“No extenuation,” says Mr. Jones. “Your answer is Yes.
It’s a good answer, it’s the truth, and I have no quarrel with it. I would think you some sort of nitwit if you hadn’t worked out some mutually agreeable arrangement between you. No, I don’t want to know how it’s done. I shudder to think about it.
When she drops in, she seems none the worse for wear. If she’s happy, and you’re happy with her—and with the limitations you no doubt face—then that will content her mother and me.”
I think of course of vaginal sinkings, that nice feel of being gripped there by a grown woman. And I think back years to my first girlfriend Rhonda, to her mouth, to the love she was kind enough to focus down below from time to time though less frequently than I would have preferred.
“That leads, of course, to my second question,” says Mr.
Jones, putting one hand, the one without the cigar, to his temple. “Will you be faithful to Tinkerbell, neither casting the lures of temptation toward other women nor consenting to be lured by them?”
I pause. “That’s a complex question.”
“It is indeed,” he says, with a rising inflection that asks it all over again.
“I don’t think,” I tell him, my hands folded, my eyes deeply sincere, “I will ever fail my beloved in this way. Yet knowing the weakness of myself and other men, the incessant clamor of the gonads that I daresay all males are prey to, I hesitate to say Yes unequivocally to your question. But Tinkerbell gives me great satisfaction, and, more importantly, I believe I do the same for her. Something about her ways in bed, if you will, seems to silence the voice of lust when I’m around other women. Besides which—and I don’t mean this flippantly—
I’ve grown, through loving Tinkerbell, to appreciate smaller women. In fact, on the whole, I’ve come to find so-called normal-sized women unbearably gross and disgusting.”
Mr. Jones looks askance at me. “Alex, you’re a most peculiar man. But then I think that’s what my daughter’s going to need, a peculiar man, and yet it’s so damned hard to know which set of peculiarities are the right ones.”
I’m not sure how to take his comment, but then I’m in no position to debate the issue. “Yes, sir,” I say.
“Almost out of the woods,” says Mr. Jones, grinning. “The third one is easy.” He tosses it off like a spent match: “Do you love Tinkerbell?”
This question throws me. It seems simple enough, but that’s the problem: It’s too simple. Does he want a one-word response, or a dissertation? Is it a trick question of some sort?
And is the time I’m taking in deliberating over it actually sinking my chances? What is love, after all? Everybody talks about it, sings about it, yammers on and on endlessly about it. But it’s so vague a word, and so loaded. I think of French troubadour poets, of courtly love and its manufacture, of Broadway show tunes and wall-sized faces saying “I love you” on big screens, saying it like some ritual curse or as if it signaled some terrible loss of control akin to vomiting.
And I say, “Yes and no,” feeling my way into the open wound of shared camaraderie, ready to provide reasons for my equivocation, a brief discourse which will show him the philosophical depths of my musings and yet come about, in the end, to a grand paean of adoration for his daughter.
But before I can begin, he rises from his chair and reaches for me, and the next thing I know, the furniture hurtles by as if in a silent wind and the doors fly open seemingly without the intervention of human hands and I’m out on the street in front of their home, trying to stop my head from spinning.
It’s dark out there but muggy. I ache inside, ache for my loss. It’s not fair, I think. She loves me and I love her and by God we belong together. I’ll call her in the morning when she’s back in the city, I’ll send roses, I’ll surprise her with a knock on her door. We’ll elope. This isn’t the Dark Ages, after all. Tinkerbell and I don’t need her parents’ permission to marry.
Doors slam in the house. Downstairs, upstairs. A high-pitched voice, Melissa’s, shouts something childish and angry, is answered by falsely calm parental soothings. None of the words can I make out.
The first floor goes dark after a while, then bit by bit the second. From where I’m standing, it looks like a miniature house, one of my basement models. I raise both hands and find I can obliterate it completely.
There is one golden glow of light hovering behind a drawn tan shade upstairs. Her bedroom, the room she grew up in. I want to clap my hands, clap them in defiance of her parents—
she’ll know what that means, she’ll surely understand. But the energy has drained from my arms and they hang useless at my sides.
Behind the shade, my lost love’s light moves slowly back and forth, back and forth, growing dimmer, casting forth ever smaller circles of gold with each beat of my heart.
RIDI BOBO
At first little things niggled at Bobo’s mind: the forced quality of Kiki’s mimed chuckle when he went into his daily pratfall getting out of bed; the great care she began to take painting in the teardrop below her left eye; the way she idly fingered a pink puffball halfway down her shiny green suit. Then more blatant signals: the creases in her crimson frown, a sign, he knew, of real discontent; the bored arcs her floppy shoes described when she walked the ruff-necked piglets; a wistful shake of the head when he brought out their favorite set of shiny steel rings and invited her, with the artful pleas of his expressive white gloves, to juggle with him.
But Bobo knew it was time to seek professional help when he whipped out his rubber chicken and held it aloft in a stranglehold—its eyes X’d shut in fake death, its pitiful head lolled against the back of his glove—and all Kiki could offer was a soundless yawn, a fatigued cock of her conical nightcap, and the curve of her back, one lazy hand waving bye-bye before collapsing languidly beside her head on the pillow. No honker would be brought forth that evening from her deep hip pocket, though he could discern its outline there beneath the cloth, a coy maddening shape that almost made him hop from toe to toe on his own. But he stopped himself, stared forlornly at the flaccid fowl in his hand, and shoved it back inside his trousers.
He went to check on the twins, their little gloved hands hugging the blankets to their chins, their perfect snowflake—white faces vacant with sleep. People said they looked more like Kiki than him, with their lime-green hair and the markings around their eyes. Beautiful boys, Jojo and Juju. He kissed their warm round red noses and softly closed the door.
In the morning, Bobo, wearing a tangerine apron over his bright blue suit, watched Kiki drive off in their new rattletrap Weezo, thick puffs of exhaust exploding out its tailpipe. Back in the kitchen, he reached for the Buy-Me Pages. Nervously rubbing his pate with his left palm, he slalomed his right index finger down the Snooper listings. Lots of flashy razz-ma-tazz ads, lots of zingers to catch a poor clown’s attention.
He needed simple. He needed quick. Ah! His finger thocked the entry short and solid as a raindrop on a roof; he noted the address and slammed the book shut.
Bobo hesitated, his fingers on his apron bow. For a moment the energy drained from him and he saw his beloved Kiki as she’d been when he married her, honker out bold as brass, doing toe hops in tandem with him, the shuff-shuff-shuff of her shiny green pants legs, the ecstatic ripples that passed through his rubber chicken as he moved it in and out of her honker and she bulbed honks around it. He longed to mimic sobbing, but the inspiration drained from him. His shoulders rose and fell once only; his sweep of orange hair canted to one side like a smart hat.
Then he whipped the apron off in a tangerine flurry, checked that the boys were okay playing with the piglets in the backyard, and was out the front door, floppy shoes flapping toward downtown.