poetry in me,
the young parson was pleased pink,
our kisses full and bitter-good like tea.
We danced in his bedroom afterward like we were at a ball.
He is not like the other men,
the ones who wear jewels on their ears like drops of blood,
colorful shirts and cotton dress trains.
Virgin Regiment women like myself keep to sensible gray,
but the men need their bright plumage.
In the morning, I borrowed his ironing board for the pleats in my skirt.
Then it was the beret for me and the stiff white collar for him,
he to the parsonage and me to the front.
At the edge of town, some well-wishers blew kisses,
shook handkerchiefs at me.
“Best of luck to the brave Virgins of the front,” one said!
So I bowed.
Like the parson, one was a pretty man,
but taller and with darker skin.
He wore a blue, shiny coat with green silk lining peeking out slyly from the sleeves.
An earring dangled by his cheek.
When he saw me stare, he plucked it out of his ear and handed it over.
I am not bad looking and can tell jokes so I have a collection of favors like this.
Others in The Virgin Regiment have much more so I don’t brag.
