Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (18 page)

“No problem.”

Most often I’ll continue getting out of my seat, then walk to the back of the plane or go to the bathroom and stand there for a few minutes, trying to fight off what I know is inevitable: I need to touch the person’s head again. Experience has taught me that you can do this three times before the head’s owner either yells at you or rings for the flight attendant. “Is something wrong?” she’ll ask.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“What do you mean 'no,' ” the passenger will say. “This freak keeps touching my head.”

“Is that true, sir?”

It’s not always a head. Sometimes I need to touch a particular purse or briefcase. When I was a child this sort of compulsive behavior was my life, but now I practice it only if I’m in a situation where I can’t smoke: planes — as I mentioned — and elevators.

Just touch the boy’s head, I thought. The old man did it, so why can’t you?

To remind myself that this is inappropriate only makes the voice more insistent. The thing must be done because it is inappropriate. If it weren’t, there’d be no point in bothering with it.

He won’t even notice it. Touch him now, quick.

Were we traveling a long distance, I would have lost the battle, but fortunately we weren’t going far. The elevator arrived on the fifth floor and I scrambled out the door, set the coffees on the carpet, and lit a cigarette. “You’re going to have to give me a minute here,” I said.

“But my room’s just down the hall. And this is nonsmoking.”

“I know, I know.”

“It’s not good for you,” he said.

“That’s true for a lot of people,” I told him. “But it really is good for me. Take my word for it.”

He leaned against a door and removed the DO NOT DISTURB sign, studying it for a moment before sticking it in his back pocket.

I only needed to smoke for a minute, but realized when I was finished that there was no ashtray. Beside the elevator was a window, but of course it was sealed shut. Hotels. They do everything in their power to make you want to jump to your death, and then they make certain that you can’t do it. “Are you finished with your cocoa?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, are you finished with the lid?”

“I guess so.”

He handed it to me and I spit into the center — no easy task, as my mouth was completely dry. Fifty percent of my body water was seeping out my ass, and the other half was in transit.

“That’s gross,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you’re just going to have to forgive me.” I stubbed the cigarette into the spit, set the lid on the carpet, and picked up the coffees. “Okay. Where to?”

He pointed down a long corridor and I followed him, gnawing on a question that’s been troubling me for years. What if you had a baby and you just. . . you just needed to touch it where you knew you shouldn’t. I don’t mean that you’d want to. You wouldn’t desire the baby any more than you desire a person whose head you’ve just touched. The act would be compulsive rather than sexual, and while to you there’d be a big difference, you couldn’t expect a prosecutor, much less an infant, to recognize it. You’d be a bad parent, and once the child could talk and you told it not to tell anyone, you would become a manipulator — a monster, basically — and the reason behind your actions would no longer matter.

The closer we got to the end of the hall, the more anxious I became. I had not laid a finger on the boy’s head. I have never poked or prodded either a baby or a child, so why did I feel so dirty? Part of it was just my makeup, the deep-seated belief that I deserve a basement room, but a larger, uglier part had to do with the voices I hear on talk radio, and my tendency, in spite of myself, to pay them heed. The man in the elevator had not thought twice about asking Michael personal questions or about laying a hand on the back of his head. Because he was neither a priest nor a homosexual, he hadn’t felt the need to watch himself, worrying that every word or gesture might be misinterpreted. He could unthinkingly wander the halls with a strange boy, while for me it amounted to a political act — an insistence that I was as good as the next guy. Yes, I am a homosexual; yes, I am soaking wet; yes, I sometimes feel an urge to touch people’s heads, but still I can safely see a ten-year-old back to his room. It bothered me that I needed to prove something this elementary. And prove it to people whom I could never hope to convince.

“This is it,” Michael said. From the other side of the door I heard the sound of a television. It was one of those Sunday-morning magazine programs, a weekly hour where all news is good news. Blind Jimmy Henderson coaches a volleyball team. An ailing groundhog is fitted for a back brace. That type of thing. The boy inserted his card key into the slot, and the door opened onto a bright, well-furnished room. It was twice the size of mine, with higher ceilings and a sitting area. One window framed a view of the lake, and the other a stand of scarlet maples.

“Oh, you’re back,” a woman said. She was clearly the boy’s mother, as their profiles were identical, the foreheads easing almost imperceptively into blunt freckled noses. Both too had spiky blond hair, though for her I imagined the style was accidental, the result of the pillows piled behind her head. She was lying beneath the covers of a canopy bed, examining one of the many brochures scattered across the comforter. A man slept beside her, and when she spoke, he shifted slightly and covered his face with the crook of his arm. “What took you so long?” She looked toward the open door, and her eyes widened as they met mine. “What the . . .”

There was a yellow robe at the foot of the bed, and the woman turned her back to me as she got up and stepped into it. Her son reached for the coffees, and I tightened my grip, unwilling to surrender what I’d come to think of as my props. They turned me from a stranger to a kindly stranger, and I’d seen myself holding them as his parents rounded on me, demanding to know what was going on.

“Give them to me,” he said, and rather than making a scene, I relaxed my grip. The coffees were taken, and I felt my resolve starting to crumble. Empty-handed, I was just a creep, the spooky wet guy who’d crawled up from the basement. The woman crossed to the dresser, and as the door started to close she called out to me. “Hey,” she said. “Wait a minute.” I turned, ready to begin the fight of my life, and she stepped forward and pressed a dollar into my hand. “You people run a very nice hotel,” she told me. “I just wish we could stay longer.”

The door closed and I stood alone in the empty corridor, examining my tip and thinking, Is that all?

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Who’s the Chef?

M Y BOSS HAS A RUBBER HAND," I told our Parisian dinner guests following my one and only day of work. The French word for boss is our word for chef, so it sounded even better than I’d expected. A chef with a rubber hand. You’d think it would melt.

The guests leaned closer to the table, not sure if I was using the right word. “Your chef? Since when did you start working?” They turned to Hugh for confirmation. “He has a job?”

Thinking, I guess, that I wouldn’t notice, Hugh set down his fork and mouthed the words “It’s volunteer work.” What irritated me was the manner in which he said it — not outright, but barely whispered, the way you might if your three-year-old was going on about his big day at school. “It’s day care.”

“Volunteer or not, I still had a chef,” I said. “And his hand was made of rubber.” I’d sat on this information for hours, had even rehearsed its delivery, double-checking all the important words in the dictionary. I don’t know what I’d expected — but it definitely wasn’t this.

“I’m sure it wasn’t actual rubber,” Hugh said. “It was probably some kind of plastic.”

The friends agreed, but they hadn’t seen my chef, hadn’t watched as he thoughtlessly wedged a pencil between his man-made fingers. A plastic hand wouldn’t have given quite so easily. A plastic hand would have made a different sound against the tabletop. “I know what I saw,” I said. “It was rubber and it smelled like a pencil eraser.”

If someone told me that his boss’s hand smelled like a pencil eraser, I’d shut up and go with it, but Hugh was in one of his moods. “What, this guy let you smell his hand?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Not exactly.”

“Okay, then, it was plastic.”

“So, what,” I said, “is everything not held directly to your nose made out of plastic? Is that the rule now?” One of our joint New Year’s resolutions was to stop bickering in front of company, but he was making it really hard. “The hand was rubber,” I said. “Heavy rubber, like a tire.”

“So it was inflatable?” The guests laughed at Hugh’s little joke, and I took a moment to think the worse of them. An inflatable hand is preposterous and not worth imagining. Couldn’t they see that?

“Look,” I said, “this wasn’t something I saw in a shop. I was right there, in the room with it.”

“Fine,” Hugh said. “So what else?”

“What do you mean, 'what else'?”

“Your volunteer job. So the boss had an artificial hand — what else?”

Let me explain that it isn’t easy finding volunteer work in Paris. The government pays people to do just about everything, especially during an election year, and when I visited the benevolence center, the only thing available was a one-day job helping to guide the blind through one of the city’s Metro stations. The program was run by my chef, who’d set up a temporary office in a small windowless room beside the ticket booth. It wasn’t my fault that no blind people showed up. “Listen,” I said, “I just spent six hours in a storage closet being ignored by a man with a rubber hand. What do you mean, 'What else?' What more do I need?”

The friends stared blankly, and I realized I’d been speaking in English.

“In French,” Hugh said. “Say it in French.”

It was one of those times when you really notice the difference between speaking and expressing yourself. I knew the words — blind people, election year, storage closet — but even when coupled with verbs and pronouns they didn’t add up the way I needed them to. In English my sentences could perform double duty, saying both that I’d reported for volunteer work and that Hugh would be punished for not listening to the single most interesting thing that had happened to me since moving to Paris.

“Just forget it,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

I left the table for a glass of water, and when I returned, Hugh was discussing Monsieur DiBiasio, the plumber hired to replace our bathroom sink.

“He’s got one arm,” I told the guests.

“No, he doesn’t,” Hugh said. “He’s got two.”

“Yes, but one of them doesn’t work.”

“Well, he’s still got it,” Hugh said. “It’s there. It fills a sleeve.”

He’s always doing this, contradicting me in front of company. And so I did what I always do, which is ask a question and then deny him a chance to answer.

“Define an arm,” I said. “If you’re talking about the long, hairy thing that hangs from your shoulder, okay, he’s got two, but if you’re talking about a long hairy thing that moves around and actually does shit then he’s got one, all right? I should know. I’m the one who carried the sink up three goddam flights of stairs. Me, not you.”

The guests were getting uncomfortable, but I didn’t care. Technically, Hugh was right, the plumber had two arms, but we weren’t in a courtroom and there was no punishment for a little exaggeration. People like mental pictures; they give them something to do besides just listening. Hadn’t we been through this? Instead of backing me up, he’d made me out to be a liar, and, oh, I hated him for that.

Once he’d destroyed my credibility with the one-armed plumber, it was pretty much over as far as the rubber hand was concerned. The guests weren’t even thinking plastic anymore, they were thinking actual working hand, made of flesh and bone and muscle. The mental picture had been erased and they’d never understand that a hand is denned by its movement rather than its shape. The chef’s had fingernails, creases — you probably could have read the palm — but it was pink and stiffish, like a false hand you might use when teaching a dangerous animal to shake. I don’t know how it attached or where, but I’m fairly certain he could take it off without too much trouble. While sitting there, just the two of us, waiting for blind people who never showed, I imagined how the hand might look positioned on a bedside table, if that was where he kept it. There was probably no point in wearing it to bed, the thing wasn’t particularly helpful; the fingers didn’t open and close. It was just a deception, like a hairpiece or a false eyelash.

The dinner conversation staggered on, but the evening was already shot. Anyone could see that. In another few minutes the guests would look at their watches and say something about their babysitter. Coats would be retrieved and we’d stand in the hallway saying good-bye again and again as the guests made their way down the stairs. I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. “I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,” people would say, and my rage would renew itself. The argument would continue until one of us died, and even then it would manage to wage on. If I went first, my tombstone would read IT WAS RUBBER. He’d likely take the adjacent plot and buy a larger tombstone reading NO, IT WAS PLASTIC.

Dead or alive, I’d have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you’re totally dependent on somebody. In the coming weeks I’d picture the hand waving good-bye or shooting into the air to hail a taxi — going about its little business as I went about mine. Hugh would ask why I was smiling and I’d say, “Oh, no reason,” and leave it at that.