Love Read online

  After several unbearable weeks, my friend wrote me an email full of gossip and news: in just one line she mentioned that she hadn’t seen Guillaume again, nor had he ever come back to Rue Myrha. His friends were used to those disappearances. Sometimes he went back to his parents’ house, in the countryside. Guillaume never returned to the building where my friend lived. She moved to northern Paris. She stopped seeing her old neighbors: the Chileans went back to Chile, the Normans who were Guillame’s friends went back to Rouen, and she didn’t investigate more because I didn’t insist all that much, and after all it was only a week and our lives went on and I never heard from him again. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, I don’t know anything about the Normans, I never again found the band he played with, a search for Guillaume Jolie brings up any number—too many!—of useless and imprecise results, I don’t know if that’s his last name, my friend forgot my intense romance, and anyway it doesn’t matter now. It’s possible he doesn’t remember me. I know I never threw away the metallic paper with his shaky handwriting, but I don’t know where it is: lost somewhere in the house.

  I didn’t dare throw it out because I’ll never have another man like Guillaume. Shooting up in the bathroom with the door cracked so he’ll be seen, like a poster child poète maudit. His sand-colored hair on the pillow and that sadness when he told me the little I learned about his family: his schizophrenic father, locked in a room because his mother refused him psychiatric help. A small town. The hugely demanding music classes. His disappointment when I told him I hated jazz. ‘I don’t hate it,’ I backtracked to soften the blow. ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.’ ‘I’m going to explain it to you,’ he said, and I replied no, no need, I’m leaving in a week, and he sighed and his enormous, thin hand took mine and rested it on his skinny chest, and he let me look at him. I’ll never have another man like that, his weak, moribund youth, a puppy who cannot live and doesn’t want to, but who ran away from the mother who should have eaten him and is now a walking suicide, a master in phantasmagoria. ‘I know it’s not healthy,’ he told me one night, after taking a pull of wine straight from the bottle, ‘but if you stay maybe I’ll feel like living.’ That’s how he talked: no shame, no fear, in the intimacy of the toxic night. I never mocked his intensity. I wasn’t cynical yet. I’m no longer fascinated by being near someone who wants to die; I want to be old, I’m no longer attracted to those fierce invalids, I imagine I’m domesticated, I don’t think the best thing is a good drunken sleep on the sand.

  Maybe he changed. Or maybe he’s dead, just as he wanted. I was never naked with anyone so beautiful: his sunken belly, protruding hip bones, his back without a single freckle, smooth and soft like a newborn’s, his eyes that shone in the dark, his delicious neck with its little rings of dirt.

  I forgot to mention how I met him. It was in Norman #1’s apartment. There was an impromptu party because we had music and alcohol. Guillaume kissed me after I asked him to pass the whiskey. We started a conversation that lasted seven days. At that party he danced naked at the request of a gay neighbor who crowned him the most beautiful man in the city. Then he put on his pants and led me to a corner and pressed me against the wall, I pulled up my skirt, opened my legs, and we had sex right there, in front of everyone. I don’t know if anyone noticed, they were all shouting and I think they were dancing flamenco. I felt tender and sad when, before penetrating me, he wet his fingers with saliva and asked me to help with the condom—best sex practices in the years of plague—and I saw the needle tracks on his arm when he brushed the blond hair from his mouth to kiss me, and we appraised with clear heads the extent of my innocence.

  —Mariana Enriquez

  Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

  COTTON SHOES

  Ididn’t know the old woman’s name. I hadn’t asked her. We’d only spoken once during the two years I lived in Shanghai. I passed by her every morning—she’d be seated on a chair outside her shop, and I’d be racing to catch the subway. Her shop didn’t have a name, only a sign that said: “Beijing Style Cotton Shoes for Sale,” which reminded me of home. The space was no larger than a bed, and inside was so crammed with shoes and boxes that customers had to stand on the street and point to the ones they wanted to try on, whereupon the old woman would take a long bamboo hook and retrieve them. Apart from attending to the occasional customer, she was always sewing layers of cloth together to make soles. When she sat, her back arched like an old flower.

  The one time I spoke to her, or to put it more accurately, she spoke to me, I was drunkenly stumbling home in the middle of a summer night. I turned the corner onto my street, and there was her shop glowing with fluorescent light. She was perched in front, knees squeezed together, clutching a pair of black shoes. Her left shoulder was lower than her right, like a jacket that had been hung up clumsily.

  “Girl,” she called to me, “can you help me up?”

  I still remember her voice. It was like my grandma’s: flat and unbreakable. It seemed to me that those from their generation often sounded like that. If the war lived in anything now, I thought, it was in their voices. She spoke with a Beijing accent, much thicker than mine. Years in the south hadn’t weakened it one bit.

  I steadied myself first before walking over. Then I bent down and pulled her up from under the arm while she pushed with her legs. Both our bodies were damp with sweat, and she was heavier than I had imagined. Perhaps it was the way she forced her entire weight on me, as though she was trying to say, Look, I’m more than just skin and bones.

  “It’s my legs,” she explained. “The weather’s been too humid.”

  She dusted off her linen pants.

  “I have a granddaughter about the same age as you,” she said. “She’s working in Singapore.”

  I told her I’d never been.

  “My son’s family immigrated there when my granddaughter was in high school,” she said as she began organizing the shoeboxes.

  “They didn’t take you?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Those words came out of her mouth so swiftly that it seemed like she had said them countless times before. I imagined it was what she had told her son, when he asked her to leave this place with them.

  She checked each box and carefully made sure the sizes were in order. The skin on her hands was warped like water-soaked paper left to dry. I set my purse down on the ground to help her.

  “Do they visit you often?” I asked.

  Without answering, she clasped the black shoes under her armpit and reached for the light switch. Then, she pointed to a white brick building down the street.

  “That’s my home. On the fourth floor,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  We closed her shop together that night. She directed me as I arranged the shoes, adjusted the price tags, and finally, once she let out a pleased sigh, I pulled down the door. After she locked it, she straightened her back as much as she could.

  “Closed for the night. Not a single customer since five,” she said. “Looks like I really need to stay here to take care of this big business of mine!”

  She let loose a bright, playful laugh, which had the purity of a church bell. She had a wide mouth and her smile made her look like a bullfrog. Briefly, it seemed as though she had become a child, waiting to be guided home. She picked up her folded chair and handed me the shoes.

  “Here, these should fit you,” she said, looking at my feet. “They’re very comfortable.”

  I thanked her, and then she waved at me and walked down the street to her building. As she moved away from the streetlight, she was old again, the shape of her body like a passing cloud in the night.

  Weeks later, when the leaves had just started turning golden, she disappeared. Just like that. One morning she was there, the next she was gone. After our brief encounter, we didn’t talk again, apart from the occasional greeting. I never found out what happened to her. A few times, I heard neighbors speculating, but to most, her departure seemed as natural as the changing seasons. I went on with my days without much thought until the evening two men came and removed the sign at her shop. They didn’t take long—perhaps five minutes—and they were adept at their work, not showing any hesitation as they knocked down the sign with a hammer. I waited around that place for a while, the shop that was no longer a shop.

  I’m not going anywhere. I thought about how resolute those words sounded when she spoke them.

  Looking over at the white brick building, I found the fourth floor. Only some of the windows were lit.

  —An Yu

  GUANGZHOU

  The hooks in the nexus of my solar plexus rhyme with what remains when I remove them. All my loved ones who love me wrong float like comic ghost tails in my periphery. I don’t look like them, and don’t look at them directly like I don’t look at the sun but see its loose rays. I love my loved ones wrong too. Then like comic genie third wishes I wish for more wishes and for more of everything and am never fed. Hunger is not the word I would use for what I am, though I eat to it. The bridge over which we span is not as connective as we believe it to be. It is so wide as to not be a bridge at all. The expanse does not connect but makes vague our relation. There can be no water under a bridge that is not a bridge, which means we will never forgive each other for not ever being enough. Split pea soup soul that I have no ham hock, no meat or bone soaked flavor but green green blandness. I used to have taste but became too new again. This is all to say that I’m lost but only now know that I am. This is all to say we are unmade and supposed to be. I fold like cardboard on a daily basis, break silent-soft underfoot of people who don’t know me, who are supposed to know me most. Best?
It’s because I’ve always been hiding and show like I’m open, like I’m willing to be vulnerable-open and honest. These are lies. Almost everything can be. I am vulnerable-open but for reasons they can’t see. I am dying. You are too. But I’ll never become a ghost because I’ve always been one. Something is going from me I have begun to early-mourn. Is it more years that I won’t have, because of the way I live my life? Do I deserve them, want them? It’s not that. I’ve known they would leave me for some time now. Leaning back against the wall of my mind, posture like I don’t give a shit because I do so much give a shit, I know not to show that I do, because of what people do with that, when you tell them you love them, when you give them what they want it’s exactly what they want and they want more. I’ll give it all away. I never wanted to keep it. I’ll put their hooks back in my sides. I’ll drag them if I have to. Where? To Guangzhou. Or to wherever we’re all going. Wherever all of what this is has always been going. I’m going too.

  —Tommy Orange

  GREEN REVERSE

  Twice a week I play UNO with a gay Egyptian psychiatrist who, inevitably, without fail, calls me a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization before he offers to murder my dog.

  “Just leave me a key,” he says. “See a movie,” he says. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I consider my options and hit him with everything I’ve got, slow-like, deliberate-like, fuck-you-like: like a yellow three. Then I look him dead in his very kind eyes and say something a hate-crimer might say, or a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization might say, and then I say, “You can’t kill Seymour. He’s a good boy.”

  “Is he, though?” he says and plays a yellow seven. “Is he really?”

  “Oh,” I go and blink like a stunned idiot with no arms and dirt in his eyes. “This little dance again?”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” he says and two-finger folds his ear at me. “What’s that?”

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say.

  “What am I doing?” he says.

  “Psyops, bro. You’re doing mind games.”

  “Am I?” he says in exactly the way that lets me know he is totally doing that. He’s asking me leading questions so that I will connect some dots in my brain and realize that Seymour is not only not a good boy, but is in fact an objectively terrible boy with one eye and no joy who wakes me up at five a.m. every morning by shitting in my kitchen and barking at it. I throw down a green seven and go, “Yeah, you are. What are you gonna ask next? Why there’s blood in his stool, knowing full well it’s because he has a polyp half-an-inch up his colon that the specialist texted me a photo of?” Then I hold up my phone and show him my wallpaper.

  He shakes his head and Draw Twos me, then gestures to the pile of cards like it’s a cupcake he made and is proud of, but the only thing he actually half bakes are bullshit theories like that I rescued Seymour because I’m trying to save my father, and while I will acknowledge some similarities, my dad is meaner and has one leg instead of one eye and a touch more continence. Psh, I go. Pfffft. Then I pick up sixes—a red and a blue—and demand to know what lazy, fat-fingered amateur shuffled the deck.

  “You did,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say, and grimace my way through the quiet. Eventually he plays a green nine and I get the same idea I get every time he plays a nine, which is that maybe I can get away with playing a six, and then I think maybe I shouldn’t do it, but then I go ahead and do it: I play the red six on his green nine and hope he doesn’t notice, but he does notice because I try the same thing every game and he always notices. Then he says I’m disgusting. Then he says I should be ashamed. Then he says he is grossed out by me.

  “Honest mistake,” I say, and pick up the five-card cheater penalty and thumb-point at Seymour on the couch looking like a gargoyle fucked a fruit bat with ulcerative colitis. “Let me guess. Next you’re gonna ask if he ever ruined a party by shitting on a lady.”

  “Not at all,” he says.

  “He did. He diarrhea-ed on Maggie Mull and I wet-wiped her legs. Sensually.”

  “Let’s talk about your medication,” he says.

  “Oh here we fuckin’ go,” I say and lean back in my chair. “Why? So you can segue into talking about Seymour’s? Because we have nothing to hide: Flagyl and Apoquel, phenobarbital and CBD, special eye drops for his eyeball, prescription low-fat dog food or else he gets pancreatitis and goes fugue and stares at the wall for a few days, and I mix canned pumpkin in there because it’s good for his turds.”

  “Sounds expensive,” he says and runs a finger across his neck.

  “You fuck,” I say. “You’re probably planning to ask how his seizures are and why his dick is yellow even though you already know the answers are real bad and because he likes to dip it in the pee puddle before he moves on.”

  “I want to know—”

  “If he ate a battery? Yeah. Nine-volt.”

  “—if you’re taking your medication,” he says.

  “How dare you,” I say. “The nerve,” I say. “Here’s the thing,” I say and tap my finger on the table a whole bunch. “No.”

  Then I avoid eye contact by staring into the ashes in the ashtray for a while, and when I finally glance up he has his cards facedown and his hands steepled and he’s giving me this look like he’s sympathetically judging me so that I’ll question my own choices. But I don’t. Instead I look at him like he’s a spoon I’m trying to bend with my mind, by which I mean that I know that he knows I’m not taking my meds anymore because I can’t afford them because American medicine leverages your pain for your money and I spend all mine on fucked-up dogs that keep dying on me but—I’m gonna keep doing that.

  “Why are you making that face,” he says.

  “Oh,” I say. “Sorry. Your arm hair was bothering me.” Then I play a green seven and tell him to choke on it.

  He doesn’t but Seymour does; he chokes and snorts and grunts because he is very itchy all of a sudden and starts berserking on the new couch—new because he destroyed the old couch when I left him home alone once for like twenty minutes—rubbing himself up it and down it before flipping onto his back with his little Frenchie legs straight up in the air like he’s dead except his eye is open and looking around. Eventually he attempts to get upright and rolls right off the edge and thumps onto the floor and shakes himself off like he’s wet even though he’s not wet, just stupid. Then he jumps back on the couch and stares at me.

  “OK fine,” I say. “He’s the worst dog I’ve ever had.”

  “Bingo,” the Doctor says.

  “UNO?” I say.

  “No,” he says, and holds up two cards.

  “Make it four, you furry geek,” I say and mess up his whole deal with a blue Draw Two–blue six power-combo.

  Dude doesn’t even flinch. He just picks up his cards and counters with a blue Reverse, a green Reverse, a Draw Four, says UNO, and wins on a red two.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I say and throw my cards down. “It’s a goddamn conspiracy. Seymour! Are you even seeing this right now?!” And right then the little lump starts stalking the potted ponytail palm on my coffee table and growling at it and I am like, yes, that is correct, fuck that plant. “You tell ’em, Seymour!” I say. “You tell ’em we ain’t taking this shit lyin’ down!”

  Then I walk over and lie down on the couch with him and flip him over and rub his belly. One nipple (three down, passenger side) is extra-large and weird looking so I pinch it twice and go bweep bweep. Seymour positions his head to better see me, and when I scratch his chin he makes these small, expressive sounds and tries to bat my hand away with his little paws. He’s totally heinous, but his helplessness is endearing so I tell him not to worry. “I’m not gonna let Doctor Kedorkian kill you.”