My father got up from his chair and went to the kitchen, saying, “Does anyone want garlic salt?” He came back carrying the garlic salt and his fencing epée. He sat down, sprinkled some garlic salt on his food, and asked Damon if he wanted some.
Damon said, “No thanks,” and went on compulsively: “There are all kinds of cool ways to tell what’s happening on surfaces, like Auger electron spectroscopy [AES], X ray photoelectron spectroscopy [XPS], and low-energy electron diffraction [LEED]. You can measure the chemical environment of surface atoms using XPS, literally see the surface order with LEED diffraction patterns, and get complete surface atomic composition with AES—”
Damon stopped talking when my father took his sword, slid it between Damon’s index and middle fingers, and bent Damon’s empty glove finger backward until it was flat against the top of his hand. Everyone was silent.
“You’re Damon,” announced my father, red-faced, full of outrage and triumph.
Damon jumped up from his chair. He had successfully lowered his pants. He now finished taking them off, and then his shirt, and then his underwear. His boots had been taken off ages ago and were lying under the table. Lastly, he whipped off his glove, which for an instant revealed his amputation, and ran out of the apartment (which was on the ground floor), and through the lobby, stark naked.
The stripping was what saved him: my parents were still in their chairs, too stunned to move. I grabbed a raincoat from the hall closet and chased after him. He had run past the doorman, who was laughing when I passed.
I found Damon huddling in a doorway a few doors down the street. I wrapped him in the raincoat, which unfortunately was black and opaque. He pushed it away, saying, “I can’t.” He was crying.
I walked with him, trying to hold the raincoat around him, to cover him up as much as possible.
“Don’t touch me with it,” he kept repeating and punching it where it happened to touch his skin.
I was annoyed at myself for not having brought his transparent clothes as a precautionary measure. Who did I think he was: a normal person?
When Damon calmed down slightly, we stopped at a corner to get a cab. While I tried to hail one, I ordered Damon to hold the raincoat in front of him, shielding the oncoming traffic from his nudity, which of course did no such favor to the pedestrians and shopkeepers behind him, where a small crowd soon gathered.
A cab finally stopped and took us to my apartment building. Before we got out, I luckily noticed, also disembarking, my parents, who had just arrived in another cab. I begged our driver to speed us away. My parents shoved themselves back into their cab and sped after us. It didn’t take us long to lose them.
Our next most attractive option was to go to a hotel, but since we estimated that no hotel would welcome a naked man, I decided that we should go to an often deserted little park by the river, supposedly to think of what to do next, but actually I was secretly hoping that Damon would get cold enough to agree to wear the raincoat long enough for us to check into a hotel.
But he didn’t. We stayed in the park for a while. Damon was sitting next to me on the bench, naked and shivering, his teeth chattering, and sometimes crying. Finally, even I was getting cold, and I couldn’t bear to see him frozen, so I thought of another plan.
I decided to take him to Stress Less Step, a massage parlor close by, which I learned, after a quick phone call, stayed open until 10:30 P.M.
The staff at Stress Less Step didn’t make a huge deal out of seeing a naked man walk in, perhaps because anyone walking in would end up naked anyway.
While Damon and I warmed ourselves in the sauna before our massages, we lamented the fact that he had not worn a mitten instead of a glove at the dinner; it would have made so much more sense, on every level, even with regards to the birth defect excuse. I then tried to soothe him, stroking his hair and speaking comforting words, in the heat, while my teeth burned.
After our massages, my masseuse came out and told Damon, in front of me, that I had been very tense. Then his masseuse, who overheard her, said “You don’t know what tense is unless you’ve done him. I wasn’t able to loosen a single knot.”
I was sorry to hear this, because I had hoped that Damon might now be relaxed enough to wear the raincoat to a hotel. I asked him, just in case, and the answer was no. But then he nudged me, looking at the reception desk. He was motioning toward the curtain that hung behind the desk and that covered the window looking out on the street. It was made of white lace. It was ample.
“Lace?” I said. “It’s not exactly the same.”
“It’ll do,” he whispered. “It has holes everywhere. It’s like being naked.”
I went up to the receptionist and asked him if we could buy or rent his curtain; that it was of utmost importance, and that we were willing to pay any price and to return it tomorrow or even later this evening. The man eyed Damon, and then agreed, as if understanding the purpose of my request. He asked for a large deposit, three-fourths of which he would give back to us upon the return of the curtain. The withheld portion would be used to dry clean the curtain, he said.
As he was unhooking it, I asked him where the nearest hotel was. He told us it was the Regency, around the corner.
Damon wrapped himself in the curtain and we walked down the street in this fashion to the Regency Hotel. We never got to find out if the Regency would allow us to check in, for the doorman wouldn’t let us through. So we kept walking, hoping to come upon another hotel. We did: the Pierre. This time we would be sly.
Damon stayed outside, out of sight, while I went inside and checked us in. Then I fetched him, and we were able to get in without anything worse than glares.
It was a relief to finally be alone in a room with his impractical nudity. We sat on the bed and hugged and commiserated. We went to bed early.
The next morning, while Damon waited in our hotel room for what was supposed to be only a short time, I went to my apartment building to fetch his transparent clothes. To my surprise, my parents were there, keeping watch outside my building, with real, lethal antique swords at their waists.
“How long have you been waiting here?” I asked them.
“Since yesterday,” said my mother.
“Don’t you have anything better to do with your lives?” I walked into the building, and they followed me.
“No,” answered my father, climbing the stairs after me. “We have nothing better to do than to save our daughter, who has lost her mind. We want an explanation. Why did you bring your own kidnapper to dinner?”
“I love him.”
“You love him? But he kidnapped you!”
“Well, now I love him.”
“Why?” asked my mother.
“Because he’s great.”
“But he kidnapped you!” repeated my father.
“Well, I kidnapped him too,” I said, unlocking the door to my apartment. “So now we’re even. I kept him in a cage and I fell in love with him. I got to see him living. And I got to find out about his tragic past.”