Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  Back inside the New York party, I realized time had ceased to flow: my husband and the producer were laughing the exact same laugh, the lime zest of their breath still acrid in the air, and I saw this was in the future, too, all these chilly women with their iron-filing eyes and rice-paper hearts. They wanted something genuine, something real. They wanted what I had: a man who was willing to go off the cliff with you. They would come after him when he was weak, I suddenly understood, when I was no longer there to fend them off. This wasn’t hysteria. It wasn’t imagination. I was in the room with one of them. Here she was, perfect teeth forming a brittle smile, hips hollow as sake boxes.

  “That story is too funny,” the producer said. “Stop it right there. Save it for the segment!”

  In a shrug of false modesty, my husband accidentally sloshed his soda water.

  “Well,” he said. “Only if you think it would be good for the show.”

  I put my hand on the producer’s arm. She turned, startled, discovering me.

  I used my grip to assess her soul—I felt the want of it, I calculated its lack, in the same way Lady Montagu mapped the microscopic world of smallpox pustules and Voltaire learned to weigh vapor.

  You tell me who the fucking ghost is.

  —

  There is a knock at the door. It’s Megumi!

  My husband answers, and the two of them regard each other, almost sadly, for a moment.

  They are clearly acknowledging the wrongness of whatever it is they’re up to.

  They head upstairs together, where I realize there are Costco-size boxes of condoms everywhere—under the sink, in the medicine cabinet, taped under the bedside table, hidden in the battery flap of a full-size talking Tigger doll!

  Megumi and my husband enter our bedroom. Right away, the worst possible thing happens—they move right past these birth-control depots. They do not collect any condoms at all.

  My kind of ghost mom would make it her job to stop hussies like Megumi from fucking grieving men, and if I were too late, it would be my job to go to Megumi late at night, to approach her as she slept on her shabby single-mom futon and, with my eyedropper, dribble one, two, three purple drops upon her lips, just enough to abort the baby he put inside her. In her belly, the fetus would clutch and clench and double up dead.

  Megumi and my husband do not approach the bed. They move instead toward the armoire, beside which is a rolling rack of all the vintage dresses I could no longer wear once I lost my bustline. I moved them onto the rack but couldn’t bear to roll them out of the room.

  Megumi runs her fingers along these dresses.

  She pauses only to eye a stack of my training bras on the dresser.

  Interesting fact: While you can get used to being titless, the naked feeling of not wearing a bra is harder to shake. You just become accustomed to the hug of one. I recommend the A-cup bras from Target’s teen section. Mine are decorated with multicolor peace signs.

  Megumi selects a dress from the rack and studies it—it’s an earthy pink Hepburn with a boat collar, white trim and pleated petticoat. At the Florida university where I met my husband, I was in his presence three different times before he finally noticed me. I was wearing that dress when he did. I wonder if he remembers it.

  Megumi holds the dress to her body, studying herself in the mirror. Then she turns to my husband, draping the dress against her figure for his approval.

  Interesting fact: The kanji for figure is a combination of the elements next and woman.

  I study my own figure in the mirror.

  Interesting fact: The loss of breasts doesn’t flatten your chest—it leaves you concave and hollowed-looking. And something about the surgery pooches your tummy. My surgeon warned me of this. But who could picture it? Who would voluntarily conjure herself that way?

  Megumi waits, my dress held against her. Then my husband reaches out. He has a faraway look in his eyes. With his fingertips, he tugs here and tapers there, adjusting the fall of fabric to the shape of her body. Finally, he nods. She accepts the dress, folding it in her arms.

  I do not dagger her. I stand there and do nothing.

  —

  Interesting fact: My first novel that no one would publish was about Scottsdale trophy wives who form a vigilante group to patrol their gated community. It contains, among other things, a bobcat killing, a night-golfing tragedy, the illegal use of a golf ball–collecting machine and a sex scene involving a man and a woman wearing backpack-mounted soda pistols. It was called The Beige Berets.

  Interesting fact: My second novel that no one would publish concerns two young girls who have rare powers of perception. One can read auras, while the other sees ghosts. To work the ghost angle, I had their father live in Charles Manson’s old apartment. To make the girls more vulnerable, I decided to kill off their mother, so I gave her cancer. To ratchet up the tension, I had a sexual predator live next door named Mr. Roses. My husband came up with the name. In fact, my husband became quite enamored with this character. He was really helpful in developing Mr. Roses’ backstory and generating his dialog. Then my husband stole this character and wrote a story from Mr. Roses’ perspective called “Dark Meadow.” I can’t even say the name of this novel without getting angry.

  —

  My husband does not return to the novel he was working on before my cancer. After the kids are asleep, he instead calls up the website bigboobsalert. He regards this on slide-show mode, so ladies with monstrous chests appear and fade, one into the next. My husband has his hand lotion ready, but he doesn’t masturbate. He stares at a nebulous place just past the computer screen. I contemplate these women. All I see in their saucerous nipples and pendulous breasts is the superpower of motherhood. Instead of offering come-hither looks to lonely men, these women should be feeding hungry babies, calling upon foundling wards and nursing the legion orphaned of the world. We should airdrop these bra-busters into tsunami zones, earthquake epicenters and the remote provinces of North Korea!

  I kneel beside my husband, slouched in his ergonomic office chair. I align my vision with his, but I can’t tell what he’s looking at. Our faces are almost touching, and though he is lost and sad, I still feel his sweet energy. “Come to bed,” I whisper, and he sort of wakes up. But he doesn’t rise to face our bedroom. Instead, he opens a blank Word document and stares at it. Eventually, he types, “Toucan cereal.”

  “No!” I shout at him. “I’m the one who got cancer, I’m the one who was struck. That’s my story. It belongs to me!”

  —

  Interesting fact: Cancer teaches you to see the insides of things. Do you see the can in uncanny or the cer in concern? When people want to make chitchat with you—even though, if they took the time, they could see that under your bandanna you have no hair—it’s easier to just say to them, “Sorry, I have some uncanny concerns right now.” If you’re feeling feisty, try “I feel arcane and acerbic.” Who hasn’t felt that?

  But sometimes you’ve got chemo brain and your balance is all woo-woo and your nails are itching like crazy and you don’t want to talk to anybody. Be prepared for that.

  Person 1: “Gosh, I haven’t seen you in forever. How’s it going?”

  You: “Toucan cereal.”

  Person 2: “Hey, what’s new? I’m so behind. I probably owe you like ten messages.”

  You: “Vulcan silencer.” Smile blankly. Hold it.

  —

  Arrows boat-tail through the night. Raccoons rear, yellow-eyed, to watch them fly. In spring the surf sorrel, considered an aphrodisiac by the Miwok peoples, open their gate-folding leaves. I can’t look at my children head-on. From afar I study them. I watch my husband shuttle them to school from a distance great enough that I almost can’t tell my kids from other ones.

  Even worse than cancer glommers are widower clingers. They approach my husband with their big sympathetic eyes and force him to say things like “We’re managing” and “Keeping our heads above water.” But he’s no fool. He returns their cass
erole dishes to be refilled.

  Our daughter takes on my voice. I study her as she admonishes her brother and the Horse-child to take their asthma medicine and do their silent reading before bed. When lice outbreaks arrive, she is the one who meticulously combs through their hair after my husband succumbs to frustration and salty talk.

  I keep a hairy eyeball wide for Megumi. She doesn’t come around, which makes me all the more suspicious. I wonder if my husband took some of that Pulitzer money and bought a “studio” in the neighborhood. You know, a place to hide your book royalties from the IRS and “get some serious work done.” I flip through his key chain, but there is nothing new, just keys to the house, his Stanford office, the Honda Odyssey, five Kryptonite bike locks.

  I use my powers of perception to scan the neighborhood for signs of this so-called writer’s studio. I try to detect the effervescence of my husband’s ever-present sparkling water, the shimmer of his condom wrappers or the snap of Megumi’s bra strap. My feelers feel only the fog rolling in, extinguishing the waking world block by block, starting with the outer avenues.

  Interesting fact: The Miwok believed the advancing fog could draw one into the next world.

  Interesting fact: Accidentally slipping into the afterlife was a grave concern for them. To locate one another in the fog, they darkened their skin with pigment made from the ashes of poison oak fires. They marked their chests with the scent of Brewer’s angelica. They developed signature calls by which they alone would be known.

  For some reason, my family skips archery tonight. And there is no Native American story when the kids are put to bed. Even bigboobsalert has to wait. In his office, my husband calls up his document and continues stealing my story. I don’t shout at him this time. He is a slow and expressive writer. Word choices play across his face. He drinks sparkling water, urinating into the plastic bottles when they’re empty, and writes most of the night. I miss talking with him. I miss how nothing seemed like it really happened unless we told each other about it.

  Interesting fact: My third, unfinished novel is about Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior who struck the felling blow to Custer at Little Bighorn. I wrote about her life only because it amazed me.

  My husband has my research spread before him: atlases of Native American tribes and field guides for botanicals and customs and mythology. I think this is good for him.

  I’m there when he hits one last Command-S for the night.

  I follow him upstairs. The children are sleeping in the big bed. He climbs in among their flopped limbs, and I want to join, but there is no room. My husband’s head comes to rest upon the pillow. Yet his eyes remain open, growing large, adjusting focus, like he is trying to follow something as it disappears into the dark.

  Interesting fact: My husband doesn’t believe that dreams carry higher meanings.

  Interesting fact: I had a dream once. In the dream, I stood naked in the darkness. A woman approached me. When she neared, I could see she was me. She said to me, or I guess I said to myself, “It’s happening.” Then she reached out and touched my left breast. I woke to find my breast warm and buzzing. I felt a lump in a position I would later learn was the superior lateral quadrant. In the morning, I stood in front of the mirror, but the lump was nowhere to be found. I told my husband about the dream. He said, “Spooky.” I told him I was going to the doctor right away. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “It’s probably nothing.”

  Eventually, my husband sleeps. An arm passes over one child and secures another. All the pillows have been stolen, then half-stolen back. The children thrum to his deep, slow breathing. I have something to tell him.

  Interesting fact: My husband has a secret name, a Sioux name.

  He’s embarrassed by it. He doesn’t like anyone to say it, as he feels he doesn’t deserve it. But when I utter the Lakota words, he wakes from his sleep. He sees me, I can tell, his eyes slowly dial me in. He doesn’t smile, but on his face is a kind of recognition.

  Through the bay windows, troughs of fog surge down Frederick Street.

  “I think it’s happening,” I say to him.

  He nods, then he drifts off again. Later, this will only have been a dream.

  I near the bed and regard my children. Here is my son, back grown strong from pulling the bow. Still I see his little-boy cheeks and long eyelashes. Still I see the boy who nursed all night, who loved to hug fire hydrants, who ran long-haired and shirtless along a slow-moving river in Florida. His hair is buzzed now, like his father’s, and his pupils behind closed eyes track slowly, like he is dreaming of a life that unfolds at a less jolting pace.

  My daughter’s hair is the gravest shade of black. If anyone got the Native blood, it is her. Dark-skinned and fast afoot, she also has fierce, far-seeing eyes. She is the one who would enter the battle to save her brother, as Buffalo Calf Road Woman famously did. Tonight she sleeps clutching my iPhone, alarm set for dawn, and in the set of her jaw, I can feel the list of things she’ll have to accomplish to get her siblings up and fed and off to school.

  And then there is the Horse-child.

  Interesting fact: My youngest’s love of interesting facts was just a stage. When my illness turned her into a horse, she never said interesting facts again.

  Interesting fact: Horses cannot utter human words or feel human emotions. They are resilient beasts, immune from the sadness of the human cargo they carry.

  She is once again a little human, a member of a weak and vulnerable breed. Who will explain what she missed while she was a horse? Who will hold her and tell her who I was and what I went through? If only she had never been a horse, if only she could remain one a little longer. What I wouldn’t give to hear her whinny and neigh her desires again, to see how delicately she tapped her hoof to receive a carrot or sugar cube. But it is over. She’ll never again gallop on all fours or give herself a mane by drawing with markers down her back. It will just have been a stage she went through, preserved only in a story. And that, I suppose, is all I will have been, a story from when they were little.

  In the morning, Prinz leaps onto the bed and stands on my chest, the handle of his leash in his mouth. For a little dog, he has large, wet eyes. I can smell his breath—wurst—and I realize I must have left a link of sausage on the cutting board. Though Prinz is capable of obedience, he succumbs to criminal tendencies. I am no longer a prison warden—I retired after the Wall fell—but I can tell a subversive personality when I see one. And it’s the charming ones you have to look out for.

  Prinz cocks his head and goes pant-pant.

  “I do not forget this betrayal,” I tell him, and take the leash in my hand.

  At the front door, I help Prinz into his miniature jacket, which is made of leather and gives him the look of a tough little VoPo. It’s November, so I button up, too. I know, the East German Volkspolizei haven’t existed for eighteen years. It’s 2008, after all. But you can’t change what a man and his dog look like in matching leather jackets.

  Outside, the air is sharp. Crisp leaves blanket the dormant lawn. Prinz sees a red squirrel and barks like mad till I drop the lead and let him race off. I peek in the mail slot, where I find the new Der Spiegel and a letter, but it’s not addressed in the handwriting of my wife, Gitte—or ex-wife, or whatever she’s calling herself.

  The letter is probably from an old inmate—my former prisoners are entering the period in life when they are “recovering their voices” and want to speak to me about what their time in my facility did to them. My address is public record, and I have nothing to hide. I welcome their letters but admit I only kind of skim them. It is a little like the rhetoric of Anonyme Alkoholiker—you understand that the steps are important for someone’s sobriety, but who really wants to hear about it? I close the mail slot. Those old inmates would piss their pants if I ever wrote back and reminded them of the criminal actions they took that landed them in my facility, let alone the things they did once they found themselves inside—lying, snitching, begging,
weeping and stooping to every possible indignity and deceit.

  I set off after Prinz, crunching through the leaves, and I can tell what you’re thinking: Hans, what are you doing reading a liberal rag like Der Spiegel? All I can say is that Gitte used to subscribe. She and I were storytellers. Swapping stories constituted our good times. That’s what sustained our marriage until, I guess, stories weren’t enough. While we cooked or gardened, I would tell stories from my day at the prison. They were glorious stories, worthy of retelling long after the prison was closed. Sometimes they were romantic, about young lovers who made terrible promises to each other before their interrogations. Often they were funny, like the color-blind prisoner who was always in a panic because he couldn’t tell whether the security lights were flashing red or green. I withheld only the tragic stories from Gitte, because she’d had enough of tragedy already.

  To my stories, she would always say, “Oh, Hans, that’s awful. Where is your humanity?”

  But she’d say it in that imploring way I took to mean, Tell me more.

  Gitte tended not to leave the house. She was convinced—wrongly—that people looked at her a certain way because she was married to the warden of a Stasi prison. So she started a little business repairing cameras, Prakticas and Exaktas, mostly. All the East German models. She would read in the morning, and in the empty afternoon hours, with her fine tools and the bright light of a swing-arm magnifying lens, she would open up the camera bodies and tell her stories, which came from the pages of Der Spiegel. In her robe, she’d sip gimlets and relate all the anti-government articles she’d read about: surveillance programs, Bundeswehr in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, drones. As she spoke, she would smoke and gesture and drink until she couldn’t make the tiny screws go in their tiny holes.