Love Love (11 page)

His cell phone chirped, and Kevin couldn't remember hearing a sweeter sound.

“I'm sorry, but I have to get that,” he said, and he ran over to the bench to pick it up.

“Mr. Lee?”

An old man's voice, it had to be him, the man who'd taken that photograph of his mother.

“Yes. And you are Mr. DeGuardi?”

“Correct. I can't talk for very long because of my arthritis, can't hold up the phone so long, you see. Karen, that's Chuck's mother, she told me that you were trying to track me down.”

“You took a photo of my mother, many years ago,” Kevin said. Alexa, who'd been pretending not to eavesdrop on the conversation, hurried over.

DeGuardi cleared his throat. “I haven't taken photographs in twenty years. And if God continues to hate me, I'll be turning ninety-three this year. So you'll forgive me if I don't remember her.”

“I think you might, unless you took a lot of nude centerfold pictures.”

Alexa stared at him with slack-jawed surprise.

“That takes me back,” DeGuardi said, “I mean really, really takes me back. Those beautiful girls. No, I didn't take too many. You're Chinese, right? That's what Karen said.”

“Korean, but close enough.”

“Jade Asia.”

“Excuse me?”

“That was her name. I did a few negroes, a couple of genuine Swedish blondes, but only one oriental.”

“Jade Asia? That's what she called herself?” Kevin said.

“Probably not her real name,” DeGuardi said.

In the distance, Kevin heard a bell. DeGuardi explained it was lunchtime in his nursing home. “I still have my files in storage. You're free to look through them, if you wish.”

The second he got off the phone, Alexa was all over him. “Are you telling me your mother is also not your mother, and that she was a
Playboy
model? Or something? Oh my God, that's just like totally insane, wow, I mean
wow
.”

Here he was again, revealing his personal life to her. “We still have another hour of practice.” He walked back on the court and picked up his racquet, but Alexa remained standing by the bench, her arms crossed.

“You're shutting me out?” she said. “Why? Because I'm a kid? Because I'm your student? Because I'm stupid? Because I'm frigid?”

“Yes, yes, no, no. And your boyfriend, Nate—”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

“He's probably just saying that so you will, you know, do things with him.”

“Sleep with him.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

He watched her walk over to him, her racquet dangling, scuffling against the blue concrete. She looked older, a woman dealing with men problems.

She sat on the court, drew her legs into herself, and sighed. “I know all this, of course, but when he says it to me, it feels real. Knowing it doesn't stop the pain.”

Kevin squatted next to her. “I could tell you that it gets better as you get older, but I'd be lying.”

“What happened between you and your wife? You were married for a long time, right?”

“How did you know about my divorce?”

“I don't know,” Alexa said, waving him off. “You might have told me at some point. You're old, remember? You forget stuff.”

“I did leave my cell phone in the fridge this afternoon.”

“See? You're just one step away from getting your own motorized scooter. Besides, it's not like I don't know anything about divorce. My parents are both residents of Splitsville. I live with my dad. My mom's out in San Francisco.”

“That's where this guy is.”

Even though he promised himself he wouldn't, he ended up recounting his whole sordid story to Alexa while they volleyed lightly at the net. Each bounce of the ball freed him a little more, tennis doing the work of therapy.

“Hey, you can totally stay with my mom,” Alexa said, slicing his errant volley to keep the exchange going.

“Huh?”

“When you go out there. You will, right? You should, because this DeGuardi guy sounds like he might keel over tomorrow, and there might be more pictures of her there and other stuff. I mean it's possible that she's still there, don't you think? In San Francisco? She probably knows who your father is, too. Maybe they're together and they've been waiting to see you all this time so you can be a family again.”

“I better get there before the carriage turns back into a pumpkin,” Kevin said, though since he saw the photo of her, his mother did
seem more real to him. To meet with a second family—what would that be like?

Kevin poked back a wide backhand from Alexa, but it floated over her head and their volleying came to an end. They must've kept it in play for at least a hundred strokes.

“And I can stay with your mother.”

Alexa reached over for her water bottle.

“Absolutely.”

“The parent you're not living with.”

“She's the most selfish person in the entire universe. She thinks I should be as independent as her, so you can see why she makes a shitty parent. And yet she goes out of her way to help strangers, maybe just to piss me off, so yeah, you should stay with her. She loves to have company she doesn't know.”

“Your mother sounds weird.”

“She is.”

It was almost four o'clock, the end of their session. They walked to Alexa's enormous tennis bag on the bench, big enough to hold six racquets. She sat down and unlaced her sneakers then took off her socks, her ritual after practice.

“You're still painting all of your toenails black, I see,” he said.

“Might as well,” she said. “The two middle ones are still all messed up after I jammed them.”

Outside of her imperfect toes, everything about Alexa was new and hopeful, and maybe that's why he enjoyed talking with her: the infinite possibilities of youth, the unblemished, unknown future ahead of her.

“Thanks for the offer, but I'll opt for the hotel, if I go. I mean I can't just up and leave.”

She stepped into her sandals and applied the straps across the gentle hills of her feet.

“Why not?”

“Because . . . I have a job?”

“That you don't like anymore,” she said, and her words whacked him. All this time, he thought he'd kept his dissatisfaction to himself, and he felt sorry that his misery was affecting others like her.

“Is it that obvious?”

She stood up.

“No.” She slung the bag over both shoulders like a backpack. “I'm just perceptive.”

They walked toward the exit, together. She was almost as tall as he was already, their gaits in sync. She'd probably grow another two to three inches, about six feet, a good height for today's power game. If she kept at it, she could really be something, but did she have the love, the desire, the drive? At one point in his life, Kevin thought he had what it took, but he hadn't counted on how lonely tennis could make you. Even in boxing you could at least bear-hug your opponent or receive some words of inspiration from your corner between rounds, but tennis left you out there to suffer with no place to hide and no one but yourself to blame.

Kevin parted the canvas curtain for her to walk through.

“So this might be good-bye,” Alexa said. “I don't like good-byes.”

“Maybe I'll see you Tuesday evening.”

She looked down at her feet, and Kevin looked down, too, at her shiny black nails, the gold chain with a red heart she wore on her left ankle. Even though she looked and acted like an adult, she was also a child, living in that awkward purgatory of adolescence.

He offered her his hand.

“Just in case this is good-bye,” he said.

“No kiss this time?” She shook his hand. “You'll miss me.”

“For sure,” Kevin said.

She walked away through the opening, then turned around.

“But not for too long,” she added.

“Why is that?”

He thought she was going to make a joke, but she remained serious. “Because that's just the way it is. People come, people leave, and we all go on.”

She slipped past the slit in the canvas curtain, climbed the staircase that led to the lobby entrance, and pushed open the door. She didn't look back.

9

J
udy had promised him they wouldn't have sex last night, but she'd made no such promise this morning.

Lying next to her in bed, Roger asked, “Are you sure?”

As the morning light beamed through the windows, she had watched Roger sleep, his lips slightly parted, his hands curled by his cheeks. He looked like a little boy, except for that screaming dragon on his shoulder. The juxtaposition intrigued her; it made him a real person. It made him sexy.

She answered him by slipping out of her panties and helping him out of his boxers.

“You're right,” Judy said to him at one point, looking up at the flushed face that hovered over hers, “it is of appropriate dimensions.”

It made him laugh, and it made her laugh, too. A perfect joke in the middle of their breathless, inspired lovemaking—she'd almost forgotten that this primal act was a talent of hers. In bed, she was as fluid as Jackson Pollock's paintings: bold, colorful, daring.

He continued to move with her, slow and quick and slow and quick, tiding in and ebbing away like an ocean wave. At certain moments, she stared at the face of the dragon tattoo, pretending that it wasn't a man who was making love to her but this serpentine creature. It was a weird fantasy to have, probably rooted in those Korean folk tales her mother used to tell many years ago. The most memorable one was about the
kumiho
, the nine-tailed fox. Once it lived to a thousand, the
kumiho
turned into a beautiful girl so it could marry a man. At the time, Judy had been fascinated with the story, even counting the number of tails when she saw a fox in a book or on television, but as she grew older, the story depressed her. A fox somehow manages to live ten centuries, and all it wants is to marry some guy? Pathetic.

But wait a minute. She really should've been paying attention to what was going on here instead of letting her mind wander, because her man was getting ready to blast off. She felt his entire body coil up, his muscles turning taut.

Right here was her favorite part of sex. Judy had borne witness to her share of masculine denouements to know of their obvious commonalities—the quickening of breath, the increased force of motion, the eventual spasm, and the long, satisfied sigh. But at the same time, they were as singular as snowflakes, and Judy believed she could tell a lot about a man from his brief ride through penile ecstasy. Because here, there were no walls, just a clear window into the vulnerable truth of a person.

He grunted, once. He exhaled as if he'd just finished some complicated task, an expression of relief rather than gratification, almost a “Whew!” Underneath his now-still body, Judy thought:
Who are you, Roger Nakamura?

R
oger was in the shower, and Judy was in bed, mulling over what just happened. She glanced out the window, at the neighbors across the way. Everywhere she looked, she saw the same beige house with brown trim, row after row. It was like two mirrors facing one another.

“Waaaaaah.”

Having announced his presence, Momo jumped up onto the bed. His eyes were a deep, sapphire blue.

“Not so afraid of me now, are you?”

The tan cat with brown paws apparently decided she wasn't a monster after all. Judy kept perfectly still as he walked up to her face and sniffed her lips. He pushed the top of his head against her hand, forcing Judy to pet him. His throaty purring was a quiet, soothing combination of sound and vibration. She scratched his chin; the harder she scratched, the more he liked it.

If a man's orgasm was a fingerprint, then Roger's was a blank. Everything happened the way it was supposed to—obviously he had an erection, and she'd felt his penis pulse inside her as he came, but then there was this odd stillness in the end instead of the familiar release. It was almost as if he'd experienced no pleasure, that while Judy had gotten off twice, the second time stronger than the first, he was pretending to feel something. Was it even possible for a man to fake an orgasm?

The more likely explanation was some sort of sexual disorder. She'd never heard of such a condition, but what did she know?

“Hey?”

His hair was still wet from the shower, a towel wrapped around his hips.

“Hi!” she said.

“You were so deep in thought,” he said.

She reached out and kissed him.

“You gave me a lot to think about,” she said. Which wasn't exactly a lie, but at the same time, it was. So there it was, her first fib with her new boyfriend, if he was even her boyfriend. In the shower, as she lathered herself in the steamy dimness, she wished for better words, less frivolous words, than
boyfriend
and
girlfriend
for a couple in their late thirties.