And waited.
And waited.
When it did not take effect, he turned off all the lights and lay down on his bed wondering about Bari’s untoward fondness for a soap opera. Eventually, his pain eased a little, and he was able to sleep.
*
A second thing that upset Xavier about Bari was her spontaneity—often to the point of impropriety—in erotic matters. Many men would have found this trait in a woman an exciting plus, but Xavier considered it out of character, as her fascination with For Love Designed was out of character.
An example?
While Bari was home from a trip to San Francisco and readying for another to Toronto, he took her to Lesegne’s again. Turbot, sole, and salmon in a delicate tomato sauce, with baby vegetables and succulent pieces of crayfish. Poached oysters with whites of leeks. Finally, an after-dinner digestif, from Château Grillet at the northern end of the Rhône Valley.
At table, Bari kicked off her high heels, placed one stockinged foot on Xavier’s instep, and slid it up his leg to his inner thigh. Only the heavy linen tablecloth allowed her to carry out this maneuver in public, but Xavier could tell by the way that a patron at another table was staring that he’d caught on to Bari’s foot play and possibly even envied Xavier his abashed status as its object.
All Xavier could think of was the scene in the film Tom Jones where Tom and a buxom flame-haired wench turn a shared meal into the prelude to some animalistic lovemaking. And, on the taxi ride home, Bari practically crawled into his clothes. Her lips were migrating decals on his face and neck. Whenever Xavier sneaked a glance into the rearview mirror, he saw the cabbie’s startled eyes drinking everything in.
“Bari,” he whispered, “we can’t do this here.”
She drew back and looked at him. “It is physically possible, you know.”
“It’s also—here, anyway—so overt it’s rude.” He nodded at the mirror.
“You’re right,” Bari said, sitting up. “You’re absolutely right.”
And the rest of the way to her atelier, she sat beside Xavier as chaste as a prioress. Once in her loft, though, they locked the door and at his insistence moved a table in front of it. Then they made love, Bari vehemently—so vehemently that their embraces were more like warfare than lovemaking. Xavier kept expecting a concerned worker to arrive with a battering ram. Although pleasantly sated at the end of these exertions, he felt that he had just taken part in his first house-clearing brawl.
“A little slower next time,” he said. “With Debussy on the CD player and your mattress somewhere nearby.”
“Sure,” Bari said. “We’ll trade off. The only civilized thing to do.”
And they did. In fact, their affair, despite Xavier’s doubts about his own worthiness and Bari’s recurrent need to travel on business, prospered. The world would have been an altogether delightful place, Xavier decided, if not for the headaches that continued, at the oddest times, to afflict him. If not for the headaches, that is, and an unexpected telephone call from his older sister, Lydia Menaker.
7
“Uncle Xave”
Lydia and her husband Philip were physicians. A refugee-relief agency headquartered in London had asked them to go to Pakistan to oversee the medical facilities at a refugee camp near the Afghan border. Although the Menakers had been working with the urban poor in Southern California, mostly illegal aliens from Mexico, they’d decided to accept this challenge and fly to Peshawar. Lydia told Xavier her plans over the telephone.
“Congratulations,” he said dubiously. “When will you and Phil be leaving?”
“In a month,” Lydia said. “But there’s a problem.”
“I’d have a problem,” he said, thinking of Peshawar’s frightening squalor.
“The problem’s Mikhail,” Lydia said.
Ah, yes. Mikhail Geoffrey Menaker, Xavier’s fifteen-year-old nephew. It shamed him to think that he’d forgotten to ask about the boy. It had been almost four years since he’d seen the kid, whom he still pictured as a befreckled eleven-year-old, not as a gawky, acne-afflicted teenager.
“What kind of problem is Mikhail, Lydia?”
“He doesn’t want to go, and we worry about subjecting him to conditions there.”
“Being named Mikhail might not stand him in great stead, either.” (The Menakers had named their son after one of Philip’s swashbuckling great-uncles.)
“His name’s not an issue. Lately, he’s had us call him ‘Mick’ when talking to him and ‘The Mick’ if referring to him in the third person.”
“ ‘The Mick’? As in themic, short for thematic?”
“Phil and I know it’s a phase he’s going through. We humor him in it.”
“Mmmm.”
“Anyway, Xavier, he neither wants to go nor to stay here in Chula Vista.”
More and more wary, Xavier said, “What does he want, Lydia?”
“He’d like to come live with you, his favorite uncle.”
“I’m his only uncle.”
“Salonika fascinates him because it’s the site of the company that makes his favorite comic books.”
“Comic books?”
“UC Comics—their headquarters are there in your state capital.”
“A sound educational reason to come here, all right.”
“Phil and I checked into a school near you. Ephebus Academy—across Le Grande Park from your condo—gets very high marks.”
“Ephebus Academy?”
“We’ll pay tuition. They’ve already agreed to enroll him.”
“Lydia, there was a mishap at Plant VanMeter this past summer. Remember?”
“Yes. But the radiation hazard was said to be minimal, and the damaged reactor is already back on line, isn’t it?”
“Still, the effects of radiation exposure on young people aren’t well understood.”
“Xavier, if you don’t want The Mick to come, say so.”
“It’s not that,” he lied. “I haven’t been feeling well lately.” (Which wasn’t a lie.)
“Symptoms?”
“Little things. A headache, sudden fatigue. They come and go, but usually strike while I’m on assignment.”
“Then you’re working too hard.”
“It’s not always on the job. I’ll get an eye tic reading Céline. Or hiccups watching TV—once while the Sankai Juku dance company was performing on PBS.”
“Get a checkup. My long-distance diagnosis, though, is that you’re suffering from stress. Simple nerves.”
Whose nerves are simple? Xavier thought. And won’t taking in a fifteen-year-old guest do a wonderful job of calming them?
“This seems to be a bad time for you,” Lydia said, “but Mikhail—The Mick, I mean—wants to say something, Xavier.”
“Hello, Uncle Xave.” The boy’s voice went up and down like a roller-coaster car: the teenager’s identifying squawk.
“Hello, Mikhail.”
“I’d try not to be a drag on you. I mean, I’d like behave myself.”
Lydia came back on. “He means it. He’s not a, uh—he’s not a bad kid. He’s bright. He even knows how to cook.”
Ultimately, Xavier agreed to act as Mikhail’s guardian during the Menakers’ eighteen-month stay in Pakistan. He owed Lydia and Phil that much—and he would not have been able to live with himself if they’d had to enroll their son in a military academy or to pay complete strangers to take him in.
Once off the phone, Xavier saw that his hands were trembling. “Uncle Xave?” he said aloud. “Dear God, I’m an Uncle Xave.”
8
The Mick
Mikhail Geoffrey Menaker flew into Sidney Lanier International Airport two weeks later. Bari, between business trips, rode out with Xavier on an EleRail train to provide moral support when he met the boy.
“What does he look like?” she asked when they reached the reception gate.
“Last time I saw him, a freckled Tom Sawyerish kid with a toothless grin.”
Xavier had
no trouble recognizing the boy once passengers began to gather. Most travelers were adults, and Mikhail emerged via a crowded escalator as if he were a unique type of humanity, either a devolved specimen or a futuristic model still in the throes of becoming. Still, Xavier had not expected the Tom Sawyer clone of recent memory to appear to them in such a guise.
“Ah,” said Bari, more interested than appalled. “A retropunk.”
“Pardon?” said Xavier, more appalled than interested.
“Retropunk. You know, it’s just started coming back in.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I saw a lot of it again last month in Tokyo.”
Xavier gawped at Mikhail, who stood just within the reception gate surveying the greeters. Little taller than he’d been four years ago, he wore faded jeans, a sleeveless leather jacket embossed under one pocket with a thumbtacked skull or robot face (it was hard to say which), old motorcycle boots, and a spiked wristlet hinting at recent imprisonment in a Roman galley. His hair bristled on top, but was skinned clean at the temples. It flowed from his nape in a mint-green and magenta braid. An arrowhead dangled from one earlobe. Black circles pouched his eyes, and high on his cheek gleamed a grease-painted atom with orbiting electrons.
“A real fashion plate,” Xavier said.
“More imaginative than ninety percent of the other arriving passengers.”
Xavier said, “About as imaginative as combining a terry-cloth toga, a baseball cap, and loggers’ boots.”
“At least he isn’t a geek in a grey flannel suit, Xavier.”
They moved toward the kid, who had a duffel bag and an armload of comic books. The comics featured on their covers a host of costumed superheroes. So many that if there were really superheroes, they could have more easily distinguished themselves from their countless fellow vigilantes by jettisoning the lookalike tights, capes, and hoods and wearing khaki slacks and T-shirts. Xavier introduced Bari, put the comics in the boy’s duffel bag, and shouldered the bag himself. Then he said, “They won’t let you into Ephebus Academy with that haircut, Mikhail.”
“I can have my head shaved, can’t I?”
“And the clothes—you can’t wear them at Ephebus. They have a uniform.”
“Yeah. Navy pants, grey shirts, a throat-gag of a tie, and a fucking escutcheon.”
“You going to have trouble with any of that?”
“From nine to three every day? No sweat, Uncle Xave. It’ll keep my real rags”—the outfit he had on, apparently—“from going downhill so god-awlmighty fast.”
Bari and Xavier looked at each other. There was no doubt that Mikhail—“Call me The Mick,” he said—lived and breathed at a remove of several generations. He wasn’t just younger: he hailed from another tribe, another country, maybe another planet. He was like an exchange student from Uranus.
As soon as they reached Xavier’s apartment, The Mick found the TV set (no easy feat—it was hidden behind a pair of louvered cabinet doors) and snapped it on. Insanely, For Love Designed smoodged into fuzzy focus.
The fair (evil) sister was informing Dr. Merleau that the dark (good) sister had been trying to have him deported to Paris as an undesirable alien and that the only way he could prevent her (the dark sibling) was to feign a marriage with her (the fair sibling). Meanwhile, she would tell one of her ouvrières to telephone a bomb threat to the dark sister’s design studio.
“I love this fucking show,” The Mick said. “It’s a hoot.”
Gak, thought Xavier. But after stepping into his tastefully decorated condo again, his eyes had gone a little out of focus, blurring everything within his view. Just a few minutes of watching By Love Designed, though, seemed, unaccountably, to have restored his vision to its normal acuity.
Bari sat down beside The Mick on the sofa, dropping an arm over his shoulder like a loving big sister. A loving blond big sister, Xavier reflected. In the context of this development, their shared affinity for a hokey sudser, Bari’s blondness made a statement as clear as that of the show’s fair-haired sister.
Like V. S. Naipaul, Xavier believed that “vulgar people have vulgar interests; common minds have common excitement.” And it dismayed him to think that the woman he loved was a soap-opera addict and that his nephew was likewise a fan.
How would he survive the next eighteen months?
9
(Don’t) Paint It Black
The Mick had brought only the clothes on his back and the stuff in his duffel: toiletry gear, a few more clothes, some paperback books, a CD selection, and not much else.
Two days later, a moving van dropped off several boxes that Xavier and The Mick pushed into the elevator and toted down the hall to Uncle Xave’s twenty-second-story apartment. They found room for the boxes in the study Xavier had given the boy for a bedroom. Five long white cardboard boxes held Mikhail’s comics collection, more than a thousand titles. Four more cartons contained his CD collection, the illustrated inserts of which all seemed to show fuzzy-maned band members with protruding tongues, bugged-out eyes, and garishly painted faces.
The van had also brought a CD player, a TV set and its stand (casters included), a portable tapeplayer/radio or “boom box,” an offbrand personal computer, and some portable plastic files for cassettes and diskettes. Xavier began to realize that The Mick was with him not simply for a brief pajama party, but for a time with, well, the likely subjective duration of the afterlife.
Oddly, for a while after Mikhail’s arrival, Xavier ceased to suffer the minor physical upsets that had begun plaguing him in September. At work, his colleagues remarked on his improved mood (translation: Lately, you’ve been a real bear), and he enjoyed the art work, dramas, films, symphonies, and dance recitals that it fell to him to cover. Maybe, here at the outset of their relationship, The Mick was actually trying not to be too much trouble. Emphasis on trying.
He had his hair cut, took the arrowhead earring off his ear, and scrubbed away the atom symbol on his cheek and the corpselike half-circles under his eyes. Every day, he left for Ephebus Academy clad in the required uniform. He hated it, but suppressed the urge to rebel and waited until after school to put on duds reflecting his bizarre tribal allegiances. He griped a lot, muttering under his breath if not cursing aloud—but he had not yet brought drugs to the dinner table or purchased a submachine gun.
And, as Lydia had promised, Mikhail cooked—scrambled eggs, hot dogs, cheeseburgers, tomato soup, chili. He didn’t cook well, but after a long day traipsing from EleRail station to EleRail station, Xavier was happy enough to eat what The Mick had prepared. Sometimes, though, he bullied him into presentable clothes and took him out for an expensive dinner.
Bari sometimes went too. Although The Mick used four-letter words as if they meant “great” or “Oh, rats,” he had a quick mind and plunged head-first into any conversation that didn’t depend on a knowledge of topics yet unstudied. The out-of-left-field quality of many of his insights compensated, almost, for the crudity of his tongue. Bari enjoyed these outings, and Xavier relaxed in the realization that playing uncle to The Mick would not necessarily put a crimp in their romance. Early on, though, he and The Mick had a major clash, and The Mick found the subterfuge that kept it from escalating into a permanent feud. Almost.
“I want to paint my room,” he said.
“Fine. What color?”
“Black. I want a cramped, funky black hole of Calcutta twenty stories up.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why do you think that, Uncle Xave?”
“It sounds hideous. And if you do even a halfway decent job of it, it’ll be almost impossible to paint over later.”
“So I can’t do it?”
“No, you can’t.”
“So I’m a refugee in your backyard? Not like your real flesh-and-blood kin but a total nonperson gook squatter.”
“No, Mikhail. But this is still my place. I’ll have to live here even after you’ve left, and I don’t want a ‘cramped, funky black hole of Calcu
tta’ in my apartment.”
“Boy, you’re a proprietarial bastard, Uncle Xave. In Central America, you’d be a fucking fatcat landowner.”
“I’m the fucking fatcat landowner only of my own home, and you will not paint any part of it black.”
“Whoa. Sorry I ripped your cord.”
A week later, The Mick invited Xavier into his room, and Xavier was taken aback to find—even in the deliberate gloom—that the walls gleamed black. Plutonian black. Stygian black. Atop this black were black-light posters of rock stars, four-color posters of superheroes, and signs proclaiming no smoking unless your soul’s on fire, dare to eat a peach, and i see uc, you see uc, we all see uc, & the uc we see is good. All Xavier could see, though, was the black walls behind these cryptic tape-ups. He grabbed The Mick’s skinny arm.
“Hold your fucking ponies, Uncle Xave! Take a look, okay?”
Xavier looked. Mikhail had draped every wall with black linen, every one. He had bought king-sized white sheets, carried them across the river to a dyer’s shop, and had them stained the color of anthracite. All for less than three hundred bucks. Wasn’t that a bargain for totally redecorating a bedroom?
“What’s that smell?” Xavier said.
“The dye. My joss sticks. It’ll go away. No big deal.”
Xavier, sniffing, looked around. How to respond? Finally, he hugged his nephew. “Thank you, Mikhail.”
“For what?”
“Respecting my feelings. You show a nobler sensibility than I expected.”
“’Cause I’m a punk who’d, like, sniff dog vomit?”
Xavier waved at the walls. “In a sense, you have. Just look at what passes with you for interior design.”
“I do. All the time. That’s what I taped it all up for. If you don’t like it, just beat it for a while.”
Later, Xavier realized that The Mick had run him off for insulting his values. Still, he’d done the room to his own standards without breaking Xavier’s rule against painting it black: a small cause for celebration.
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