by Tim O'Brien
"In the bank?"
"Bank. Like in money. You're so smart, right? That slick education of yours, I figure you got a terrific answer when I say, 'Hey, give me your money.'" He raised his eyebrows. "I bet what you say is, I bet you say, 'Get lost, shorty,' and so I say, 'Yeah, but otherwise I send Ma some juicy pics.' Your ma, not mine. And that's when you come up with that amazing tough-girl answer. That's when you prove what a professional you are."
Jan looked at him for a time, then at the floor. "My mother," she said, "wouldn't give a shit."
"That's your bowl-me-over answer?"
"Pretty much."
He shrugged. "Well, I got news. When it comes to naked, all mothers give a shit."
"Not mine."
"No? Tell you what, then." He was cooing, playing with her. "Here's what we do. You and me, we hop a cab right now, show Mom the pics, pop the question. The lady lives..." He took out a slip of paper. "Lives in St. Anthony Park, right?"
"Right," said Jan.
"What say we hit the road? No need to get dressed, obviously."
"How much?"
"Sorry?"
"To lay off. How much?"
The man shook his head as if dealing with a problem student, a slow learner. "Zero. Didn't I already say that? What we're talking here, we're doing a shtick on what I did want. Guys like me, we exist. And you know why? To fuck Snow White. To put the hurt on cute suburban chicks, think they're half Wonder Woman, half badass. Gonna stop the wars, feed the hungry, get naked with guttersnipes, make a couple quick bucks on the side."
"You planned this?"
"I did. Icky me. What'd you expect? Hit the pavement out of some fancy-dancy school, figure you can skinny-dip in the sewer for a couple months, fraternize with the scum, then hustle back to Main Street with lots of scary stories to tell—you think it works like that? Go lowlife? Walk away clean?"
"I didn't think anything," Jan said.
"Ah. No kidding?" His voice had a mellow, tuneful quality that seemed to blend with the steady rain outside. "Anyhow, lucky for you I turned a new leaf. Fell head over heels in affection. Changed my itsy-bitsy mind."
She looked at him skeptically. "So what's this about? Humiliation?"
"For starters, why not? Humiliation ain't all bad. Look at me, I turned out fine."
"Blackmail," she said. "That's low."
The young man laughed. "It's a living. Dwarfs gotta eat."
"You're not a dwarf."
"Help me out, then. What am I? Extra low, right?"
"Absolutely," she said.
The two of them sat in silence, listening to the rain. In the lamplight the young man's face did not seem so young anymore: black pockets under the eyes, ultraviolet wreckage along the cheeks and forehead. Early thirties, at least. Maybe older. It was his stature alone, Jan realized, that had given the impression of youth, and she couldn't help feeling a twinge of guilt.
She made herself shake it off. "Until twenty minutes ago," she said, "I was doing fine, no problems."
"Were you now?"
"Yes."
"Real hustler, I guess? Working girl?"
"A job. A few dirty pictures, some spare change. I'm not doing anything."
"Not doing anything," he said. "Boy, I wonder if Mommy'd see it that way." Again the man's enormous blue eyes flashed, then he shook his head and appraised her with something close to pity. "Listen, I'm trying to be polite. A good citizen, understand? And I'm telling you, sweetmeat, right from my rotten little heart: you're way over your head. Way, way over. I was somebody else—somebody tall, let's say—you'd be in one extremely yucky place right now. Police whistles wouldn't do zip. I mean, who you think you are? Playmate of the Month? Miss July?"
Jan stared at him. Twenty years of ridicule had caught up with her. "Go eat a screwdriver," she said. "Drink poison."
The man laughed. He did Groucho with his eyebrows. "Touchy you," he said.
"You're cruel," said Jan.
"Yeah, well, it gets crueler. Hate like the dickens to break the news, but Brigitte Bardot you're not. Look in a mirror. You got normal going for you, you're not a mutant, and there's the whole sad story. Veronica—makes me giggle. Guys like us, we don't pay for gorgeous, we pay for available. Take my word, you better wake up fast. Get naked in front of street scum, sooner or later some Jack the Ripper decides what the hell, dumb broad's asking for it, she's saying pretty please, she's down on her hands and knees begging for serious hurt. It will happen. Guaranteed. Think blackmail's wicked, try a needle in your throat. Try a little back-alley basketball, slam dunk, you're the basket. I know these dudes. Birds of a feather. Far as they're concerned, you're one more pigeon from the burbs. Great big bull's-eye painted on that skinny white chest of yours."
"Mutant?" Jan murmured.
"Hey, I didn't say that. Almost average, I said. Cut or two below mediocre. Count your blessings."
Jan nodded and made a face.
She knew anyway.
"Basically, you're here to insult me?"
"Course not," he said. "Consider the source. Who am I to call the kettle butt-ugly?" He took a hit from the bottle, wiped his mouth, gave her an encouraging smile. "Actually, you were right the first time. What I actually came for, I came here to cash in, to actually extort your ass, maybe even put some actual old-fashioned scare into you. That's what I did want. Now I want something else."
Jan snorted. "I'll bet. I'd rather be blackmailed."
"Whoa. I got feelings."
"Out of here," Jan said. "I already told you, I don't do that."
"I didn't mean—"
"Not if you grew ten inches. Not if you came up to my bellybutton."
For a few seconds he glared at her. "What you think, a dwarf can't get nookie? The curiosity factor—you're looking at one hot ticket. Pity factor, too. Pity pays." His tone was still light, but everything else had darkened. "All I wanted, I was gonna invite you to a nice, cheery birthday party. Cake and ice cream. Now I don't know."
"Birthday party," Jan said. "I can imagine."
"You can't imagine. Don't be so smart, I've still got the pics."
"Whose birthday?"
"Tiny ol' me, yours truly. It's not like I was hatched, you know. Not like Ma and Pa cracked open a rock, found me there like some puny fossil." He looked away, hands tight in his lap. "So this party, it might be an eye opener, never know. Meet my friends, my brother."
Jan laughed. "This is how you ask for a date? Threaten somebody?"
"Whatever works."
"Okay, I'm curious," she said. "Why?"
"Why?"
"You heard me."
"Well," he said, and the darkness vanished. His eyes went foxy. "Revenge."
"I don't follow."
"Nothing to follow. You get fifty bucks, I get to show off my normal, almost average date. After it's over—my party—we deep-six the porno."
He lifted his eyebrows, waited a moment. "Guess you'll need to know my name, right?"
It was Andrew Henry Wilton. His younger brother—younger by nine years—called him Hanko, or sometimes Andy, or sometimes Little Guy.
Andrew was thirty-two.
He stood four feet seven inches.
He'd grown up in Edina, ritzy suburb.
Ritzy parents, both dead. Ritzy brother, alive, six foot two, smoothie, skier's tan, great teeth.
Anyhow, back to Andrew. Educated at the Blake School and the University of Chicago. Dropped off the map in '67. Tried enlisting, way too short. Tried again, even shorter. Weird thing, but from the time he was a little kid—"And we're talking little," Andrew said—he'd always wanted to be a warrior. Not soldier. Warrior. Like in Zulu. Who knew why? Short-guy complex. Audie Murphy movies. "So there's this terrific war on, right? I'm dying to kill people, dying to get killed, and guess what? Big bad recruiter morons, creeps take one look, laugh their brains out, tell me to get lost. So I do. Big-time. I get lost."
Cooked hot dogs on University Avenue, buck-fifty each, gouge 'em for sa
uerkraut, spit in the mustard. Lots of time for reading. Raced through War and, Peace. Pondered Marcuse, pondered Miss Fonda, yin and yang of nincompoops. Give me a break. Just 'cause you're heightwise disadvantaged, doesn't turn you goo-brain liberal, doesn't make you into Joan Baez, doesn't mean you don't want to go to war and cut off testicles and grease folks every which way.
John Birch Society, mostly dwarfs, bet you didn't know that.
Sold hot dogs, yeah.
Read about Toulouse-Lautrec. Brother pipsqueak. Ladies' man extraordinaire. Hotshot artist. What's to lose? Buy a camera.
Question: You know what most of the silver in the world is used for? Answer: Photography.
Question: You know what makes airhead RFK babes horny? Answer: War and Pity. Should've been the title. Big brawny dude, Tolstoy was. Didn't occur to him.
Sold dogs, snapped pics, got laid like Mick Jagger.
Pretend you're me.
Brother gets drafted. Hates the war, goes anyway, wins medals, comes back with this fab tan, fab teeth, gives you a bear hug, says, Hey, Little Guy.
Except you're eight feet tall. You're Goliath. Zulu, right? Stand on the street all day, sell Oscar Mayer, flash the friggin' peace sign, get yourself a peacoat, watch the Snow Whites go by. Dream about tit for tat. Midget anger, it's big.
Yeah, and keep turning pages.
Dipped into Orwell on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, thought about leading a dwarf brigade over to Nam. Like the Lincoln Brigade, you know, except we're all shrimps, chips on the shoulder, scores to settle, out to beat up on Commie peasants even runtier than we are. Impractical idea, pretty much. Gave it up. Gave up hot dogs, too. Peddled pot, got busted, kept peddling, got busted, headed back to grad school. Particle physics, no dummy. Couldn't take it. Dropped out. Peaceniks everywhere, long hair, dipsticks ringing doorbells for Leon Trotsky—hey, what's the country coming to? Back to the street, no big deal. One thing leads to another. Learned the scams. Camera cons. Extortion. Like, for example, how to rip off condescending Snow Whites. How to stick it to politically engaged dimwits who do these clever skits and call it guerrilla theater ... I mean, Jesus Christ, guerrilla? Go bang-bang, scare the shoppers, think you're Che Guevara?
Wasted life.
Feeling blue these days. Awful small.
"There you have it," Andrew Henry Wilton said. "Rainy night. Two-incher. Any pity?"
"No," Jan said.
He chuckled to himself, pulled on his sneakers, and took a bow from the waist. "No sweat. You'll adore my brother."
She did, in fact.
Enough to marry him eight months later, and enough to play the sad-sack clown through twenty-nine years of infidelity, and enough to snap her life in half when he so casually strolled away in the impossibly far-off year of 1999.
But this was Andrew's birthday, July 30, 1969, and except for a polite, excessively gracious manner—a certain CEO slickness, or what might even be called oiliness, perhaps, if one were disposed toward scurrility—Andrew's younger brother seemed nothing at all like the movie-star monster she'd been warned to expect. The man's teeth and tan were unexceptional. He was tall, as advertised, but his overall presence, although scrubbed and pleasant and neatly barbered, would win him no screen tests.
A crinkly smile, true.
Erect posture.
Flirtatious from the first instant.
He looked her straight in the eye when Andrew said, "Babe, this is Richard. Don't call him Dick unless you mean it, like I do."
Richard, with whom she would spend the better part of a nightmare, laughed. He took her hand in both of his. She should've known then, but didn't, because he had Andrew's twinkling blue eyes and his own impeccable manners and all those extra inches.
"And this," Andrew was saying, perhaps too quietly, perhaps with spite, perhaps with foreknowledge, "is my girl, Veronica."
"Beautiful name," said Richard.
"Thank you," said Jan. "It's not mine."
"Intriguing," said Richard.
The party wasn't much of a party, and near the end, when only four or five guests still lingered in Andrew's pathetically decorated living room, the atmosphere took a turn toward the dismal. There was an uncut birthday cake. There were a couple of balloons, many empty bottles. Jan had done what she had to do—taken Andrew's hand a few times, gone through the motions—but no one had truly bought it, least of all Richard, and after the first hour the pretense had been dropped. It was now a few minutes past midnight. Lights were low, Andrew had vanished, Richard had taken a seat beside her at a cluttered kitchen table, legs crossed, impressively polite, impressively earnest, only an ankle in occasional contact with her left hip as he inquired about the life of a "working model." He seemed undisturbed, soberly spellbound, when Jan said, "I get naked for money."
"Mmmm," said Richard.
"It's temporary. Like a hobby."
"And Andrew?"
"Well," Jan said, and nothing else, which she recognized as a betrayal, a piece of pain she alone had brought into the world, and which would jolt her awake three decades later, in 1999—that word "well," its elusiveness, its invitation, and also, of course, Richard Wilton's ankle so inadvertently against her hip—and how for a short while, as if transported into a story full of gnomes and Prince Charmings, she had forgotten she was a clown, ugly as North Dakota.
In the coming years, this blue-eyed charmer would take great care to remind her of the repulsive verities, relentlessly, without pity, but now, in the early morning hours of July 31, 1969, Jan Huebner felt delivered.
"I'm entranced," said the tall brother, the reptile, the husband-to-be, Richard.
And then, in the same cultured, deeply musical voice that would later come to terrorize her, he talked about his difficulties with Andrew. How much he loved him. How the poor guy could never deal with his height problem—full of rage, full of envy, out to get even with the world, a crying shame—and how he, Richard, heartbreaker, voluptuary, ruiner of lives, fucker of anything, would love dearly to take her to dinner.
The war went on. People ate Raisin Bran. There were new orphans and widows and Gold Star mothers. Three thousand and twenty American soldiers died that summer, and more than seven thousand Vietnamese. People took aspirin for their headaches. People requested doggie bags at fancy restaurants. Dow Chemical made a killing. From sea to sea, along country roads, in great sleeping cities, there were petty jealousies and grocery lists and erotic fantasies and upset stomachs. The earth kept spinning. In the second week of August, Jan Huebner learned that one of her classmates at Darton Hall had been gravely wounded along a river called the Song Tra Ky. Another classmate now lived in Winnipeg, alone and afraid, nursing grudges that would harden into hatred over the coming decades. Elsewhere, in imagination or in fact, the nation's youth began converging on forty acres of farmland outside Woodstock, New York. Sharon Tate had been dead less than a week. Sanitation workers in Manhattan were sweeping up Neil Armstrong's ticker tape. But for Jan Huebner, as for most others, the summer of 1969 would later call to mind not headlines, nor global politics, nor even a war, but small, modest memories of small, modest things: rumpled beds and ringing telephones and birthday cakes and dirty pictures and catchy tunes about everyday people. There was a fatal Ferris wheel accident in Oregon. There were Krazy Day sales on a thousand sun-drenched Main Streets. Jan Huebner met her husband.
Summer ended, autumn came. Football season. Darton Hall lost its opener.
And while people perished on the far side of the planet, other people had their teeth filled, and filed for divorce, and made love in parked cars.
Freshmen were oriented.
The Mets were on a roll.
Small, simple things, yes, but as in some great nationwide darkroom, the most ordinary human snapshots would be fixed in memory by the acidic wash of war—the music, the lingo, the evening news.
In mid-September Jan Huebner abandoned the peace movement. She changed her phone number, dropped out of the street scene,
enrolled in graduate school. She gave up personal photo shoots except in the special case of her new fiancé, who seemed charmed by the Veronica in her, or by the abstraction of Veronica. He would not really look at her for another eight months, a full week into their honeymoon, at which point he would suddenly frown and shake his head as if having purchased the wrong brand of cigarettes. They were in Hawaii. They were on a crowded beach. The honeymoon was almost over. Jan wore a new string bikini, posing for him, eyes hooded, one of her practiced come-get-me poses, and for what seemed a long, long while, Richard peered into the viewfinder of his camera as if focus had become a problem, as though some technical malfunction had created a sunken jaw and muddy brown hair and bone-thin legs. Jan was sensitive to this. She crossed her eyes, made a funny face.
A week or so after his birthday party, Andrew had stopped by with fifty dollars.
His mood was chipper.
"An actress you're not," he said, "but who's to complain? You showed up. Got to meet that incredible brother of mine."
Jan shook her head and tried to decline the money. A few nights earlier she had slept with Richard for the first of what would become a good many humiliating times. She would sleep with him again in four hours, and after eight months she would marry him, guileless, never suspecting, and then she would spend the remainder of the twentieth century as a captive to ridicule and dirty pictures. She would live in a three-bedroom house in Eden Prairie. She would drive a Chrysler. She would watch her husband flirt at cocktail parties. She would endure jokes about plastic surgery, and even make a few herself, and try to clown her way toward a happy ending.
"Just take it," said Andrew. He pressed the cash into her hand, stared up at her, then winked. "My brother, you adored him, I bet."
"I did, I do," Jan said. "Very sweet."
"Sweet you think?"
Jan nodded. "Everything's relative. He treats me like a person."
"Yeah, well," Andrew said. "Give it time."
He flashed her an odd grin, a little wicked, as if he'd just run one of his street scams, exacting revenge for some uncommitted crime.
