My Life in Heavy Metal (23 page)

I was not terribly concerned about Ling. She had a heart from the new school. That is how I understood things to be. I was more concerned at my own behavior, the way rejected longing might cause me to lash out and spoil everything. I did not consider the extent of her feelings. I did not consider the way she occasionally pushed my name into the dark between us—
David, David
—her voice a wet reed, her eyes turned away, as if to hide or disown.

Men store their own private stock of memories, those visual haunts that remind us, in times of yearning. With a torturing clarity, I can see one old girlfriend, seating and unseating herself on my lap, her bottom blue in the moonlight, roundly swallowing. Another, arching her back, lacing her calves around mine, and gushing. Or Ling,
pooled beneath me, having already been worked to the end and back, dragging her fingers down her nose and lips, asking me to come,
right here.

Was this degradation, or do the extremes of passion allow for a more supple view? I can say only that I wanted nothing more than this prompt, the chance to stain her, to display what she elicited, to stripe her from cheek to belly. This pleased us, this joyous dirtiness, and we finger-painted her torso, until, with a towel I fetched, she wiped me off.

We were on the way to the airport to pick up Pam when Ling turned to me and said: “I'm seeing someone new.” My heart began a half-time faster. I suffered the inward panic of a man whose good fortune has run out. I stared at the black, rain-slicked highway, at the downtown buildings gilded in light. Quickly, to stanch my confusion, I said, “That's great. I think that's great.”

Ling added—in that deep voice of hers, flat as a frozen pond—“I mean, we both know where we are.”

“Right,” I said.

She asked if I might not want to hear a little about the fellow. It was a cruel question, all things considered, but we were playing roles now. That is where we had come to. We were friends now. And friends listened to friends moon over new lovers.

He was a classmate of hers, a fellow engineer. He had built a robotic fish that much impressed her. I had listened to her rave about this fish before, and had wondered out loud as to its purpose. Was it intended for research? Was there some practical application? Did the world especially need a robotic fish? Might a robotic fisherman, all things considered, be a better investment of
know-how? That wasn't the point, Ling had told me. I was missing the point.

That she had decided to end our arrangement on the way to the airport to pick up our mutual friend, dropping it into conversation as an afterthought—this was an act of provocation. Yes. But she was twenty-two years old, in over her head, and no doubt terrified of my reaction. It was inconsiderate. Yet, from an engineering standpoint, sound methodology. She had chosen a time that would ensure minimum recoil.

And so, the business of the airport pick up. Ling stomped along in her ridiculous army boots, telling her stupid stories, while I stumbled about in a red silence. Inside the terminal, I found a bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror, my stupid, combed-forward hair. The guy at the sink next to me said, “You lose your luggage, too?”

When I emerged Pam was there, bright, friendly Pam, who knew nothing of the situation, thought, instead, that she was visiting two pals, who, to her delight, enjoyed a casual friendship. She and Ling spent the trip home gabbing boisterously while I pretended to concentrate on the wet roads.

The next evening Pam and I went to pick up Ling for dinner. We clomped up the stairs to her place. I'd had cocktails in preparation. The lights were on inside but the door was locked. We knocked and shouted, knocked again. A minute or so passed. There was maybe some vague scramble and murmur, and I suppose I had an inkling, somewhere, though I was trusting enough, or vain enough, or fragile
enough, to hide this from myself. We figured Ling was in the shower.

Pam pulled out her key and slipped it into the lock and opened the door and before us stood a young man, disheveled and blushing. From the corner of my eye I saw the bathroom door quickly shut. It was, for that long moment, like the revelations delivered in dreams: astonishing yet inevitable.
How could she?
and
Of course.
It wasn't what I saw that was so difficult to bear, but, like the hacks buzzing away on TV always say, it was the cover-up, the way in which they hadn't been undressed and groping, drunk on one another's mouths, struggling into clothing.

“You must be John,” Pam said. “I've heard all about
you.
” She ushered him to a seat at Ling's small kitchen table. “What have you two been up to? Studying? A little study group?” She laughed. “We're going to dinner, John. Come with us.”

Flushed with sheepish pleasure, as lost to the real action as Pam, John tried to frown. “I've got homework to do.”

Homework,
I thought.
Christ.

“You can do that later,” Pam said. “You've got all night.”

I sat down across from John, the Fishboy, studying his face, as if for some indication of why he would make Ling's knees weak. He had a thick mouth, sleepy eyes, a tangled hedge of brown hair. He was young, as she was. And I was an old man made silly by my affections.

“We'll only be about an hour,” I said helpfully.

Fishboy tried again to frown.

“Of course you'll come,” Pam said.

And now Ling emerged from the bathroom and strode over to Pam and gave her a little hug, and smiled with embarrassed glee. Pam went to take a pee and Ling sat herself at the head of the table, with Fishboy on one side and me on the other.

I thought about Ling's mouth, wide, fishy, the happy industry of her motions, sweeping her black hair away, her tongue extending, the two surfaces meeting, the intimacy with which she outlined my shape, how hungry she had been and how I needed that hunger and how that mouth would now be fixed on this new body and had been in the moments when Pam and I were rising up the stairs.

“What sort of homework do you have to do?” I asked Fishboy.

He held up a textbook. “Design stuff. Same as Ling.”

“Cool.”

“And you're a teacher, right?” he said. “Ling told me about you.”

I nodded and fiddled with my key ring. I wanted terribly not to let my feelings show. And, at the same time, I wanted to punch Ling in the face. I wanted to shake her so hard her skull would buckle against the wall.

Pam emerged from the bathroom and some minutes were spent discussing where we might dine. Pam continued to urge Fishboy to come along. I did, as well. What a good sport I was! What a jolly good fellow! He finally begged off. Ling said, “I'll walk you out” and stumbled after him. They spent a minute in the hallway, groping.

“Were we early?” I asked Pam.

She laughed. “Apparently.”

There is a point at which self-preservation demands pride, no matter how hollow. Ling pretends she has done nothing wrong, and I pretend I am not reeling. This was our dinner, Pam gabbing along idiotically. I looked at Ling only once. A flush of red skin snaked from her neck to the center of her cheek. Sex rash. I was certain if I looked again I would begin to shake.

When you are betrayed to this extent, and in this way, a kind of dissonance prevails. There is the person you knew before, and there is the person you know now. And they are not the same person. So that, when you think about them, it is only as a way of understanding what you have lost, what you will never have again. You become wed to the dross of memory, a person who lies alone in bed and thinks about what has already happened.

We had wanted to end things neatly. That is what we had both vowed, right? But the way things had gone, the way Ling had jury-rigged them, seemed devised to ensure the opposite. My initial sense was that she had felt pressured by me, or frightened, had sensed the bruising loneliness of my life, the way in which I clutched at the world around me, and opted to expulse me from her life in such a manner that no clinging would ensue.

My friends insisted she was terribly angry at me for the way in which I had ravaged her body and dismissed the rest of her. Perhaps she had been more shamed by our relationship than I'd realized, the way it sought a convenient path from isolation. And perhaps, once she had found her own way, I came to represent a
desperate past. But then there was the matter of our sexual relationship. And nothing there had ever been fake, or dull, or shameful. If anything, the sensations there had been too real, out of proportion. Perhaps these scared her. Perhaps, as a young woman of twenty-two, she had felt that the only way to exorcise this sexual possession was to stage a public renunciation.

It doesn't much matter. Most of these feelings were subconscious, nothing she would admit. She would say, only, that she had lost track of time, had made a mistake, but not a terribly large one, because, after all, she had announced an end to our agreement. In the strict terms favored by lawyers, or engineers, she had done nothing wrong.

This discernment of motive did nothing, anyhow, to undo or diminish my pain. It was just something I thought about so I did not have to think about the coming blue, waiting there with its rolling pin, or what Ling—or any of the Lings of this wide world—might be doing, at that late hour, in her cozy apartment across our big city.

When you have spent as long inside yourself as I have you learn a certain humility in the face of hardship. And then you learn it again. It takes years to become as softhearted and hopeful as I am. I had no business dancing with a young woman like that. I should have known better.

The heart is not only a lonely hunter, though it is certainly that. It is a drowning salesman, a bloodied clown, an incurable disease. We pay dearly for its every decision. There are a lucky few, dead in certain vital places, who learn to tame their passions.

But I am certain that you, too, have some episode in your life that lines up against this one, some mad period of transgression in which your body, your foolish foolish body, led you toward tender ruin. And sometimes, at night, you must lie awake and ask yourself: How could I have done this? How ever, in the world, might I have become such a fool? How do I stop? And when? When? When will I have her again?

This book would not exist but for the grace of the following kickass human beings: Richard and Barbara Almond, Peter Almond, Alice Rosenthal, Tom Finkel, Pablo Salopek, Holden Lewis, Pat Flood, Emma Trelles, Ann Clark Espuelas, Keith Morris, Victor Cruz, Liz Vondrak, Rachel Garber, Kirk Semple, Amy Williams, Dave Blair, Jim Clark, Tim Huggins, Ana Jamolca, Jenni Price, Lad Tobin, Eve Bridburg, Shane Dubow, and Steve Amick. Thanks to all the editors who have supported my work, in particular Adrienne Brodeur, Alice Turner, Jodee Rubins, Michael Griffith, Colleen Donfield, Lois Hauselman, Michael Czyzniejewski, and, of course, Brendan Cahill. Thanks, finally, to all my wonderful my students, who have taught me as much as I taught them.