Infandous (15 page)

It’s brighter on the other side of the wave. Droplets of the ocean cling to my eyelashes and magnify the sun, and the blue world all around me bobs and sways and glistens.

We dry off and flop side by side on the sand and press facedown into our towels. We don’t talk. We don’t have to talk. Marissa scoots her foot across to my towel and pokes me a little, runs her big toe down my calf. I poke her back.

I drift in and out of sleep and dream of waves and wolves and mermaids. I wake with a start and a gasp. Marissa’s sitting up, watching me.

“You okay?”

I don’t nod.

I’ve got a few wrinkled dollar bills, and she has sixty-seven cents, so we split an iced mocha with extra whip and wander back through town, toward her place.

Neither of us has a lot to say, so we walk like that together, taking turns sipping the mocha.

We pop into a couple of shops just to look around. Venice Beach paraphernalia is everywhere—key chains and T-shirts and magnets.

I leave Marissa at her apartment—“Homework,” I tell her. She squeezes my hand good-bye, and when she pulls away there’s a ring in my palm, with the price tag still attached. It’s twisted wire, just a flat star and a simple band.

“Looked like you,” Marissa says, and she grins. I slip it onto my ring finger. It fits just right.

When I get back to my place, I don’t go upstairs. Instead, I go to my studio and flip the wall switch, watching the familiar flicker become light.

There’s my laptop, and on an impulse I visit the page of the guy who recognized my baby pie. Joaquin. He writes poetry, really bad poetry. No one comments on his poems. The newest one reads:

She

Is Beauty

A long wave

I want to ride it

But it’s not the ocean

It’s the gleam of her hair

She pulls at me like the tide

She calls to me like the cresting sea

I want only to touch her curves

To bear witness to her beauty

To run my hands

To run my eyes

Along the

Shape of

Her

I roll my eyes. Ridiculous. Sappy shit. And in the shape of a diamond. His earlier attempts aren’t much better; I scroll back and skim them. They’re mostly nature poems and a couple about skateboarding. Nothing great, not that I’m an expert or anything, but come on. This latest poem is by far the worst of the bunch. The earlier poems, at least, were about the world. Reading through the poems, I wonder what has changed in this stranger’s life. What’s happened to him that now he’s writing
this
?

My art has changed too. Before last winter, it was pretty good, I guess, but now it’s better. Maybe that’s because I’m half a year older than I was then and that I’ve had those months to sharpen my ideas. Maybe no matter what, my art would be better.

You can’t separate what
could have been
from what
is.
It kind of kills me that my art is better now than before. It’s darker, sure, but it’s more subtle too. It’s the art of a secret keeper. It shows but doesn’t share.

I’m cold now. My suit is still damp under my clothes. But before I go upstairs, I send a message to Joaquin:
Your new poem is different from the others. What happened?
I don’t expect him to be online and to answer, but he is and he does, almost at once.
Yeah
, he writes.
I fell in love.

Love.

My computer pings as another message comes through.
What happened to you?

Thirteen

It’s Marissa’s birthday on Saturday, so even though I shouldn’t spend the money, I take us to a movie. A
real
movie, a big summer blockbuster starring that guy who looks like someone took a frying pan to his face but manages to be hot anyway.

We never see first-run movies usually. We wait until they’re in the cheap theaters and do our best to avoid the reviews in the meantime. The showing I take Marissa to isn’t even a matinee. I buy a tub of popcorn to split—the big one—and we gorge ourselves on it, big salty, buttery handfuls, washed down with tingly sweet bubbles of soda.

It’s an action movie that hits all the right notes, more or less, and it ends with soaring music and a rising sun behind the burned-out husk of a car, the skeleton corpse of the villain lying broken out the driver’s side window, with the frying-pan-face hot guy kissing the too-gorgeous-to-be-real wife, and everyone knows that as soon as the credits run he’s going to bang the shit out of her.

Marissa loves the whole thing, and I can’t help but buy into it a little too, even though I know better. It’s another fairy tale, just with a higher body count. I see how they do it—the music, how it builds and breaks like an orgasm, the tint of orangey-pink sky, the angle of the kiss that makes our chests expand with that feeling you get when you know everything’s going to be all right.

It’s dark when we leave the theater. We’ve abandoned the popcorn bucket on the floor of the theater, along with the soda cup. (“Job security for the service sector,” Marissa tells me. “We’re helping the fuckers.”)

I ask her if she wants to crash at my place, because Mom will be spending the night downstairs with Jordan. Neither one of them has to work tomorrow, and she was silly, giddy this morning about the idea of sleeping in with him, not being in a rush for once. I smiled and nodded like it didn’t bother me, and either she bought it or wanted to buy it enough to ignore the stiffness of my mouth.

But Marissa says she can’t, Sal’s promised to make her dessert, and she’s kept him waiting long enough, so we hug and I say “Happy birthday” one more time and then set my skateboard down and head toward home.

I know as soon as I get to our building that something’s wrong. The door to Jordan’s apartment is swung open, and I can hear shouting from the street. Mick and Shilo, the two gay kids who live in apartment C, are kind of lurking outside of Jordan’s door as if they’re trying to hear what’s going on but don’t really want to get personally involved. I push past them into the apartment. I carry the skateboard across my body like a weapon, and I mentally recheck if I remembered to put the new pepper spray in the pocket of my hoodie—I did.

If anyone’s fucking with my mother, I’m ready to go to war.

But I stumble to a stop just inside the apartment, because what I’m seeing doesn’t quite make sense. There’s my mother on the futon, her copper hair spilled forward over her shoulders, long enough to cover her breasts but splitting around her right nipple. Jordan is on his feet in front of her, holding a brown throw pillow in front of his crotch, and there’s someone else—another woman, someone I’ve never met before. She’s the kind of woman who must own stock in Avon or something, the makeup’s caked on so thick. She’s dressed in maroon slacks and this shirt with a ridiculous bow at the neck, like she’s a present, though I can’t imagine who would want to unwrap
that
. She’s, like, fifteen years older than my mom, and her whole demeanor is so tightly wound that she practically
sizzles
, but not in a good way. The words that stream out of her mouth would be considered “bad” in any company, but since she’s directing them at my mom, they’re fucking blasphemous.

“Cradle-robbing whore,” she says. It seems to be the end of what must have been a crescendo of profanity because she’s breathing heavily as if she’s been yelling for a while.

Jordan looks dumbstruck and ridiculous clutching that little limp pillow in front of his dick, and my mom has tears down her cheeks, but she looks first to Jordan to see what he’s going to do.

A moment passes—too long for my mom’s taste, I can tell, and I watch emotions flicker across her face—disappointment first, then sadness, and then something else I can’t name. Then she steels herself and rises.

Next to Jordan—and with both of them naked—my mom’s age is more apparent than it’s ever been. Her breasts are softer than mine and heavier, and the tips of her nipples are stretched a little.

I did that
.

The triangle of her pubic hair is a shade darker than the tendrils that drape across her shoulders, and circling her hips is the silvery starburst of stretch marks etched into her skin.

I made those
.

She takes two steps—one next to Jordan and another past him. She stares for a minute at the woman—I still have no idea what the fuck is happening, but my skateboard has drooped a little in my arms. My mom kind of towers over the other woman, even though my mom’s barefoot and naked. There’s an energy radiating off of Mom, a strength, and though the woman tries to hold her gaze, she can’t do it, and her eyes drop to the floor.

Then my mother looks at me. Her façade is beginning to crack, and I know her well enough to see that more tears are coming, so I grab her hand and pull her out of the apartment, past open-mouthed Mick and Shilo, and we go upstairs.

She disappears into the bathroom first thing, and I hear her crank on the shower. I hear her crying in there, too, and I stand outside the bathroom door, trying to decide whether to stay or to go back downstairs and kick the shit out of the pantsuit lady.

Then I figure out who she must be, and I’m kind of paralyzed.

***

I see the whole situation again, from Jordan’s mom’s point of view: She heads over to her kid’s apartment—who knows why, to drop off some laundry or a casserole, something like that, and she knocks and turns the doorknob at the same time, just as she always does—probably always has since he was a kid. Except this time when she pushes open the door she finds her baby son between the legs of this female, this woman, her coppery hair shimmering like flames engulfing them both, the scent of her in the humid air.

Or maybe she found him kneeling as if in prayer, face buried deep in the ocean of my mother.

Or maybe she found her baby boy, my goddess mother atop him, clutching him to her breast and breathing her sweet breath into his mouth, replacing his mortality with ecstasy.

And did Jordan’s mother’s words echo in my mother’s ears like a distorted playback of her own mother’s disowning curse? Did her heart break at seeing me there, in the doorway, witness to her pain?

I don’t know. I can imagine. And imagine. And imagine.

A myth is not in the telling but in the endless retelling.

***

The apartment has grown quiet and dark. Mom has shut off the shower. I go to her room and find her favorite yoga pants, one of her tank tops, a pair of panties. I wait in the gloom of our living room, holding her clothes. When she opens the bathroom door, her shadow precedes her, distorted and unfamiliar. When my eyes adjust, I see her hair is knotted at her neck and her face is swollen from crying. She smiles at me anyway and takes the clothes, shuts the door again. Darkness again.

Mom didn’t used to believe in a shut door. She’d leave it open while she showered, while she peed, while she dressed. She liked to talk and listen all the time.

“No closed doors,” she used to tell me. “The door between us is always open.”

But tonight she shuts it, and I know I’ve been shutting doors lately too—the door between us, the one that was never supposed to close. I remember I’d asked her once, “Why even have a door if we never close it?”

She said, “Because that way we know that we
choose
to keep it open.”

***

I can’t stay there, in the apartment, looking at one side of a closed door. I head down to my studio and stare at my notebook for a while, flipping the pages back and forth until one tears. I feel like pacing, but my shitty storage room workspace is too small and I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, close to my mom upstairs, so I take a deep breath and count to ten before shining a light on the sculpture that’s been my summer project, my newest baby pie.

I look at the wall, at the shadow I’ve created—a wolf head and neck curved inward, a blank white eye and sharp teeth, too many of them. A scruff under the chin. Two ears pointed backward.

I take a picture—not of the sculpture, which isn’t the main point anyway, but of its shadow. My breaths are even now. The work calms me, and I let myself disappear into it as I load the image to my laptop, as I sharpen the lines, amp up the contrast. Then I sit back and look at it.

It’s good, but something is missing. A paradox. Something that circles back on itself, like so many things seem to do: a word that speaks of not speaking. From my box full of scraps I dig out a couple of deformed coat hangers. I’ve got a pair of rusty pliers somewhere, and I scrounge around until I find it. I want to make a word. This is new to me, so I’m slow and not very good at it, and I puncture my hands again and again with the wire hangers and the pliers both. It hurts and I bleed and wonder briefly about tetanus, but I finish it, at last, the word made of wire and propped between the wall and the lamp. I flick the lamp’s switch:

INFANDOUS
.

I don’t even stop to wipe the blood from my fingers before I’ve got it photographed and into Photoshop with the wolf head. I sit back and look at the screen. Separated from the baby pie, the shadow has become its own thing. The proportions are different than if I’d drawn it; the ratio of white space to black looks off, the placement and size of the letters beneath the image is wonky and slippery. It’s imperfect, and ugly. I curve a line around the image to frame it and hit save.

Then I copy it onto a memory stick. The sun is rising. The myth is not in the telling but the constant retelling. This is my story. I want to tell it, not once, not just to myself, but over and over again.

It’s time for a field trip.

***

So it costs about five bucks to print one sheet of stickers. If you buy five sheets at this one place I know, you get the sixth sheet free. Unless you’re friends with Kai, the redheaded kid who works the early shift there. Then all six sheets are free.

As I paddle my skateboard down the long, broken stretch of sidewalk, money is on my mind. The mermaid tail of my mother, crafted from brand-new pennies. My crappy little paychecks from Riley Wilson. Naomi and Bobby’s wealth, the beautiful bounty of it, how everything they own shines new and smart. The easy purchase of my cobalt blue bikini, the extra-large sweet teas versus my poor man’s lemonade.