“Relax. We’re not the monogamous type.”
He shivered as her cold fingers grazed his chest. Considered stopping her, of demanding something more for himself. Yet he had waited forever to be in someone’s hands. When her fingers meandered down and stroked the crotch of his jeans, he lost his breath.
She removed her tank top. Beneath it she wore a lace bra, daintier than he would have imagined. He looked away again, and then back at them, her small cups. He ran his hand across her back, not knowing what was allowed.
She unhooked herself, took his hands and molded them over her breasts. And once he was situated there, she returned her hand to his jeans, unzipped the fly, felt him through his silly cotton briefs. It felt like playing with electric sockets; their bodies had buttons, levers, the capacity to shock. She was cold and methodical, without kisses, as if teaching him choreography for a play.
And then, quite suddenly, something shifted: she turned around, pressed her back against his bare skin, cupped her hands over his hands. No longer leading him; surrendering. She had pinned hersmall body against him. She had even shut her eyes, leaving him to see and touch her angles. And gradually, Jason did so like a man long starved, biting back the urge to chew her crisp black hair. They were no longer cold. They were hot and hurried, all instinct and need.
He had worried, at various times earlier that evening, that she saw him as a little brother. Now that felt like the most colonized thought he’d had yet. He could smell her body odor, at once unappealing and intoxicating. Then she drew his hand farther down, diving beneath the folds of her underwear. He felt the curls of thicker hair, and below it, a landscape of caves and coral—slick and glossy, he imagined, as an ocean bed.
He feared himself, he wanted to know the rules, but her low moaning seemed to say that there were none.
For several months, he forgot about the Met and the black box theaters and went to Beloved House to make love with Gina—and to study. He read the books and watched the tapes she set in front of him, became obsessed with Nam June Paik’s TV art and Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted nudes. And she studiedhim, and sometimes took his picture on her Canon when he wasn’t looking. If he left the room to urinate, she picked up his books and read the notes he had written in the margins. It was flattering to be the object of someone’s gaze in this way. To not always be the gazer. He had never felt so aware of himself as a body and as a person. Her questions required him to explain himself, and the more he talked, the more he felt he knew himself. He was proud to see who he was becoming.
He found a job at a bookstore near school and didn’t tell his parents about his intentions to move to Beloved House until he was clomping down the staircase with one arm around his typewriter and the other holding a suitcase packed with clothes and books. He’d never needed much.
“Where you go?” his mother asked in English.
“I got an apartment.”
She was horrified. What did he mean, what apartment? Withwho? He was so young, just nineteen—who would cook for him and make sure he ate? He would probably eat cornflakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He always messed up the laundry by forgetting to put in the soap, so how would he wash his clothes?
“Look what you’re doing to your ma,” his father said. “When’s the last time you thought about anyone except yourself?”
Jason disregarded his father and argued half-heartedly with his mother. He was past caring what they thought. Only his grandfather’s reaction disturbed him. Koon Lai’s raisiny face clouded over, and he shrank into his chair like he might someday dissolve into it.
Beloved House held a communal dinner that night in Jason’s welcome. The beans and rice ran out quickly, but the beer and music kept coming, and once inebriated, the housemates took turns relating the time and place of their favorite one-night stands, then the day and streets where they’d been mugged. He chewed on Angelo’s sunflower seeds and tried to shake off the image of Jackie, Yia Yia, and his parents sitting joylessly around a table crammed end to end with plates of fish cakes and pork ribs.
Beloved House was a slapdash, janky construction, exposing them to the changing of the seasons, the drafts of winter and the smacking wetness of summer. It was an archeology site, littered with remnants of the past twenty artists who had come and gone with those seasons. Roaches squirmed in the corners of the dish strainer, squiggles of corkscrew pasta fell from the kitchen ceiling, and the shower curtain was always molding over and sticking to itself, so that Jason never managed to stretch it to its full length. The first month of his stay, they suffered a two-week gas outage. Jason spent those weeks eating Breyers ice cream and cereal, just as his mother had predicted. But it was better this way, he thought: to live in a house that continually reminded you of your animalness, your vulnerability to the elements.
About a year into his stay at Beloved House, Gina met someone at Club 57. Jason never learned his name, let alone his ethnicity—only that he had a Volkswagen. She set out with him on a cross-countryroad trip. She said they would return in six weeks, but six weeks turned into six months, and when they got back to New York she stayed with him, somewhere in Queens. When Gina finally dropped by Beloved House, she fought with Jim for hours and barely spoke to Jason at all, which made it obvious that in the hierarchy of her polyamory, Jason was at the bottom.
Going home was impossible. He couldn’t bear to return to his mother’s disappointment, his father’s violence, his grandfather’s ceaseless grief. He spent most of his time squirreled away in his room, writing poems about outcasts who wandered in shadowed, predawn Hopperesque streets or, like Li Po, drankalone, under the moon. The ink of spoiled pens dripped like hoisin, stained his fingers. Sometimes he only had the energy to lie in a ball on his mattress, paralyzed with the fear of unending lonesomeness.
During these months, only his grandfather visited him. Koon Lai would appear on the fire escape, wearing the gray suit that smelled of mothballs, and he’d spread a handkerchief on the dirty window ledge and sit there for hours with his thin knees crossed. He’d listen to his grandson moan into a pillow, and he’d say, “Go home and visit your mother.” Sometimes he’d unwrap a dried plum and offer it to the boy.
But Jason couldn’t hear or see him. All he felt was a lingering warmth that softened him like a bowl of mushroom jook on a winter day.
It took some time before he called home and learned Koon Lai was dead.
SADIE
Sadie arrived at the 99 Cents store on Rockaway Avenue determined to find Mr. William and his nurse, even if it meant spending the whole day in Mr. Pierre Henry’s dollar store. Mr. Henry didn’t mind. He gave her a plastic chair to sit on. She showed her gratitude by fetching two orders of saltfish and bake from a takeout spot on Rutland Road.
But neither Mr. William nor the nurse showed, and though Sadie came back the following day to wait, they did not turn up then either. Sadie tore a page from her notebook, wrote a message with her number, and asked Mr. Henry to deliver it to Mr. William if he ever came by.
Three days later, the twinkle of her ringtone caught her with a mouth full of toothpaste.
“Hello?” she gurgled.
“Hello?” said a voice raspy as sandpaper.
“Mr. William!”
She spat into the sink, wiped her mouth, and dashed back to her bedroom.
“Pauline gave me your letter. I remember you. They said you’ve been looking for me. But the thing is, these days, I don’t leave thehouse. And I don’t know if you would feel comfortable inside my apartment. I understand a young woman might not feel right coming into a stranger’s apartment.”
