Short People (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 15

  We idled in the Burger King parking lot listening to power chords, the car still in park, and I wondered if I should start driving. I didn’t know where she would take me next, though, and since there were no distractions here, I wanted to find an in while I had the chance.

  “Maybe if I knew what I failed at, I could—”

  “Don’t you have any tapes?”

  “Sure. What do you want to listen to?”

  “Something good, I don’t know. Where are they?”

  “First tell me what it is I failed at.”

  “Forget it. Let’s just go.”

  She found me laborious. I found her tedious—or wanted to. Instead, I was charmed. She was so much better at living than I was.

  “You don’t like me much, do you?” I said.

  “I like you fine. Let’s go.”

  I watched her body language. She was pinched everywhere, curled in an upright fetal position, brow furrowed, lips pursed. I held my gaze in the hope she would return it, that I would receive at least this small kindness, a moment of eye-to-eye contact, possibly a sneaking smile to let me know that, despite appearances, she still thought we might have something in common. She held out. Her cheek pulsed with tension. Giving up, I released the parking brake. Then I reached over her and popped open the glove compartment. She yielded as my arm brushed her calf, spreading her legs to make room while I fished around for a tape.

  “Is Lapin okay? He’s all I’ve got.”

  She sighed. “Fine,” and as soon as I was out of her way, she snapped her legs shut.

  We listened to my friend Lapin Milk’s demo as I squealed the tires in frustration and defeat, and spun out into the street. Lapin’s folk-tinged rock and roll, so earnest, tormented and lyrically loopy, so in love with the pain of love, eased us out of our separate selves. Neither of us could help but to mumble along to the morbid chorus: You hit and you run / You tore me to shreds / You left me mangled / You left me for dead / You bailed with the best parts of me. The windows were open, and the backdraft whipped and swirled through the car. All the way across town, I gauged the intonations of her shifting posture, watching her tension and annoyance flutter away like loose parking tickets in the circulating air. Eventually her shoulders slumped, her feet fell to the floor. Legs splayed, calves crossed, she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes, and I began to feel emboldened. While shifting gears, I allowed myself to brush her outer thigh, lightly, subtly, lingering just for a second, as if by coincidence.

  She sat up. “Hey, how is Lapin?”

  I’d been fearing this question all night. Lapin Milk, formerly Nate Parker, was a big deal, the only kid making the rounds of the podunk local clubs who had more talent than ego. He’d just returned from Boston, where he’d been going to some fancy music school for the past year. The people there—self-important, pretentious, the worst kind of music geeks—just didn’t get it, so fuck them, he came home before they could embitter him and destroy his passion. Unlike them, he really had something to say, and chose to protect what he knew over making the contacts and capitalizing on the buzz the school offered. He didn’t care about fame, but about being understood, and anyway, if you’re good enough, the industry will come to you. I understood him: we’d been friends for years, since we’d been the two worst players on JV baseball, taking up space on the far end of the bench and trying to pinpoint exactly what we found so profound about the piercing metaphysical cry that is Bowie’s Aladdin Sane.

  And she thought she understood him, though in fact, the way Lapin told it, she pestered him, annoyed the shit out of him, calling him four, five, ten times a day until finally he got a caller ID box and began answering only when he had another girl over. She willfully misunderstood—or maybe got off on—his sadistic and ruthless exegeses on how this or that girl, whoever he had there, was such a better fuck than she was. “She’s crazy,” he told me. “She’s obsessed. She won’t take a hint.”

  “Lapin’s fine,” I said. “He’s, you know, keeping on.”

  She lit a cigarette, still casual, and blew the smoke out the window. “I haven’t talked to him in forever. He’s . . . Is he pissed at me or something?”

  “No, I don’t know. He’s . . . you’d have to ask him.”

  “He must’ve said something.”

  I fumbled for a cigarette of my own, a sympathy cigarette. I couldn’t tell her what Lapin thought of her. For one thing, I didn’t want to believe he was right. Sure, when I’d met her at his gig, she’d kept an eye on him, watching him as he slid back and forth across the bar buying Kamikaze after Kamikaze for his hangers-on, but unlike his other girls, she’d actually seemed sort of interested in me. For another thing, if his assessment was true, I didn’t want to know about it. And raising the topic could only lower my odds. I’d become the go-between, the neuter, the friend—no longer a sexual threat.

  I’d fallen for her that night. She was so bold. She strutted instead of swishing. When we played pool, she gripped her stick like she had a table in her basement, lined up her shots, made them. During my turns, she swung herself around the room as if she was beyond pining for charming princes and knew how to handle boozy Don Juans, like if someone touched her, it would be because she’d decided he could; she’d make the calls and name the positions. In the middle of our game, some paunchy old fuck woozed up and hulked over her, slobbering something into her ear, his eyes glassy, his whole body swooning. Instead of freaking out, she chuckled. “Any way you want it, baby,” she said as she slapped her own ass. That was all it took to shake him off. Here is a girl, I’d thought, who’s all outward rush, so well defended from sentiment and introspection that she’s impervious to the long-term damage they, like chemical weapons, wreak on the rest of us. What finally cinched my desire was how, when I probed for her fragile secrets, asking why she was so angry, she laughed in my face and said, “What? You think you’re some kind of shrink or something? I’m not angry.” I raised a single incredulous eyebrow. “But you are . . . It’s just . . . it’s all over you. You’re all aggression. How come?” Without answering, as if my question were meaningless, she swiveled her stool, turning her back on me, and entered the heated debate about vegetarianism taking place among the girls seated on her other side. I knew then that she was protecting something unfathomably precious, and the fact that I couldn’t stride past her defenses, I was sure, intimated that, when I finally managed to tip-toe into the chamber where she kept her riches, I would discover the someone I was so desperate to love.

  “Listen, Lapin’s . . . he’s kind of a sort of rock star, you know?”

  “So?”

  “He just, he has different ways of . . . He’s different than we are.”

  “How would you know?”

  “We’re best friends.”

  “Well, fine, okay. But you don’t even know me.”

  I couldn’t help wincing when I heard her say this.

  “You don’t know how I am.”

  “I’ve been paying attention.”

  She squirmed, skeptical, but for the first time, curious, susceptible to my wiles. “Oh? So, like, what do I do?”

  I could say . . . what? I could say that, while Lapin did whatever he wanted, secure as he was in his sustained blessedness, in his born right to be the constant center of attention, myopically selfish, thus freeing those around him from the burden of his existence, her every action was tactical, an attempt to surprise or shock or seduce, and like me she didn’t exist when others weren’t there to witness her. While I suspected this was correct, it was maybe too aggressive. She’d bristle and lose interest. It was a quip when I needed a koan. I could cut deeply, let her know I was on to her, that I saw how everything she’d done tonight—from accepting my company simply because I was Lapin’s friend to breaking in on the poker game and showing me off at Burger King—was tied together by her insecurity, by her gargantuan capacity for self-loathing. I could say anything, and if I was vague enough and included plenty of caveats and loopholes
, it would ring true. But I didn’t want to manipulate her. I wanted, actually, to understand her—and though I knew she’d scoff at the very thought—to be there with her.

  “I don’t know,” I said after numerous deep, contemplative drags on my cigarette. “Do you actually want to talk about this?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll have to pull over somewhere.”

  “We’re almost at the party.”

  “We can’t talk about this at the party.”

  “Sure we can.”

  “You’ll have to play with your friends.”

  “No.” That dumbfounded, judgmental expression. “There it is. Turn. Turn.”

  “Which—where?”

  She tapped my shoulder like it was a conga and reached across in front of me.

  “Left, right there.”

  The party—I use the term loosely—consisted of a mob of teenagers crammed into the parking lot of a landscaped municipal park. They all looked alike: blond, crisp t-shirts embossed with tableaus of surfboards and sunglasses and fun in the sun, tucked into freshly ironed blue jeans. The boys all wore brand-new basketball shoes; the girls, Tretorns. The same swarm of people who, under different names, spread like a virus through my town, and whom I’d fled tonight to try my luck with her. As I trolled through the parking lot, swerving around them, I gripped the wheel tensely and wished one of them would slip a foot under my tire, just by mistake, so I could randomly crush it and pull the world crashing down around him. She, meanwhile, flipped down the visor and checked herself in the mirror, fidgeting with her barrettes, rubbing a wet finger at the edges of her eyes, turning and peering, angling for a side view of herself. We were being sized up, a thousand petty questions asked and answered in a glance, and if they’d failed my test, I was failing their test as well. So was she. The boys were smirking, the girls were whispering. One guy held his fingers to his mouth in a V and rapidly flicked his tongue through the slit. We weren’t wanted here, and I couldn’t believe she didn’t already know this.

  I parked in the darkness away from the crowd. “So these are your friends, huh?”

  “These are my friends. Yes.” Her speech was clipped now. She sat back, away from me. Her eyes seemed to dare me to disagree.

  But why put myself through her justifications? I couldn’t be more disappointed than I already was. Suddenly she wasn’t so mysterious or surprising, just an empty, insecure girl nakedly desiring a society that didn’t want her. I could see now why she put up with Lapin’s sadism—at least it was one-on-one. With these people she was the knowing butt of a sophomoric joke.

  “You really think we’ll be able to talk here?”

  “Chill out, man.”

  “No, it’s alright with me—you’re the one who wanted to talk. I just . . . this isn’t really my scene.”

  “You want to go? Fine. Fine. We can go. What do you want to do? Get an ice cream cone and hold my hand? No, you want to go park somewhere so you can beg me for a blow job, don’t you? That’s cool. How about here? Whip it out. Let’s have at it.”

  I felt myself leaving. Saw myself driving the back roads home, blasting the college radio station where maybe I’d find some punk rock and reporting all this tomorrow to Lapin who’d laugh and say, “You should’ve at least fucked her.”

  “Look, I could . . . it’s—what?—late . . . I could go home. Why don’t I just leave you off here and you can catch a ride from somebody.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, with contrition I knew was meant to manipulate. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “No?”

  “No. I . . . I wanted to see what you’d do.”

  “Well, now you know. I’m not as base as you think. And listen, believe it or not, and I know you don’t want to, but we don’t all think with our dicks.”

  “I never said that.”

  “But that’s what you think, no?”

  She looked like she was about to cry.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  She slid over and balanced next to me on the edge of the driver’s seat. Twisting to keep from falling, she snuck her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my chest. I felt bad about myself, I don’t know why.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, look at me for a second, okay?” Her cheeks were dry and smooth. I cupped her chin in my two hands. “Some people have good intentions.”

  I felt like a sham, even as I said it, but whereas earlier I’d had every intention of trying to seduce her—to be like the others but with, I imagined, more class, more delicacy—I now really did want my good intentions to prevail over my wet dreams. Then again, I wondered if, here, in my arms, she was maybe less safe than she’d been with any man to whom she’d previously bartered her body for attention. I would happily forestall sex for the possibility of a more elusive intimacy. I was dangerous to her exactly because I wasn’t going to make a play. I posed no physical threat, but I suspected the stern kindness I was displaying was more disruptive to her sense of self than the aggressive thrust she had come to expect from boys brandishing their dicks like knives. I posed an ontological threat. She knew what to do with a hard-on, that was easy, but a man? Maybe not.

  I flattered myself like this as she leaned in and kissed me, her lips probing for pliancy, her teeth scraping at the edges of my mouth, her tongue prying at my teeth.

  I refused to give in.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It seemed like the right thing.”

  “Well, stop.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “It doesn’t matter if I like it, it’s not”—I searched for the word—“genuine. Why don’t you wait and kiss me when you mean it?”

  “Does that mean you’re going to stay?”

  “And if you’re not capable of being genuine, then don’t kiss me at all.”

  “But you’re going to stay?”

  “For how long?”

  “An hour, maybe?”

  I made a point of checking my watch—11:24.

  “Okay, an hour.”

  Sullen, I sat on a picnic table at the farthest edge of the pale circles of light illuminating the parking lot and watched her pretend that she was the same breed as these other girls. It was as if the kids at the party had held up a picture of a girl—a sweet young thing, a girl next door—who looked nothing like her and said, “If this were you we’d accept you,” and in taking this impossible challenge, she’d succeeded in partially sublimating her most unique and charming features—her explosive, devouring anger, the speed with which she twirled chaos around in her hand, her sexualization of everything—but failed miserably at taking on the bouncy, smiley duplicity, the faux naïveté, of the girl in the picture. Flitting from the edge of one group to another, she was a parody of everything they stood for. Her false smile glaringly false, almost but not quite ironic, while theirs—smiling because that was what you were supposed to do—seemed simply stupid. Her posture loose-limbed and flexible despite her efforts to repress everything her body knew. Her absurd attempts to thrust herself into their conversations. Two girls compare notes: “I’m so drunk.” “I know. Me too.” “We should slow down, maybe.” And her attempt at a joke, “You won’t get laid that way.” They scowl, they hiss. Does she realize she’s the aggressive one, I wonder, even here where she’s trying to be meek? The performance would’ve been hilarious if she’d known that she was mocking them, that they were the laughable ones. Instead, it was pathetic. Dejected, she slunk away from the girls.

  The boys at the party were even less subtle, twisting her nipples, flipping their fingers up between her legs. It wasn’t even heartbreaking. She turned her head to the sky and laughed. “You wish you could have a piece of this.” But that didn’t stop them. “That dripping thing? My dick would fall off.” Or, “Only if you did all three of us at once.” When no one would give her a beer, she begged. One of them finally said, “I’ve got some beer for you,” and with crude bravado,
he began unzipping his fly. He stopped when he got the laugh he was after, but she wasn’t resisting. She was whatever they wanted her to be. So little self-respect. The irony was that she thought that they, everyone there in that parking lot, were the intimidating ones, when in fact, she scared them to death, and through her example of what not to do, got the girls to pray for their own chastity and kept the boys awake late into the night rubbing away their memories of her cleavage. All they knew of her was sex, and despite herself, that’s all she presented to them. Hardly immune to this, I found myself asking: Who is she here to ensnare tonight? How many of these boys have had her on nights when they knew there was no one around to see?

  Not that I cared, really, not anymore. I no longer wondered how Lapin could miss the sweet sadness and beauty I saw in her. It wasn’t there. I had imagined it. Now that I knew this, what more was there for me to learn about her? Oh, so much more than I needed to, because when the cops came and scattered the party, she found me and dragged me deep into the park where we hid behind a shrub and, while waiting for them to leave, finally had that long conversation.

  I guess I’ll admit that by now she had become an object, an icon, albeit defaced and desecrated, of a certain kind of fertility: the whorish, skanky kind. Having assimilated the opinions of all of the friends she’d subjected me to tonight, I wanted to fuck her quick, speed home and shower. So, call me a prick. Call me an asshole. Tell me I’m as bad as she is. I won’t disagree, but I will say that my intent had been kind at the start, it’s just that, after wasting four hours as the only man—or woman, for that matter, or boy or girl— so desperate and self-deluded as to believe she was worth his kindness, I’d grown tired of trying to defy her expectations. She’d broken me down. Which is why, as we lay side by side on our stomachs, peering through the tangled lower brambles of the hedgerow at the distant flashlights and headlights and red-and-blue twirling lights atop the cop cars, wondering how long before they receded and freed us from hiding, I dug my leg under hers and flipped over, yanking her toward me like the other half of a bear trap. I palmed the cheeks of her ass and rippled my fingers, kneading the baby fat. I felt for resistance. I grappled with my own shock at myself. I took her body into my arms—reached out and grabbed—without even asking myself what she might want. And I wondered how this aggressive new me could have wasted so much time dodging the truth, cloaking his billy-goat self in the soft kid gloves of a gentleman’s skittishness, the monk’s itchy hair shirt of moral hesitation. Rolling us over so I was on top, I roughly kissed her. It was so easy. What a relief: I wasn’t the nice guy I’d thought I was. I was capable of being like all the rest.