Now she came by every day, pulling up a bucket (it came to be called her bucket) to watch the painting's progress and to talk with him about her days. Ignacio learned of a neighborhood boy whom she loved named Eddie, a rough boy with a cowlick who teased her and called her Ladybones because she was underweight. One day Eddie kissed her cheek, and she shrieked with wild joy and slipped from her bucket as she recounted the episode for Ignacio, but later Eddie kicked her in the stomach and she was heartsick and swore off love for a life devoted to art and the church. She became intent and serious about the painting and her eyes were unblinking and her chatter tapered off and months later when the painting was finished she cried because she didn't want her time with Ignacio to end or for the painting to be moved from its blocks. She wanted the painting for her own, and was inconsolable when she discovered Ignacio had a buyer lined up and that it would be shipped to New York City the very next day.
What the girl did not know was that Ignacio had been spending his nights working on a smaller painting just for her, a special little painting with hearts in the corners and an admiring dedication at the bottom, and when he presented it to her she wiped the tears from her face and placed a hand on the canvas and after a pause began to cry all over again, and she swore before God and Jesus Christ she would someday repay him and she ran off with the canvas under her arm, ashamed of her emotion, and Ignacio laughed as he watched her go and was warm in his body from the good deed he had done.
Now Ignacio bows his head for a sip of soda water and you breathe a great sigh of relief, because for a moment you were afraid this would be a dirty and immoral pedophile love story, and you thank him for the tale and stand to return to your work but he clears his throat and says there is a ways to go yet and to hold your horses because the story soon gets good, and he winks, and you are revisited by your worry. Ignacio strokes his mustache and continues.
"I looked for her every day, but she didn't come by anymore after that. After a while I forgot about her. Years passed, my work continued, when one morning just this last summer I was kneeling in the driveway washing the wheels of my van when I felt a presence at my back, and I could see in the reflection of the hubcaps that there was a woman standing over me, and I turned, and there was a pair of beautiful brown ankles blooming like flowers out of red leather high-heeled shoes. I looked up and saw the calves, and the kneecaps, and the thighs — bare, brown thighs — and I looked up, farther still, and could see from my angle that this presence, this woman… was not wearing any underwear!"
Ignacio's eyes are insane and he leans back and now you are required to say something in response but your mind is a blank and there is a sound in your ears like the sucking of a vacuum, and so you say simply this: "Wow."
"That is nothing," he says. "Now I will really tell you something." He fans the air between you. "I was stunned by the sight of this woman's genitals. I was helpless, frozen, a blinded animal on the highway. And then there was the faintest shift in the breeze, and from where I was kneeling, I swear to you I could smell it… her fresh… vaginal"
With the utterance of these last two words you find yourself categorically lost and alone in the world, and if an earthquake suddenly ripped the bar in two you would raise your arms and invite a piece of the building to visit your skull and crush it to dust. Ignacio finishes his story (this presence was of course the little girl, now grown, returning to pay for the painting by offering her virginity, which he accepts, and he is a passionate and superhuman sexual machine and she is a voracious whore, and then she is gone and he smokes a cigar in his bedroom alone) and you stand before him as long as you can but your chin begins trembling and you feel you have finally reached your limit, that your ears and heart cannot absorb any more of the regulars' filthy, detestable disinformation, and your eyes well up and Ignacio, concerned, asks you what's the matter and you push past him apologizing and rush out the door and into the alley, surprised to find that you are openly crying. Once this starts you believe you will not be able to stop, or will soon reach a point from which you will not return without damaging your mind, and so to put an end to this falling feeling you draw back your hand and punch the brick wall as hard as you can. Now your hand is like a frozen claw, and you reenter the bar to show Simon the blood and shredded skin and are sent home and in the morning your hand is twice its normal size and you realize through the fog of pain that your wife is gone, the closets and bathroom cupboards bare. On the pillow a note.
Two
Dana is eighteen and gains admittance to the bar with her stepmother's ID card. Her stepmother is fifty-two years old. You are thirty-two. Dana's boyfriend, Joey, is twenty-seven. They sit together and laugh at you as you approach — they are small and brown-skinned and find something comical about your tall and skinny white person. You like them both very much and give them free drinks and they never once tip you but this is not due to any cheapness of heart but a lack of tipping money. Not that they would tip extravagantly if they ever won a large cash prize. They have never been and will never be flashy, money-throwing people, and this is fine with you because their eyes are genuine and they like you and you imagine them doing imitations of you when they are alone, hiccupping, struggling with gravity, and adjusting invisible eyeglasses.
There is a scandal attached to their romance, and this is what it is: Joey had been Dana's gym teacher. Their relationship was uncovered by the high school vice principal, an ambitious man with adult acne, intensely disliked by students and faculty alike. He one night found Dana and Joey holding hands and kissing at the local pizzeria and did not intervene but alerted the news media, who descended on the restaurant with their camera lights blazing and microphones pointed lance-like toward Joey, at that moment entertaining Dana by chugging Bud Light from a frosted glass pitcher. He was humiliated publicly and dispatched "with a flamethrower"; Dana was beaten by her father and suspended indefinitely. The vice principal was promoted and threw himself a party in the cafeteria and nobody, not one person with either professional or personal ties to the man, came.
But now Dana has taken her GED and the unfortunate tale is behind her. She lives alone in Culver City and works two part-time jobs and is happy enough with her life and with Joey but her youth will not allow her true contentment and as the months pass she turns an eye to you. Joey leaves town overnight for an interview at an all-girls Catholic school in San Francisco and Dana arrives alone at the bar, drunk, in a low-cut blouse. She stays after hours and takes off the blouse and her skin is flawless and everything is all over in a matter of three or four minutes and you and she sit side by side staring into the darkness of the back room, the smoke from your cigarettes drawn into the space and disappearing. You think you can hear her crying but you do not want to look over or ask her any questions or try in any way to comfort her and if she got up and ran out the door you would not stop her. "I've never been with a white guy before," she says, extending a chubby baby hand, your pants still gathered at your ankles.
Discuss Ginny with her short brown hair, her pug nose, and her plump red hands like spotted meat left to swell in the desert sun. Her eyes are popped and her pores emit a smell of chili dogs and french fries dipped in mayonnaise and you cannot help but wonder what horrors reside in her large intestine. She actively attends both AA and NA meetings but is always the last to leave the bar and will often stay after hours, by which time you are helplessly drunk and accordingly interested in her large white backside. She follows you into the storage room and will partially disrobe to be fondled and lightly slapped but she always stops you short of achieving anything purposeful and she will never touch you but only be touched. Now she puts her clothes back on and is very red and she leaves the bar with her hair in a mess, smiling in twisted triumph at the thought of your unfulfilled and piggish desires, and you curse her and her teasing ways, for after all she has done this before, to you and others, and you tell yourself this will not under any circumstances happen again. It happens again and again and again and again.