Читать книгу No One Belongs Here More Than You - Миранда Джулай - Страница 10

Many times people have asked if I would like to meet their sister. Some women never marry and don’t fuss much with their appearance, and the years don’t tiptoe around them. These women, they have brothers, and the brothers of such women often know a man like me, an old man who is alone. Men alone often have one or two large things wrong with them, but these are things that the brothers think their sisters should be able to live with. An example of such a problem is: still being in love with one’s deceased wife. This wasn’t my problem; I had never been in love with anyone, dead or alive. But this is an example of the type of problem that men like me have, sizable. We are often introduced to people’s sisters. Sisters come in all ages; this took me a while to realize. I have no siblings, but I remember boys in school talking about their sisters, and so I always imagined sisters being of a certain age, school age. Did I want to meet their sister? At first I was taken aback to see such a tall, elderly sister. But of course everyone is old now, even the beautiful sisters of the boys I knew in school. It has been so long since I met a little girl. Men like me, men alone, we are the least likely people to be introduced to little girls. And I can tell you in one word why this is. Rape.

Almost all the purses in the world are made at the one place, Deagan Leather. Even if they have different tags on them, even if one of them says MADE IN SRI LANKA and the other one says MADE WITH PRIDE IN THE USA, they were both assembled in Richmond, California, at Deagan. When you finish your twentieth consecutive year at Deagan, they throw you a party with hula punch, and you automatically get free purses for the rest of your life. Victor Caesar-Sanchez and I are the only two people who’ve gotten the party so far. We play a game called What Good Thing Can You Make Out of Unlimited Purses. An example of a good thing is a leather house, or a leather airplane that actually flies. I didn’t know the name of Victor’s wife until she died last year: it was Caroline. I guess she wasn’t Mexican like him; I had pictured her Mexican this whole time. And I did not know he had a sister until he asked, Do you want to meet my sister? Her name was Blanca Caesar-Sanchez. Again I made that mistake of imagining her a teenager. A teenager in a white dress. New little breasts. I did want to meet her.

He arranged for Blanca and me to meet at an AIDS benefit party. Many of the people there were in their twenties and thirties, and I wondered if they were Blanca or the friends of Blanca. I went out of my way to be tolerant of them. There were also people in their forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, and these people had a chance of being Blanca, too, or the parents of Blanca, or grandparents or even great-grandparents of Blanca, if Blanca was a child. There were a few children running around, sisters of brothers, who could be Blanca or Blanca’s grandchild. The evening wore on. Many times I saw Victor and he told me that he had just seen his sister but lost her again. Then he said that he had in fact sent her over to my table not fifteen minutes ago to introduce herself, and had I not met her? I had not.

Well, what did you think of her?

I didn’t meet her!

Oh, I thought you said you had.

No, I said I had not, I had not.

Well, that is a shame. I think she left. She told me she liked you.

What?

She said she wants to see you again.

But I never met her!

Watch it, that’s my sister you’re talking about.

I am six foot three. I weigh 180 pounds. I have gray hair that is receded. I am not fit, but I have a naturally fast metabolism, so I am skinny. Except for my stomach.

Blanca came in and out of my life over the next few weeks, but she never came in far enough for me to see her. I failed to meet her in so many different ways that I began to know her anyway. I knew the qualities of her particular absence. I dressed up for it. I wore a suit that I had never gotten the hang of in the seventies, but now it felt all right. It’s an unusual suit because it’s light beige, almost off-white. You don’t see that color much in big amounts, suit and jacket both. It became my uniform for not meeting Blanca.

Was she at the Tiny Bubble Lounge last night?

She was! Did she introduce herself?

No.

I told her you sometimes go there. She’s been stopping by regularly.

I’d like to meet her.

And she’d like to meet you.

Victor, she’s gotta introduce herself. I see her in my dreams.

And what does she look like?

She’s an angel.

That’s Blanca, that’s the one.

Is she blond?

No, she’s dark-haired, like me.

A brunette.

Well, I don’t know about that.

You just said she was.

Yeah, I just don’t like to hear my sister talked about that way.

Brunette? That’s nothing bad.

Yeah. But it’s how you said it.

“Brunette” said by a man who has to use two hands to jerk off each night, that’s what she did to me. I knew when she was near because I started breathing harder. The whole feeling in the room changed: her smell wrapped itself around my face, and I just knew she was there and I couldn’t stop thinking she was a teenager. Even though it made no sense. The bar was full of smoke and men, but I could see her, behind someone, just out of view, in tight jeans and tennis shoes, chewing gum, with pierced ears and some kind of band holding her hair back. A ribbon or some kind of plastic band. And pierced ears. I said that already. Okay. That’s what I saw. Some may say that such a girl is not ready for a relationship with a man, especially a man in his late sixties. But to that I say: We don’t know anything. We don’t know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn’t force her. I wouldn’t have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don’t know anything. Call me when you’ve cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I’ll listen.

There were many times a day when I needed her. When I walked or took the bus to Deagan, when I was in motion, and when I was still. When I was inspecting purses and all of them were perfect, down to the last grommet. Day after day, no flaws, just a building tension, a growing fog that could be cut only by a backward strap or a missing buckle. Some people go on forever without flinching, without crying out. But I cried, Blanca! When the sun became unusually high and bright, or when it sank, especially when it sank far below the hills and I felt something similarly bright falling down inside of me, I called, Blanca. I called out to my own heart, as if she were within me like an egg. White like an egg and not quite ready; about to be, like an egg.

I had never thought much about Victor, but now he became this exciting person because he was Blanca’s brother. Victor thought of me differently, too, more as a member of his family. As if Blanca and I were already a couple. He invited me over to a family-style dinner with Blanca and their parents. It was in an old people’s home, and Mr. and Mrs. Caesar-Sanchez were the oldest people I’ve ever met who were still alive. The food they ate was all intravenous. When I asked Mrs. Caesar-Sanchez where her daughter was, she looked so incredibly confused that I let it go. There was a picture of her on the wall, not Blanca but her mother, as a girl. She had Blanca’s look in her eyes: come hither, come yon. Victor talked to his parents as if they understood him, but I knew they didn’t. He gave them each a purse, the popular SOHO-style shoulder tote in pebbled leather. It didn’t seem like his parents would ever stand again, and shoulder totes really demand standing. Walking, living, needing, caring, toting. It seemed they were so far beyond these things, but I don’t know, my parents died before I was old enough to give them anything. Victor and I ate the Chinese fried chicken that we had brought with us, and then we all watched a show where couples compete at remodeling their kitchens. Victor drove me home, and we did not speak in the car because what was there to say. For the eighthundredthmillionthtrillionth time, she hadn’t shown up.

I had never been in love, I had been a peaceful man, but now I was caught in agitation. I accidentally hurt myself with my own body, as if I were two clumsy people fighting. I held on to some things too tightly, ripping pages as I turned them, and let go of other things too suddenly, plates, breaking them. Victor sat with me at lunch all week and tried to interest me in things that were not interesting. Finally, he invited me over to his apartment to have drinks with Blanca. I could tell this was it. I had wowed their parents with my comfortable silence. Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I will ask myself: Is it worth it? And it just isn’t. I wore the same thing I had worn all the other times I thought I was going to meet her, the all-beige, but this time I was more careful. I tucked my shirt into my boxers before I pulled up my pants, and when I pulled them up, they stroked the hairs on my legs. I was noticing everything, I was electric.

Blanca, of course, was late. Victor and I laughed about this, and I really laughed because now it was really funny in a way it had not been before. Goddamn that girl! She knew how to tease a guy. Victor and I toasted to Blanca and her lateness. I filled her cup and drank it for her, here’s to my girl! My little girl!

At midnight Victor cleared his throat and said there was something he hadn’t told me.

She’s not coming?

No, she’s coming.

Oh, good.

But I had a little plan for tonight, for you and Blanca.

What.

I have E.

What?

E.

What’s E?

Ecstasy.

Oh.

Have you ever had it?

No, I’ll just stick with my beer.

You’re gonna like this.

I had a joint once and I didn’t feel right for a whole year.

This isn’t like that; it’ll make you nice and loose with Blanca.

I don’t think she wants me loose.

Trust me, she does. She’ll have the third tab when she comes in.

Blanca likes this stuff?

Of course.

Is she like a … wild, out-of-control teenager?

You know she is.

God, I thought maybe she was, but I didn’t want to ask.

Just put it under your tongue, like this.

Okay. Is she seventeen?

Yeah. Now let’s just listen to the music and wait for it to kick in.

We sat on Victor’s couch and listened to Johnny Cash or someone who sounds like that. A cowboy singer singing his cowboy song. I thought about Blanca and could feel her coming closer. I could almost hear her shoes on the street below, the sound of her running up the stairs, the door flying open. I imagined this again and again, hoping the door would fly open at the exact moment that I was imagining it flying open, and it would be a dream come true. The music, the cowboy, was a part of this. It made the air thicker, like I was thinking on the outside of my head. My thoughts were in the air, riding the song like a horse. I began to think of Victor as the cowboy. And for some reason I said this. Even though I don’t like call and response, I called out.

Victor.

Yeah.

It’s like you’re the cowboy.

Yeah. What cowboy?

Singing the song, the cowboy song.

That’s me, all right. You hear that sadness in my voice.

I do.

There’s a lot of sadness in me.

I can hear it.

I think you’ve got a similar pain.

I do. I want to see her so bad, Victor. You have no idea.

I know.

Can you just show me a picture? Please.

You know I can’t do that.

Why not?

Come onto the couch.

I sat beside Victor and I knew it was happening, the drugs. He held my hand and I rubbed his arm harder and harder and it felt okay. But then the rubbing was all of us, the whole length of our giant old selves. It was like a humping thing. I was thinking of eagles humping each other and then I remembered they don’t hump, they lay eggs. I pushed him away.

What if Blanca walked in? You’re her brother.

Let’s just take our shirts off. The pants can stay on.

Are you gay?

I said the pants can stay on.

When do these drugs stop? If I drink water, do they stop sooner?

Just let this happen. It’s okay. Just let it happen. There’s no Blanca.

I didn’t believe him for three hours. I sat in Victor’s bedroom and he stayed on the couch and we waited for the drugs to stop and I waited for Blanca. When the drugs were over, I suddenly knew he was right. It was as if I had been on the drug for the last three months, and now I was back. I came out of the bedroom and sat on the couch.

I feel like she’s been killed.

I’m sorry.

Do you even have a sister?

No.

Why did you take me to meet your parents?

I wanted them to meet you before they died.

Oh.

It felt like the air was multiplying, and I couldn’t even think about what Victor said because I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the air. I tried to think of myself as a breathing machine. I told myself: You won’t die from overbreathing, because you are a breathing machine, specially calibrated to adjust to the changing amounts of air in the room.

He said, Tell me about the girls.

What girls?

You like little girls.

No, teenagers.

Where do you meet them?

What? I don’t do that, I just think about it.

That’s good.

Yeah. I wouldn’t do that.

Not even with Blanca?

Yeah, I guess with Blanca, but she’s—that’s different.

You don’t like grown women?

Not so far, not yet.

Have you ever had sex with a woman?

Yeah.

What about a man?

No.

Victor brought his arms around me and I felt sick in my stomach and my cock felt sick, too. It felt feverish and painful and I rubbed it just to clear my head. Victor rubbed it, too, with tears on his cheeks and lips. I wanted to punch him, punch a hole right through him and then fill that hole with my body, and I was, I was doing that. He was sobbing now the way Blanca would sob, like a child. When I came, I came on the couch; I didn’t want to come inside him because of what sperm can do. But he ate it off the couch and then he kissed me with a deep tongue, so whatever sperm can do, it was doing it to me. We slept. It was the sleep of one hundred years. And when we woke, it was still night, and Victor reached across me and turned on the lamp.

We were two old men. Everything seemed ordinary, even overly ordinary. There was a fly in the room and it buzzed around in a way that told us nothing amazing had ever happened in this place. I began to think about work, about the new hires in grommeting. I had to remember to tell them about the missing clamp on the heat sealer. I knew if I said something about this, if I said the word “grommeting,” then everything would be as it had been, forever, amen.

We’ll have to talk to the new hires tomorrow.

Yeah? Didn’t Albie train them on Wednesday?

Yeah, but the ones in—

I was about to say “grommeting,” the word “grommeting” was pulling up from the wet darkness under my throat; the G was coming forth with the grimace that makes the G sound. But in that instant the buzzing fly lurched toward my ear, and with animal reaction, fierce and unthinking, I swung at it and knocked over the lamp. It broke more than was fitting, crashing and shattering as if it were a lamp twelve times its size. In a final gesture, the bulb exploded in fireworks that fell quietly, extinguishing themselves. We said nothing, but the sudden return of darkness seemed to be a question, raised like eyebrows, waiting. Whatever I did next, whatever I said, would decide me. I didn’t say “grommeting,” but the G stayed in my throat, gathering voice.

I growled.

And Victor turned to me, right away, pressing his face against my neck. The new life came easily after this, a growl.