“Are you okay?” I asked.
She snorted and poured out two more shots. We drank and coughed and cried again, the woman eyeing me comically, her gaze distant and soft now in the weird light. My eyes paced the shiny surface of the bar. The cat purred. Then the woman went to the bathroom. A few minutes passed. I thought to leave, to go home to check my e-mail. If Britt Wendt had written to me, I’d have to be careful not to write back too quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was send her a drunken e-mail. Then I pictured Lacey Freeman’s buffet spread—roasted suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, whiskey-laced yams, German chocolate cake. I was hungry. I ate a piece of jerky and listened as the woman flushed the toilet and blew her nose again. When she returned, she poured out two more shots, and this time when we drank them we winced and moaned, but we didn’t cry.
“You like it here?” she asked. “Nobody comes here. But you? You like it?”
“It’s great,” I said.
She nodded, folded her arms, and rested her elbows on the bar. Swaying absentmindedly, she started singing an out-of-tune folk song, then caught herself and laughed. She seemed deep in thought for a while. I can’t really say what her deal was. It was like I had walked into some kind of cosmic warp zone. Then all of a sudden she looked up at me. We locked eyes. When I blinked, she smiled cruelly and squinted, as though calling me a coward. What nerve, I thought, to try to take me down, her only customer. I felt insulted by her bravado. And so we had a staring contest, like a game of chicken, to see who was the least penetrable, whose mind would conquer whose. I cleared my throat and stared long and hard. I felt my face go cold, my teeth clench. Her face remained relaxed, eyes open wide. Even when she puffed on her cigarette and the smoke rose up, she didn’t blink. She was amazing. There was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman. I could see that she was reading me, and my challenge was to resist her taunting expressions and try to read her even more deeply, with even more scorn and disgust than she had found for me. I tried as hard as I could, but all I came up with was my own foolishness. I blushed. It was like I was naked before her, holding my own limp dick in my hand.
She sucked her teeth and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, still staring. It was clear that she had beaten me. But I didn’t want to look away. Nor did I want her to. I enjoyed the attention, the scrutiny. So much of my life I’d been faking my reactions, claiming to myself and others that I liked what I liked because I believed it was good for me, while in fact I didn’t like that shit at all. This woman could see that I wanted to be ruined. I wanted someone—Britt Wendt, maybe—to come and destroy me. “Murder me” my eyes said to the woman. She laughed, as though she heard my thoughts and found them ridiculous. I laughed back at her, a false, triumphant laugh, as though she were a bitter ex-lover come to dance on my grave and mine was the zombie hand rising up out of the earth to strangle her.
“Psss,” she said, and looked away finally. She poured two more shots. We drank. Wordlessly, we mended our rapport. Then she offered me another cigarette and I lit the wrong end. That did it. “You waste,” she said and clucked her tongue. She put the bottle away. When I took out my wallet, she just waved her big fat hand. “It’s nothing,” she said. In perhaps my first genuine expression of gratitude, I leaned over the bar and tried to kiss her cheek. She moved out of the way and laughed at me again, this time with great satisfaction, like a rare, wondrous beauty, arrogant and magical. She pointed to the door.
Later that night, leaning against the crumbling, mildewed tile of the shower stall back home, I looked down at myself. I was beautiful, I thought. Legions of curious fingers should be reaching out to touch me. My arms were thick and strong. A spurt of wiry black hair rose from my wrist, trembling in the warm spray like a delicate morning tendril in the dew. There I was, spectacular and alive, and the whole world was missing it. Britt Wendt was missing it most of all. I thought I heard someone call my name, some sweet angel descending from heaven just to appreciate me—I was that great. But of course, when I stumbled out into the dark hall, there was nobody. No one in that flophouse even knew my name. The only faces I could ever hope to recognize were of the lovers on the other side of the gypsum. I’d seen them entering their room once on my way back from the toilets. Where were they now? I wondered. Dancing in the fucking moonlight? I stumbled back to my room, lay on my bed, checked my e-mail, and, finding nothing, cried a little with loneliness, and then a little more with hope. I fell asleep naked in front of my space heater.
? ? ?
“what are dimensions”
All lowercase, no punctuation. These were the words Britt Wendt had e-mailed back to me on December 26, seven minutes past midnight. I read them in the early dawn, my eyes still crossed with slivovitz, but the meaning was clear: she was interested. I rubbed my eyes, read her e-mail again, praised Jesus, then ran to the toilet and vomited with joy.