Luster(32)

Weirdly, the frankness of this intensity is hard on my conscience. I look through her closet and feel terrible about it. I find a cache of notebooks and scan through them, and all of it is raw—cruel, longing portraits of her classmates, careful records of calorie allotments, and in one totally nondescript composition notebook, pages upon pages of Batman fan fiction. I read it for a while because it is pretty good. The characters are believably drawn, Bruce Wayne out and about in Gotham in his playboy iteration, attending an auction for the last model of the gun that killed his parents, losing the auction to a black, omniscient sprite that is clearly Akila’s surrogate, though Clark Kent becomes more prominent as the story goes on, lounging around the Batcave post breakup with Lois Lane, who doesn’t take him seriously as a journalist or a man. I do not expect this fan fiction to become about how he reclaims his manhood, and I do not expect the lengthy description of the soaps in Bruce’s bat-shaped bath. Here, there are some character problems, the exclamation points in Batman’s dialogue ultimately less believable than his sexual awe and jealousy, as he is a human man with a complicated belt and Clark is an intergalactic softboi with infinite strength. It’s so dirty and engrossing that I don’t notice Akila until she is ripping the notebook out of my hands. She clutches it against her chest and looks at the floor. To see her there, the embarrassment open on her small face, feels like seeing an Olive Garden commercial after having already plowed through two bowls of fettuccini. The stark photorealism always beyond a terrible indulgence, in this case the invasion of her privacy, which I had shrugged off as an extension of Rebecca’s, though of course that was incorrect. Once Akila herself is grounded in the context of her room, her vulnerability, her personhood, is concrete. She doesn’t speak and puts the notebooks exactly where they were. It is strange to see that even these secret things have a fixed place. If I destroyed this marriage, I would be destroying this, too.

“Can you please leave?” she says in a high voice, her back still turned. I leave and go outside and have a cigarette. I am a creep. My bowels don’t work and maybe there are other things inside me that are dead, but there is so much life around me, tomatoes that beat the bugs and rot, waiting to be held by a hand. I watch the sunset. I’m not sure what day it is. Technically early September is not fall, but so many of the trees are already bald. Across the way that same white lady is watching me through her blinds. I salute her and she recedes. Rebecca comes out and glances at me, fishing her keys from her purse.

“A body came in. I have to work,” she says, and though she is speaking to me, I feel our last conversation still in the air. Her eyes linger on my cigarette and I think she’s going to ask me to put it out, but instead she asks for one. I light her up. “Akila has tae kwon do in an hour,” she says, turning to unlock her car. “You can take the Volvo. The studio is a mile down the road, in the shopping center.” She gets into her Lincoln Navigator and tears out of the driveway, and inside Akila is already dressed in her gi.



* * *



Later, we proceed to the car. She puts her gear in the back and we slide silently into our seats. It is only once I’m behind the wheel that I realize this is Eric’s car. I start the engine and try not to think about the last time I was in this spot, in his lap, the memory of his fist a heat behind my eyes. I open the glove compartment, and there are a handful of watermelon Jolly Ranchers. There is also a flask, and I close it quickly, glance at Akila to see if she saw. But she is looking out of the window, already engaged in the merciful act of pretending I’m not here. I haven’t driven in three years. I pull out onto the road and stop short at a red light. I turn and look at Akila, and beyond her there is an actual deer. I roll down the window and yell at it because I’m already dealing with too many moving parts. Akila turns and glares at me, and then her face softens and grows nervous. I know it’s because she can tell I’m nervous, and that makes it worse.

“Do you know how to drive?”

“Yes,” I say, though when it starts to rain I scramble to find the switch for the wipers. She reaches over calmly and switches them on. I hunch over the wheel and continue on. After a harrowing seven minutes, we arrive at the shopping center. The dojang is sitting between a dimly lit Morton Williams and a nail parlor that has begun to scroll down its metal door. She takes her bag and goes inside. I park the car and for a while I go back and forth on whether it would be weirder to stay in the car or go in. Eventually I go inside because I need to use the bathroom. After, I take a seat behind a group of ornery parents who occasionally look up from their phones to clap. The practice is so structured, it is almost nonviolent, the master a stocky, terrifying man who circles the mat as they run through leg extensions and isolated abdominal work, endurance drills that they count off in Korean in increments of ten, a few adults in the mix who are being very dramatic during the stretching portion, everyone doing assisted butterflies and half splits and almost certainly farting up a storm. The dojang smells like it was scooped out of someone’s belly button, but after fifteen minutes I don’t smell anything but Lysol and the seasoned plastic of used sparring gear. There are co-instructors wandering around, and for the most part they are cheerful and nondescript, but one of them is black and when I catch his eye, he pauses in the middle of his form and smiles. Like most hyper-symmetrical black men, his smile is a disarming show of contrasts and, in this case, anchored by an obscene pair of dimples. I smile back at him and think bitterly about my abstinence. His eyes are bright and kind, and so of course I picture our children, our rent, and our amicable divorce in the time it takes him to move along as the students run around the mat in bare feet, count through axe and crescent kicks and land light blows on each other as the master grunts his approval of the more crisp performers and attends to the stereo, which, underneath the agony of the class, is playing the soundtrack from The Matrix Reloaded.