In his affected murmur, Claudius told us a story I had heard before. The story may or may not have been true, but it shocked people, or aroused them, or made them feel vulnerable and sad. Claudius wasn’t what you would call a patient guy. He needed to know as soon as possible where people stood, especially girls. Here is the story: When he was in high school, he discovered that the old lady who lived alone next door was watching him from her window. He would exercise in his room, wearing only his briefs, every morning and night. He locked the door to keep his alcoholic mother out. Furiously blinking, Claudius continued: “Calf-raises, push-ups, chin-ups, and crunches till I dropped. And there she was, this old biddy, looking dead at me with her old biddy glasses like it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was putting on a show. So that’s just what I did. At first I stood at the window and stared right back at her, rubbing my chest and abs. Then, after a week or so of this, I started rubbing baby oil on myself. I took it up a notch by walking around naked, and when that didn’t faze her, I tried to get my girlfriend to put on a sex show with me. Well, she wasn’t having it. Too innocent, I guess, so get this: I masturbated instead, right in front of the window. The old biddy watched this too, but the next night she wasn’t there. Wasn’t there the next night either. That was the last night she watched me. I guess she got to see what she’d been waiting for all along.”
In unison the girls let out a shriek, which spilled into rapid chatter that was like another language. Even in the dim party lights, their darting eyes stood out, fine russet and amber stones. The flurry of motion seemed to release scent from them: ripe sweat and vanilla and almond. Iris’s body shook with laughter as she slapped her thigh and rocked her head back. Her perfect Afro eclipsed broad sections of the room in its orbit. Other girls had either been repulsed or aroused by the story, unambiguously so. None had ever reacted like this. And something else was off. Iris’s wild mouth and eyes moved independently of the rest of her face. She resembled a hard plastic doll.
“What the fuck?” Sybil said finally. “This one thinks he’s a freak,” she said and sent his tassel spinning with a flick of her finger.
“Shame is the name of the game,” Claudius said, with a flare of his nostrils. “Shame is the nonsense of every age.” He was speaking a little too grandly now, even for him. “Let’s get on with the nonsense of this age.”
The girls whispered to each other, blew soft gibberish onto each other’s necks.
“Well,” Claudius said, “who’s next?”
“Him,” Iris said. “What’s he got to say?”
All three of them stared at me, waiting. There were a million ways I could go, but every corridor of my mind led to the same place.
“My dad,” I began, saying the first and only words that came to me. I explained that he was a white man, born and raised in Italy. He would always call my mother his cioccolata. Whenever she was angry with him, yelling for one reason or another, he would laugh and pet her cheek. In those moments he would tell her she was agrodulce, always retaining some of her sweetness.
Claudius smiled when I said this. He liked when I used Italian words on girls.
I told them my father loved my mother and her family. He especially liked when her younger sisters would visit. This was when I was a boy. Before they arrived I would sit on the rim of the tub and run my finger along the edge of the shower curtain, watching as he beautified himself. He put on cologne and decided whether to leave one or two buttons open at the neck of his finest shirts. He would make sure his cheeks were perfectly stubbled. During the visits he charmed as he mixed drinks, kissed the backs of hands, and admired new hairstyles. He ladled praise over my pretty aunts in easy pours. And I always adored him.
Claudius had stopped smiling. I wasn’t telling a shameful story. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I kept on.
Things like this would frustrate my mother, I told them; she accused him of flirting, loudly complained about his lack of respect for her. One day, when I was twelve, something else really brought out her fury. She came home from work hours before I was expecting her, and found me at the kitchen table looking through my father’s collection of nudes. I had seen my father’s dirty magazines before, and had avoided detection previously by taking only quick peeks, but this time I discovered, or could no longer ignore, that my father had specific preferences. I was riveted by the curves of the women’s buttocks, their dark nipples, and the dense blackness displayed between their thighs. My mother picked through the pile—I hadn’t realized until then how many were there—and from time to time, between glances at me, she would touch a finger to the mute faces of the women in the pictures, strained into expressions of pleasure. Her deeply brown skin against the images of theirs. My mother’s silence unnerved me. I desperately wanted her to say something, anything at all, but she didn’t. She simply took the entire stack from the table and gestured for me to go to my room.
When my father got home, he and my mother argued in the living room. I crept out and watched from the hallway.
“Leo, he’s twelve,” she said to him. It was as if my father had sat me down to show me the magazines himself, or worse, as if he had taken me to a whorehouse. Why would she blame him for what I did? I couldn’t understand it.
“Benito’s curious, almost a grown boy,” my father replied. He thought it was no big deal, nothing to fuss about, and I agreed. “And isn’t it good that he learns such women are beautiful? That his mamma is beautiful?”
“That’s not what he’s learning!” my mother screamed, and in that moment she looked hideous to me. “Don’t you realize what you’re teaching him? Don’t you see what you’re doing?”
At this, he took her into his arms and kissed her on the neck. She struggled against him for a little while, infuriated even more by his words. But he kept kissing her neck, and biting it. He snuffed out her anger with his embrace, and between laughs he murmured his pet names for her: cioccolata, agrodulce. I raised myself a little, still observing them from the hallway, filled with a distinct feeling of pride.
I stopped the story there, unable to go on, unsure how. For a while no one said anything. Iris took a sip of her Jack. Sybil looked around, as though she’d left something in another room. The music blared on. Finally Claudius grabbed the back of my head and laughed.
“This dude’s a psychopathic thinker,” he said. “A sensitive soul, a killjoy. He wears his heart and his mind on his sleeve.”
The girls appeared unconvinced.
“OK, ladies,” Claudius said, “your turn now.”
“We haven’t had nearly enough to drink for all that, boys,” Iris said. “Not really feeling your game.”
Sybil nodded. “Plus, you know what they say. Women and their secrets.”
“And bubbles,” Iris added with a wink.
Then they turned away, and just like that sealed us off from them. I marveled for a moment at this female power. From the corner of his eye, Claudius watched Sybil’s ass, continuing to make a claim on her, the only one he could still make in this moment of rejection. “That’s a goddamn bubble,” he whispered to me. It was held up for scrutiny by the tightness of her jeans and the heels of her boots. He glanced at me and went on and on about the miracle of tight jeans—he recognized these as Brazilian, he said, nodding slowly as he uttered the word with reverence. Looking again at Sybil, the long and deep curve of her that communicated with something ancient in him, he moved his lips as if trying to remember the old language. But the girls were lost to us. Though Claudius didn’t say anything to me about it, I couldn’t help weighing our two stories in my mind. I was clearly the one to blame.
Claudius and I spent the next two hours or so chatting, smoking, and drinking out in the backyard, where the torches flattened everyone’s faces and made them gleam. Eventually we went in. I munched on cookies and a sopping square of rum cake in the kitchen, intent on some sweetness, despite my own troublesome teeth, as we approached the end of the night. Claudius had gathered h
imself again and was scrambling around the emptying party, looking to see if there were any other girls worthy of our attention.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my own shameful story. Not long after the incident with the magazines, my mother left us, and later she divorced my father. She claimed he loved her with his eyes instead of his heart. She said a woman couldn’t spend her whole life with a man like that. But she was wrong about my father’s feelings. Sure of this, arrogant in my knowledge, I ranted it to myself. My father worshipped my mother, every fact and feature of her. All he’d ever done was shower her with devotion. After she left, he complained to me one day that she wasn’t gone at all, that she was too wicked for such a mercy. She was still there, he said, her flavor stuck in him: a froth in the veins, a disease of the blood. That’s how I began to think of her too then, as a sickness, as a betrayal on the cellular level. My choice to stay with him became a badge of loyalty, and I brandished it in her face as often as I could, until she stopped trying to talk sense to me. She did write on my seventeenth birthday though, asking me to come to Newark to see her, to meet her new man and his kids. She also called my dorm room at the end of freshman year, right before final exams, to tell me about her engagement and to let me know how much it would mean to her to have me attend the wedding.
“What makes you think I would ever do that?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment, and even this interval of thought enraged me, primed me to pounce on anything she said. I stared at the naked lamp on my desk and forced my gaze into the bulb’s hot center.
“What makes you think you wouldn’t?” she said. “At some point, baby, you have to give up the idea fixed in your head and say enough is enough.”
I cursed at her and hung up the phone, shaking, purblind with anger, completely closed to her. I was still convinced she was a coward, unable to withstand the force of my father’s affections, as if there were such a thing as too much love.
My father. The old version of him would have enjoyed this party. I walked into the living room smiling at this thought. There was a time when he would have hosted such an event, casting invitations far and wide to young, magnificent, colorful people, people he referred to as the essence of the earth. For these parties, he’d let me stay up, all night if I could manage it. So I could imagine him kissing the cheeks of the four girls who were now heading toward the door, whose brown feet were tantalizing in their heels and sandals, wearing jeans smoothed on like blue oil, and summer dresses like saintly robes. My father would hold their hands and beg them not to go yet. He’d tell them about a special bottle, some vintage he’d been saving for the right moment, and offer the promise of a home-cooked breakfast at the first peek of sunrise. He’d say almost anything he could think of to make them stay, to keep the party going as long as possible, to get a smile to flash across one of their faces.
But my father was wasting away in Philly, not here, the man he used to be long gone, and so the four girls were allowed to pass out of the house without ceremony. Many more guys than girls were left now, and most of them had these hangdog looks made more pathetic by the dreary music the deejay played at a lowered volume.
Iris and Sybil were standing by a makeshift bookcase, giving three lames the same treatment they had given me and Claudius. Now, drunk or high, maybe both, they lifted their feet and flailed their arms, swimming in a thick sea of hilarity. Then one of the lames clung to Sybil’s arm as he begged her to stay, to give him her phone number, to go home with him. The guy looked older—old, frankly—and he and his buddies had probably crashed the party, though not the way we had. They seemed to come from someplace else entirely, another time, another dimension, and the stink of it emanated from them. That was it: something I couldn’t name festered in their horniness, and it made their solicitations coarse, mean, and frightening. I could have interfered, played the gallant hero like my father would have, but Iris was able to drag her friend away and out of the house.
Claudius came into the room holding his fez upside down like a little bucket. He resembled certain homeless folks you’d see begging on the subway, crackling with foul energy, offended and beseeching. His hair was matted and kinked. He stormed ahead and almost walked through me.
“No luck?”
“Fucking sausage fest,” he called back.
I followed him outside. He put the fez back on and its tassel flopped in the breeze. I had seen him this way before, agitated. He was terrible at idleness, much worse than I was, and the map of his life had no significance or shape without some destination to plunge his way into. He could quickly lose his way. We stood together, surrounded by the high-pitched barking of a neighbor’s dog, the buzz of a faulty streetlight, a faint clinking of metal. I clapped him on the shoulder and said we should head back up to campus. He took out his pager. The greenish glow of its display told us it was just past three o’clock in the morning. Subway service would be awful.
Just then, on the sidewalk, Iris and Sybil teetered by on bicycles, their front wheels doing a spastic dance. They rode a little past us before Sybil swerved and crashed into the side of Iris’s bike. She caught herself, but Iris fell. We rushed through the house’s gate, and I helped Iris up. There were tears in her eyes, but she was making a noise that eventually revealed itself as a laugh. Sybil was laughing too.
“We’re messed up,” Iris admitted. Without apology she belched into her fist and then examined her arm. A wide cut ran from her elbow halfway to her wrist. It filled with blood and was rimmed with dirt. She dipped her finger into the thick line of blood. The way she did it made me want to dip my finger too.
As she stared at the reddened tip of her finger, I suggested we walk them home. I jumped back when she tried to mark me with the spot of blood.
“A couple of goddamned gentlemen,” she said. “Chivalry is undead.”
We walked with their bikes while the girls, holding hands, staggered ahead of us, their very movements synced in drunken exaggeration, suggesting a new rhythm to prolong the night. It was like the records my father would play in the wee hours of his parties, after the delicate guests had already gone home and the skeptics who remained sat and considered the hands of the clock. He had a selection of special vinyl, mostly bop, that made things jump into life again, nothing like the bleak music the deejay played back at the house. My father’s music persuaded you that nothing ever had to end. Claudius and I, feeling good again, stared at the girls. Iris’s calves and thighs were shapely for such a thin girl. Sybil’s ass was like two warm, fat jewels on garish display.
Eyeing it, I said, “That’s a goddamn onion.”
“Make a grown man cry,” Claudius answered to my call. But then he looked doubtfully at me. “You wouldn’t even know what to do with that though. I called dibs, remember?” He jutted his chin at Iris and said, “That’s more your speed, B. Two sticks make fire.”
With a laugh he picked up his pace so that he was walking next to Sybil, and I was back with Iris. Another gash split the skin near her wrist. Every once in a while, when the wound grew rich with blood, she sucked at it like an injured child.
We walked for a long time, deeper into Brooklyn, and it did feel as though we were actually sinking. Wooden boards slanted across the windows of the apartments above a corner store and lines of stiff weeds punched through cracks in the sidewalk. We passed a place called Salt, a bar that looked like it hadn’t been open for business in years. Around the corner was a series of names tagged on a brick wall. Each of the names had three letters—SER, EVE, RON, REL, MED—and the drips of paint made murky icicles of color. The ground became more densely littered with crushed paper bags, empty bottles of malt liquor, and other shapeless hunks of trash. I guided Iris’s bike around inexplicable puddles layered with scum. It hadn’t rained in weeks, and it wouldn’t tonight. Men sat on the edges of ramshackle stoops or stood in front of shuttered bodegas. They leered at us, but their looks were less threatening than mysterious.
Iris talked incessantly, invo
king the bubble, picking her words with drunk deliberation. “It’s not about being all profound and shit,” she said, “it’s not even about that. It’s like, can you tiptoe over every surface? Can you go anywhere and be open to every little thing?”
Gazing at her, I was careful to appear interested in what she had to say. I wasn’t going to screw up our chances a second time. I softened my tone and asked, “What’s all this business with the bubble?”
Sybil’s laugh drifted ahead of us.
“It’s Japanese: mono no aware,” she said. “A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty. I studied world philosophies, in college, and did a year abroad.” To illustrate the idea, she started talking about sakura, the cherry blossom tree.
At first all this sounded like more pothead gibberish. Then the notion of abroad, and the mysterious worldliness it suggested, began to excite me as much as her hips did. Iris was black, Central American, maybe Jewish somehow, and who knew what else. She was even more exotic than I had thought.
She talked about a dream she’d had about the cherry blossoms, a vision: the pink buds flowering, paling, and drifting down in bunches, left there like soft skirts on the grass. “I asked my mom about it,” she said. “She can read dreams. She cried a tear from her left eye. Then she said life is exactly like that.”
Iris was holding something out to me, something real, but I couldn’t quite grasp whatever it was. “Here’s what I want to know,” I said, and then blurted, “Have you ever made love in the grass?”
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 9
