Adverbs (17 page)

“
Glee
?” Tony said. “You’re from England, right? With the accent? ’Cause we don’t have glee here, I don’t think. What else?”

Helena looked around the Elephant, which was not crowded but certainly not empty. The Masked Ball part wasn’t really happening, just a few masks and feathers, but still it was very lovely, and Helena felt good even with a bad drink. “I’m married,” she said.

“Married?” Tony said. “So you love a guy already?”

“Well,” Helena said, and took a breath because it was a long sentence. “He said he went to Canada but I have his passport so I think he’s with his old girlfriend all this time, who I think is the same as your old girlfriend, too.”

“They’re all the same,” Tony said. “They’re all the same and it’s all the same to me. So you’re looking for a little adventure maybe, married lady. What do you like in a guy? Because I keep fit and I know how to give a total rubdown massage.”

“Well,” Helena said, and had another taste of Morning Sickness.

“You ever been with a woman?” Tony said, and suddenly he was wearing cologne made to smell like a man who gave rubdowns. “With your sexy accent I bet you could get women, too.”

“Actually yes,” Helena said. “I had this crazy flatmate, or a friend, and sometimes we would drink too much and have a lot of orgasms together.”

“Like the song says,” Tony said. “Wow. What happened?”

“Well,” Helena said, “we turned out not to be lesbians.”

“I’d like to watch that,” Tony said.

Helena thought of what she and Sam—there’s another common name, Sam—usually did, which was sit around and listen to records. “You like to watch two girls, huh?” Helena said. “Maybe you could find another guy who likes that.”

Tony put his hand on a space between Helena’s neck and her chin, just about where Helena greeted her neighbor’s dog. “And what would we do, if I found another guy?” he said.

“You could have sex with him,” Helena said, moving her inked-up head.

“I want to have sex with
you
,” Tony said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your husband. There must be lots wrong with him if you’re alone at the Masked Ball.”

“Oh, there is,” Helena said, and so she listed them. “He isn’t very tall and he says it’s all the same to him. Things are all the same to him and he hasn’t been fired like me. He likes stupid British horror movies from the 1960s, and Andrea. He is by no stretch of the imagination a good listener, and he flirts with old girlfriends and sometimes he is calm and nice when I wish he’d yell and throw things up into the air and we have no money.” In a list this didn’t seem enough, so she made up something to make it worse. “And he’s a terrorist. He’s a deadly terrorist who hates American freedoms. What are your drawbacks, Tony?”

“Let’s see,” Tony said. “I’ve been known to make women scream when we’re making love. That’s probably my biggest problem. It’s a ten-inch problem, if you know what I mean.”

Helena blushed underneath permanent black ink. This was very embarrassing that he was behaving this way. But David embarrassed her too, and who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship where the biggest problem was that he made you scream when you made love? Helena finished her drink. “I really shouldn’t be drinking,” she said, “especially when it tastes so awful.” Most of the chianti was at the bottom, and it made Helena remember this cheap cheap restaurant she and David went to five or six days running in New York. They lived there. “Bring us a bottle of your cheapest chianti!” they would say, which must
mean they were not worrying about money. People in love would say such things. Helena would say them if she were in love. She stood up.

“Have another drink,” Tony said.

“No,” Helena said.

A man in a top hat, a man in a suit, appeared in a spotlight. “We’re going to have a dance contest,” the man said, and it was loud. “We’re having a dance contest. We’re going to play a song and the best dancer wins a cash money prize.”

“Give me your number,” Tony said. “Give me your number you sweet hot as lava baby.”

“I forgot my number,” Helena said, but she knew where her place was. Tony sent a naked photo in the mail, was certainly another drawback. Yes, Helena had nasty letters too, but she kept them in her purse which slapped against her as she stepped out on the floor. They were playing a song they probably never play in nightclubs. The verses are this:

and

and Helena began dancing, because it wasn’t any of those things that were leading her home, either. She danced and danced, with the flapping and predetermined motions of a bird flying south. Her purse swung against her because there was no one to hold it, and certain men began dancing in her path, as they will do when a woman is on the floor without a husband for protection. But Helena had no worries about these men or the bag she brought into the club. She knew how to dance even with her baggage. She knew a thing or two about this. She knew who she loved, even if she could not list the particulars of what got her into this kind of love, far from home in another country. But home now was with David and she would fly there soon when the song was over. First let her dance. Let her fly higher than a flying fuck. Let her dance and sing and do all the acrobatic feats required of her sudden glee. She danced like she was going to win the contest, and all the gold medals of figure skating she dreamed of winning when this song was born and that her mother told her would never be hers, would be hers. So she loved him. She just did, immediately and again, often and clearly, naturally and soundly and obviously and many others. She couldn’t stop loving him because it was like pretending your own mother was not in Britain, where the song’s sexy accent was from. Other people around her were dancing with fancier feathers, shaking the sexy plumage in
an aggressive and attractive manner, but it’s not the makeup. It’s not the makeup and it’s not the way that you dance, and this is like love too, where there’s only one dancer who will win your contest that night, and they are not particularly the best one. As Helena danced some of the other people at the Masked Ball stopped dancing like they were going to let her win, and why shouldn’t she? Why couldn’t she go out and flirt with a guy at the Black Elephant and then come home with the contest money? She could not remember the last time she felt so not fat, and the song with its humiliating lyrics of

kept her in the bright flush of dancing and somebody letting her win. Let her win because she needs the love. Let her dance and win the contest, and let her learn later that you do not need a passport to go from the United States to Canada.

“You won the contest!” the man in the hat said. “You won the contest and you won the prize! It’s an envelope full of money! What’s your name?”

“Helena,” she said.

The man wrote her name on the envelope, H-E-L-E-NN-A-H, and gave her the money and she held it in her hand.

“There weren’t that many people,” she said modestly, “in the contest.”

“People are nervous after the catastrophe,” the man admitted. “People think, If a volcano rose up and destroyed us all in a ring of fire, where would I want to be? Dancing with strangers or home with the man I love? So we have masked balls all the time, but more and more people stay home in the nest. Take the money and go home, baby. It’s a hundred gazillion dollars. Go home with the prize money. You won because you are the best dancer at the ball and because you are gorgeous beautiful, and I’m not saying that as a sexy thing baby, because I am totally gay.”

“You see that guy in the mask?” Helena pointed him to Tony. “He’s gay too and he wants your wild love but doesn’t know it. Go to him. Surprise him.”

“I’ll do that,” the man said, and Helena stepped out and into the same taxi with the same driver.

“Nice evening?” the driver said.

“It sure was,” Helena agreed. “I won a contest.”

“The contest ripped your purse, looks like,” the driver said.

Helena looked at her purse and made up something else. “A baby was in it,” she said. “An angry baby who wanted to go dancing so it ripped out of my purse.” The cab got closer to the neighborhood where Helena lived with her husband. “Now it’s in my belly,” she said. “I’m pregnant. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“Pregnant with a baby, wow,” the driver said. “My lady and I think about having children but I think I have to get over my mother first.”

Helena rolled down the window of the cab, which is always
the thing to do on the way home from dancing. Outside it was right as rain and raining the sort of mist that San Francisco offers, and London. Weather, it’s all over the world like love. It may be that there was a great divide between Helena and her husband, but Brits swim the channel all the time. Helena opened her purse and tossed the letters to her mother into the dark night. “I’m going to have a baby,” she said, but she kept Tony’s picture, because the chorus of the song says that if the guy singing it had a photograph of you, as something to remind him, he wouldn’t spend his life just wishing. It’s a stupid song, but that’s not particularly the point of going out. The point is, somewhere someone wants your picture. Helena could keep Tony’s photograph in the drawer with the passport pictures, as something to remind her, and instead of spending her life just wishing, she could show the photographs to the baby. “This is your father,” she could say, “and this is some bloke I met at the Black Elephant.” The baby would know what
bloke
meant because the baby would be Helena’s baby, and it would require a passport photograph to go visit its screechy grandmother who was wrong all the time. We all need passport photographs to go anywhere, even though they tend to show us at our worst. But if you don’t want to see us at our worst, you can shut the drawer where they are kept.

“Does your husband know?” the driver said, after he had refused her money for good luck. “And does he know your face is covered in ugly ink?”

“He doesn’t care,” Helena said. “He loves me anyway,” and she went upstairs to see if this was so. David sat up from the bed in the dark.

“I was worried,” he said. “I got home and you weren’t here and you didn’t even leave a note.”

“
Dear David
,” she said, “
I went out but I’m home now
.” She got herself a glass of water and drank it even though she also had to pee, and this is even another thing like love. We need things and also to get rid of them, and at the same time. We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable. Helena sat in her second-favorite chair and looked. He was wearing pajamas, but the particulars hardly matter. It wasn’t the things he said, and it wasn’t the things he did. All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you’re bisexual and everyone is. And so the happiness is not particular, and so you cannot be particular, or all you will have at the end of the night is a purse full of complaints to your mother.
Let yourself win the contest
, the music says,
or there’s no point in going to the bar except to drink
. “Listen,” Helena said. “Listen and look. We’re going to have a baby. I know you weren’t in Canada because your passport is here. I think you were with Andrea and it must stop, because this baby is going to win contests. This will lead to a professional modeling career which will enable the baby to put itself through scientist school and cure all the diseases the world’s throwing at us. Don’t make it sit in its crib instead, writing you letters about lying about Canada.”

But David was already hugging her. “Are you really going to have a baby?” he said. “Both of us? You don’t need a passport to get to Canada, my love. If you forget, you can get in with a driver’s license as long as you make a fuss. I made a fuss, so
please you don’t, baby. Andrea is sort of mean, and she has that stupid hair, but truly it’s that I don’t love her and I do you, and what on earth has happened to your face?”

“Is that true?” Helena said, and was breathless and willing to believe that she knew it all along with the love. “I don’t even have a driver’s license because I’m new in town and everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.”

“I’ll teach you to drive,” said her husband, and Helena imagined that he would have a lot to teach her. So much more gorgeous he was than the song, even in those particular pajamas, that she could imagine he was going to teach her a lot. “I’ll teach you to drive and drive you anyplace in the meantime. And the baby, wherever it wants to go.”

“It likes the Black Elephant,” Helena said and lay down next to him on the bed. He put his arm around her and felt the belly where the baby was currently living. This made Helena need to pee even more, but she kept him there out of love and because of love and because all the stupidest songs are right. Why talk over this music? Helena could think of no reason. Why argue with the way love falls, not particularly, on people who arguably have not earned the warmth it brings in the bed, as fierce and red as the center of the Earth? Helena did not argue. Perhaps she could not, after all the dancing. She leaned against her spouse and stopped her sobbing. She threw her worries into a puddle on the street and let the love deliver itself like an envelope full of money. She clutched it in her hand, the stuff she won, the money she earned, the love she arrived at, everything everything just for her and her baby, baby. She leaned against him and wished for nothing else.