Our Country Friends(60)
“Nooooo!” She was breathless now, panting, and the lullabies written all over the walls were singing to her in their distant alphabets. “Okay,” she said, her eyes wet, her nose snotty. “Okay, stop.” He took his fingers away, fell silent for a moment, then lifted up the sleeves of her bateau T-shirt and caressed her shoulders. “I’ve never been tickled before,” she said, sighing at how good his hands felt, wondering if the calluses on his fingers were the result of his last job in the kitchen of his uncle’s restaurant. No, they were always there, weren’t they? He had been born callused. “God, I am so stoned,” she said.
“You are a crazy, crazy girl,” he whispered, enjoying how those simple words sounded in his mouth. She wrapped her arms around him and found herself kissing his hair, which, though leavened with gray, was still absurdly plentiful. He pressed her to him and kissed her neck, even softer than he had imagined. “What are we doing?” she kept whispering as her lips descended to the neck hair which crawled up his nape like a worsted turtleneck, hair she had always urged him to shave, but which now felt fine, or, more to the point, in need of kissing. “Oh, Vin.”
Hearing his own name, or an American fraction of it, made him sad, and he did not know why. It was as if he had forgotten who he was for a moment. As if he had entered the body of another Vinod and that was the body she had needed all along. He stopped kissing her neck, though it pained him to stop. The wheezing of his battered lung returned and he remembered that he had come to Senderovsky’s bungalow colony to dissolve, and he was now doing the opposite, taking on more presence and solidity, challenging the engineers in the interstellar Bangalore to constantly come up with new code. What if he couldn’t keep up with her love? Or his own?
He felt her heave against him in a series of spasms and, within the fog of his high, finally understood that she was crying. “It’s okay, baby,” he said, taking the American “baby” out for a spin, a word he’d never used with his one serious girlfriend, a tall, also Korean fellow adjunct almost perplexing in her sadness. He kissed the sparse hairs at the crown of her head and felt his high dissolving. “It’s okay,” he repeated. What had he done? He shouldn’t have kissed her. They moved apart and he took her face into memory—the contrast of her doughy nose with the cheekbones that were only getting sharper with age—as if he would never see her again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for what he’s done to you.”
“What do you mean? Who did what?”
She took him by the hand and led him outside. Despite his fading high, this arrangement felt familiar. Back when the world was Kodachrome, she had led him and Senderovsky by the hand to all the places in the city where a velvet rope needed to be lifted, places where they felt like impostors in Teva sandals and puka shells. “Look,” he said, “in the meadow, fireflies. I think they’re finally here!”
“No, honey,” she said. “It’s still too early. It has to be June.”
“It’s almost June.”
“Late June.”
“Just pretend they’re here and kiss me.”
“Where everyone can see us?”
“Where everyone can see us.”
From the darkened porch Ed and Senderovsky watched the kiss unfold in real time, each leaning forward as if they were observing from a theater balcony. (“Oh, God,” Ed said. “What the fuck is happening now?”) She took him to her bungalow. The light flipped halogen against the dark. A blind was drawn so that the landowner and the gentleman could see nothing further.
Karen bent down and reached under the bed, feeling the nylon coarseness of the BTS Love Yourself sheets against her forehead. He stood behind her, ramrod straight, as if the role of lover required army precision. She noticed that and found it sweet. Would it be right to do this to him now, right after their first kiss? When they were stoned?
She stood up, kicked the Teva box farther under the bed, turned around, and placed her palms around his stubby cheeks. “Let me guess,” she said, “you shaved just this morning?” It was something from the past, her making fun of his hirsuteness.
He noticed just how thoroughly she had swept the floors—she couldn’t help herself, even in the country. “Remember,” he said, “back in Queens, how we used to watch The Simpsons together and talk on the phone? We’d talk about the show while we were watching it. My parents still had a rotary phone.”
She put her hands on his buttocks and squeezed. “You were in Elmhurst and I was in Jackson Heights,” he said, bathed in memory, unable to stop talking, even as he brought his hands up to her chest, passing through some mental tollbooth, into a world where he was finally allowed to touch her like that. He pictured her coming out of Senderovsky’s pool as he watched the fullness of her body. When they would go to bed together, he would still be able to smell the chlorine on her neck, like an olfactory afterimage.
“I was just a Metallica song away,” she said.
“That’s right, that’s right,” he said. “You were into metal for some reason. I’m so glad that only lasted through sophomore year.”
She let herself fall backward on the bed, bringing him down with her. He weighed so little (too little, the old version of her said). The erection she felt against her thigh was no longer sacrilegious. They were not family, no matter what she had told herself, no matter how much she had needed a family.