Fiona and Jane(39)

“Cloning,” she replied.

“What about straight women? Won’t they be lonely?”

Carly thought for a moment. She said, “Heterosexuality is a performance. Once the stage is removed, women will be liberated, and—”

I kissed her to make her stop talking. She knew this trick but didn’t mind.

Over and over, she pressed me for details surrounding my last boyfriend. I didn’t want to talk about him, but she kept needling me. How’d you meet, why’d you break up, how often did you have sex, and the big one: Did you love him. Did you really love him? How much? Why him?

“No, baby,” I said. “I thought I knew all about what love was, but I had no idea,” I added. “Until now, with you.” Sometimes she accepted this answer with a smile. Most of the time, she didn’t buy it.

My past with men became the source of countless fights. Carly believed the more we talked about it, the closer we’d get to the truth. She thought if she could understand it, she might cure me, my attraction to men merely a bad habit to correct, as if I were one of the dogs she worked with at the obedience school.

I wondered if the reason she hated men was as simple as tracing back what Carly’s dad did to her mom. Carly was four when she died. Her dad shot her with a handgun. Carly’s grandparents took her younger brother, but they didn’t want to raise another girl who would just end up like her mom, Carly said, so she passed through foster families and group homes until she emancipated at seventeen. She never saw her brother, those grandparents, again.

“I don’t think about them,” she claimed. “I stopped existing to them, so they don’t exist to me.”

When I asked if her dad was in jail, Carly had nodded her head grimly. After a minute, she said if he ever got parole, she would find him and kill him herself. She’d make him suffer. Feed his limbs to her dogs. Carly had a beautiful German shepherd named Xena and a golden retriever mix with corgi legs called Gabrielle. The muddy greens of her irises were suddenly clear, bright blue.

She asked about my father, but I didn’t tell her the whole truth.

“He passed away a few years ago,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “At least you still have your mom.”

I didn’t tell Carly he took his own life. He was alone. Without family. My fault, because I’d outed him to Mah. He’d trusted me, his only child. My baby daughter, he used to call me. I let him down.

I didn’t tell her I hadn’t cried once, not since he died.

I just nodded, then changed the subject.



* * *



? ? ?

Carly met Won one time, when she and I first started dating last summer. The three of us got together for happy hour at the Abbey. Won complimented the blue in Carly’s hair—Manic Panic, she’d replied, patting her crown self-consciously—and then he asked for her advice about Pepper, the Pomeranian he’d recently adopted. Maybe she felt defensive because I’d told her Won cuts hair at a celebrity salon in Beverly Hills; instead of answering, she cracked a joke about Asians eating dog meat. Won laughed without missing a beat, and the conversation moved on before I had a chance to react. When I confronted Carly later that night, she’d started bawling. She kept insisting she hadn’t meant it “like that.” Like what, I didn’t know. Anyway, I forgave her; it was a mistake. A dumb joke.

Something changed, though. A shift between us, as if before then, I hadn’t realized she was—really, truly—a white girl. I just didn’t think of her that way. She was Carly. My girlfriend. I never talked to Won about it after. There wasn’t ever a good time to bring it up.



* * *



? ? ?

“You have one thing on your list,” Won said. I sat at his station with a black smock tied at my throat. “I think we should do a side part for you,” he added. “Do you trust me?”

“I tried my best. Honest,” I said. “I couldn’t come up with anything else.”

His hands stopped moving through my hair, and he found my eyes in the opulent salon mirror. “Did you consider writing down ‘controlling’?”

“Carly wasn’t controlling,” I said.

“Let’s see,” he said. “How many times did I see you last year? One, my birthday. Then that last haircut you thought was too short but you were wrong.”

“You were busy, too,” I said. “You were always working—your hair shows—and Korea all summer—”

“I was in Seoul for two weeks,” he said.

“Didn’t realize you were keeping score,” I muttered.

Won didn’t answer.

“I’m back,” I said. “I’m here now.” I threw up my hands and jazzed them, a halfhearted joke. “You missed me?”

“Do you want to know what happened with Jesse?” His eyes were on my hair again.

“Your Joshua Tree Klingon?”

“I didn’t tell you he was positive. He didn’t say anything until we’d already hooked up a few times.”

“What? Are you saying— Did you—”

“After that sob story about his mom losing her mind, I kind of fell for him.”

“When was this?” I said. “Why didn’t you call me?”