The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  And you think, One drink. Or, Why not? And maybe, if the music is decent, you feel a little pumped up, you want to move, and you look at your girlfriends—they’re looking, shrugging, trying to see some reason to fit in—and you raise your eyebrows. Usually they raise theirs back in reply. Then—because you’ve been doing it for years together—you slowly move into the crowd, turning sideways to squeeze past people, your hand sometimes reaching backward or forward to stay in touch with your buds, and you aim toward the bar. Fairly often some guy grabs your ass as you pass, and sometimes it’s worse, sometimes you get the air grind—guy’s hands up as if he’s being held at gunpoint, his crotch inching toward you, his breath boozed up and awful—and you skitter forward and make it to the bar and try to shout for a drink. Up and down the bar, if there is a bar, guys glance sideways and send their eyes north and south over you, and you try to ignore them, try to pretend that getting a drink is the most important thing in the world because you don’t want to risk meeting their glance, and eventually one of you, if you’re lucky, makes eye contact with the bartender. Then you shout and he nods and you pull some bills out of somewhere and hand drinks back to your friends, each one immediately sticking the straw in her mouth to take a big sip because you’re going to need it.

  That’s where we ended up five minutes after arriving at the party Victor had told us about.

  * * *

  At least the room was stylish. That probably made us want to stay. It was a big industrial loft, brick and metal and outsized lighting fixtures, with broad windows that overlooked a canal. The music sucked—it was European techno-pop, with a repetitive beat and a grinding, relentless forward drive—but it was also irresistible. I handed gin and tonics back to Constance and Amy. They nodded thanks and began sipping. I paid the bartender. He touched the bill to his forehead in a little salute and hustled off.

  “Any sign of him? Of Jack?” Amy yelled into my ear when I joined them a few feet from the bar.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t heard from him, and I wasn’t sure he would show. It would hurt if he didn’t show, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. I had been thinking about him too much, anyway, and had checked the photo of him asleep an unhealthy number of times. I remembered the kiss, and the look we had shared on the platform between the cars. My entire body remembered it. He had the look, the feel, even the size of the man I had envisioned for myself. It was weird to think that, but it was true. If I had gone shopping for a guy who fit me, and all the men from my history had been hanging on a dress rack in a well-lit shop, I would have picked Jack every single time. I could have held him up to me, taken one glance in a mirror, and known he’d fit me.

  And I loved talking to him. I felt drunk when I talked to him.

  “An amazing room!” Constance yelled at both of us. “Is this a bar or a private residence?”

  Amy held her hand out to say she didn’t know, couldn’t tell, didn’t care.

  “It’s still early,” Amy said to me.

  “It’s almost eleven,” I answered.

  She shrugged.

  * * *

  So we did the chick thing, which is kind of lame and sort of great. We danced in a triangle, moving a little, sipping a little, drifting slowly into the middle of the floor. It had been a long time, I realized, since we had been out in a club scene dancing. It felt good. The gin began to work, and we did our signature moves: Amy wiggling her butt like a lightning bug and Constance sort of on her toes as if she wanted to reach something down from a high shelf but hadn’t yet decided to lift her arms. It made me smile to watch them. You couldn’t escape your personality when it came to dancing, I knew.

  A few guys came up and circled us, dancing and moving, and we looked at one another and opened our eyes a little to ask, Way, no way? They weren’t very cute. When Amy bit down on her straw and shook her head a millimeter, that was good enough to say no. We kept dancing and sipping. The drink tasted weak. The first group of guys drifted away, and we moved a little closer. Then Amy started doing ridiculous dance moves, ones we had seen a guy named Leonard back at Amherst make sometime in our first year. The guy was a mega-geek, but charming in a way, too, and he danced with crazy abandon that we had copied for four years. We did a dance called the Guy Repellent, which you could launch into if someone started dancing with you and you wanted him gone. Leonard had given us that, and that’s the dance Amy started doing to get us laughing. She had mastered it and only pulled it out as a favor to us, but Constance and I both watched her spaz out, people around her trying not to notice. She did it perfectly.

  Eventually, Constance grabbed her by the hand to get her to stop, and we made our way to the windows. It was a pretty sight. Light glistened on the canal below and turned the water into a crowd of stars.

  “What do you think?” Constance said into my ear. “Do you think he’s coming?”

  “I don’t know,” I shouted back.

  “Didn’t you take his number? You could call him and ask him what the fuck he’s doing,” Amy said.

  “That sounds desperate.”

  “It is desperate, but so what? You call for pizza or Chinese food when you want it, don’t you?” Amy asked.

  Constance shook her head. I wasn’t sure she had heard the conversation.

  “Well, if we’re going to stay, we need more drinks,” Amy said.

  “Do you want to stay?” I asked. “We don’t have to stay just for Jack. I didn’t mean it to be like that.”

  But I was lying, and they both knew it.

  “One more drink,” Constance said. “Then we’ll head out.”

  “Have you seen Victor anywhere?” I asked Amy.

  Amy shook her head. It was making my throat hurt to talk. I drained the last of my drink and was about to turn when I suddenly knew Jack had arrived. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did.

  Amy bit down on her straw and made a little bucking motion with her head to indicate, There, right there, right behind you.

  9

  I didn’t turn. I didn’t do anything except bubble my drink with my straw. Amy’s gaze flicked back and forth from whoever was behind me to my eyes. She even tilted her head a little to say, Come on, he’s right there, come on, what are you doing?

  My neck started flaming. I took a final sip of gin and tonic. I kept my eyes on the other girls and pretended we had been having a great conversation. I didn’t want him to think the night was suddenly much more interesting now that he had arrived.

  But it was, and my neck knew it.

  He came around into our circle and smiled. It was too loud to make any chitchat. I returned his smile and nodded. It wasn’t clear what we were supposed to do next. In some clubs you could wait until a break in the music, but not in this one. Not in this apartment. The music kept pounding forward and people danced everywhere, and Jack appeared a little out of his element. He was not the dancer type, I didn’t think.

  “This is Raef!” Jack yelled to all of us, cupping his mouth with his hands.

  He yelled at the top of his voice, and I barely heard him, but everyone nodded, anyway.

  “He’s the sheepherder from Australia,” Jack went on with a second breath. “He’s a great guy. We’ve been traveling together for a while.”

  “Hi, ladies,” Raef said, his voice sharper and easier to hear through the music.

  I looked at Raef. He was a handsome guy, though slightly husky and not as tall as Jack, with sandy-colored hair and a bright, happy smile. His accent—even in the two words he had spoken—sounded delightful. He wore some sort of Australian fleece-lined jacket, and it looked like it should be too hot to wear in a crowd like this, but it also looked like he always wore it. He had a big can of beer in his hand. He smiled and toasted us.

  And it took me a second, and I’m not even sure I understood it at first, but his eyes were not on Amy, as we had come to expect in all our time together, but on Constance. And her eyes were glued onto his. Even Amy saw it, and she flashed a quick look
at me, her eyebrows up again, as if to ask, Really? It was hard to imagine Constance with a less likely guy than an Australian sheepherder from the outback.

  “Our grandkids are going to love this story,” Jack said into my ear.

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolutely. Raef will have to be best man at our wedding. In fact, the entire wedding party is right here.”

  “Does this line ever work? This whole marriage thing?”

  “It’s working now, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head, but my stomach said something else.

  “Time for a drink,” I said, then yelled loud enough to the other three. “Hey, Jack Vermont is buying the next round!”

  We headed back to the bar. We had crossed halfway across the dance floor when suddenly a bunch of people started yelling and scattering from something happening in their midst. It was all herd behavior; a girl slipped in her heels and went to one knee, and no one helped her up. Then someone else shot by, and I couldn’t understand what he said, but he was laughing and shaking his head and saying something in Dutch. Jack grabbed me to make sure no one bowled me over, and I had a quick flash of Raef grabbing Constance. I had lost Amy, though I suspected she was just behind us, and I knew, whatever happened, she could take care of herself. I started to turn to look for her when I saw the cause of the disturbance.

  Two guys, both horribly drunk, both skinheads, danced in the middle of the floor with their dicks out. They peed wherever they liked, their penises flapping, their hands up in exaltation. It felt good to pee, they seemed to say, and they danced with no self-consciousness at all. They wobbled on their feet, then occasionally seemed to get their balance. When they appeared steady, they wiggled their johnnies again and peed. Whenever they approached the surrounding circle, the crowd surged back, yelling and squealing, while the two guys high-fived and generally made jackasses of themselves. It was the worst kind of assholish frat party behavior, and I hadn’t expected to see anything like it in Europe.

  “Gross,” Amy said from behind me. “Just fucking gross.”

  Then the guys danced toward us.

  Everyone pushed back, but we didn’t have anywhere to go. The bar blocked one end and the jam of people had made it impossible to move. I had a brief glimpse of the dancers’ dumb, stupid faces as they gyrated forward. They appeared smug and happy, oblivious to almost everything around them except the beat of the music and their floppy joints. A glistening stream of urine looped out from their dicks every few steps, and the crowd pushed back and away, disgusted and mesmerized at the same time.

  “Here they come!” Constance yelled, trying her best to melt into the people behind her. “Oh, God!”

  “It’s disgusting!” Amy shouted.

  A few guys tried to dart forward and grab the dancers, but the dancers always managed to turn and threaten with their penises before the guys could seize them. The dancers had the sort of dumb, funny luck that sometimes happens to boozers. They laughed and kept drifting toward us, their hands on their wankers whenever they felt threatened.

  They were the proverbial skunks at the garden party, and they were damn good at what they were doing.

  * * *

  Maybe he didn’t step out of a moonbeam, or climb off the back of a white charger, but Jack stepped forward. Somehow he had gotten hold of a rubber trash can lid and managed to fit it to his forearm like a shield. As soon as people got an inkling of his strategy, they began to laugh and cheer. Raef called him over and handed him a shoe. It took me a second, but I realized eventually that it was Constance’s heeled sandal. Jack needed it as a second weapon, one that he could use to whack their penises if they came too close. He held it by the toe and practiced twanging it down. The dancers didn’t seem to care what Jack had planned. They drank from two enormous cans of beer, and you could all but see the liquid passing through them to their bladders.

  I looked over at Constance and Amy. They both watched, their mouths open with surprise and delight. Raef had his arm hooked through Constance’s arm.

  Here’s another thing: the situation was weird, inevitably thuggish, with the guys being skinheads and everything, but Jack, by playing to the crowd, defused it. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the circle, a Roman gladiator greeting the crowd, and the people began hooting and laughing. Twice he feinted toward the dancers, pretending to rush them, but they crabbed backward, their johnnies propped in their hands. Then, as if dumbly coming up with a strategy of their own, they began circling Jack in different directions, one trying to sneak behind him while he was occupied with the other.

  I watched Jack, and I thought about our kiss and the way his arm felt around the small of my back.

  Finally, he moved on the dancers. He held the shield in front of him, ready to deflect the urine back at them if they tried to squirt at him, and the skinheads proved to be no match. He took a big snap at one of the dancers’ penises with Constance’s shoe, and the guy wobbled away and began tucking his goods back in his pants. The other guy came sideways at Jack, but Jack moved too fast for him. Jack slammed the shield against the idiot, and the guy took three giant steps sideways, tried to right himself in his drunkenness, then fell like a plank onto his side. His beer skidded off into the crowd, and Jack, jumping on him, grabbed the guy’s feet and began using him to mop up the floor. The crowd loved seeing that, and two other guys came forward and began running the dancer around the floor like a Hoover. The second dancer—the one who had escaped—made a halfhearted effort to intervene, but a bunch of people began booing him and chased him away. The skinhead wandered off, leaving his friend to be rolled around in his own mess.

  Jack made a final triumphant circle, raising the shield in victory. I met his eyes and wondered if a prince could be a guy with a garbage can lid on his forearm, a shoe as a sword, his knighthood conferred by besting dragons squirting their noxious fluids.

  10

  Just your father being your father. You know how he is, darling. Have fun.

  I am having fun. But Daddy’s being a buzzkill.

  He doesn’t mean to be. Just Dad being Dad. He can’t help it.

  If anything, I’m TOO on top of everything. You know that.

  He knows it, too. Just have fun. By the way, I cleaned out that back closet and gave away some old dresses.

  Which old dresses? Do we have to do this now?

  Just the blue one with the sleeves. You haven’t worn it in years. I want my closets back!

  Oh, Mom, good grief. How is Mr. Periwinkle?

  He’s outside a lot. Okay, have to run. Kiss the girls.

  … and make them cry?

  Miss you.

  Miss you, too.

  Raef traveled for jazz. That’s what he told us, and that’s why we followed him at three o’clock in the morning to a place called Smarty’s on a tiny little street off a tiny little street beside a canal somewhere in the downtown part of Amsterdam. He promised us it would be worth it, and after shots and a half dozen gin and tonics, after an Amsterdam joint the size of an ear of corn, we were in no shape to refuse. He led us down a set of cement stairs to a basement bar. I wondered how they could have basement bars in Amsterdam because the whole place hovered at sea level, but I was in no condition to discuss civil engineering. I hung on to Jack and Constance hung on to Raef and Amy hung on to Alfred, a Dutch guy whose fingers reminded me of typewriter keys.

  Victor, Amy’s Count Chocula, had never shown at the party. Somehow or another, Count Chocula and Alfred knew each other, but I couldn’t draw a mental line to connect them.

  A waitress with bulging biceps and a look that said she might spit into your drink or take you home, either option open, pointed us to a table by the WC. We had to turn sideways to make it through the small tables, and the music wrapped around us and didn’t let go. A black guy played a deep sax, twisting the sound and making it yowl and bend and sip, and as soon as we plopped down, Raef leaned across the table and told us what we were hearing.

  “That
’s Johnn P,” he said, his voice bright and Aussie and fun to listen to, “and he’s from Nigeria, but he lives here now. I don’t think the other guys are well known, just session guys sitting in.”

  That was all I heard. Even that was difficult to hear. The waitress came by, and we ordered drinks—cognacs with waters on the side—and she nodded and headed off like a woman wading through a meadow of chairs. I felt hazy and a bit disoriented, but also happy. I wasn’t Hemingway, and this wasn’t Spain after World War I, but it was as close as I had come in my short life.

  “I’d rate our kiss on the platform about a seven. How about you?” Jack asked, leaning close.

  “That high? I was thinking more a six, maybe a five point five.”

  “You’re a righty kisser. I knew you would be.”

  “How did you know it?”

  “Most people are. If you meet a lefty kisser, chances are they have a small fin on the back of their neck. It’s very hard to see, but it will be there.”

  “A fin?”

  He nodded.

  “A little-known fact,” he said.

  “Trouble is, I’ve never been ranked below a nine. My kisses can ruin a man for all other women. I’m just reporting what people say.”

  “That’s why I held back, too,” he said. “I could have brought it up to a ten, but I didn’t want you to faint on the spot.”

  “What’s the fin for?”

  “What fin?”

  “The fin you just talked about. The one on the back of the person’s neck.”

  “People of Atlantis. They all kiss lefty.”

  “And that’s how you can detect them?”

  “Also, they will not eat tuna fish. Or any fish, for that matter. It’s a question of cannibalism.”

  “I see. Can a normal person be a lefty kisser?”

  “Not in my experience, no.”

  “Is it dangerous to kiss a citizen of Atlantis?”

  “Desperately. You should always bring a tiny packet of tartar sauce on a first date just in case. Obviously, tartar sauce is Kryptonite to anyone from Atlantis.”