I nearly choked on my barbecue pork. “You said that?”
She’d segregated her food into neat piles, none of them touching, and begun to clear them away, one by one, counterclockwise from the top. My own plate was a mess of fried rice, vegetables, and animal parts.
She shrugged. “It was obvious. I’d seen them before and they did everything a good couple was supposed to do. Teased each other, finished each other’s sentences. But there was one important thing missing.”
“What?” I asked, interested in spite of myself.
“They never touched. Well they touched, but they never touched. I’m talking love-touching here. There’s a kind of touch—on the wrist, the shoulder, wherever—that signifies genuine intimacy.” She reached out and grabbed my hand. “Like that. A touch that says I see you. I recognize you. I don’t take you for granted.”
Had I been pressed to put a word to what she was doing it would not have been “love-touching.” Her grip was actually a bit painful. She burst into tearful laughter to recall how the chagrined couple had admitted that she was right, that maybe they did need to give their love life some attention. The story ended with the three of them sipping lemonade on the porch, then setting about building the gazebo together.
She set her fork down and looked at me expectantly.
“Well,” I said after a moment.
She sighed, then got up and walked over to the sliding door. “I’m sorry I bored you.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t—”
“We can’t all have lives as thrilling as yours, you know.”
“I didn’t—”
“I’m out there helping people, Felix. Making a difference. You know, sometimes I just want to—” She broke off. “Oh my god!”
“What is it?”
“Come over here! Come here right now!”
I hurried over, not seeing anything unusual. The parking lot. The low-rise across the way. “There.” She pointed. “On the top floor. Is he…?”
The pale man was sitting in his apartment, looking at something out of sight, his hand in his lap, moving rhythmically.
“Yes,” I said. “He is.”
“Oh my god!” she laughed, covering her mouth.
“We shouldn’t be watching him,” I said.
“He’s sitting right by his window.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t know we can see him.”
“I’m sure that he does.”
“Can you close the drapes, please?”
She rolled open the sliding door and shouted: “We can see you! Hey! We can see you!”
The pale man didn’t seem to hear, or to care. The intensity of his arm increased and he arched back, then slumped.
“Oh,” she said, her voice softening. “Oh, that’s so sad.”
“Can we close the door now?”
“He looks like he’s about to cry.”
“Close the damn door!”
She looked surprised, then her face shut down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what’s happening right now.”
“What’s happening,”—she closed the door and turned to me—”is that you think you’re him. You’re not, you know.”
I forced myself to look at her. “Then who am I?”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards her. She was walking through a very different movie than the one I’d been cast in, a movie in which violins crescendoed as she kissed me hard. Our teeth banged together. Her tongue forced its way into my mouth. By the time we’d made it to the bedroom, my pants were down. “Wait,” I said, but she put a hand on my chest and shoved. I fell back on the bed and my head hit the wall. She stripped quickly, then climbed onto the bed and roughly put on a condom. My socks were still on, my pants around my ankles. I stared at her in confusion, physically aroused, yet terrified as she climbed on top of me and guided me in, bending me back at a painful angle and slamming her full weight down on my body, using one hand to stimulate herself. I moaned in pain and she moaned in pleasure. Her hand became a blur. Her body shuddered. She tensed, making a low keening noise, then collapsed, breathing hard against my neck.
“Did you…?” she panted.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Wow. Oh, wow. That was something. Wasn’t that something?” She lay with her elbow on my diaphragm, wisps of hair irritating my face. Next door, I could have sworn I heard the old man applauding. When she finally rolled off, I disposed of the empty condom, disheartened to see that she had no intention of leaving. I didn’t care who she was anymore. I just wanted her gone. I lay back down beside her and shut my eyes. After a minute, she put a hand on my chest. “Felix?”
I made a humming sound, pretending to be half-asleep.
“I want to take you shopping tomorrow,” she said.
I opened one eye. “Why?”
She shifted up onto her elbow. “You’re a famous author. You should look the part.”
“I’m not famous.”
“Stop being modest.”
“I’m not being modest. I’m not remotely famous.”
“You will be soon. We just need to work on your presentation. No one’s going to listen to you if you’re dressed like… well, I’m sorry, but like a homeless person. You might get away with rumpled. But sloppy won’t get you anywhere. And your hair.” She pawed at my hair, smoothing it straight back. “I think I like it like this.”
I shut my eyes again as she rubbed at a spot on my arm with her thumb. “I mentioned you to Spencer Ford today. He gave me the name of an agent. Maybe you could get in touch.”
“With Spencer Ford?”
“No, silly. The agent.”
The spot on my arm felt raw, as if she’d rubbed off the first few layers of skin. The next time she said my name, I didn’t answer. She sidled up close and roped her arm around me. I took deep regular breaths, afraid she’d start talking again if she knew I was awake. After a few minutes, a vague pain settled into my legs. I tried to ease away but her hold on me tightened. I lay perfectly still, waiting. The pain was becoming unbearable. Just when it seemed that she’d never let go, she flopped onto her back and began to snore.
I quietly moved to the darkened living area. She’d left her purse by the door, a handmade-looking thing holding a small assortment of personal effects: lipstick, loose change, business cards for the Well-Heeled Dog Trainers. The name on her driver’s license was Kim Penn. My math put her at twenty-nine years old. In a little hidden compartment on the side of her purse, I found an unmarked vial of pills and a neatly folded note from a fortune cookie that read, Your future will exceed your expectations. I carefully put everything back, then patted my own pockets, surprised to find that not only did I not have any cigarettes, I had no desire for a cigarette. I sat in the dark for a while, then opened my laptop and squinted in the sudden light, the search engine greeting me like a stone idol in a cave. I reached for the keyboard and stopped, feeling oddly tentative. I’d forgotten how to interact with it. I didn’t have a thing to say.
When I was eighteen years old, Dad drove me halfway across the country and dropped me outside the twin dorm buildings of the West Coast College with a look of barely concealed relief on his face. Within a few weeks, a strange disorganization had crept into my life. I’d ask my roommate, a Vietnamese exchange student named Henry, if he’d seen my watch or my keys or my calculator, and he would give me a brief, horrified look, as if I’d offended not only him but his entire family, before shaking his head and returning to his homework. By the winter term, I was losing blocks of time. At first, I attributed it to fatigue, but as the semester wore on, the gaps widened from hours to days. Sometimes it was relatively easy to catch up on what I’d missed. Other times I’d be utterly lost, with no one to fill me in but Henry, who’d begun to regard me warily, as if the structure of my face were changing in some small but perceptible way.