Likes

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Betti says something that makes the two of them laugh. “He’s being nice to me. I can barely put a sentence together.” She gives Manuel another wave. “But we agree. The gate doesn’t really make a difference, bunny.”

  Her chair scrapes against the pavers as she scoots closer.

  “According to him, a gate doesn’t do shit!” she says gaily. “I get it. The little man’s just trying to handle his business. Just doing what he’s got to do.” She leans across and pokes me in the arm. “I bet he likes eggs.”

  She winks at me. Now she looks perfectly herself again: immaculate, ironclad, ready for anything.

  THE YOUNG WIFE’S TALE

  There once was a king who came to his throne only after a long period of trouble. Everyone, everywhere, felt relief that he had at last returned to them, but no one felt it more keenly than the young wives of the men whom he led. What possessed them was more than relief; it was a deep, mysterious joy. Their husbands would no longer be leaving for war, they told themselves. Their children would grow old under the eyes of their fathers, and the land would prosper, and life would be restored to the rhythms they could not even recall. So they said to one another as they bent their heads and pounded clothes in the cold streams.

  In truth, the young wives were stirred by the king’s bravery, and his extraordinary beauty. Never before had they seen a man as beautiful as he. They wondered whether it was the years in exile, his time spent wandering disguised and alone, that had given him his grace. His eyes said he understood all the sadness in the world, and his worn face said that he would do everything in his power to defeat it. These qualities, combined with his dark, lank hair and his roughened hands, made the young wives almost frantic with a longing they couldn’t describe. But they would see it reflected in each other’s flushed, stricken faces, and know that they were not alone in what they felt.

  The women’s hunger caused them to act in strange ways. Some small, some not. One wife awoke in the morning, climbed from the bed, went about her tasks, and heated the water, without once opening her eyes. She was reluctant to enter out of her dream. Another, in the early days of winter, would slip behind her house, take off her clothes, and stand turned to the sun, unmoving as stone. Among the youngest of the wives was a girl who disappeared for long spells into the forest. Each time she would eat a little less and roam a little farther, in the belief that she might faint at just the moment the king was striding past, and he would stoop down to the ground, lift her up in his arms, and revive her. Why she believed this was a mystery—the king did not hunt in these woods, nor did he travel alone anymore, nor did he travel on foot. Maybe she was searching for the exiled king, the sorrowful king, and believed she would find him in this forest. But he would be at once the king adrift and the king redeemed, because look, in her dream, how he lifts her from the ground.

  In time, the king died and passed into legend. He was remembered in songs and paintings and books, and then for a long while he was forgotten, as the paintings blackened and the books moldered and other, shorter songs came into fashion. Such a very long time went by, it seemed possible that the king and his hard struggles, the peace that followed, would be forever lost, as if his beauty had never existed, and he had never walked this earth or looked up at this sky. But there was an old university where, one night, a scholar discovered the king, either in a trance or in the stacks of the library, and once again his story came to light. First, he appeared in sketches and drafts, then in a book so long it required multiple volumes, followed by rock-and-roll albums and animated cartoons, underground fanzines and doctoral dissertations, and, finally, a film.

  In this latest incarnation, the king began again to disturb the young wives of the world. There were so many pleasures to be had as a young wife—the new towels and sheets, the espresso machine, the warm, receptive body waiting in the bed—and at first this seemed merely one of them. Two women together, confessing the terrible love they felt for their husbands, so much deeper and sharper than they had ever expected to feel, could then pour fresh cups of coffee, pick up crumbs off the new yellow dishes with the moistened tips of their fingers, and proceed to speak gravely of their feelings for the king without suffering the slightest twinge of foolishness or betrayal. They took it as one of the privileges of marriage. They laughed when other women, their still-unmarried friends, suggested it was a movie actor who provoked in them their peculiar hunger. Because hadn’t they seen him a hundred times before, as a cowboy drifter, an army sergeant, a sidekick, a painter having an affair? It was not an actor who stirred them. Their thoughts belonged wholly to the brave, ravaged, beautiful king.

  * * *

  Eva believed in the beginning that the king reminded her of her husband, and she told him so. He smiled at her in such a way to show he was grateful, but also that he disagreed. Don’t you see it? Eva asked. She was full of adoration for him. For the way his feet sounded coming up the stairs, the way he kept himself so clean-smelling and neat, for the solo dances he’d perform on the carpet when he was happy. Countless ways and things she adored, innumerable as the stars. Things that of course existed before they were married, but to which she could now fully surrender, abandoning herself to wonder. How did she ever. How did she ever. She could not account for her fortune. She could only note that she had, unaware, held part of her self in suspension before, and now she had let go. The fall was slow, luxurious, and seemingly infinite. It refused to be described. She was reduced to murmuring, almost against her will, You are the best. Words impoverished of their meaning, used most often to thank a person to whom one’s not truly indebted, but when Eva uttered them to her husband, she asked the words to carry the full weight of her astonishment. She wasn’t ever confident they did.

  A paradox of growing so close to another person was the doubt that you could impart to them the very closeness that you felt. Eva would awake in the night, feeling someone’s breath on her forehead, hearing someone beside her ask, Do you know how much your husband loves you? Do you know?

  Eva would sigh and burrow more deeply next to him, then descend into a dream about the king. He was drawing his sword from his belt. He was turning to face an enemy. The look on his face was grim, and the circle of motion his body described—rough hand on hilt, arm sweeping up, torso pivoting in the direction of danger—had a poem’s grace, its balance and frugality. There was the clang of metal meeting. The hissing sound of tempered weapons slicing through the air. More enemies, their black helmets dull in the brilliant sunlight, came swarming down the wooded slope. They yelped and they whooped, they beat their drums and bared their rotting teeth like dogs, but the expression on the king’s face did not change. One by one he felled his enemies, pressing in on him from all sides, with a bleak patience and determination. Eva flattened herself against a tree and quaked. Not once in her dream did she fear for the king, but she felt acutely the overwhelming odds against him, the extreme peril, the thrill. He would not die, but he might come close. The bark of the tree bit into her skin, her fingers were sticky with pitch, the pine needles yielded beneath her feet. The next time that Eva awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, her heart was beating very fast.

  The mornings made her sad. She didn’t like saying goodbye to her husband when he left for work. She held on to him tightly, and he said to her, We’ll see each other tonight. I know, she sighed, but that seems far away from now. And it was true, the days were long. He was a resident in emergency medicine. He was a lawyer for legal aid. He wrote articles about changes in technology, for which he was paid, and also articles about wars in Africa, for which he was not paid. He worked in a record shop and composed strange, haunting music. It didn’t matter. He was doing something good. Eva, also, had a job. She had high hopes for herself. For both of them. They were traveling the distance, in very small, sometimes imperceptible increments, between where they found themselves now and where they desired one day to be. Soon. It wasn’t happening quickly enough. You’re getting there, they told each oth
er. With brightness in their voices, a true conviction. Over and over they told each other, You’re a rock star. Fuck them. What do they know. You’re kicking ass. I mean it. We’re getting there. Soon.

  Eva would see the king when she stepped onto the bus in the mornings. Then she would see him again in the lap of the little boy sitting across from her on the aisle. She would see him behind the glass at the newsstand, and as he flew raggedly down the length of a block. When she walked to the bank she saw him, hair tangled and sword raised, looking out across the city from the top of an office building. Somehow he remained irreducibly himself, even when miniaturized on a lunch box, or multiplied in the pages of a magazine, or flattened and stretched across the side of a bus. Though she saw him everywhere, her spirit would still leap in surprise at the sight of him. Then her heart would unfurl, in petals of flame, and she would burn with a clear, consuming light.

  At its peak, before it extinguished itself, the fire made Eva’s vision sharpen. She perceived what was beautiful and fierce in the man who drove the bus, his supple fingers tapping against the wheel, and the man beside her in the elevator, who nodded at her kindly, almost caressingly, before he stepped off at the seventh floor, and the man she saw from her window, crossing the street against the traffic light, a small limp in his step. She stared at each of them and realized, I could love you. The thought filled her with courage. She wondered if everyone around her might feel it, her valor and love, radiating off her like heat. But as quickly as it flared up, her insight faded, and all that remained were the ashes, the unremarkable faces of men.

  The nights also made Eva sad sometimes. She tried luring her husband into staying up late, with the promise of movies or cookie dough or card games. I don’t want to go to sleep yet, she’d say as her eyelids grew heavier and heavier. Yet the new sheets were so exquisitely soft. And the blanket her cousins had brought back from Wales. Their bed was an abyss into which she could not help but precipitously fall. She clasped his arm, knowing that to sleep was to leave each other for a while. I’ll be right here, he said. I’m not going anywhere. And she said wistfully, I know! Sleep well. I’ll see you in the morning.

  Her husband shook his head. She could hear his hair rubbing back and forth on the pillowcase. I’ll probably see you before then, he said. You have a funny habit of showing up in my dreams. You’re always hanging around.

  He said it with exasperation, but he didn’t mean it. Together they had developed a talent for hanging around. How else could they have built their wealth of solace and closeness and ease? They lived surrounded by the dear familiar. Eva had been folding laundry when he asked her to marry him. He had been warming leftover noodles on the stove. On the television played a spooky show that they liked, whose characters and conflicts they knew so well, had seen so many times, that they could drift in and out of conversation, or become absorbed with the task of mating socks, of stirring pans, to still return and feel they hadn’t missed anything at all. When Eva turned around to glance at the screen, she nearly fell over her husband (not yet her husband), who was on his knees among the washcloths and the turtlenecks still spread across the floor. He opened his hand, like a magician about to make a coin disappear, and there sat a ring. Her grandmother’s ring; she recognized it at once. But how did it ever end up in his hand? There had been forethought, conspiracy! Her very soul rushed forward to meet him. She dropped to the floor and they held each other, laughing and weeping, with all the beloved things of their life arrayed about them, the butter popping in the pan, the detective muttering on the television, the water stain from the leak last winter floating on the ceiling above their heads.

  Recounting the moment later, she shivered at the possibility that it could have happened differently. I would have been embarrassed! she cried. A dimly lit restaurant, a horse-drawn carriage? A banner pulled by a propeller plane across the sky? Some women she knew had become engaged on faraway beaches, strolling underneath the moon. Ugh, she said. It was horrible to contemplate. There were so many opportunities for the process to go awry. She felt lucky her husband had asked the right way, the solely acceptable way, which was exactly the way that he had.

  But saying so was obvious. For if he had asked in a different manner, if he had taken her to the top of a mountain, or buried the ring in a chocolate dessert, then he would have been a different person, and she would never have married him, now would she.

  Would she?

  With a pang she remembered the dizzying sensation she had felt while walking through the city. Anything was possible. Anything, more dangerously, was imaginable. Why was it so easy to feel the bus driver’s hand holding her own as he led her up the crumbling stoop to meet his father? And how did she know that the man on the elevator preferred his eggs soft in the middle, served on little dry triangles of toast? Every glance, every encounter, contained within it a dark, expanding universe of intimacies, exploding like dandelion fluff at her slightest breath, flying up and drifting about and taking stubborn root somewhere. Which was why she understood, with absolute certainty, that the slightly lame, foolhardy fellow, the one riskily crossing the street, would, if given the chance, bury his head between her legs, inhale, and utter indecipherable words of joy, making every inch of her vibrate with the sound.

  Did you hear me?

  Yes, yes, I heard you, she says, and sinks her hands into the damp head of hair, lightly closing her eyes, feeling her body hum, wondering how did she ever—

  Eva?

  Her husband was propped up on his elbow, looking at her curiously.

  You asleep? he asked.

  * * *

  That night she dreamed once more of the king. He heaved open the oaken doors to the hall and hung there, his bent figure thrown into shadow, before he staggered through. The men gathered in the great hall stopped what they were doing and turned to him and stared. They seemed hardly to recognize their king, his face filthy, his eyes haggard, his lean body stooped with exhaustion and pain. It was as if they could scarcely believe he was not dead. A young boy was the first to come to his senses and run forward to the king, who hesitated, then laid his hand, with a sigh, upon the child’s shoulder. Rousing themselves from their disbelief, the men sent up a shout. The king had come home. His enemies, who had snatched him from the battlefield, could not keep him. The voices of his men echoed through the hall, but the king did not share in their rejoicing. He smiled at them faintly. Leaning on the boy, he limped to a dark corner, sank down on a bench, tipped his head back against the stone, and closed his eyes. Eva stood pressed behind a pillar, close enough to see how his face twitched with grief. She looked down and found she was carrying a basin of water, its cool weight trembling slightly in her hands. The water, she knew, was meant for the king. But before she could move to him, a hush fell over the hall, the men parting as another walked slowly through their midst and with quiet steps approached the body resting on the bench. The man was tall, his hair gray, and when he stood before the king, he seemed to cover him with light. My lord, the man said, in a voice of such gentleness that the king then opened his eyes. His face showed his struggle to understand what he saw. You fell, the king whispered. The older man looked at him with love. Yes, the man said, but I did not die. And from the king’s face the pain dropped away, and wonder took its place, for his old friend had been returned to him.

  The moment was broken by the sound of water dripping. Eva gazed down at the bowl in her hands. Then she awoke, in the darkness of the bedroom, feeling wetness on her cheeks, pooled in the cups of her ears. She heard a voice beside her whispering. Eva, it said. Eva, it asked in soft dismay, why are you crying?

  In the morning, it was her husband who held on tightly. He looked back up at her as he circled down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, out of sight, he called to her, as if he wasn’t sure she’d still be there. He told her to have a very good day. He told her to say hello for him to her friend. I will, she shouted into the stairwell, I will. The front door scraped open, lingered a mom
ent, and then swung shut with a gasp.

  As her husband had asked, Eva delivered his special hello to her friend. She was a young wife herself, and pregnant. Her doctor had offices in the part of the city where Eva worked, so after her appointment they would sometimes meet at a restaurant and eat together. Generally speaking, her friend had an exceptional appetite, but now she stared down sadly at her food.

  She said, I bet this looks delicious to you.

  Eva shook her head.

  What? Her friend lit up. Are you pregnant too?

  Eva shook her head again, and smiled.

  Oh. Her friend subsided. You got my hopes up. I thought for a minute I wasn’t alone.

  You’re not alone, Eva said.

  She found her friend disturbing to behold. Her face appeared both drawn and puffy at the same time. Tiny blossoms of burst blood vessels had broken out along her cheeks and the delicate skin above her breasts. Her hair—all over, she said—had turned coarser. All day she stroked her stomach without knowing it, though her belly had only just emerged.

  We have a favorite, she said. I want to know what you think. Lucy.

  I like it, Eva said. And what if it’s a boy?

  Her friend spoke the musical name of the king, and a shudder passed between them.

  Can you imagine? her friend asked, for a moment on fire. She remembered herself. No, really it’s Jack.