I lift him off your lap and your powder-blue cords have new dark scuff marks and I put him in his normal spot on the floor and you step back into your boots and slip into your little furry jacket and walk across the room away from the evidence of my affection, your panties and your bras. What a relief to open the door and lead you out of my home, and it’s a whole new world with you in it. You pause in the stairwell and point to a smudge on the wall. “Blood?” you whisper, alive and jocular, my furry nymph, and I nod in affirmation and you raise your eyebrows. “Larry’s blood?”
I smack your ass and you like it and you hop down my stairs and I’m the only one who knows about your dad and soon it will be time for the red ladle. You push open the door that I’ve been pushing open for almost fifteen years. We walk to the bodega and you’re practically skipping.
“Is this the part they’re trying to make into a historical district?” you ask. “I read about that somewhere.”
“No,” I say. “This is the other part of Bed-Stuy.”
My section reminds you of “Sesame Street and Jennifer Lopez songs” and every guy in the shop wants to bang you but you’re with me. You like the attention; you tell me you feel like a celebrity in here and you giggle. I pay for the Twizzlers and the Evian and you shove the Twizzlers in your back pocket, as if you need to draw more attention to your ass. So this is what it would be like if you lived here with me. It would be good, warm. Before you know it, we are back on my stoop.
We sit close and tear into the Twizzlers and share the Evian. A couple of teenage girls from the block pass by and mad-dog you with your Evian and you get sweet, defensive and assure me that you only drink Evian because Peach says it’s alkaline and you’re not wearing a bra, the way you weren’t wearing a bra that first day in the shop and it really does feel like a new beginning.
You scruff my hair with your cold little hand. “You wanna go back up?”
“Yeah,” I say and I wish, I wish I could have prepared for you, hidden your things and showered, and put on matching socks. But you are here now, walking up my stairs, slowly, teasing me with every deliberate, soft step.
It’s a blur from then on. My shitty sofa transforms into a hammock on a desert island in a Corona commercial minus the beer. We don’t need beer, we don’t need anything, we have us now. I keep my arms around you and you hold me in a way that would please Eric Carmen. We suck face until we can’t and then we just tell each other things. You tell me all about the Dickens festival, the fight with your father over cigarettes, your stepmonster and the shitty motel, the bratty stepsiblings, the overpriced candy apples. You want to know about me and I tell you I like you, a lot. We go back to sucking face. It goes on like that for a while and you’re all worn out and cozy. When you finally fall asleep your little body is limp. I don’t know if I will ever be able to sleep with you this close to me. You can’t tell lies in your sleep and you smile slightly, I think, every so often, and move closer to me.
The only reason I know that I am able to sleep in such close proximity to you is that the next morning the sound of the shower turning on wakes me up and you are no longer in my arms and you are naked, wet, there.
25
IF you live alone, you’d be a fucking masochistic freak to buy an opaque shower curtain. I started thinking about this in the Silver Seahorse, where the shower curtain was white, save a few spots of mold on the bottom. It’s like they were trying to make the rooms feel like Psycho. I thought buying a shower curtain would be the easiest fucking thing in the world but you go to Bed Bath & Beyond and they have like six hundred opaque shower curtains that are obviously not an option. And then you go online and there are thousands to choose from. I didn’t buy a totally clear one because you need something to look at while you’re on the can, but when you think about it, this shower curtain is something you are going to look at
Every.
Fucking.
Day.
So I started going through hundreds of options online. Most of the designs are bullshit you could never stomach every day (a map of the world, go fuck yourself, fish, a map of Brooklyn, really go fuck yourself, snowmen, the Eiffel Tower, nautical signs—I mean, I’m not some fucker who buys scarves at Urban Outfitters and rates movies on IMDB). I just wanted something funny and classic.
I finally settled on a clear shower curtain with yellow police tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS slapped across. And when I bought this shower curtain, I never imagined that you would be on the other side of the police tape, those damn yellow stripes blocking my view of you. Next time I’m going for an all clear, Beck. Lesson learned.
And really it’s all for the best because I don’t have time to watch you shower. I have to take this opportunity to hide all the Beckmobilia and hope that you didn’t do any snooping when you woke up. I retrace your steps. You left the bathroom closet door open (typical woman) after you got a towel. Fortunately you took the towel on top and you didn’t find your bras stashed under the bottom towel. Hopefully, you didn’t open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and find your scratched-up silver hair clip (I stole it the first day I stepped into your apartment, those clips are everywhere, you’d never miss it, right?). I needed it because a few delicious strands of your hair are woven in, holding your DNA, your scent. Did you open the refrigerator door and find your leftover bottle of Nantucket Nectar diet iced tea, half-empty? Your lips touched it and I wanted to keep your lips in my refrigerator. You did pour a glass of water and there is always the possibility that you would have mistaken your iced tea bottle for my own.
The bathroom door is the one thing in here that is actually not even slightly broken and you could have closed it all the way, but you didn’t. It’s like you want all doors open at all times, the way your windows have no curtains in your apartment. And I can’t help but feel excited that in some way, you wanted me to sneak a peek at you in there, right now, blocked by that Big Bird–colored police tape. You arch your back and let the water hit one tit and another tit and then you turn around and you like it here, in my shower, in my home and you let the water go at your neck and drip down your back and you take the bar of Ivory soap (my soap), and hold it between your breasts and move it down and let it fall and then you rub the suds on your belly, lower, lower until your hands are down there and then as soon as they’re down there they’re back up on your neck and you’re holding back and you’re so hot for me right now and I should take off my clothes and get in the shower but if I did that, you would look at the moving door and realize that your white bikini top is hanging on the doorknob. I know you didn’t notice it yet. And there’s a chance you will never notice it since you didn’t close the door all the way. I can grab the bikini and pray that you’re so wrapped up in your sopping wet—double entendre, baby—self and don’t notice or I can leave it there and assume that when you do finish—cleaning, not fucking—that you will be so preoccupied with drying off and blinded by the steam that you won’t notice your own bikini top.
Who am I kidding? I have to get that bikini top. I close my eyes. I pray. My hand is shaking when I reach around to the interior side of the door and pull it off the doorknob. You don’t notice and everything is safe again and I really need you to get the fuck out of my apartment. I put your bikini behind the frozen Stouffer’s things I buy but never eat and then you are out of the shower, out of the bathroom and you call out.
“Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?”
For a second, I panic. You know and the bikini is a gun and I am fucked but you are in a towel, dripping and I look like a fucking lunatic against the fridge.
“I’m just kidding,” you say. “I know it’s a bad joke, but it’s not that bad. Chill out.”