this voice. I hung up on it and called Jody to ask how he was spending the off-season. There was no off-season, he said. But after five months of guiding tourists through the backwaters of Plaquemines Parish to shoot at floodlit gar, of tossing marshmallows at tame alligators to distract whiny tourist children, he’d about had it with Louisiana anyway.
I tried to sell him winter. It took less than fifteen minutes to sell him winter. He’d never lived a real one, a northern one. Never owned a pair of ice skates or salted a driveway.
Cheap post-rock concerts, I coaxed. Nuit Blanche. Poutine (this felt like groveling). The pastéis de nata at the Jean-Talon market …
Okay okay okay.
I should have been the one hawking Bahamas cruises.
Jody mooched a series of Amtraks up at the end of December, with $600 U.S. and no true winter coat. I snuck a look at his arms when he put them around me at Central, deep in the belly of the overheated station. A little bothered inside the elbows. Aside from the gator, I mean. Not clean, exactly, but clean enough. (Newly clean. Was there ever a phrase cobbled from more idiot-hope?)
Memory had slightened him. It wasn’t till I saw the two of us reflected in a drugstore window that I realized how much taller he was than me. I decided to take this as further evidence of an overall straightening out.
He said that this winter’s work would be liquidating his dead father’s blues collection, he and his sister sharing the take.
We’re selling them off piece by piece. Slower that way but you get more in the long run, according to Cass. Said she’ll wire my share every couple of weeks. Less administration.
Administration, I said.
Her very precious time. One of us is our dad’s child.
Wouldn’t you two be, you know, sentimental? I asked. Though I knew he would not be. I’d first met him in a roachy hostel kitchen in Tamaulipas, OxyContined to his eyeteeth, making everybody sandwiches whether they wanted them or not. (You, he’d said, shaking a salsa picante bottle at me. You’re avocado and hot sauce.) Afterwards he’d told me about the meds racket he and a friend were trying to get off the ground. Those were the words he used: get off the ground. Ailing elderly Americans with prescriptions to fill. And he objected to the term racket, insisting it would be a civic service. Basically an NGO. He’d be addressing a gross deficit in the health-care system, assisting those who’d slipped down into its many yawning chasms. All you needed were a minibus and the right attitude, a wholesome-looking girl. (That was me: wholesome-looking. An invitation of sorts.) He existed in a constant state of somnambulism, a soothing lassitude, but now and again you’d catch the sharp glint of scheme in his pyrite-flecked eyes.
Look, he was saying now. Dad was Mr. Corporate Law. Guy wore a suit to the beach. Wouldn’t have known Blind Lemon from Blind Melon, he just knew what things were worth.
The records had been crated up in storage for eight years, and as Jody put it, someone might as well be spinning some joy from them.
I admit I was skeptical. But every fortnight we’ve been charging glasses to Elzadie Robinson and T. Bone Walker; rare red wax and Parchman Farm; Ed Bell and his 1930 pressing of “Carry It Right Back Home.”
Someone had taught Jody the nines thing, since the last time we’d slept together. I’d read about it before, tantric: shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow shallow deep, so she—so I—could go along with him. He never lost count, must have gotten in a fair amount of practice. I didn’t really mind thinking of that. Whoever she might’ve been, she was far away, too far to be jealous of, practically imaginary. It was my name he’d shout, unfailingly, in the instant before coming. Typically American of him, I said. More than any other national. Americans all call your name out—it’s like they’re trying to stop you walking into traffic.
Jody was nonplussed by this. Maybe hurt. Hard to tell.
It’s just common courtesy, he said.
Often his orgasm would carry within it the dark kernel of a migraine. Jody would pop two acetaminophen straight after to be safe, and a couple of something else for good measure. Partaking? he’d ask, and I would, and we’d drift off together, a tangled raft of random beach junk. He’d rouse when the girls downstairs were at it again. Waking me with a little shove, Hey, what’s that? What’s she saying?
A game he called Fucking or Fighting? I’d listen a minute and then translate as best as I could: One of them wants to get a dog, I think, or: The Husky One thinks the Unhusky One has slept with somebody else.
The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We’d hear them all the time, but their names remained a mystery. Possibly they knew mine, with Jody so courteously hollering it.
That last one, he’d ask. What’s that mean?
Mille-feuille? It’s a kind of pastry, but the way she’s saying it probably just means pussy. But a bit sweeter than pussy. I mean, nicer than. Ah. You know what I mean.
He did not laugh. He took it all very seriously. Repeating in that methadone drawl of his, milfoy, milfoil, millfoey. French by tenement osmosis.
Five days out of seven I was still getting up early to go and fold towels into pleasing shapes and wonder about the kind of women—mostly women—who would unfurl and ruin them without a blink. Men came too, but not many or often, and I didn’t fall to measuring my life against theirs in the way I did with women. Especially the women my age, the ones I encountered mostly in the things they left behind: La Prairie hand creams, lipsticks in obnoxious forty-dollar shades, designer underwear, magazines commodifying mindfulness and self-love.
There was a lost-and-found, of course, but usually I either pocketed things or simply unfound them into the trash with disgust.
As winter deepened it seemed crueler and crueler to sacrifice the meager quota of daily sunlight in the service of these women.
On those night-dark mornings, the radio of our next-door neighbor was a kind of static rope I’d use to drag myself from bed, from Jody, to the kitchen. From there I hoped inertia might do the rest. The radio was loud and clear; I suppose it traveled through the plumbing, sink to sink, like the tin-can telephones we used to make when we were kids. I toasted bagels to a patter of rapid-fire Quebecois; a man’s voice and then a woman’s. Topical talkback. Something about the Charter of Values, military suicides. The weather report: neige neige neige, le vortex polaire. I was okay in high school. I got prizes in French. Now, when I tried to speak it, the words would fall out of my mouth like clumps of half-chewed bread. There was better luck listening: the words, more and more of them, floating back up towards their meanings like free divers’ balloons and then hanging there, swollen and luminous. Turnstile. Shooting. Embezzlement.
I’d roll these words dumbly around my mouth, waiting for the coffee to brew, staring out into the dark street to see how much snow had fallen overnight. Marie’s bike was useless now, chained to a railing, squirrel amusement.
Afternoons I’d come home to find Jody compulsively refreshing a web page, following the frenzied final moments of bidding as though it were an NBA playoff game he’d placed big money on. I’d empty my coat pockets of tips and tiny soaps and miniature bottles of rich body lotion, then walk around turning all the thermostats down by five degrees.
If you’re cold, I’d say, why don’t you put on a fucking sweater?
If you hate your job, he’d say, why don’t you fucking quit?
I glanced over his shoulder. On screen, Ramblingmike73 was winning Memphis Minnie at $392, and there were still ten minutes of scrummage left.
I got us, Jody said.
But I was uncertain whether I wanted to be got. In the bathroom I arranged the gleanings from my shift into the medicine cabinet, where a few of Jody’s toiletries were neatly lined up along the top shelf. Mostly this was comforting. A cottonwool-swaddled thought: How sinister a spoon looks, lying all alone on a windowsill.
Early