Part 10 (1/2)
”I know you.”
”Yes. f.u.c.k me.”
”All these things you haven't”I entered her hard”told me!”
”Yes.” Her legs wrapped around my waist. I felt the socks on my back. Her arms tightened around my neck. ”Secrets. Crybaby. Secrets.”
”I hate them.”
She stopped moving.
”I hate your secrets.”
The fear on her face turned into a smile. ”Take them. Take them all. f.u.c.k me now. You can have them all.”
I pushed as hard as I could. She closed her eyes, chuckled.
”I want them. Promise me”
”Just do this now. Yes, that. Whatever you want. Whatever you want. You...”
It was so good. And when it was over, the boy would come home and we three would sit at the kitchen table and be a family again.
Lily came quickly, which was not like her, but then kept pumping and moving, keeping it going as long as she could. ”Max, I love you. Oh, Max.” She rose and fell. Her eyes were shut above a huge smile. I watched. Half of me swam in her like a sea, the other half watched. Watched her from as far away as the moon.
”Absence makes the heart lose weight.”
Gus Duveen looked at Ibrahim like he was a bad smell. ”What does that mean?”
”This is a saying in Saru. It is what Lily felt when Max was not here. I had an uncle who married a woman who turned into paper. This is not uncommon, but he did not know it until it was almost too late.”
Squeezing my knee under the table, Lily leaned over and whispered, ”I love Ibrahim's stories.”
”My uncle went on a business trip to Umm Hujul and met a woman there. They fell madly in love and he asked to marry her. This was all right and everything went according to plan. After the wedding, they returned to Saru and he created a household for her. Then he is a businessman, so he must go out and return to work. He is a traveling salesman all over the Middle East but no big worry. He told his new wife he would be coming back every week to see her. Now, the first time he returned, she was happy to see him but was much, much lighter. When he picks her up in bed, she almost floats out of his arms. 'You must eat something!' he says, but they are so glad to see each other nothing more is said about it. The next time he returns to his house, she is fifteen times lighter. She can walk on water now, but no one is impressed because she is not holy, only skinny. My uncle thinks this is not love, but blackmail: this is her way of making him stay at home. So he tells her he did not marry a balloon, and if she wants to lift off the earth, he will not be interested in her anymore. Desperate, she says, 'Take me with you and I will do anything.' 'Are you crazy? Women do not go with men to their business.' But she is very stubborn and says, 'Well then, unless I can be near you always, I will lose the rest of my weight and disappear. I cannot help it. My body loves you too and has its own mind. I don't want to die, but if it wants to it will, husband.'”
Lily caressed the inside of my thigh. Since returning from New York, I'd experienced a completely new side of her: hungry, worried, agitated. We made love more than ever before, but her body stayed tight as a strung bow and never seemed to relax. Even when we'd finished and lay there in the calm dark, I felt her tension. Too soon she would want to start again and I had to catch up to her desire. Out of the bedroom, she was overly bright and peppy. There were few quiet moments anymore; out of the bedroom everything had to be either in motion or in the planning stage. I had the feeling she instinctively knew what I'd discovered and wanted to steer our lives away from that moment of truth, that moment of impact. As long as she kept moving, talking, planning... the disastrous facts could be avoided. Yet how could she know what I'd found? I knew about women's eerie sense of intuition, but did it go this far?Were they that clairvoyant?
On my part, I simply hadn't had the courage to confront her. I justified this cowardice by figuring I wanted to observe her a while with my new knowledge in hand. Scrutinize someone from a different position and you see new things. Look at them with Xray eyes and their beauty becomes bones and blood, curves, dips, cells, cause and effect.
”But G.o.d does not let us love someone only a little while.” Ibrahim reached over and touched Gus on the arm. His grumpy lover smiled back at him and nodded. ”My uncle was a man first and a businessman second. He loved his wife and did not want to see her turn into air. What could he do? One day right before he was to leave again, they were playing together. You know the way lovers play. He had a ballpoint pen, and because the point was not out, he pressed it to his wife's neck and pretended to write something. Now remember how thin she was. He kept on doing it. But you know what happened?
She was so slender that her blood rose up to the edge of her skin when the pen touched over it, like fish to food in the aquarium. And then there was his name, written in blue blood beneath his poor skinny wife's skin! My uncle was horrified but fascinated too, of course. Once he saw this and showed her, he wrote many other things too and all of them stayed visible on her the longest time. Hours, probably.”
”f.u.c.king guy used his wife for a pad, and they lived happily ever after,” Gus said, ruining the end of the story.
Ibrahim was delighted. ”You're so smart, Gus. That's right. He took his wife to his business meetings now and could explain her presence there when he said he would be taking notes on her during the meeting. If n.o.body believed him, he would just show them how it worked. She became his paper.”
A moment later Ib was called to the phone and got up from the table, leaving the rest of us to look at each other in the wake of this story. Gus spoke first.
”Sometimes I genuinely think he believes them.”
Lily waved him off. ”Oh, he does not. He's just being entertaining.”
”But they all have some kind of point, don't they? They're not just Arabian Nights.” Sullivan Band spoke. ”What was that one about?” She was due to go on duty in a few minutes. ”Sometimes I use his stories in our drama group. As exercises. The only thing I got from this was women are weak and'll do anything to be by their men. s.e.xist!”
”It's not about weak women, it's about transformation. What happens to us, or what we are willing to do for the people we love.”
”That's right, Max.”
”I agree.”
Sullivan held up both hands. ”I think you're wrong, but c'est la vie . I have to go be a waitress.”
She stood and walked to the kitchen, pa.s.sing Ibrahim on the way. They spoke for a moment, then continued in their different directions. When he got to the table, he grinned at me.
”You think my uncle's story's about love, Max?”
”Whatever it's about, I liked it. Would you mind if I used some of it in 'Paper Clip'?”
”No, that would be an honor. Does everybody have enough to eat? Yes? Because I'm sorry but Gus, Lily, and I have to go and talk to a man about salmon. Come, partners, the salmon man is waiting.”
The three of them walked out together, leaving Alberta Band and me at the table. Lunch for employees at Crowds and Power was a fullblown affair, starting around eleven and continuing for the most part until they were done and not when the doors opened for the day to the public. I loved eating with them, listening to their stories, offering some of my own. The restaurant was a United Nations, a hotel lobby of comings and goings, greetings and goodbyes. The food was good, the people who prepared and presented it intriguing.
”Max, can I ask a favor?”
”Sure.”
”I never told you, but I'm a really big fan of your comic strip. Could you draw me a little sketch of the two guys in it? Nothing elaborate or involved. I'd love to frame it and put it on the wall of my apartment.”
”Alberta, I'd love to. Do you want it drawn on something special?””No, anything would be great.”
”I've got a nice sketchpad in the car. Let me go get it and I'll do one in there. But stick aroundI've got an idea and need you here to do it.”
When I returned, she had combed her hair and freshened her lipstick.
”Okay, sit right where you are. I need you for about ten minutes.”
Alberta is a goodlooking woman, so it was a pleasure to use her as a model.
”What're you doing?”
”Keep your pants on. You'll see when I'm finished. Turn your head a little to the left. Yeah! Like that. Stay still.”
We chatted while I drew and she gave up trying to guess what I was doing.
”Alberta, tell me about Lily. Whatever comes to your mind. I always like to hear what other people have to say about her.”
Rather than ask what I meant, she folded her hands in her lap and looked into the near distance.
”She was the one who hired us, you know. Sullivan and I'd been working at this dreary deli up on the Strip. The boss pinched our a.s.ses too many times, so we hauled freight out of there. Not many places hire two people at a time, and you'd be surprised at how biased they are against hiring sisters. Like the two of you're in cahoots and'll steal 'em blind. Anyway, we heard there might be something here and we came down for an interview. First thing I saw when I came in the door was Mabdean, who'd just cut off all his hair and looked like a big black genie in a bottle. I turned to my sister and said, 'I'll wash floors for this place if he works here.' Gus came around but wouldn't deign to talk to us, Ibrahim was out, and we waited around till finally Lily asked if she could help us. We thought she owned the place, judging by the way people kowtowed to her. I don't think we talked ten minutes before she gave us both jobs and then a week later Mabdean and I moved in together.