“That’s right,” Hank said in his college-professor voice. “People don’t buy paintings. They buy stories. And everyone has a theory about Eggplant X’s name.”
“What’s your theory?” Sue asked Hank.
Hank was pleased with Sue’s question, because it gave him the chance to do some more art-talk jerking off, and so he said, “I think he wants you to make up your own story, which is smart. And why he’s my top-selling client too. He doesn’t explain any of his pieces. He says they exist free and clear of him. Once he lets them go into the world, he lets each piece take on a life of its own.”
“I bet he cashes the fucking paychecks, though,” I said.
“First. Please watch your language around your granddaughter,” Hank shot back at me, as if he never said the word fuck himself. “And second, why wouldn’t he cash those checks? It would be un-American to refuse what the market offers, right? That’s capitalism. America’s true religion. You taught me that, Pop.”
Hank only calls me Pop when he’s making fun of me. And I also knew my son was mocking me with the un-American comment and talk of capitalism, which I believe in wholeheartedly because I’m no lousy red fucking Communist. But regardless of all that, I let Hank’s comments slide. I wanted Sue and my son to get together, and he had to appear confident and attractive to woo her. If I emasculated Hank in a battle of wits—and I could do that easily even with my fucked-up brain—Sue would never again be attracted to him. So I let him be alpha male for the evening, if only for the well-being of my granddaughter.
Hank went on to talk about Eggplant X’s paintings related to “the Asian experience in America.” Lots to do with dry cleaning and martial arts being racist, which I don’t quite understand because Bruce Lee types and every Chinese dry cleaner in America have historically made big bank.
Asians are the best when it comes to martial arts and dry cleaning—every single moron in the entire world knows that. I use Asian dry cleaners exclusively. White people are shit when it comes to dry cleaning. And if I were making a kung fu movie, I’d make damn sure the lead was Asian. There is no white Bruce Lee. Period. I like some of Chuck Norris’s politics, but he is the minivan to Bruce Lee’s Corvette.
And yet I kept all this to myself and let my son puff out his pretty feathers and strut his stuff. He didn’t have any other angle to run on women, and sometimes it’s best to go with what you do adequately rather than try to attempt something beyond your skill set.
I could tell Hank was uneasy about Sue’s reaction. He gets tense talking about race-related subjects in front of people of different ethnicities. I don’t understand it, because he’s always so fucking sure about his opinions in a room full of whites. If Hank knew how many times I said the word gook in front of Sue, he would have had a heart attack right there and then.
There was no dessert, because Hank was trying to keep me “heart healthy,” and I don’t count cut-up fruit as dessert. So I said, “Someone has a bedtime that expired a long time ago,” meaning Ella, get your ass to bed now. I volunteered to tuck her in so that Hank and Sue could be alone and hopefully get down to business.
Ella managed to milk more time out of her father by being cute and telling stories about how she was learning about Chile, “one of the skinniest countries in the world,” which prompted me to ask Hank if Chile was a “heart-healthy country” being that it was so skinny, a good joke that he ignored completely. Because he is weak when it comes to raising a child, Ella’s stall tactics worked for a good fifteen minutes, but eventually I got her to give Hank and Sue kisses on the cheeks, and then I was in the upstairs bathroom with Ella, making sure she washed her face and brushed her teeth.
This next bit of information might shock you, but I actually combed Ella’s hair. Her mother wasn’t there anymore to do it, and Ella had only just met Sue—and, truth be told, I like combing hair. I find it soothing. I used to comb Jessica’s hair when she was depressed. Her mother used to do it for her when Jessica was little. She’d get dangerously sad back then too, especially in the winter, when there was less sun. It was in her genes. Whenever my wife started to slide south, you could see it in her hair, which would get greasy and matted-looking. I couldn’t stand seeing that, and because I didn’t know how to cure depression, I started combing hair. It was something I could do. And combing Ella’s hair was also something I could do.
Don’t tell anyone about this shit. Both about my dead wife’s depression and the fact that I like combing my granddaughter’s hair. The first part is none of anyone’s goddamn business, and the latter might give people the wrong idea about me. I’m not a fucking pervert or anything like that. A little girl needed her hair combed, and so I did it. Period. If Femke hadn’t abandoned her own flesh and blood, it wouldn’t have been necessary for me to step up, but that Dutch whore left, and I do what needs to be done.
While I was combing out Ella’s long brown hair, holding the roots, making sure not to hurt her, I said, “Do you think that Ms. Sue would make a good mother?”
“I like her,” Ella said. “She isn’t a mommy?”
“No,” I said. Then, just to test the water, I added, “She would probably love to have a kid around to take care of. You know of any little girls who need a mother?”
Ella thought about it for a few seconds and then said, “Will Ms. Sue be coming back here?”
I told her I sure hoped so.
Then Ella asked if Sue was my friend, and I said Sue was maybe my best friend lately, but more like a daughter.
Ella spun around here and said, “I know you hate my mother, and I’m mad at her for leaving Daddy. But I miss her. I really miss her!”
There were tears in her little brown eyes, and I thought up a million and one ways to kill Ella’s Dutch bitch mother, but I had to push all that deep down inside of me because Ella was sobbing into my chest. Her little forehead was pushing the dog tags into my breastplate and it hurt, but I didn’t say anything about that or even move Ella’s head. I just put my arms around her until she cried herself to sleep, at which point I tucked her in and then tiptoed out of her room, shutting off the lights and closing the door behind me.
I went into stealth mode here and crept down the stairs just enough to get a view of Sue and Hank, who were now on the couch.
Sue kept touching Hank’s forearm as they talked, which could only mean one of two things. Either she thought Hank was a homosexual—I could honestly understand why, the way he went on about art all night and insisted on being called “Henri”—or she was actually starting to fall for him.