Loving Day

by Mat Johnson

  Mano means hand. I kind of want to punch him with mine. Not really. Just a little, but not really. I’m suddenly tired. I want to go home. I have a daughter. Tal doesn’t need this. Tal needs me to date a woman who can add something to both our lives. I don’t need this. I don’t even really need a penis anymore. It can go. I could use a tube to pee or something. It’d be awkward, but I could get over that.

  “Sun said you used to be married?” Elijah asks when my silence becomes too much for him.

  “Married. Divorced. The whole cycle.”

  “That’s why you get it, then.” Elijah goes to clink my glass again. It’s already empty. He fills it up for me once more.

  “Marriage for men, it makes sense in a world where the average life expectancy is thirty-seven. If you’re a guy in a village of like sixty, eighty people, with just a few women of childbearing age. But in our world? Never catch me getting married.” He twirls his ponytail as he talks. He twirls it faster and faster. I look at the hair; I can’t look at him. I hear the words, I even think about them, but I can’t look at Sun’s white boy as he deems to whitesplain the world.

  “Maybe we should just kill ourselves at thirty-seven. Have you considered that?” I shoot back.

  “I think her ex was, like, thirty-four? When he killed himself?” he says and it takes me a minute to even realize he’s talking about Sunita’s, and I blush at my error.

  “Listen, no faux pas, really. It’s just, she’s still really sensitive about it. You should know. But like in marriage, you have to kill yourself a little, right? Inside. To make it work. A long-term relationship is sexually fulfilling for, what? Maybe three years? It’s great as it is—Sun and I have been together two—you got to get creative to make it last. So you have to make a choice.”

  “You can break up.” I’m not being theoretical. I mean Sunita Habersham, and him. They can break up. The earth would continue to rotate. It would be lovely, even.

  “Or you can get her to realize that our societal expectations just aren’t realistic. When you have something deep, a quickie in the shallow end never hurts anyone. We’re just apes, right?”

  “Oh. Another bonobo fan.”

  “That’s Sun talking. She reads all that pop geek bullshit.” Elijah points at my mouth with his long, ringed finger, poking. “Those aren’t the only apes. Did she tell you about the gorillas? What they do?”

  “We didn’t get that far.” I don’t want to get any further, either. I just want the women to come back. I look in the direction of the bathroom, sure they will reappear to rescue me, but they don’t.

  “In gorilla society, there’s just one guy: the silverback. And he takes all the women, and kicks the other males out. The females, they stray every once in a while, but it’s permitted because the alpha male gets what he wants.”

  “Sun and I are fucking.” I say it. With little outward malice.

  “I know! And thanks for your contribution to our union.”

  When the women get back, we’re talking about football. The real kind that involves feet. He takes the subject there the second they enter into my peripheral vision, and I let him out of exhaustion. Elijah has some “fascinating theories” on the rise of “American futbol” and its statement on the post-isolationist attitudes in the age of the Internet. I have a theory too: that he’s an asshole.

  Sun sits right next to me. Close, next to me. I think this means something. I think, we are not just splashing in the shallow. We are swimming in the deep sea of love! The language of that is so horrid it sends me into a depression that lasts through the main course and into a third bottle of Cabernet.

  “They have horrible wine here, unfortunately,” Elijah says, comparing the last two house wines to his contribution and I don’t know, maybe he’s finally right about something, but it’s still the kind of drink that makes things not hurt so much.

  “Just amazing body. I love Madagascan grapes. We were in Madagascar—when was it, last year? Eighteen months?”

  “Maybe,” Sun says. She leans over, brushes against my shoulder. “Or a long time ago, or whenever.” Sun says the last part to me. It’s almost a whisper. It’s almost just for me. It’s almost intimate, except for the fact that it’s addressed to everyone and so it isn’t.

  “It was a buddhavistic moment of clarity.”

  “It was okay. I guess.” Sun sniffs, then she shoots back another glass of the cheap stuff.

  “It was…one of those rare moments of connection that you get. The rhythm of the drums. The surf. The rustle of the wind through the leaves. And my little Sunny.”

  The Sun of this moment goes, “Okay, does anyone have a cigarette?” She gets up and walks out the door. I can see her through the window, looking left, looking right, and then nothing. She’s gone.

  “Isn’t Madagascar where you encountered Chlamydia?” Roslyn asks, and I want to go home now. There is a flutter on Elijah’s brow, the reaction to a faint breeze of an ill wind, but nothing more. I reach for my wineglass and it’s just a pool of drips at the bottom, the last bottle offering slightly more of the same.

  “Charuprabha. Her name was Charuprabha. But yes. That was there. She was working with Tossing a Starfish.” To me Elijah says, “They do work with the poor in the Vohipeno region. Very powerful stuff.”

  “Oh, she was wonderful. I remember her visit. So well. Also, who was the Swedish friend you made? Katnis. That was it. Katnis Lumner, the young thing with the long blond hair on her legs. You make so many friends in the world, Elijah! So many connections!” Roslyn finishes her glass as well.

  There are still words coming out of Elijah’s mouth, but I have reached my limit of Elijah sentences, so feel absolved of having to listen.

  “Go outside,” Roslyn says into my ear, while he’s still talking. And then Roslyn pats me on the head.

  I feel myself trying to get up, and I feel drunk. Tal would be mad. For her, I refuse to stumble. I refuse to recognize the uncertainty of my horizontal stability.

  Sun found cigarettes. She smokes one. I walk over, and Sun keeps staring straight off to the street, one arm around her stomach. She’s wearing the white outfit again, the one she wore when I first saw her at the comic convention. There’s a jacket now, a Russian hat with flapping fake-fur ears, and the draping of a hand-knit scarf to accommodate the cold, but it’s the same.

  “You wore that the first time I saw you,” is what I say to her, but it sounds like “I love you” and I don’t even know if that’s true. I usually don’t know till much later, and then from the intensity of the loss after everything goes wrong. I said I loved Becks, and I can think of Becks now, place her in a day like this one. See Becks wrapped in the red wool scarf she used to wear, those worker boots she thought made her look more working class, the ones that went into the closet forever when she became a professional. I can see Becks stumbling ahead of me, giggling drunk, as we walked through the dark from the bars of Mumbles, ocean to the right, hoping for an available minicab somewhere in the buildings to our left. I remember seeing that sight, and knowing I loved her, that I loved a mousy-haired Welsh girl named Becky, and I remember that and feel nothing close to that now. I can live in the moment, but I can’t trust the moment. This moment, where Sun exhales and I see all the smoke and I, too, want to spiral around inside her, it could be lying as well.

  When Sunita turns, it’s sudden and as deliberate and forced as the smile. The earflaps jump. The rest of the smoke inside her comes out of the forced corner of her grin, and the cigarette is flicked to the street beyond.

  “Don’t worry, Warren, they can’t give you cancer if you sacrifice them to the sewer god.”

  “We can just go now. We don’t have to go to this concert, you know? I’m tired. This was enough. Come with me. You could spend the night.”

  “Oh, come on. Nobody likes a quitter. Didn’t you like your meal? I thought the food was fantastic!” Sun’s still smiling. She wants me to be smiling. If we’re both smiling, our lips will be too ti
ght to verbally unpack what the hell happened in there.

  “That’s Elijah? That’s the boyfriend?”

  “He’s okay. He can be fun. Really.”

  “Wow, so that wasn’t a joke. That’s the person you’ve chosen to be your real boyfriend. Okay.”

  “Hey, I don’t have to justify him to you. My relationship with Elijah shouldn’t be threatening to you, Warren. It’s a separate relationship. It has nothing to do with ours.” It comes out quick. It was already prepared, loaded in her head, and waiting to be delivered.

  “So you admit it. We have a relationship.”

  “Sure. Fine. But I have one with him, too.”

  “But he’s a self-centered asshole!” That I say this, more than the fact that the world is kind of fuzzy and unmoored, makes me suspect I might be drunk. When I follow with, “You don’t love him,” that confirms it.

  “You don’t know me. We fuck, Warren. We fuck, and we talk comic books. That’s it. You barely know me.”

  “But I want to know more,” I say, with far too much vulnerability. And it doesn’t matter because I’ve already pushed things too far into ruin.

  Elijah laughs. Not at this, but at something Roslyn’s said to him as they walk out the door. Something he doesn’t like, something he has to mimic joviality about and add “You know, I don’t know if you know how funny you are” to complete his response. He walks right up to Sun and hugs her. Hugs, rocks back and forth, hugs. And then looking at me, Elijah smiles even bigger and goes to hug me. The man is hugging me. Really hard. His beard brushes against my neck. His ginger goatee. It reminds me of Becks’s pubic hair, wet from sweat, shaved into damn near the same oval. Oh look, Sun and I have similar tastes in white people.

  They walk right in front of us, the two of them, the official couple. The couple licensed and approved by time. Roslyn takes my hand again, pulls me on. I grasp it, keep staring ahead. She puts a hand on my chin, and aims my face at hers.

  “You are a beautiful mixed man,” Roslyn tells me. This is not true, but it is truly a lovely mantra. For I am a beautiful mixed man. “You are a strong multiracial warrior,” she continues. “Thank you” doesn’t seem enough so I give her a kiss on her cheek. The side of her face offers much-needed warmth as I watch Sun and Elijah entwined a few feet beyond.

  —

  There’s a small, hand-painted, black-and-white sign with a white angel playing guitar on it. Under it is a door, and through that door, steps that lead to the second-story loft above an empty Greek restaurant. All the Oreos are up there. There are so many Oreos, it makes me want to eat one. “It really is a delicious cookie,” I whisper in Roslyn’s ear, and she nods and smiles because it’s loud and she can’t hear me. It is a delicious cookie, really, it is clear to me now. The chocolate crust, the creamy white cloud on the inside. “How could it be an insult?” I ask Roslyn, and she says, “I don’t know. I believe it’s guitars and banjo. Or perhaps ukuleles.”

  The space is a shotgun, with a stage at the back, a few couches already filled with people sitting on every available surface. Roslyn walks toward one of them, and I look at the people crowded around it and I know them. They are the faces of people I sometimes nod to as I walk the grounds of Mélange, and sometimes they nod back. And sometimes they don’t, because I have an angry face or they heard the gesture is called a nigganod and want nothing to do with it. But they are fully invested in her, Roslyn, the great matriarch of the new people.

  “How’s that date going?” is screamed into my ear. I turn to see Spider smiling.

  “It’s gone to shit. I thought you weren’t going to be here?” I yell.

  “Came to see the aftermath,” he yells back, then wags his head right and left as he laughs. He takes me by the arm, pulls me farther away from the speakers, sits right on the floor, and leans against the wall. I kneel down knowing how hard it’s going to be to get back up again, deciding not to do so till the alcohol in me is ready to find its final resting place in the toilet.

  “It turns out, I don’t understand Sunita,” I tell him. “I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, but I don’t get her.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I don’t understand some women either, and I was born one.” Spider shrugs, offers me a swig of the flask he struggles to yank out his hip pocket. I’m looking at the bottle, a lovely steel job, shiny, curved like the edge of his leg. But I’m thinking, He’s serious.

  “You really were a woman?” I lean harder against the wall. I push into it. I want the outline of my body to mold into the plaster so something in my life feels firm.

  “Yeah man, I told you. Biologically. Never quite fit in any other way, though. So I did what I had to do. This is, like, what, fourteen years ago?” He sees the way I’m looking at him. Because I’m not looking, I’m inspecting. I’m checking the leathered folds giving parentheses around his smile, clocking the receding stubble of his hairline, looking for the bulge of an Adam’s apple under the ink that crawls over his neck from out of his shirt. “Testosterone. It’s a helluva drug,” Spider adds. Nothing is what it is or what it was.

  “That’s the problem right there,” he responds as if he heard my thought. “You gotta change. With life. Life changes, you got to go with it. Or you get pulled apart.” I don’t know if he’s talking about me, or Sunita.

  I close my eyes. I close out everything but the sound of a dulcimer. My dad used to make his own dulcimers. Cardboard ones mostly, but wooden ones too. It was a part of some hippie forecast of an apocalypse where knowledge of dulcimer construction would be essential. It’s the first time in decades I’ve heard one and its music is light and tinny and the sound of a tipsy Craig Duffy, pipe of Cavendish hanging from the corner of his mouth and bathing in a tub of good mood. I open my eyes to see the player actually does remind me of my father as well, except he’s younger and, of course, brown.

  “Hey look, the civil rights movement had a baby!” I say it loud, but none of the people around me respond beyond a glance my way then quickly back to each other again. They’re all young couples, in their twenties. Some wearing wedding bands, some about to put them on. They’re so beautiful. They have that skin, that youth skin, like Play-Doh when you first pop the lid. Even staring blank-faced, the ends of their mouths tilt toward a smile. Nothing has happened to them yet that doesn’t seem conquerable given their massive expanse of unused time. I look at each couple, examine them as they are now, add in any other moments from my memory when I’ve seen them huddled at Mélange, for my supporting data. I decide which ones will end in divorce when this moment is years behind them. Which ones will look at their partner and feel so little that the memory of any strong opinion seems a mirage? The ones that will say, I never truly loved you. Later, they’ll realize that there was love, and it was real, and that the fact that real love can dissipate so completely is even more devastating. That love is the greatest thing we have, the best thing we get, the only thing worth waking for, and even it turns into a putrefying mess just like the bodies we’re stuck in.

  “A rocking night, right?!” one leans over to say to me. Skinny with a fat brown beard. The mop top girl with whom his legs are intertwined kisses him on the lips the second he turns back to her, as if he’s been gone a million years and miles. They both laugh, because they are young love and young love is as arrogant and self-involved as youth in all other forms. I hate that I was them. I hate that Becks isn’t here anymore. My Becks. Becks the abstract. The version of Becks I cared the world for. Not the actual person, who still exists now, out in the world. The real person—I don’t miss being with her, in that actual relationship we created. The constant bickering. The long and loaded silences. The moments weighed down by years of piling resentments that gave even the smallest interactions the potential to bring it all crashing down. What I miss is what came before, what always comes before. The euphoria of love. With her, I remember it with her. I could cry right here at the abstract idea of it. I miss being able to believe in it, so completely. That’s wh
y I hate them, these couples around me. Not for their happiness, or for their love, or even for their self-delusion, but because they don’t know. They don’t know that the rot always comes. I don’t just want to love again. I want to regain the privilege to love like a fool.

  —

  They play “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood to make us leave. I’ve always found its corny country-infused paleo-patriotism to be comforting in a post-9/11 way, but few in the crowd agree with me. They sing along in groans. When it gets to the line, “And I gladly stand up,” everyone sitting actually does, and soon there is a torrent heading for the door. At the exit, the crowd orbits around Roslyn, and she gives each their own personalized parting message.

  On the sidewalk, I can hear the phone ringing in my breast pocket. I think, Sunita, but when I look at it it’s Tosha’s name and face staring back at me. I try to shut it off and I’m poking at it and then she’s talking to me.

  “Warren? Warren? Warren?”

  “Natasha, I’m here.”

  In response, Tosha blurts forth with, “You’re going to get a call from George asking if we’re engaged so just say yes.”

  “Are you serious? Tosha, it’s two in the morning.”

  “When he asks, just say, ‘Yes!’ Okay?” and then she’s silent. I look at the phone’s screen, and see she’s disconnected. It goes dark. Then it lights up again, and I see George’s name and number there.

  “Hey,” George says.

  “Hey,” I respond as if him calling me right now, at this time of night, is totally normal.

  “So…” George continues. I don’t know what to fill in here. Our past phone conversations were less stilted, but usually consisted of “How you doing?” followed by “Cool, man. I’ll go get her.”

  “Warren, I don’t want to hear any bullshit right now. I’m gonna ask you something, and I expect a straight answer. This involves me, but it also involves my children, and I don’t play when it comes to my children, understand?”

  “I understand,” I say, because it’s late and I’m out on this street and I want this over.