Secondhand World Page 8

  “No.” Hero smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “The great void.”

  “You mean—”

  “Nothing. That's it.”

  I thought I knew what he meant. All that expansive landscape, the obliterating whiteness of sea and sky, the ominous ever absence/presence of the whale.

  “Well, if it's about nothing,” I said, “it sure takes its time.”

  Hero laughed and began to sing. “‘ I can go a hundred miles an hour/Long as I got the Almighty Power/Stuck up there with my pair of fuzzy dice …’”

  Flagrant

  An afternoon in late March. Hero and I make love in my bed. We are off manuals now, having learned what each of us likes (Hero: kneeling in back of me with his hands on my hips; me: Hero going down on me, lapping in avid circles), with room for improvisation and fooling around. We act out our fantasies—the rock star and the groupie; Lolita and Humbert Humbert; the housewife and the meter man—starring in our own private porno movies, breaking the mood by laughing too hard.

  Afterward, on this particular afternoon, we sit naked in bed while Hero rolls a chubby joint, swiping at its seam with his tongue. I get up to open the window. “It's snowing,” I say. Hero gets up from the bed and hands me the lighted joint, which I inhale as he wraps his arms around me. We look out at the white that has settled on the lawn and across the black asphalt of the street. “It's so beautiful,” I say.

  “You are,” he says, kissing the side of my neck. We sink back onto the bed.

  Later we take a shower. I kneel to suck Hero's cock, gasping against the cascade of water. He pulls me up and runs the soap across my breasts and stomach. I can feel his hard-on against my ass. He enters me, lathery and wet; I have to stand on my tiptoes and hold on to the showerhead. When I come it's like being tossed, like waves breaking over my head and pushing me under. I am aware of Hero behind me, his orgasm whirlpooling around me; the voice of a sailor drowning at sea.

  We towel each other dry. Hero reaches down to get behind my knees and ankles, between my legs. He kisses me there. “Your racing stripe,” he calls my pubic hair. His fine, fair hair is slicked to his head, his pubic hair like a white beard dripping around his shriveled penis.

  “We can call that one wet monkey position,” I say, folding him up inside my towel.

  “I got the banana,” Hero says. He rubs his penis, already hardening, against my thigh. I laugh and throw the towel at him. The bathroom windows are painted with steam. I pull open the bathroom door and the vapor rushes to escape. I run for the bedroom, Hero right behind me, and there is my mother on the stairs, one hand clutched to the railing.

  Jamming

  Hero started a band called Choosy Mothers Choose Jif. Its members: Dusty on drums, leonine head, sullen, hulking. Adrienne on bass, picking her way through chords like she was negotiating a minefield. Hero on lead guitar, thin, dressed in black, with his pouting lips and dazzling Kabuki face. Audrey on lead vocals, fringed suede coat over miniskirt and cowboy boots, swaying with her eyes closed, her alto scratchy and sweet. I helped out with lyrics and attended all sessions, which were conducted in Rachel's basement.

  That strange flower, the sun,

  Is just what you say.

  Have it your way.

  Just what you say.

  The world is ugly,

  And the people are sad, baby.

  That savage of fire,

  That seed,

  Have it your way.

  Just what you say.

  The world, it is ugly, babe,

  And the people are sad,

  And the people are sad, yeah.

  It was our riff on Wallace Stevens. Hero rocked it out, singing backup to ethereal Audrey with his own crooning, Dylanesque whine.

  “No, no, no, Aud.” Hero stopped, and the other band members trailed off, Dusty crashing against the cymbals. “It's And the people are sad,’ beat, BEAT. You're leaving out a beat.”

  Audrey chewed a hangnail. “Sounds better my way,” she said.

  Hero shook his head. “It messes up the rhythm,” he said. “What do you guys think?” Dusty and Adrienne shrugged.

  “Sorry, wasn't listening,” Rachel said, doodling on her math homework.

  Hero looked over at me. “What about you, Isa?” he said.

  Audrey shifted her weight from one cowboy boot to the other. “Well, of course she's going to side with you; she's your girlfriend, for Chrissake!”

  “Isa can be objective,” Hero said. “She's got a mind of her own. What do you think, Isa?”

  “I dunno,” I said, distracted by European history. “What would Wallace Stevens think?”

  Hero pulled his guitar strap from around his neck and put his guitar in its green velvet coffin, where it lay in state. “Okay,” he said, “since no one else seems to care about the musical integrity of the piece, let's just call it a night.”

  Audrey smiled. “It's a night,” she called it.

  Canceled Class

  My mother didn't say a word as Hero dressed and left. By this time the snow was coming down hard, the wind sending it in wild, roundabout routes, like feathers dumped before an oscillating fan.

  “Classes were canceled,” my mother said. She stood at the top of the stairs still, her book bag in her hand. Melted snow glistened in her hair.

  “I have to get dressed,” I said, surprised by the strength in my voice. I went into my room and put on my jeans and shirt. The bed looked incriminating, the sheets wrung and twisted; I retrieved the bedspread from the floor and threw it on top. Evidence of pot and sex was sweet and underlying despite the open window where the cold air strummed at the curtain. I lifted the window higher. Blood was pulsing in my head and my hands were shaking.

  My mother didn't knock. She opened the door and stood there for a moment, taking in the bed, the smell, the window. Her calmness scared me. I couldn't read it. It didn't seem to mask anything, not anger, not shock. I wondered if she was doped on something.

  “Isa,” she said, “what is the matter with that boy?”

  I had no idea what she meant at first. “Hero?” I said.

  “So white, like ghost.”

  “He has oculocutaneous albinism,” I said. I'd forgotten that she'd never seen Hero before; I'd forgotten what people first saw. “He's albino.”

  “Aiee, so white,” she said. “Like dead person.”

  “Mom, cut it out. He's not dead and he's not a ghost. It's a skin condition, that's all. It's rare.”

  My mother shook her head. “That boy is unlucky, Isa,” she said. “Aigo, sireo!” I don't like him.

  “Mom, stop it,” I said.

  “No, you stop, Isa,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “Promise me you won't see him anymore.”

  “I can't promise,” I said. “We're in love.”

  This seemed to rouse my mother. “If he comes to this house again, I will tell your father,” she said, her voice rising. “And he will stop you from seeing him. Don't talk about ‘in love,’ Isa. You are too young.”

  “I'm not too young,” I said. “Maybe you're too old, but I'm not too young!”

  My mother put a hand in front of her face, as though to wave away an insect. She half turned as if to leave, but then she turned back to me. “What do you know about it?” she said, sounding a lot like my father. “Stupid girl. What do you know?”

  Conspiring

  Rachel got in trouble with Dusty. At a party for football players and their molls, she'd gotten drunk and made out with Danny O’Herlihy the backup quarterback.

  “Was he really mad?”

  Rachel shrugged. “After he blew up at me, I think he felt better,” she said. “I can't tell if he's more upset because I kissed another guy or because Danny's second-string.”

  “Is he going to break up with you?”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “No way. Dumb fuck thinks he owns me.”

  “So, break up with him,” I said. “That'd show him.”

&nb
sp; “The problem is,” she said, chewing her lower lip, “I kind of think so, too.”

  • • •

  Hero and I sat in the library during seventh-period study hall, side by side at adjacent carrels, our hands working their way along each other's inner thigh. I could feel his erection against the corner of his jeans pocket. We propped books open in front of us in case Mrs. Johnson, the library aide, cruised by. Hero had his sunglasses on, and I stared straight ahead as though absorbed by the text in front of me.

  Our not being allowed to see one another—my mother had actually employed Mrs. Williamson to come over in the afternoons when she was in class—had only heightened our passion, of course, and at least once a day a teacher tapped us on the shoulder and said, “PDA“—sometimes with a smile, like Mr. Felsenfeld, who wanted to show that he personally was cool with it but must reluctantly enforce school policy; sometimes with the swift redemption of a true avenger, like Miss Banyon, who had probably never had sex and resented the teenage hormones that loped, riotous and insolent, through the school halls. “PDA,” she screeched, her talon fingers clawing at the point of contact, like one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Still we groped one another: by my locker; in the woods outside school, where we hung out before the final bell in the morning; at the south end of the library, where Mrs. Johnson, a fairly tolerant woman with teenage children of her own, patrolled the area.

  I felt Hero's fingers edging up to the cross seam in my jeans, felt the wet heat gathering there, when he suddenly stopped, his left hand withdrawing to his own lap. He took my hand. “Isa,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  He took a breath. “My parents are talking about sending me to a school for the visually impaired. In Pennsylvania.”

  “In Pennsylvania?”

  “I'd have to board there.”

  I stared. “But you're doing fine here, aren't you?” I said.

  Hero shrugged. “They're bent out of shape because there's no real vision resource teacher here, and they tried to get one, but Mr. Gagne didn't keep his promise.”

  I glimpsed the future without Hero and felt something in my rib cage go hollow. “But you don't want to?” I said.

  “‘Course not.” Hero squeezed my leg. “And I won't.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  He gave me a sidelong look behind his glasses. “Leave,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come, too, Isa,” he said. “Let's blow this joint. Make like Kerouac. There's a whole big world out there.”

  “You're kidding.”

  He shook his head. “My cousin Will's out in L.A. He's trying to get a band together. He says there're lots of jobs there for kids like us—lifeguarding, parking cars for rich people, stuff like that. You can make money waiting tables, and most of the time it's so warm you can sleep on the beach. I want to learn how to surf.”

  “You're crazy, Hero.” I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew he was looking beyond the wall in front of him, to some sun-spangled Utopia. “You'd get burnt to a crisp.”

  Hero smiled. “I'll wear sunscreen.”

  “Wow, you're really serious.”

  “Deadly,” he said. “Name one thing to stay here for.”

  I thought of my mother and father and felt the downward pull of gravity. What I felt for them was too complicated to name, too difficult to provoke the simple word “stay.” It seemed impossible to leave them. Perhaps it was necessary.

  “Rachel,” I said, thinking fleetingly of Louise and Jerry.

  “She can come too,” said Hero.

  “But how—”

  “Don't worry, Isa,” he said. “I've got it all figured.”

  About a week before we planned to leave, my father scowled at me from across the dinner table. He set down his bowl of rice and placed his silver chopsticks parallel across the top.

  “How are you doing in math these days?” he said.

  “Okay,” I murmured into my food.

  “Any tests lately?”

  I shook my head. Actually there had been one a week before on which I'd received an 84. The plan was to be gone before second-term grades came out, and I doubted I'd have much use for calculus in California.

  “You don't bring home papers,” my father said. “What kind of homework are you getting?”

  “Yeobo,” my mother said warningly.

  “I just want to know how she's doing,” my father said. “She needs to keep up grades for colleges.”

  “Isa's doing fine, yeobo’,’ she said. “I'm the one who needs help. This biology course, aigo, too difficult. What is this photo-synthesis’?”

  My father smiled indulgently. “I told you, Hae Kyoung, you should have taken physics instead.”

  My mother made a face. “All those atoms and invisible things,” she said. “I thought plants would be easier. Something you can see and touch. Something real.”

  My father shook his head. “Physics is the foundation for all things,” he said. “Nothing is more real.”

  My mother tossed her head. “What I really love,” she said, “is my poetry class. That William Yeats. ‘An Irish Airman Foretells His Death.’ So beautiful!”

  “Huh!” my father said, chewing hard on a piece of broccoli. “Poetry. What's real about that?”

  “‘Foresees,’” I said. “‘Foresees His Death.’”

  “Foresees,” my mother repeated. “Foresees.”

  I thought about a week from now, where I would be. I tried to imagine what my parents would feel when they realized I was gone. Would the school call to tell them I was absent, or would they not figure it out until dinnertime? I thought they'd just give up on me, pronounce me wayward and ungrateful. It was my brother they cared about anyway, I reasoned. I thought of the double box on my father's closet shelf. Stephen's loss was the blow from which they could not recover.

  Still, it was hard to imagine leaving them. The sound of my father clearing his throat in the mornings, the slap-slap of my mother's backless slippers down the stairs. I looked at them, at the way my father held his bowl to his mouth and shoved the rice in with rapid, economical movements of his wrist, the way my mother turned her spoon first away and then toward her before she brought the soup to her lips. The china pattern was white-and-blue floral; the spoons and chopsticks my mother had brought from Korea were silver with engraved flowers; the kitchen table was rectangular butcher block, scratched and white, with a split starting down the center seam. It all seemed more vivid to me, more real, now that I knew I would be leaving it. Even my father's baiting, his mulish challenge, was something I began to yearn for, to render nostalgic.

  Rachel showed me a photograph she had cut from a magazine. Four women, in one-piece bathing suits and rubber caps with outsized rubber daisies attached, sat in the water playing cards. There was a table floating between them. The women were lying on their backs, their cards fanned out in their hands, in attitudes of total relaxation.

  “That's us,” Rachel said, pointing to the picture.

  “Which one's me?” Hero said, peering over the top of his sunglasses.

  “Do you know where this was taken?” Rachel asked.

  “The Dead Sea?” I guessed.

  “The Salt Lakes,” she said. “I've always wanted to see them. You can float just like that.”

  “Is it ‘Salt Lakes’?” I said. “I thought there was just one.”

  Hero nodded. “It's on the way,” he said. “We can stop and see it.”

  I had never been west of Buffalo, so the thought of buoyant Utah lakes and crashing California surf was as theoretical to me as the moon landing. We were going to travel by Greyhound; Audrey would give us a ride to the bus station on Friday morning. The three of us, Rachel, Hero, and me, had pooled more than two thousand dollars, including the money I'd been saving for my eye operation.

  Rachel seemed happy to be going. The trick was to keep Dusty at bay. She'd tried breaking up with him, but he refused to a
ccept it. We laughed over the letter he'd written her. I love you so much, baby, and I promise to give you a longer leash.

  “What am I, a dachshund?” Rachel had responded. She said it was just sex between them anyway. “Too bad it was so good,” she said. “But it was never love, like you and Hero.”

  I felt my face flush, but in truth I didn't think there had ever been anything like me and Hero.

  “Rachel?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you worry about what's going to happen once we get there? To California, I mean?”

  Rachel considered. “No,” she said. “We'll be fine.” She was silent for a moment. “We can always turn tricks if we get desperate.”

  I stared at her.

  “That was a joke, Isa!” she said. “But I bet we'd do well. Once-in-a-lifetime chance to make it with an albino, a Korean, or a big-breasted WASP! Mix and match.”

  I laughed. “I think you'd get most of the business,” I said.

  Rachel shook her head. “Don't underestimate yourself, Isa,” she said. “You're always underestimating yourself.”

  On the Road

  Isnuck a canvas duffel bag to Rachel's the night before we left. I'd been momentarily stymied by the prospect of packing for the rest of my life. What did one bring? What was essential for a life of bus travel and itinerant fruit picking, squatting in abandoned buildings and running from the law? Lots of underwear seemed crucial somehow, and socks, a few T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, a sweatshirt, a bathing suit in case we got jobs as lifeguards (though I was skeptical, as I had barely passed a YMCA swim class when I was nine).

  A toothbrush, a tube of Crest, a hairbrush, and, for sentimental reasons, a powdered eye shadow kit my mother had bought me for my sixteenth birthday. “You can create eyelid with shadow,” she told me. “Until your operation.” I tried to avoid guilt by concentrating on details.