I could see her sitting on the couch and pressing play on the remote. Every gesture, every scream, every glare and growl I’d made for the last week was Dana’s. Who are you? she would rightly ask. Are you Dana? Do you even know who you are? No, I would sob, No, I don’t. Jim brought me the thermometer.
“It’s the kind you stick in your ear. Or do you want to just go home?”
“No, no. Can’t go home.” I lay on the floor. At noon Phillip texted a single question mark and a tiny cartoon emoticon of a clock. He’d been waiting for almost two months now. Just two months ago my life had been ordered and peaceful. I rolled onto my stomach and prayed for him to deliver me from this situation I’d gotten myself into. What would be the emoticon for Carry me to your penthouse and tend to me as a husband? Jim laid a wet paper towel on my forehead.
At seven P.M. Nakako asked me to turn on the alarm when I left. “You do know the code, right?” I pulled myself up off the floor, stumbled out with her, and drove home shivering. I parked in the driveway and forced myself out of the car, braced for ridicule.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the front door.
“Yum, yum, yum,” said a voice from the shadows. She swaggered out and put her hand on the small of my back. She was wearing a backward baseball cap.
“Step away!” I barked, and she hung back for exactly one, two, three seconds before lunging. The next five minutes proved that my neighbors didn’t care if I lived or died.
When I finally made it to the front door I shut it behind me and smiled, touching my cheeks. Of course there weren’t any actual tears, but I was that moved. She must have practiced all day, rehearsing in front of the TV. Any two foes can fight in anger, but this was something rare. I was reminded of the Christmas Day soccer game between enemies in World War I or II. She still repulsed me, I’d still shoot her in battle the next day, but until dawn we’d play this game.
The next evening we did the entire DVD, in order. “Gang Defense” was the most confusing because there were two bad men and another man in all denim who didn’t want trouble. “Hey,” he said to the others. “This isn’t cool. Let’s scram.” Clee switched roles between the three men with no warning; I was constantly stopping to reorient myself.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. “I’m over here.”
“Which one are you?”
She hesitated. Until now there had been no overt acknowledgment of the video or that we were anyone but our own angry selves.
“I’m the first man,” she said.
“The one in denim?”
“The first bad man.”
It was the way she was standing when she said it—her feet planted wide, her big hands waiting in the air. Just like a bad man, the kind that comes to a sleepy town and makes all kinds of trouble before galloping off again. She wasn’t the first bad man ever but the first I’d ever met who had long blond hair and pink velour pants. She snapped her gum impatiently.
We sailed through the rest of the scene and then repeated it two more times. It was like square dancing or tennis, I told Ruth-Anne the following week. “Once you get the moves down, it’s second nature—a real vacation for the brain.”
“So you would describe your pleasure as . . . ?”
“A little theatrical but mostly athletic. And I’m the most surprised of anyone because I’ve never been good at sports.”
“And for Clee? Do you think her enjoyment is also athletic?”
“No.” I lowered my eyes. It wasn’t really my business to say.
“You think it’s something else?”
“For her it might not be a game, it might be real. She’s a ‘misogynist’ or something. That’s her thing.” I described the wolfish intensity that came over her when she simulated. “Of course this is your department, not mine. Do you think it might be psychological?”
“Well, that’s a broad term.”
“But accurate, right?”
“Sure, okay,” she said begrudgingly. She thought I was trying to get two diagnoses for the price of one.
“Say no more,” I demurred, holding up the palms of my hands. To change the subject I pointed to the heavy-looking Chinese food cartons lined up on her desk. “Is that all from you?”
“I drink a lot of water,” she said, and patted her water bottle. “At the end of the day I gather them up and empty them all in the bathroom at once.”
“The bathroom here or the bathroom at home?”
“The bathroom here!” she laughed. “Can you imagine? Me driving home a zillion containers of urine and feces? What a mess!”
She mimed driving a car and we laughed about that. It really was a very funny image. Laughing like friends always emphasized that we weren’t. This wasn’t real like the laughing she did at home.
She kept driving, and I ponied up another chuckle. Why didn’t she stop?
“So what if it’s real for her?” she said, suddenly dropping her hands. “Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting.”