Babylon and Other Stories (12 page)

“I am your monster,” Luz said. “I will live in your basement.”

Marie-Claire shrugged. “Too bad, I already live in the basement.”

“How come?” Luz asked in her regular voice. “Do your parents make you live there because you smoke pot?”

“Um, kind of. How do you know about pot?”

“From school,” said Luz, moving away from the water's edge. If she didn't keep hopping she'd lose her balance. “And from my dad. And from you.”

“God, your dad is such the aging hippie,” Marie-Claire muttered.

“No he's not, he's a teacher.”

“Right,” said Marie-Claire, motioning her back. “Come here, you better take that thing off. It's like time to go.” She bent down and undid the buckle.

“I want to take it home,” Luz said to the top of Marie-Claire's head.

“And do what?”

“Keep it. I found it, it's mine.”

“Okay, whatever. We'll see what your dad says. Let's go. Here, take my hand for when we cross the street.”

“I'm not a
baby,
Marie-Claire,” said Luz. She grasped the foot and held the leg out. “You can hold my leg, though.”

They crossed Lakeshore together, a leg's length between them.

At eleven-thirty, Manny gave Kelly the rest of the night off.

“Gee, thanks,” she said.

“Just don't say I never did anything for you.”

“You never did anything for me, Manny.”

“Oh, ouch. Okay, get out of here.”

She was turning the key in the ignition when Lone came out of the bar, walked over to the car—with a slight but definite limp— and knocked on her window. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I didn't think you were leaving so soon,” he said, leaning down, his hands on the car.

“Manny let me go home early.”

“Oh. Time off for good behavior.” He smiled, then shyly looked down at his legs.

Kelly looked there, too. “Something like that,” she said.

“I was wondering if you maybe wanted to go get a drink.”

“Where? Here?”

“Oh, that's right. You do work at a bar.” One hand came up and slapped Lone on the forehead, seemingly of its own volition. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and said, “Here. Someplace else. Whatever.”

Kelly sighed and shifted the car into reverse. “You know, I'm really tired, but thanks anyway.”

Lone put his hand on the side of the open window, inside the car, a gesture that aggravated her. If she backed away, at what point would he let go?

“Come on,” he said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why should I? And why do you care? Because Manny told you about me?”

“If you mean he told me about your vow thing, well, yes,” Lone said forthrightly. “I think it's interesting. I want to know why somebody would do something like that. Therefore I am interested in you. Therefore I am asking you to have a drink with me. Is that a good enough reason?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He insisted on driving, so they left her car at the Edge. His van was outfitted with equipment that met his special needs. This was what he called it, special needs, in a tone that sounded partly confessional and partly bragging. When he started the van, Metallica flared briefly from the tapedeck, disappearing suddenly when he switched it off.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

Kelly rolled down the window and felt the wind. She could smell the water, salty and close. It was nice, actually, not to be going home right away, to avoid the certainty of her apartment and her bed and a magazine to read until she fell asleep. If she missed anything about dating, she thought, it might be this: a moment of precarious silence in a stranger's car, nighttime air, hands in your lap, waiting for the night to settle into itself. This was the moment before things got defined, before you had to decide what would happen, who you'd be, what you'd do. She took a deep breath and watched the telephone poles flip by.

“This okay?” Lone said, pulling over.

They were out by the docks in Ste. Anne's, at a bar that was what Manny wanted the Edgewater to be. Upscale. Nicer decor, fancier people, waitresses in black skirts serving mixed drinks. A terrace was strung with colored lights, and voices rippled in
waves of rhythm and laughter. Words stood out in small, quick bursts like names being called.

“Fine,” she said.

As they approached the entrance, Lone jumped ahead of her, awkwardly, and opened the door.

“Thanks,” she said.

He pulled out her chair for her, too. Once they'd settled their drinks, he said, “So why'd you quit school? You know that's no good.”

“Did you finish school?”

“No,” he said. “That's how I know.”

“What do you do, anyway?”

He looked at her. His skin under the stubble was dotted with small craters. He was wearing an earring, she noticed, a thin, small gold band that looked like it was pinching the bottom of his ear.

“Not a lot,” he said. “You didn't answer my question.”

“I don't really know. I couldn't get into it, I guess.”

“Uh-huh. Was it the same thing with men?”

“Not really.”

“You don't talk much, do you?”

“I just met you,” Kelly said.

“True enough,” Lone said, then nodded and tipped his drink to his mouth. Ice rattled against his teeth. “That's a fact.” He smiled and looked at her again, just at her face, and it made her blush.

She remembered this, now. The part of sex that wasn't about touching someone else but about
being touched,
feeling your own skin warm under a man's eyes and hands, alive to your own body, inside and out of it. She didn't know which was stranger, feeling somebody else's body for the first time or feeling how your own self could change.

“You look pretty,” he said.

Kelly rolled her eyes a tiny bit.

Lone just smiled and shook his head. “Oh, you're a hard one,” he said, and laughed as if this were a quality that he in particular was well positioned to appreciate. “You are.”

When they got home, Marie-Claire let Luz watch cartoons with a book balanced on her lap so that when her father came home she could pretend to have been reading it. The TV room was dark and cool, and the bright sunlight that filtered occasionally through the curtains seemed incongruous and strange. Luz sat with her legs out in front of her on the couch: her own legs next to her new leg, all three of them pointing at the TV. During the commercial breaks she would look at the plastic one and sometimes put her hand on it, as if to keep it from walking off. Marie-Claire wandered around the house for a while—what was she doing, Luz wondered, was she going through the tin box?—and then came back downstairs and stood in the door of the TV room, pretending she was watching Luz, not the TV, but after a while they were just watching cartoons on the couch together. When Marie-Claire fell asleep, Luz got up on her knees and edged closer to look at her face. It was weird how you could see flecks of her makeup stuck to her skin. Mascara was glopped onto her eyelashes, and there were streaks underneath where it had rubbed off, little eyelash flutters that looked like the marks of a feather.

Marie-Claire opened her eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

“Nothing,” Luz said, and scooted back to her side of the couch.

When Luz's father came home from school he found them silent on the couch, Luz with Nancy Drew #114 and Marie-Claire with a copy of
Steal This Book
that she must've found upstairs. He put his backpack down in the hallway and came into the
room. “Hello, young women,” he said. “And how are we all today? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I hope.”

“Fine,” said Marie-Claire. She put the book down on the coffee table. “The day was totally fine.”

“Great, great,” said Luz's father. “You taking care of my baby, Marie-Claire? Luz, is Marie-Claire taking good care of you?”

“Yeah,” said Luz.

“Good,” he said. Then his eyebrows came together sharply in the center of his forehead. “What is
that
?”

Luz cradled it protectively. “It's my leg,” she said.

“Um. Marie-Claire?”

She shrugged. “We found it by the lake. Luz wanted to bring it home.”

“It's filthy,” Luz's father said.

“You liked it too,” Luz pointed out to Marie-Claire.

“Yeah, I did like it,” she admitted. “Actually, Mr. Howard, I'm thinking, you know, I might want to take it home with me.”

“No!” said Luz.

Marie-Claire ignored her and turned to her father, sitting up straighter on the couch. She spoke fast and low, imitation enthusiasm bubbling out from under shyness. “I've been doing this sculpture? I'm trying to work on, like, people? This'll be perfect, because I'm very into humans, and, like, artificial parts, because it's like society, you know?” Her black-rimmed eyes opened wide, then aimed down at the ground before she looked back up at him through her long, mascara-thick eyelashes.

Luz thought,
please.
She knew this was all a lie. Marie-Claire didn't have any sculptures.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Luz's father said. “Why don't you take it home.”

“How come she gets to have it and not me?”

“Luz,” her father and Marie-Claire said at the same time.

“Dad,” Luz said, “it's my leg.”

“Another way of looking at this, Luz, is that I really don't want you to have that thing in the house anyway. It's too, I don't know, it's not a toy. It's not meant to be played with.”

“It's not fair,” Luz said. Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.

“I know,” Marie-Claire said, putting a hand on her shoulder while her father watched. “I know it's not.”

Lone told her about the accident. He was twenty-one, at the height of his Evel Knievel years, and was coming down a hill in the Laurentians high on cocaine, shrieking his head off out of pure joy, when he took a curve too fast and smashed sideways into a truck coming in the opposite direction. He woke up in the hospital, and the doctors told him there hadn't been anything below the knee for them to try to save.

“What happened to the guy driving the truck?”

“Goddamn it,” Lone said. “People always ask me that.” He slamed his beer down on the table.

They were in his motel room, a Days Inn off the Trans-Canada. He wasn't staying with Manny because his apartment was a third-floor walkup.

“And I say hey, you know, I've been stuck with this prosthetic fucking leg ever since, what about that?” He grabbed his leg with both hands just where, it looked like, the real part ended, and shook it a little bit, for emphasis.

“So what happened to him?”

“He was fine,” Lone said. “He walked away. Unlike some people I might mention.”

“Oh, you mean you.”

“Yes, I mean me. Very funny.”

“Ha ha,” Kelly said solemnly. She took a swig of her beer, swallowed and sighed. “Anyway.”

“Anyway,” said Lone. “So, do you want to see it?”

“Do I want to what?”

“Do you want to see my leg?”

Kelly shrugged. The truth was that she did want to see it, badly. “If you want to show me.”

“Well, I only want to show you if you want to see it,” he countered.

“Then show me.”

Lone reached down, undid his left shoe and pulled it off, then his white athletic sock. Underneath was the pink plastic foot, toeless, curved, as delicate as a woman's shoe. He started to roll up his jeans, then stopped. “You know what? This would be easier if…” he said.

“That's fine.”

“Okay.” He took off his other shoe and sock, then stood up and undid the buttons at his fly and balanced himself with one hand while he pulled his jeans down with the other. When he sat down again he pulled them off completely and sat there in his boxer shorts.

She found herself looking back and forth between his face and his legs, as if this were somehow the most polite approach to the situation. He leaned back and rested his arms on the sides of his chair. “That's the prosthesis,” he said.

She nodded, and leaned closer. It was attached to the end of his leg with a brown strap. “Can I touch it?”

“Sure,” he said.

She started at the ankle, which wasn't really an ankle at all, no bone, little contour, just a thinness above the foot. The plastic
was scratched and peeling in places, having been through God knows what trouble. Her fingers went from the ridge of the plastic onto Lone's real skin, which felt weirdly, almost wrongly soft. She rubbed her fingers up and down the hair on the side of his leg, and Lone exhaled a little laugh. She lifted his leg a bit with her left hand and slid her right hand underneath. They were sitting close together now.

“That tickles,” Lone said.

She unbuckled the strap that held the prosthesis to his leg and set it gently on the table next to the beer bottles. On the stub of his leg the skin was rippled and folded, as if the doctor had wrapped it like a present, and she slid her fingertips over the bumps. Some of the ridges were red, like welts. “Does it hurt?” she said.

“No.” Lone put his hand on her shoulder.

While they kissed, she kept her hand on his leg.

Up in her room, Luz watched Marie-Claire walk away. She couldn't breathe without crying. Marie-Claire swung the leg back and forth as she walked, like a baseball player warming up with a bat. After she turned the corner, Luz climbed under her desk and pulled the chair in as close as she could and sat with her knees up to her chin. One of her knees had a scab from when she fell at the park a week ago. She scratched it off and watched blood well up through the skin. Hearing her father moving around downstairs, getting a drink out of the fridge, she knew he was going to sit down at the kitchen table and open the mail. Then he'd read the newspaper because he never had time in the morning. Then he'd call her downstairs and have her sit in the kitchen while he made dinner, asking her questions about what the day was like, and then she could watch TV for an hour before she had to go to bed.

She pushed the chair away, softly, and crept out from under
the desk. She could feel dry tears crinkling her cheek. She went into her father's bedroom and smelled the soapy smell that was always in there. When the floor creaked she stood still, but he didn't call upstairs or anything. Very slowly and quietly, she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand, lifted the stack of
Macleans,
and pulled out the tin box. She put the joint in her pocket, closed the box and the drawer, then went into the bathroom and shut the door and looked at herself in the mirror. First she wanted to practice, to make sure it looked right when she said,
Marie Claire showed me how.