Stranger Things Happen (21 page)

"What?" the woman says.

"How you met. That's sweet. Look here." The fortune-teller
points to the worn-down tread. "It was a blind date. See what I
mean about luck?"

"You can see that in her shoe?" the man says.

"Yeah," the fortune-teller says. "Plain as anything. Just like
the garden and the grandkids. Blind date, first kiss, hunh! The
next date, she invited you over for dinner. She washed the sheets
first. Do you want me to go on?"

"Where will we live?" the woman says. "Do we fight about money?
Does he still snore when he gets old? His sense of humor—does he
still tell the same dumb jokes?"

"Look," the fortune-teller says, "You'll have a good life. You
don't want all the details, do you? Go home, make wedding plans,
get married. You should probably get married inside. I think it
might rain. I'm not good at weather. You'll be happy, I promise.
I'm good at the happy stuff. It's what I see best. You want to know
about snoring, or breast cancer, or mortgages, go see the woman
next door who reads tea leaves."

She says, "You'll get old together. You'll be comfortable
together. I promise. Trust me. I can see you, then, the two of you,
you'll be sitting in your garden. There's dirt under your
fingernails. You're drinking lemonade. I can't tell if it's
homemade or not, but it's perfect. Not too sweet. You're
remembering I told you this. Remember I told you this. How lucky
you were, to find each other! You'll be comfortable together, like
an old pair of shoes."

"Okay, Joe. As I was saying, our Martian women are gonna be
blond, because, see, just because." 

— 
RAY BRADBURY
, "The
Concrete Mixer"

A few years ago, Jack dropped the C from his name and became
Jak. He called me up at breakfast one morning to tell me this. He
said he was frying bacon for breakfast and that all his roommates
were away. He said that he was walking around stark naked. He could
have been telling the truth, I don't know. I could hear something
spitting and hissing in the background that could have been bacon,
or maybe it was just static on the line.

Jak keeps a journal in which he records the dreams he has about
making love to his ex-girlfriend Nikki, who looks like Sandy
Duncan. Nikki is now married to someone else. In the most recent
dream, Jak says, Nikki had a wooden leg. Sandy Duncan has a glass
eye in real life. Jak calls me up to tell me this dream.

He calls to say that he is in love with the woman who does the
Braun coffee-maker commercial, the one with the short blond hair,
like Nikki, and eyes that are dreamy and a little too far apart. He
can't tell from the commercial if she has a wooden leg, but he
watches TV every night, in the hopes of seeing her again.

#

If I were blond, I could fall in love with Jak.

#

Jak calls me with the first line of a story. Most of my friends
are two-thirds water, he says, and I say that this doesn't surprise
me. He says, no, that this is the first line. There's a Philip K.
Dick novel, I tell him, that has a first line like that, but not
exactly and I can't remember the name of the novel. I am listening
to him while I clean out my father's refrigerator. The name of the
Philip K. Dick novel is 
Confessions of a Crap Artist
,
I tell Jak. What novel, he says.

He says that he followed a woman home from the subway,
accidentally. He says that he was sitting across from her on the
Number 1 uptown and he smiled at her. This is a bad thing to do in
New York when there isn't anyone else in the subway car, traveling
uptown past 116th Street, when it's one o'clock in the morning,
even when you're Asian and not much taller than she is, even
when 
she 
made eye contact first, which is what
Jak says she did. Anyway he smiled and she looked away. She got off
at the next stop, 125th, and so did he. 125th is his stop. She
looked back and when she saw him, her face changed and she began to
walk faster.

Was she blond, I ask, casually. I don't remember, Jak says. They
came up onto Broadway, Jak just a little behind her, and then she
looked back at him and crossed over to the east side. He stayed on
the west side so she wouldn't think he was following her. She
walked fast. He dawdled. She was about a block ahead when he saw
her cross at La Salle, towards him, towards Claremont and
Riverside, where Jak lives on the fifth floor of a rundown
brownstone. I used to live in this building before I left school.
Now I live in my father's garage. The woman on Broadway looked back
and saw that Jak was still following her. She walked faster. He
says he walked even more slowly.

By the time he came to the corner market on Riverside, the one
that stays open all night long, he couldn't see her. So he bought a
pint of ice cream and some toilet paper. She was in front of him at
the counter, paying for a carton of skim milk and a box of dish
detergent. When she saw him, he thought she was going to say
something to the cashier but instead she picked up her change and
hurried out of the store.

Jak says that the lights on Claremont are always a little dim
and fizzy, and sounds are muffled, as if the street is under water.
In the summer, the air is heavier and darker at night, like water
on your skin. I say that I remember that. He says that up ahead of
him, the woman was flickering under the street light like a light
bulb. What do you mean, like a light bulb? I ask. I can hear him
shrug over the phone. She flickered, he says. I mean like a light
bulb. He says that she would turn back to look at him, and then
look away again. Her face was pale. It flickered.

By this point, he says, he wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't worried
anymore. He felt almost as if they knew each other. It might have
been a game they were playing. He says that he wasn't surprised
when she stopped in front of his building and let herself in. She
slammed the security door behind her and stood for a moment,
glaring at him through the glass. She looked exactly the way Nikki
looked, he says, when Nikki was still going out with him, when she
was angry at him for being late or for misunderstanding something.
The woman behind the glass pressed her lips together and glared at
Jak.

He says when he took his key out of his pocket, she turned and
ran up the stairs. She went up the first flight of stairs and then
he couldn't see her anymore. He went inside and took the elevator
up to the fifth floor. On the fifth floor, when he was getting out,
he says that the woman who looked like Nikki was slamming shut the
door of the apartment directly across from his apartment. He heard
the chain slide across the latch.

She lives across from you, I say. He says that he thinks she
just moved in. Nothing like meeting new neighbors, I say. In the
back of the refrigerator, behind wrinkled carrots and jars of
pickled onions and horseradish, I find a bottle of butterscotch
sauce. I didn't buy this, I tell Jak over the phone. Who bought
this? My father's diabetic. I know your father's diabetic, he
says.

#

I've known Jak for seven years. Nikki has been married for three
months now. He was in Ankara on an archeological dig when they
broke up, only he didn't know they'd broken up until he got back to
New York. She called and told him that she was engaged. She invited
him to the wedding and then disinvited him a few weeks later. I was
invited to the wedding, too, but instead I went to New York and
spent the weekend with Jak. We didn't sleep together.

Saturday night, which was when Nikki was supposed to be getting
married, we watched an episode of 
Baywatch
in which
the actor David Hasselhoff almost marries the beautiful blond
lifeguard, but in the end doesn't, because he has to go save some
tourists whose fishing boat has caught fire. Then we
watched 
The Princess Bride
. We drank a lot of Scotch
and I threw up in Jak's sink while he stood outside the bathroom
door and sang a song he had written about Nikki getting married.
When I wouldn't come out of the bathroom, he said good night
through the door.

I cleaned up the sink and brushed my teeth and went to sleep on
a lumpy foldout futon. I dreamed that I was in Nikki's bridal
party. Everyone was blond in my dream, the bridegroom, the best
man, the mother of the bride, the flower girl, everyone looked like
Sandy Duncan except for me. In the morning I got up and drove my
father's car back to Virginia, and my father's garage, and Jak went
to work at VideoArt, where he has a part-time job which involves
technical videos about beauty school, and the Gulf War, and things
like that. He mostly edits, but I once saw his hands on a late
night commercial, dialing the number for a video calendar featuring
exotic beauties. Women, not flowers. I almost ordered the calendar.
I haven't spoken to Nikki since before Jak went to Turkey and she
got engaged.

#

When I first moved into my father's garage, I got a job at the
textile mill where my father has worked for the last twenty years.
I answered phones. I listened to men tell jokes about blondes. I
took home free packages of men's underwear. My father and I
pretended we didn't know each other. After a while, I had all the
men's underwear that I needed. I knew all the jokes by heart. I
told my father that I was going to take a sabbatical from my
sabbatical, just for a while. I was going to write a book. I think
that he was relieved.

#

Jak calls me up to ask me how my father is doing. My father
loves Jak. They write letters to each other a couple of times a
year, in which my father tells Jak how I am doing, and whom I am
dating. These tend to be very short letters. Jak sends articles
back to my father about religion, insects, foreign countries where
he has been digging things up. My father and Jak aren't very much
alike, at least I don't think so, but
they 
like 
each other. Jak is the son that my
father never had, the son-in-law he will never have.

I ask Jak if he has run into his new neighbor, the blond one,
again, and there is a brief silence. He says, yeah, he has. She
knocked on his door a few days later, to borrow a cup of sugar.
That's original, I say. He says that she didn't seem to recognize
him and so he didn't bring it up. He says that he has noticed that
there seem to be an unusually high percentage of blond women in his
apartment building.

Let's run away to Las Vegas, I say, on impulse. He asks why Las
Vegas. We could get married, I say, and the next day we could get
divorced. I've always wanted an ex-husband, I tell him. It would
make my father very happy. He makes a counter-proposal: we could go
to New Orleans and not get married. I point out that we've already
done that. I say that maybe we should try something new, but in the
end we decide that he should come to Charlottesville in May. I am
going to give a reading.

#

My father would like Jak to marry me, but not necessarily in Las
Vegas.

#

The time that we went to New Orleans, we stayed awake all night
in the lobby of a hostel, playing Hearts with a girl from Finland.
Every time that Jak took a heart, no matter what was in his hand,
no matter whether or not someone else had already taken a point,
he'd try to shoot the moon. We could have done it, I think, we
could have fallen in love in New Orleans, but not in front of the
girl from Finland, who was blond.

A year later, Jak found an ad for tickets to Paris, ninety-nine
dollars round trip. This was while we were still in school. We went
for Valentine's Day because that was one of the conditions of the
pro-motional fare. Nikki was spending a semester in Scotland. She
was studying mad cow disease. They were sort of not seeing each
other while she was away and in any case she was away and so I went
with Jak to Paris for Valentine's Day. Isn't it romantic, I said,
we're going to be in Paris on Valentine's Day. Maybe we'll meet
someone, Jak said.

#

I lied. We didn't go to Paris for Valentine's Day, although Jak
really did find the ad in the paper, and the tickets were really
only ninety-nine dollars round trip. We didn't go and he never
asked me, and anyway Nikki came home later that month and they got
back together again. We did go to New Orleans, though. I don't
think I've made that up.

#

I realize there is a problem with Las Vegas, which is that there
are a lot of blond women there.

#

You are probably wondering why I am living in my father's
garage. My father is probably wondering why I am living in his
garage. It worries his neighbors.

#

Jak calls to tell me that he is quitting his job at VideoArt. He
has gotten some grant money, which will not only cover the rest of
the school year, but will also allow him to spend another summer in
Turkey, digging things up. I tell him that I'm happy for him. He
says that a weird thing happened when he went to pick up his last
paycheck. He got into an elevator with seven blond women who all
looked like Sandy Duncan. They stopped talking when he got on and
the elevator was so quiet he could hear them all breathing. He says
that they were all breathing in perfect unison. He says that all of
their bosoms were rising and falling in unison like they had been
running, like some sort of synchronized Olympic breast event.

He says that they smelled wonderful—that the whole elevator
smelled wonderful—like a box of Lemon Fresh Joy soap detergent. He
got off on the thirtieth floor and they all stayed on the elevator,
although he was telepathically communicating with them that they
should all get off with him, that all seven of them should spend
the day with him, they could all go to the Central Park Zoo, it
would be wonderful.

But not a single one got off, although he thought they looked
wistful when he did. He stood in the hall and the elevator door
closed and he watched the numbers and the elevator finally stopped
on the forty-fifth floor, the top floor. After he picked up his
paycheck, he went up to the forty-fifth floor and this is the
strange thing, he says. He says that when the elevator doors opened
and he got out, the forty-fifth floor was completely deserted.
There was plastic up everywhere and drills and cans of paint and
bits of molding lying on the floor, like the whole top floor was
being renovated. A piece of the ceiling had been removed and he
could see the girders and the sky through the girders. All the
office doors were open and so he walked around, but he says he
didn't see anyone, anyone at all. So where did the women go, he
says. Maybe they were construction workers, I say. They didn't
smell like construction workers, he says.

#

If I say that some of my friends are two-thirds water, then you
will realize that some of my friends aren't, that some of them are
probably more and some are probably less than two-thirds, that
maybe some of them are two-thirds something besides water, maybe
some of them are two-thirds Lemon Fresh Joy. When I say that some
women are blondes, you will realize that I am probably not. I am
probably not in love with Jak.

#

I have been living in my father's garage for a year and a half.
My bed is surrounded by boxes of Christmas tree ornaments (his) and
boxes of college textbooks (mine). We are pretending that I am
writing a novel. I don't pay rent. The novel will be dedicated to
him. So far, I've finished the dedication page and the first three
chapters. Really, what I do is sleep late, until he goes to work,
and then I walk three miles downtown to the dollar movie theater
that used to be a porn theater, the used bookstore where I stand
and read trashy romance novels in the aisle. Sometimes I go to the
coffeehouse where, in a few months, I am supposed to give a
reading. The owner is a friend of my father's and gives me coffee.
I sit in the window and write letters. I go home, I fix dinner for
my father, and then sometimes I write. Sometimes I watch TV.
Sometimes I go out again. I go to bars and play pool with men that
I couldn't possibly bring home to my father. Sometimes I bring them
back to his garage instead. I lure them home with promises of free
underwear.