Nude Men (27 page)

Sara might be lying, which wouldn’t make much difference at this point anyway.

“Sara,” I say, reasonably, “I am willing to go hang gliding with you. I’ll risk my life for you, but I won’t sleep with you.”

“It’s because of my beard, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say, hoping I am telling the truth.

Sara goes to her room, upset. I sit on the couch and think. I decide to wait for Henrietta, who should be home soon. When she arrives, she is rather surprised to see a fat, pretty, dead goldfish on the floor, and water stains on the wall against which it had been thrown. She is also surprised to see a tiny thing floating around in her saucepan, which I tell her is also a fish. She finds a flat ripped fish in the corner of her living room. Each new fish corpse she finds upsets her more, because it depicts a not very flattering portrait of her daughter’s mental state.

“Are you going to do it?” Lady Henrietta asks me.

“Do what?”

“Grant her dying wish.”

“I’ll go hang gliding with her.”

“Not that one. That’s not her dying wish. That’s merely the wish of a dying girl. I meant the other one.”

“She told you about it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to?”

“It’s up to you.”

“I will not grant it. I don’t think it would be right.”

“Do dying wishes have to be right?”

“No, but they should not be wrong.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of a dying wish, that for once in your life you can wish for something wrong and people will comply?”

“No,” I reply. “There are some things in life that even dying wishes should not ask for.”

“Are you doing this for her own good?”

“Yes.”

“Why? You think it would harm her to sleep with someone before her death? There certainly could not be any long-term psychological damage.”

“No, but I believe she will be more at peace during the last moments of her life if her dying wish is not granted.”

“Do you mean she will be more happy?”

“Happiness, at this point, is not the point. It does not matter, it is trivial.”

“What
does
matter?”

“Peace and serenity.”

“Don’t you think she’ll get enough of those when she’s dead?”

I pause. “Okay, so you want me to fuck your girl?” I hope to shock her into accepting my point of view.

“It’s up to you.”

“I feel that I should not do it.”

“Or rather, you fear that you cannot.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing she’s alluding to the beard.

“It’s the beard, isn’t it?” she says.

“No, but if it were, I would thank the beard, because it’s making me act the right way.”

“You just switched into present tense, which means you just admitted that it is the beard.”

“Think what you want.”

* * *

P
eople start to clap when we have dinner at other restaurants as well.

S
ara has been flipping coins lately, asking Fate if she will live or die.

“Everything in life is a fifty percent chance,” she says, to justify her flipping of the coins.

“No, almost nothing is,” I tell her.

“Heads means I’ll live, tails means I’ll die,” she says, ignoring my answer. She flips the coin. “It’s heads.” Indeed it is heads. She flips it again. “It’s heads again!” It’s heads again. “That means Fate is telling me twice that I’ll live. Fate is reconfirming her answer.”

“What if you got two tails now, what would that mean?”

“It would mean that I’m bothering Fate too much and she wants me to leave her alone. She’s not answering me anymore, and she’s leaving the answers up to Randomness.”

W
e go hang gliding. Sara does not shave anymore, so everyone thinks she is a young man. My beard is almost as full as hers. She started letting hers grow before mine.

We fly on separate hang gliders, each of us with an instructor. The parrot follows us. He’s big, sky-blue and white. Tears are running out of my eyes, from the wind and from my thoughts. My beard is plastered against my cheeks; hers must be too. Once in a while, I hear parts of the parrot’s favorite phrase, “Death and dying.” As he circles us, I hear “and dying,” or “death and,” or even “time yet?” and “soon?”

When we land, Sara says she loves hang gliding and that she had the best time of her life. It was indeed an unforgettable experience. She suddenly asks me how Laura is doing and how it feels to be living with her. I tell her it feels nice.

“Do you spend lots of time together?” she asks.

“Yes, when she’s home. But she often has to leave for a few days to perform in other cities.”

“Is she away right now?” asks Sara.

“Yes, actually. She’s in California for two days.”

The fruit in Sara is starting to smell riper. It is more exquisite than ever, but closer to being less so.

T
hat night, Sara visits me, wearing her dress the color of the sun and her beard. She wants me to shave her beard. She says it’s important, meaningful, intimate, sensual, and romantic.

“You won’t be able to resist me when you shave me,” she says.

We go into the bathroom and I start shaving her beard, and I immediately and uncontrollably begin to cry. Then Sara cries. Our noses run over our mustaches, and our tears run into our beards. After I’ve shaved half her face, we start to kiss and to hug each other, still crying. Then Sara goes and lies down on my bed. I take out my little white elephant, slide it onto a gold chain, and hook it around Sara’s neck. She recognizes it from the story she read in my diary. She thanks me, squeezes the elephant in her palm, and makes a silent wish. I lie next to her and hold her. If at this point she were to ask me again to make love to her, I would not refuse, even though half her beard is still there. But she does not ask. We fall asleep crying.

While we sleep, I dream a strange nightmare, in which Sara wants to handcuff me to the foot of the couch the following morning. At first I refuse, but she insists until I finally agree. She then changes her mind about the location and handcuffs me instead to the bottom drawer of one of the file cabinets Laura bought to make me feel more at home. I see that I will always be a slave to file cabinets. Sara then lowers my pants and sits on me and, still wearing her dress the color of the sun and her half beard, has sex with me. Then, still in the dream, the door to my apartment opens, and my friend Tommy comes in, at which point Sara stops moving and remains sitting on me.

“The door was open, so I came in,” he says.

Tommy has a special relationship with doors. They are never closed for him; they simply don’t treat him that way. They are always open, unless they’re locked. And I have forgotten to lock my door.

“How’re you doing, man?” I ask him, trying to sound casual.

“Fine. I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by. Are you busy?”

“No, not at all,” Sara and I both answer.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” he says to Sara, and shakes her hand. He does not comment on her half beard.

They do small talk, which I don’t listen to because I’m frantically trying to think of an explanation to give him as to why I’m handcuffed to the file cabinet with Sara sitting on me, in case he asks. But they keep talking, and I’m starting to feel vaguely like a couch: incidental.

“What are you guys doing anyway?” Tommy finally asks.

“We are acting out the famous fairy tale ‘The Princess and the Pea,’ ” I tell him. “I’m playing the mattress.”

“And the pea,” Sara adds.

“Is he any good?” Tommy asks her.

“Yes, especially as the pea.”

“And why the handcuffs?”

“Because I’m an object,” I reply, glaring at Sara. “Mattresses and peas are helpless things.”

Eventually Tommy leaves, telling us not to get up, he’ll let himself out. And that’s the end of the dream.

In the morning, I half expect Sara to ask me if she can handcuff me to one of the file cabinets, but she doesn’t. She asks me to shave the rest of her beard, which I do, and then she requests me to escort her back home by subway, because she wants to be wearing her dress the color of the sun in the subway. This we do.

W
hen we arrive at Henrietta’s apartment, we find her in bed, the blankets up to her nose. Not even her fingers stick out. “What’s wrong?” we ask.

“Nothing. I just have a slight cold.” She looks at Sara. “You shaved your beard.”

“No. Jeremy shaved me. Don’t you think he did a good job?”

“Yes. It looks nice.”

“He’s better at it than we are. You shave me the way you shave your legs and armpits. I shave myself the way I’d shave a doll’s head. But Jeremy shaves me the way a real man shaves a real woman’s beard.”

“Yes,” replies Henrietta through the blanket. “You should go tell your parrot a bit about it.”

The moment Sara leaves the room, Henrietta whips back the blankets and goes to her dressing table, on which are a bottle of rubbing alcohol, Band-Aids, cotton balls, and a tube of Vaseline.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I hurt myself.”

“How?”

“I ate all my cuticles and my lips.” She turns her face to me and, with bleeding fingers, points to her bleeding lips.

“Why?” I ask.

“I was nervous.”

“And your nails too?”

“No, I don’t bite my nails. I prefer skin.” She presses a Kleenex to her lips. The blood seeps right through, and the Kleenex holds there by itself.

“You don’t have a cold?” I ask.

“No; I didn’t want Sara to see me bleeding,” she answers, the Kleenex flapping in the wind of her breath.

“What brought this on?”

“News.” She opens the bottle of alcohol and starts disinfecting her fingers.

I sit on the window seat, sensing it will take a bit of time to get things out of her. “Yeah... ?” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. Flap flap of the Kleenex. She looks like a flag.

“Is it good news or bad news?”

“That’s a good question. And that’s the reason I ate myself. I can’t decide. Or rather, it’s both, perhaps.” She wraps Band-Aids around the tips of her fingers.

“What is this news?”

“Wait. Let me put on the last Band-Aid.”

I wait in silence. When she is finished with her fingers, she unsticks the Kleenex from her mouth and applies Vaseline to her lips. She then sits motionless and does not speak.

“Can you tell me now?” I ask.

Her pupils turn to me. She springs off her chair, runs to her bed, and dives on it. She buries her face in her pillow, clutching it with clenched fists, her knuckles white. Before I can decide if I should be worried, she slowly gets up, looking much more relaxed now, and comes to sit by me on the window seat. She stares outside.

“Sara’s doctor called me,” she begins. “He said he spoke to a doctor friend of his, a specialist, about Sara’s condition.” Her pupils slide from the window to my face and then back, like a puppet’s eyes. “... a doctor friend of his,” she repeats, “who said there may be a cure for Sara.” The puppet’s eyes slide again to me and back outside. “He needs to test her, to know.” The eyes are on me again, full of water now, no longer a puppet’s.

I get a bit of my own water in my vision. A smile develops on my face, expressing my joy, but she shakes her head, frowns, and says, “No! That’s why I ate my skin. It’s because we cannot let ourselves be happy, or it might kill us later.”

I take away the smile.

“Jeremy, be careful,” she says, mechanically putting one of her fingers in her mouth, to eat its cuticle, and taking it back out instantly when she tastes the Band-Aid. She begins unconsciously to unroll a corner of the Band-Aid. “This news, I’m sure, is just a cruel trick of destiny,” she says. “Our hopes will go up, and then they will be crushed when the doctor says, ‘Oh, well, I was wrong, there’s no hope for Sara, sorry, oops.’ ”

“Oops,” says the parrot, walking into the room like a little person.

The door has been left ajar. Henrietta rushes out, and comes back a minute later, saying, “Sara didn’t hear a thing. She’s in the kitchen, flipping coins.”

Henrietta picks up the parrot and holds him next to her on the windowsill. She strokes his head, and he starts purring loudly (a feat he learned from my cat, Minou, when they met recently).

Henrietta goes on: “I’m afraid I might kill the doctor, or do some such thing, when he says sorry oops.”

“Doctors are prepared for that. They have protection,” I say. “You mean like bodyguards.”

“Or muscular secretaries.”

“You mean nurses.”

“Yes.”

“Meow,” says the parrot.

“I want
you
to take her to the doctor for the test,” she tells me.