Love Me Back (13 page)

We go out to dinner at La Calle Doce with a friend who says you make him think of the song Jolene. You color a sombrero and eat chips and bar garnishes—orange wedges, maraschino cherries, cucumber slices. You color maracas. My friend buys a song from the mariachis for you. Don Gato: You follow the story as if it is the most important news, and when Don Gato comes back to life at the end your relief is immense.

There is a wishing well in the middle of the dining room, a koi pond lit amber. You ask for a penny and then you sit on the low mosaic tile wall through three entire courses while we talk. After dessert I come to collect you, thinking you have been mesmerized by so many iridescent fish all this time. But your face is troubled. What’s wrong? I say.

Mama, you say, I don’t know what to wish for.

You give me the sweaty penny and say You can have my wish.

Thank you, I say. That’s thoughtful.

I think, my arm around your waist. I close my eyes for effect and I see The Restaurant. I see the way Casey stands when he takes an order at a table. I hear Asami’s beautiful laugh. I’m so glad that in this one exact moment I’m not waiting tables, not locked into that place across town for the night. But I still feel it going on. It’s always there. I flick the coin into the water and open my eyes. We watch it flutter to the bottom, and then we go home.

The Dangler

Shaila has a body to break your mind. You scan it once expecting a flaw, twice not believing there isn’t one, three times for the exhilaration. The way her legs are tan, a real brown sugar tan, her calves all cut up and high, her toes manicured but in that simple nude style, her ass so round, so beautiful. Her slender waist, her perfect all-real breasts floating and pulling the world to her, nipples often showing—just a bit, if she turns—through whatever silk dress she’s wearing. She has long straight dirty blond hair that falls over her face when she checks her phone. She’s gorgeous but in a porchy Alabama way, not the way women in Dallas usually look if they’re trying. Like you look at her and think that must be about how she looked before she went into her big bathroom to get ready.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad muscular so they
ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick. They’re expecting to be turned down so you shouldn’t feel any obligation.

I’ve seen every woman in Dallas bring her best into the bar but Shaila’s the one who stops time and mouths. She’s easy like a man too which makes them insane. God she’s dirty, they slobber. They’re all after her and she gives them all their turns, letting them outspend each other. Ahmed owns a pizza company that runs catchy snarky ads, he’s a Pakistani New Yorker who knows Danny from the Bronx. He left his wife and four kids for Shaila but now he sits at the corner of the bar all sad and blurred, staring into the middle whiskey distance.

Frank, one of my regulars, told me she fucks like a spider monkey, whatever that means. He took her to the Bahamas. Danny took her to Vegas and they got so blown out in the hotel room they couldn’t make their dinner time at Pagliacci, when that was a reservation a normal person couldn’t get in a lifetime of trying. She used to be married to the guy who started Glamorous You, a multimillion-dollar mall makeover photography company, so she made out like a king in the divorce and she can just hang out in the bar every night or take off for the Bahamas.

She drives an orange Ferrari. I heard it’s the only one that color. They call her the Dangler because once she came
to the bar when it was that time and she was wearing a black dress the size of an eyelash. I guess she sat on the barstool some way and somebody saw the string. I guess if you have all that money and that body it doesn’t matter what people call you.

Best pussy of my life, Frank told me, it’s all over after the Dangler.

There’s this other woman I call the other dangler in my head. I was waiting behind her at the Public Storage to get a spot to store his TV and his records and that green chair because I didn’t have room for them in my new place. I don’t know why I did that for him, I even paid for the storage. Had to borrow a truck and call up my ex because the only truck I could borrow was a stick and I can’t drive a stick.

Some advice: Don’t call your ex to help you do anything for your current hateful man who’s in Miami for the summer probably making some memories, at least not if the last time you were sitting in that green chair watching that TV the hateful man said, about you, This is the best pussy I can get right now.

So the woman in front of me was jammed up about something at the Public Storage, while my ex was waiting outside with the truck.

I can’t do that, she kept saying, you don’t understand. She’ll kill me. I need to handle this while she’s away. I’ve been in the hospital. I’m supposed to be there now I just got to handle this.

She had seaweedy hair divided into two ponytails,
the bands had those pink plastic balls. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and stonewashed denim cargo shorts. She was skinny in an unhealthy way and her toenails were yellow and clawy in some of those black rubber sandals with all the straps, like feet tires. I didn’t ever see her face, just stood behind her while she tried to get something from the Public Storage woman. From her elbow skin I’d guess early forties. But maybe younger factoring in hard living. She had a purse with a Mickey Mouse keychain hanging off it and her keys were clipped to her belt with a Mickey Mouse carabiner. She had a anklet on each ankle, a Mickey Mouse charm dangled from each one. Finally she yelled at the Public Storage woman.

Ughhh! You do not understand, she will freaking kill me. I just need to put this in there like she said. She’s waiting for me right outside, why does she have to come in?

I thought you said she was away, the Public Storage woman said coldly.

I turned around with my arms crossed in front of me like I just wanted a change of scenery but I was really looking to see if there was somebody out there. I saw my ex, who gave me a high sign like What the fuck is taking so long, and in the parking spot right past him was a bigger truck, a white Chevy Silverado. There was a woman in the driver’s seat, she looked about fifty and she had long white hair that she smoothed back with a hand that had a ring on each finger. She was nodding her head and slapping her knee to some music. The other dangler gave up arguing and said as she went out the door God! People don’t got to be so damned ugly! Her Mickey Mouse carabiner caught on the handle,
jerking her back. The bell on the door jangled roughly as she worked the carabiner off the handle. Outside, she climbed into the bed of the truck and the driver started backing out before she’d even sat down on the toolbox, making her lose her balance. She yelled at the driver and banged on the window behind the gun rack. The driver didn’t turn around, just kept nodding her head to the music.

Frank said the spider monkey thing to me one day when I was running some errands for him. He was a criminal lawyer who did a lot of big white-collar cases and handled all the minor shit for his friends—Danny’s traffic tickets, the bar’s occasional health code violations, the DUI Ahmed got after Shaila dumped him to go to Cabo with Matt, this personal trainer who had stopped drinking alcohol but still came to the bar three nights a week to get coke from Danny. He’d down glass after glass of iced tea, usually in one draw. You’d refill the glass and he’d be doing his little Splenda ritual, shake shake tear pour stir—and when you turned around again the glass would be empty.

He was the one who had it worst for Shaila, even worse than Ahmed. You could tell by how they sat at the table—she’d be leaning back giving off this all-balls safari-guide vibe and Matt would sit forward in his chair to catch the invisible gazelles of wisdom leaping out of her mouth. He was a nervous tense one with those gigantic biceps not good for anything but reps. Probably the only thing whiter than the pure coke Danny got him and made him pay out his demolished septum for was his teeth, which glowed
ultraviolet in the bar. He laughed at everything Shaila said and leaned forward more and drank more tea and went to the bathroom to snort more off the key to his Avalanche, which he didn’t valet, because he wanted to keep his keys or because he wasn’t loaded like Shaila’s other fuckems I don’t know. Eventually he’d come back from his latest trip to the men’s room chewing the invisible gum.

So I did these runarounds for Frank, who had a receptionist and a legal secretary and a junior attorney but still needed someone to handle things like his lunch and shoes for the women he was seeing. He told me he’d been having drinks with Danny and Ahmed at Trece one night when Danny got a text from Shaila. It said
what time can I fit you in tonight my love?
and Danny was showing it to Frank saying I fucking love this whore she’s such a fine dirtleg always ready when Frank got a text from Shaila:
what time can I fit you in tonight my love?
Frank was pissed she texted Danny first and Danny was about to go public with his alpha male stock when Ahmed said You cocksuckers it’s just D before F. I got it first. She don’t give a fuck about any of us.

That’s what’s so great about her, said Frank, and Danny said What do you want Ahmed? Christ. Sweet cunt, no bullshit.

That is what I’ve tried to give my hateful man but it hasn’t worked out. My hateful man is Ghanaian British and tall and mean and has a gift for hats. The selection of, and the wearing of in such a way as to crack my dumb heart. He plays jazz trombone for a twelve-piece that’s going
places and he’s proud of the strong embouchure and extra-muscular tongue he brings me. In bed only is he sweet and sometimes when his fluttering lick releases me I almost cry with the ache for him to be that gentle in the hallway, or the living room. But he’s brushed me back one too many times for me to let him see how much I want that. He doesn’t like for me to sit next to him on the couch, or any nonfucking touching in general, but he’ll tickle me sometimes. He had me pinned to the floor one night and he wouldn’t stop even though I was seriously asking him to and I was a little drunk so I spit on him because I couldn’t move anything else. Suddenly he was very still and he wiped the spit off his face with his right hand. He was a little drunk too and as I was sitting up he hit me across the face with the spit hand so hard my head slammed back into the green chair. Fuck! he said, looking at his hand. It was his slide hand and he had a show the next night.