Greg Ames - I Feel Free

I Feel Free

McSweeney's 21

I’d been dating Karen for two weeks, maybe three, when she told me an ex-lover was stalking her. “Relentlessly,” she said. They’d broken up over a year ago, she insisted, but Trang just couldn’t take a hint. He followed her everywhere, threatened her with a bowie knife, and had even kicked another man repeatedly in the mouth with his combat boots. Major reconstructive surgery. “He’s huge,” she said. “And crazy.”

I didn’t feel an immediate urge to speak. I am not a big man, and any comment from me, I believed, would only emphasize the disparity in our physiques.

“I don’t want to freak you out or anything,” she said, “but Trang’s probably parked across the street right now, in that donut shop parking lot, watching us with his high-powered binoculars.”

I glanced at the window. “He is?” I said. “Interesting.” I didn’t want to appear weak or excitable. “With binoculars?”

“Last night I felt him watching us have sex,” she continued. “When my bra came off, I could feel him cursing. He was pounding his fists against his steering wheel, vowing bloody revenge. He was scraping his knife against a small gray stone. That’s how he sharpens the blade.” She shuddered. “That knife is so sharp.”

“Come on, Karen.” I laughed, still thinking it was a joke, a test. “How could you possibly know that?”

“I just know,” she said. “I know Trang.”

 

Online dating was new to me. My friend Diamond Doug Ronson had suggested it. He said, “I know three people personally, three, who met their wives on the Internet.”

Advice on dating from a married man always rankled me. I suspected that Diamond Doug knew he had made a terrible mistake and now wanted all his friends to do the same.

I said, “Hell no. Put my face online. ‘I like chocolate and literature.’ No thanks.”

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll ask one of these guys which website he used and I’ll send you the link. Totally discreet. Couldn’t hurt to try, right?”

I told him that I would consider it, primarily to shut him up. If I agreed, then we could talk about baseball. There were two interesting pennant races to break down and analyze.

The website, I learned the following day, was called GetInvolved!.com — an online dating forum “for singles who want serious commitment now.”

I ignored Doug’s e-mail for over a month, scorning the whole idea of meeting another person through the computer, until I heard from an old friend that my ex-girlfriend Teresa was engaged to a jazz drummer. The wedding was set for June. My solitude proved unbearable then. I had eaten a thousand meals alone in the last year or so. Many of those meals were choked down on street corners, standing with a plastic fork in my hand. My cheek bulging with Lo Mein, I watched couples pass hand-in-hand, laughing. That was no way to live. Finally I drafted a profile, outing myself as a SWM, 32, NS, who was “independent” and “friendly but shy.”

 

At first Karen was so lighthearted and flirtatious. Our first date was an Italian restaurant somewhere in Prospect Heights. When we walked in, the hostess squealed and pulled Karen into a big hug. “You look great! No more bags under your eyes.” She gave Karen’s breasts a friendly squeeze. “Putting some weight back on!” I didn’t like the sounds of this. Why was this woman fondling my date’s bosoms? The hostess turned to me. Her dark eyes glimmered. “So you’re banging Karen? I know this bitch from Riverward. Were you there, too? Over in the men’s ward?” I shook my head no. “Come this way,” she said and sat us by a side window.

While we perused our menus I asked Karen about Riverward. She said it was a rehab in Pennsylvania. I didn’t pursue the topic.

After dinner, we took a midnight walk through Prospect Park. It was okay but not especially memorable or passionate. We kissed good night before she drove home to her place in Canarsie. “I’ll call you,” I said, but I wasn’t entirely sure about that. A recovering addict living out in Canarsie was not exactly what I was looking for.

But the following evening Karen showed up at my apartment building with takeout Thai and a Scrabble board. Personally I believe one should always call first —dropping in unannounced is kind of rude — but I let her in anyway, despite my annoyance. Surprisingly, we had a lot of fun that night. Karen wasn’t as undesirable as I had first thought. A weathered dark-haired beauty in her early thirties, she had an ecstatic smile and kind green eyes. She crushed me with triple word scores. At the end of the night we kissed again, this time with a little more enthusiasm. When we ended up in bed together I remembered why people enjoyed sex so much. After a calendar year of involuntary chastity, I had begun to convince myself that getting laid was overrated. That delusion was wiped out in less than half an hour.

Later that week Karen helped me to decorate my apartment. It was true that I hadn’t done much to personalize the space since I’d moved in. I had simply ignored its unloveliness. After Teresa and I broke up and moved out of our spacious apartment, I went on craigslist and took the first affordable place I could find in Brooklyn. The thin, frayed carpet fell somewhere on the color spectrum between beige and turd brown. The walls were flat white and scuffed, unpainted during my tenancy. I had tacked up only one print, Nude in the Tub, by my favorite painter, Pierre Bonnard, who I imagined as a private man, somebody like me. Karen brimmed with ideas about interior decoration. She was always knocking down walls in her mind.

My apartment featured a small washer/dryer set-up. When she saw them, Karen was thrilled. “Are these new?” she said. The landlord had installed them himself the previous month. He had also raised the rent a hundred bucks, but it seemed like a fair deal at the time. “These aren’t even coin-op,” she said, hugging me.

Karen transformed corners with low tables and spider plants and driftwood sculptures. Walls came alive with bright tapestries. She even added a phone line for herself. I admired her creativity and enthusiasm. Day after day she continued to add little touches to the place. Plastic geraniums. Candelabra. I strolled around my apartment like a tourist. On my bare white walls Karen had hung photographs of herself having fun in not so distant locations. One showed her at Canarsie Pier, another at the cemetery. She stood next to fishermen and tombstones, beaming. I wondered who was working the camera. The unknown photographer’s shadow sometimes fell across her face, darkening her features.

Karen was temporarily unemployed, so she did most of her interior decorating while I was at work. I’d come home at night to find another surprise waiting for me. “Isn’t it exciting?” she’d ask. Or she’d say, “It’ll grow on you.”

On the mantle above the fake fireplace I kept a black-and-white portrait of my parents. A wedding photo from 1967. Karen exiled them to the bathroom. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they laughed from their cold perch on the toilet tank. They watched me urinate and floss. But the mantle wasn’t barren. In Mom and Dad’s place stood a framed eight-by-eleven photograph of a man I’d never met. He was not smiling. He just stared out of his plastic frame with cold, expressionless eyes.

“Karen, who is this?” I said, peering into the frame. The man’s dark hair looked like it had been trimmed with a scythe.

Karen didn’t hear my question, though. She was power-drilling a series of holes into the ceiling so that she could hang some Boston ferns.

“Karen,” I called out in a louder voice. “Who’s this dude on my mantle?”

She turned off the drill, flipped up her protective goggles, and joined me on the opposite side of the room.

“Oh, that’s just Trang,” she said, taking my hands in hers. She kissed me. Then she trailed her lips across my cheek to my left earlobe. “It’s an old photograph,” she breathed in my ear. “It’s just there to remind me how awful and domineering he was.”

Pulling away from her, I took a closer look at that photo. He had a scar above his lip that seemed to connect his nose to his mouth. He was an ugly man.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “The stalker Trang?”

“He was so terrible,” she said, eyeing his picture on the mantle. “Such an animal.”

“Take it down,” I said. After all, I didn’t have any photographs of Teresa on display.

“It’s cute that you’re jealous, babe, but let’s leave it up for a few days and see if it grows on you. If you still don’t like it, I’ll whisk it away and you’ll never see it again. Does that sound like a fair deal?”

“It sounds insane,” I said.

My married buddy Diamond Doug Ronson, the reformed wild man, otherwise known as Pass the Jug, I Wanna New Drug, and Doobie Doug, often talked about the compromises he needed to make with his wife Liz. Frequently he just gave in, surrendered outright, because he knew most things weren’t worth the fight. “You have to choose your battles,” he said. “Otherwise you’d find yourself fighting over everything. Who’s got the energy for that? Man, here’s my advice: just let her have what she wants. What the fuck do you care?”

Still, I had to draw the line somewhere. “No way,” I said. I took down the photograph and buried it in a drawer. It had been a test of some sort, I decided, and I felt like I had passed.

 

For a few nights Karen and I got along great. We made meals together and talked about our lives. She was funny, articulate, thoughtful. Karen talked openly about her former addiction to cocaine, detailing where it had taken her and what she had done to recover. She considered abstinence one of her greatest achievements in life. Chopping onions on a cutting block, I marveled at her courage and discipline. I found myself comparing my experiences to hers, disappointed that I had never been arrested or locked up in a women’s detention center.

One evening I returned from work and found damp clothes scattered all over the living room. There were mounds of moist fabric on the steaming radiator, wet jeans draped over drying racks, T-shirts clinging to the backs of wooden chairs. Soggy gray underpants drooped above every doorframe, like mistletoe in a surrealist painting. Men’s dress shirts hung from newly hammered nails in the walls. The washer and dryer were both shuddering. I did not recognize any of the clothes. They weren’t mine, and they didn’t seem to belong to Karen.

I unbuttoned my collar and stripped off my jacket. I waded through the humid air. Sweat beaded on my forehead. “Hey Karen,” I called out, “it’s really hot in here.” All the windows were steamed. I wiped my forehead with a tissue. “Is the heater on? What’s the deal with all this laundry?”

“It is hot in here,” said a strange man seated on my couch.

Startled, I jumped back and raised my fists reflexively. “Who are you?” I said. His face looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. He stared at me without speaking. I couldn’t see the scar over his lip from that distance, and he had a shorter haircut — high and tight, military style.

I felt my jaw muscles tensing. “I asked you a question, man.”

“I suggested she open a window.” He waved his hand, indicating the futility of the request. “She wouldn’t listen.”

Karen came into the room carrying a sloshing pitcher of margaritas. Lime wedges see-sawed in the yellow liquid like capsized boats. “Hi there, sweetie,” she said. She placed the pitcher on the coffee table and rushed toward me. She rammed her tongue into my mouth. “I missed you,” she said.

I tasted Nicorette and tequila. Abruptly I disengaged my mouth from hers and said, “Who is that, Karen?”

“Him?” She followed the angle of my pointed finger. “Oh, that’s just Trang.”

“In the flesh,” he said.

“Actually he was just leaving,” Karen said, pointedly. “Weren’t you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Trang said, then he winked at me. “That’s news to me, in any case.”

“This is a joke, right?” I said. “You guys are playing a joke on me?”

Trang had one slender leg crossed over the other. He wasn’t nearly as big as Karen had described, but his narrow face suggested a fierce and nasty intelligence. Both of his ropey-muscled arms were slung over the back of my couch. His posture vaguely suggested crucifixion. “What’s up?” he said to me. “How was work?”

Karen squeezed both my hands in hers. “Oh, now, listen, before I forget: we really need to have that old dryer looked at. . . . Honey! Pay attention. Stop staring at Trang. What are we gonna do about the dryer? It’s been giving me trouble all day.”

I wiped a rivulet of sweat off my cheek. The apartment was as humid as a greenhouse. “Wait. What’s wrong with the dryer? It’s brand new.”

Trang said, “This is a nice little pad you have here, Roger.”

“I told you his name is Rob!” Karen stamped her foot. “Can’t you remember anything? Rob. It’s short for Robert.” She glanced at me. “Right?”

“Yes,” I said. “That is my name.”

Yawning, Trang flicked a piece of lint or a stray hair off his knee. He leaned forward and poured himself a goblet full of margarita. Then he poured one for Karen. Both rims were crusted with salt. “Whatever,” he said. “You say tomato, I say Roger. Let’s call the whole thing off.”

“Shut up,” I said to him. “I didn’t invite you in here.” I turned toward Karen. “Can you explain this to me?”

As I approached her I felt my foot strike against something. Trang’s mouth fell open. With astonishing quickness he leapt up and stood face-to-face with me. At my feet a steel briefcase lay on its side. “You should watch where you’re going,” he said. Trang reached down and picked up the case with both hands. He hugged it to his chest. “This is off-limits to you,” he said, and walked out the front door.

I watched him leave. “What are you two up to?” I said to Karen. “Is this some kind of scam?”

“Robby, no!” She seized my hands again. “You and I are together. Trang is a distant memory. He means nothing to me. He just came over to drop off my clothes.”

As crazy as it may sound, I wanted to believe Karen. I really did enjoy her company. With her around I never knew what to expect. Every day offered danger and excitement. She laughed a lot and talked about things I’d never thought about before. She kept the apartment clean. She hung weird shit on the walls. There was always a new surprise. Despite her eccentricities, Karen made the place feel more like a home. And I hadn’t experienced daily contact with a woman in well over a year. Not since Teresa left town. Too long. For months I had puttered around the apartment, alone, drinking beer and reading books about dead Russian geniuses. I talked aloud to myself, conducting three-part conversations, a sure sign it was time for a girlfriend. But I didn’t have the enthusiasm to put myself out there. The split-up had left me shell-shocked and apprehensive, trapped in an apartment that I hated.

Sometimes after sex, Karen blew gently on my skin to dry the sweat. Her long hair tickled my skin as she moved slowly down my body, cooling my chest and thighs and the bottoms of my feet with little puffs of breath, and I liked that almost as much as the sex itself. No one else had ever done that for me before. It seemed to me such a tender, thoughtful act of affection. Even Trang’s presence didn’t sour me. On the contrary. I found myself even more attracted to Karen, knowing that another man was still in the picture. Her smile seemed brighter, her eyes more luminous.

“I believe you, Karen,” I said. “I was just surprised. That’s all.”

 

After Trang’s departure, I retreated to the bedroom. Alone, I resumed reading my Tolstoy biography. At least a week had passed since I’d last looked at it. Before I could read an entire page, though, Karen barged in and sat on the bed’s edge. “What’s the matter, Robby?” she said. “Are you depressed?”

“No, it’s just . . . well. Trang,” I said, my eyes still focused on the page. I had already forgotten my gallant plan for victory. Now I just wanted to be left alone. “I think you’re still in love with him.”

“Sweetie, that’s crazy. I kicked him out. Told him, ‘Don’t come back.’”

“He came back?” I said.

“Just to say goodbye.”

“I’m not going to be a watchdog in my own house,” I said. “I don’t have the energy for that. If you’re going to screw around behind my back—”

“You’re adorable!” She kissed my cheek. Then she eyed the cover of my book. “The Russian Master: Leo Tolstoy,” she said. “Did you ever read any Larry McMurtry? You should check out McMurtry if you’re so into Tolstoy.”

The Tolstoy biography was informative and reasonably interesting. Not the best book I’d ever read, but I was enjoying it. My office work exhausted me. All day long I packaged and sold recruiting manuals for marketing networks. Half the time I had no idea what I was talking about. I had to learn the job on the fly and pretend that I cared. So I certainly didn’t want a lot of stress at home, too. A good book and a few beers made for a perfect night.

Karen slid even closer to me, sucking her cough lozenge. “That McMurtry. Boy, he’s something else. What a way with words.”

I shut the book on my index finger to save my place. I don’t know why I liked Karen so much, but I did. Maybe it was something in her eyes, the trusting and childlike quality in them. Just beneath Karen’s coarse surface — the tell-tale wrist scars, the heartbreaking dolphin tattoo on her left shoulder blade — there was a girl who had trusted the wrong people along the way. That version of Karen was still in there somewhere but was hiding to avoid another beating. She didn’t need a rough character like Trang, a man who couldn’t recognize her delicacy.

“McMurtry’s good?” I asked her.

She waved the question away. “Just read him. You’ll see. You’ll see what I mean about old McMurtry.”

After a moment of charged silence, Karen stood up and left the room. She shut the door quietly behind her.

For the next hour I read about Leo Tolstoy’s dramatic experiences in the Caucasus. He fought bloody skirmishes with mountain tribesmen. He went days without eating. He was a rugged, intelligent man who would change the course of world literature. I immersed myself in his story, trying to gain strength and guidance from it. My life lacked drama and danger. Sometimes I longed for it. At my office we made a point of avoiding any conflicts. Aggression wasn’t “conducive to productivity.” But six years in a cubicle rendered me a virtual stranger to spontaneity.

Soon my bedroom door swung open again. “Knock knock, Lonesome Dove,” Karen said. She carried a stack of clean clothes into the room. I tried to keep reading, but the sentences blurred and became incomprehensible.

Humming a song under her breath, Karen yanked open dresser drawers and slammed them shut. “We — are — family,” she sang, wagging her head. “I got all my sisters and me.”

“Karen, please,” I said, not looking up from my book. “I’m trying to read.”

She approached the bed, sat down, and took a long look at the book’s cover. “Still working on that one, huh?”

“Well, I’ve been a little distracted,” I told her.

Nodding affably, Karen posed a question. “You think Sir Leo Tolstoy liked to shampoo that big beard of his?”

“I don’t know how he behaved in the bathtub,” I said. “And for the record, Karen, Tolstoy was a count, not a knight.”

My tone was more acerbic than I’d intended. But Karen didn’t seem to notice. She leaned closer to inspect the book’s cover. She tipped it back with her hand, preventing me from reading it. “What a beard, huh?”

I smelled her peach scented shampoo. “Karen,” I said.

Ignoring me, she gently stroked the image of Tolstoy’s cottony beard with her forefinger. “He looks crazy,” she said. “And I’ve seen some kooks, boy. He fits the profile.”

Against my will I looked down at the photograph, or daguerreotype, or whatever it was. He was in his most pious religious phase then, an old man wearing some kind of white gown and seeker’s sandals.

I said, “He was obsessed with God and vegetarianism and humility when that was taken.”

“Yeah, I bet he was,” Karen said agreeably, “but you know he spent some quality time on that beard each morning. Probably used a top-notch conditioner and some French oils, too. Scrubbed it up good.” She paused. “But you know Trang’s the same way. Some nights he’ll spend a couple hours polishing up those snow globes he carries around. He really takes his time with it.”

“Snow globes,” I said. “You’re kidding.”

“He’s pretty intense about it.”

Karen walked out of the room humming. I couldn’t even enjoy my damn book after that. No matter what the biographer wrote about the Russian master’s selflessness and his talent for humanity, I imagined Tolstoy lathering his beard with imported French or Italian conditioner, smiling at his brilliant face in the mirror, while behind him Trang held a snow globe up to the light and dabbed at it with a cloth.

 

I didn’t know a great deal about Karen but a few memories she shared with me indicated that she had had a pretty rough childhood. This endeared her to me. My childhood was not sweet either. My folks moved a lot, from one dead town to another. I never made any close friends. Almost every day I fought after school. Karen had a look that I recognized from all those forgettable places. She was a watcher, the girl who stood off to the side, cupping a cigarette, pretending she had seen it all before. She could probably destroy my entire life in three months. She could break it down into sections and then smash it into smaller pieces, right before my very eyes. By doing nothing to stop it, of course, I would be a willing accomplice. And maybe I wanted to feel myself come completely undone at the hands of a damaged, mysterious woman. Otherwise, how could I have been sure I was still alive? Sometimes a man needed to see if he could still bleed.

Later that night, after Karen and I had eaten dinner, Trang returned with a rented DVD for us to watch. “It’s a classic,” he said, waving it over his head. In his other hand he carried the snow-globe case. Karen explained in a whisper that this rented DVD was a peace offering. She said that it was very difficult for Trang to be friendly with me. He was making a concerted effort to be civilized. Trang had had a very rough life, she said. He needed love and tolerance.

“What’s the movie called?” I said miserably.

“Okay, Curious George, I’ll give you a hint,” Trang said. “The cast includes such luminaries as Dudley Moore, Liza Minelli and Sir John Gielgud. . . . Does that ring a bell?”

“No,” I said.

My couch seated only two people comfortably — it was more of a loveseat, actually — and we had a hard time deciding who should sit where. After a brief negotiation, Karen decided to get down on the floor, which left Trang and me side by side on the loveseat.

“Cozy, no?” he said to me.

I moved my knee away from his.

The movie was called Arthur. It was pretty lame, not that funny or clever, but Trang and Karen laughed all the way through. I honestly couldn’t understand what they saw in it. Halfway through the film Trang took out his bowie knife and sharpened it on his stone. The scraping sound chilled my blood. Maybe that explains why I was distracted and couldn’t focus on the movie. Afterwards, Trang called Arthur a brilliant socioeconomic parable. He walked out the door, still chuckling to himself. “Oh, that Dudley Moore,” he said. “What a lark, what a plunge!”

“Karen, we need to talk,” I said later that night. “This doesn’t seem to be working out.”

“What doesn’t, Robby?”

“This,” I said. “Us.”

Karen buried her face in her hands. “And I’ve been so happy,” she said. “Please. Don’t do this. Don’t end this.” Her shoulders sagged. “Let’s just see where it takes us.”

“You’ve been happy?” I said, surprised. “You like how things are going?”

“I’m in love.” She looked at me through the spaces between her fingers. “Can’t you see that?”

I was touched. She was in love? How could I have been so oblivious?

Alone in the bedroom, I thought about my relationship with Karen. What kind of future did we have together? I weighed the pros and cons. There was companionship, clean laundry, and Trang. Was it an ideal situation? No. I wouldn’t say that. How much did I have in common with Karen? Close to nothing. But the sex was phenomenal. Trang’s constant vigilance made that a little more difficult, of course. There were obvious complications. But this was what you had to expect when you shared your life with another person, especially a woman in her thirties. Baggage. Hell, I was no prize myself. And if you wanted a romantic relationship to succeed, then you needed to understand the logistics of surrender and sacrifice. Nothing good came without a struggle. I decided to stick it out for another week.

 

“Can I offer you piece of advice?” Trang said the following morning. He was seated at the kitchen table, drinking my coffee. He had the Sports section of the Times spread before him. When I didn’t reply, he forged ahead anyway. “You’re a pussy,” he said. “And you’ve got no nuts.”

“What?” I said, cinching the knot of my plaid flannel bathrobe. “Stand up. Say that again.”

I’d been in scraps before. For four straight years I fought at least once a week after school, surrounded by a ring of leering bitter faces, the up-front cruelty of kids, and I actually began to look forward to the afternoon’s final bell. Even though I hadn’t chosen it for myself, this had become my identity: I was a brawler. At three-thirty, I stood in the center of the circle with a bloody lip, refusing to go down. A perfectly landed punch to the jaw would end it. Somebody was going to lose. I had brought my right knee down on more than one blood-spurting nose. I had elbowed people, hard, in their kidneys. I had been made to eat dirt. For years I had thrived on fear. It fueled me. “I’ll fight right now,” I said to Trang. Even though it had been almost a decade since I’d last thrown a punch, I warmed instantly to the idea. “Stand up, Trang. Let’s have some fun.”

“Holy cow,” he said with a grin. “Don’t shoot the messenger, amigo.”

At that moment I wanted to grab Trang by the shoulders and throw him out the door. I wanted to smash in his face. But I remembered what Karen had said about reconstructive surgery. And how Trang had once kicked a man in the head, repeatedly. I wondered if a confrontation was worth it.

“Let’s examine your relationship with Karen,” he said. “You’re playing this thing all wrong, my friend. I’m just trying to help you here.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Yes, you do. Women want to believe that we — men — are much more calculating and dangerous than we really are.” He lowered his voice. “Usually I try not to disavow them of this misconception, if you know what I mean.”

I felt tired, lightheaded. “What are you talking about?”

He leaned forward on his elbows, preparing to let me in on a secret. “Sometimes you gotta play the savage.” He glanced over my shoulder, then continued in a lower voice: “Beat your chest a little, Roger. You’re too nice and a chick’ll walk all over you. Where do nice guys finish?”

“Last,” I said grudgingly.

“That’s right.” He glanced over my shoulder again. “Every now and then you gotta jack up their heartbeats. Women are like little rabbits. Make them think their life is in jeopardy, and then you rush in and save the day. They’re so relieved, so aroused, they forget you put them in peril in the first place.”

“You have a pretty low opinion of women,” I said.

 

That night the living room windows were all steamed up again, but at least the wet clothes had disappeared from the chair backs and walls.

“I made baked ziti,” Trang said with a triumphant smile. He emerged from the kitchen carrying a steaming casserole dish. He wore an apron that said COOKIN’ WITH GAS. His bowie knife was strapped to his belt. “I made enough for all of us.”

I joined Karen by the washer-dryer combo. She was frantically adding figures on a small notepad. “Yes, sir. Have it for you by tomorrow,” she said into the phone. “That’s thirteen-fifty, total. Okay. Yes. Bye.” She hung up. “Hi, Rob.” She stepped forward for a kiss. “How was work?”

Before I could reply, the phone rang again. She flipped her hair to the side and lifted the receiver to her ear. “Karen’s,” she said. “This is Karen speaking.”

“Hey,” I said. “We need to have a serious talk.”

“Watch your foot,” she said, pointing at my shoe. “Careful.”

I looked down. My toes had grazed the steel briefcase by accident. “Jesus,” I said. “Why doesn’t he store that in a safer place? If it’s so important to him.”

Luckily, Trang couldn’t hear us. He was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on his baked ziti.

After dinner, I overheard Trang talking long distance to a collector out in Vancouver. He described the delicate hand-blown glass of his collectibles. He talked about the quality of the glitter in the newer models — shaved porcelain and bone chips had, of course, been the industry standard for decades — and he reminded the man that distilled water, which could be found in the best globes, evaporated much more slowly than plain tap water. I still had a hard time believing that he was serious. Soon Trang was shouting, pacing in the living room. Enraged, he gesticulated with his free hand and called the man a novice, a world-class shithead. The snow globes from Graceland and Alcatraz were from his dead grandmother’s private collection; he wouldn’t let them go for cheap. They were exceedingly rare. “Go look them up in the red book,” he shouted. “Stop wasting my time, you clown.” He tossed my cordless phone onto the couch.

 

Our apartment was crowded at night. Strangers passed through the living room with their hands buried in potato chip bags. Others arrived and peered into the fridge. Were they friends of Karen? I couldn’t keep up. They seemed to know where to find everything: the various soups and spaghettis; the paper plates and plastic ware; the remote control.

One evening an elderly woman with a gold front tooth informed me that we needed more toilet paper. “Yo, Roger,” she said. “Next time buy the cheap T.P., baby. Single-ply. Don’t even mess with that scented or quilted stuff that leaves the dingleberries.” Then she hobbled out the front door. 

There was so much I didn’t know about Karen. And what scared me was that she would continue to reveal herself to me over months, years, decades. If we ever decided to get married, all these strange people would become my extended family. It was almost too much to handle. Shaken, I called my former ally, Diamond Doug, even though I knew he couldn’t hang out with me anymore. Long gone were the days when the two of us could just spontaneously head off to the bar together, throw darts all night or watch SportsCenter on the TV suspended above the bar.

I began to tell him about my bizarre houseguest but Doug interrupted me and launched into a horror story of his own. His in-laws were visiting from Illinois. They were outrageously tall, annoying Midwesterners who sometimes stayed for ten days. They slept in his guest room, ate all his food, smiled incessantly.

“It makes my life a living hell,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky, bro.”

“It’s not like that over here,” I told him. “Really. It’s totally crazy.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said.

“No, I won’t. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Dude, I’ve heard all this from you before. ‘Her ankles are too thick.’ Or: ‘She doesn’t read enough books.’ You want to be alone forever? If you do, that’s cool. Be alone. You’ll be another Saint Francis of Assisi, feeding seeds to all the birds. But if you don’t want to be alone, whacking your pud to cyber porn and sobbing into your pillow every night, stop sabotaging this relationship before it even starts. I’m sick of your bullshit.”

“You don’t understand, Doug. This one is different. She—”

“Oh, I understand. Believe me, I understand. Nothing surprises me anymore. I have seen it all. Trust me on this one. You won’t find anyone better than this Karen. She sounds awesome. You said she’s got black hair and green eyes, right? That’s hot. And soon you’ll have two or three kids before you know it. And after a while you won’t even notice the insanity. What?” Now he was talking to his wife in the background. “No, it’s not Fran, honey. It’s Rob. Okay, okay. Okay.”

“Doug,” I said, my voice cracking. “Please. I need help. This is moving way too fast for me.”

“I gotta go. Wife’s waiting for a phone call. Hang in there.”

I was scared, angry, confused. Maybe Karen and I needed to go to couples counseling?

 

Almost every night Trang listened to one of my Cream CDs at full volume. His favorite track, evidently, was “I Feel Free.” He’d stand at the stereo and press repeat, so that he could listen to that song ten or fifteen times in a row. There was a time when I had really enjoyed that album too, so I understood his excitement. Jack Bruce had a wonderful singing voice. But my musical tastes had changed radically in the eighteen years since I had purchased the CD. Hearing it over and over was beginning to enrage me. It was an insidious form of torture.

“Slowhand,” Trang said, bobbing his head to the music. “Slowhand was in this band.” We were home alone together. It was a Friday night and Karen was out returning clothes to her many relatives around the city. “Eric Clapton’s nickname is Slowhand,” Trang added.

Averting my eyes from an air guitar solo, I took out my journal. I still hoped that one day I would write something beautiful, something profound and illuminating about human nature. With a tiny pencil I scribbled: “Trang likes Cream.”

I sat there staring at my words.

Trang stood next to one of the speakers, cocked his head to the side, and pressed his ear to the woofer. “What a lark, what a plunge!” he shouted over the music. “Cream was a power trio. Bass, drums, and guitar. Man, those suckers rocked. Case closed.”

I shut my journal. “Where are you from, Trang?”

“What?”

“Where. Are. You. From?” I shouted.

“Canada,” he hollered back.

“How long have you been in New York?”

“Feels like forever.” He was getting ready to press Repeat.

“You were born in Canada?”

“Not exactly. It’s a long story.”

We said nothing after that. I listened to “I Feel Free” about four more times, then I retreated to the bedroom, shut the door behind me, and inserted foam ear plugs into my head.

Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy moved away from his beloved Yasnaya Polyana, his sprawling family estate, to live an ascetic life in a monastery. He renounced his birthright as a member of the aristocracy. “I will live simply,” he proclaimed. “Without resources. God will guide me.” Ten days later, Tolstoy died of heart failure in a railroad station in Astapovo. A porter found him dead on a rickety cot. “He looked just like any other corpse,” the porter said to a journalist. “Sort of desiccated, like an old pear. We get corpses here all the time. At the time I didn’t know he was Lev Tolstoy, God rest his soul.”

An hour later, when I came out of the bedroom for a snack, I found Trang standing on my loveseat holding a hairbrush to his lips. The stereo was cranked as high as it could go. Even with the foam plugs jammed into my ears, I felt Jack Bruce’s voice thumping like a fist on my sternum.

“Bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, I feel free!”

I stood in the doorway and watched the following scene: Karen emerged from the bathroom still wearing her slick yellow raincoat. Her hair was in a ponytail. She emptied her pockets, pulling out great wads of wet bills, which she stacked on the coffee table. After counting her earnings, she looked up and watched Trang.

He swayed his hips sensuously, side to side. “Feel when I dance with you,” he lip-synched, eyes clamped shut. Trang held the hairbrush in both hands. “We move like the sea. You, you’re all I want to know. I feel free.”

A smile bloomed on Karen’s face, spreading from her mouth to her eyes. She blushed. She watched him intently as she stripped off her soaked raincoat.

“I can walk down the street, there’s no one there,” Trang serenaded her, the hairbrush clutched in his left fist. His right hand was pressed, fingers splayed, against his chest. “Though the pavements are one huge crowd. I can drive down the road, my eyes don’t see, though my mind wants to cry out loud. Though my mind wants to cry out loud!”

Watching him, Karen smoothed a few wet curls of hair back with her fingers. With dilated eyes she looked at Trang as she had never once looked at me. He turned his body fully toward her. I didn’t need to watch his lips to know what he was singing. I knew the lyrics by heart. Standing on my couch, Trang smiled down at her. His joy was pure. “You’re the sun and as you shine on me, I feel free. . . . I feel free. . . . I feel free.”

When the song was over, Karen laughed and blew kisses at him. She clapped her hands softly, soundlessly.

 

It was a hot, humid night. The streets were still slick from an earlier rain. Karen and Trang sat out on the front steps, drinking malt liquor from forty-ounce bottles. He had dragged the stereo over to the windowsill, so that they could listen to his song from outside. I think he also had the remote control. This would soon be my family, I realized. When you moved in with a woman you didn’t get involved only with her. You got involved with all the people in her life — her girlfriends, her relatives, and her ex-lovers. She carried them all around inside her, a battalion of ghosts.

While they fraternized on the stoop, I thought about calling Teresa in Chicago. I practiced the message I would leave if I reached her voicemail. “Hey there, T. What’s shaking? Rob here. Just hanging out in Brooklyn, enjoying a night in with Karen, my new girlfriend. Thought I’d give you a call. Hope you’re doing well. Bye now.” But I couldn’t do that. Teresa didn’t leave a phone number or a forwarding address. I walked out of my bedroom to make myself a snack. The kitchen light was on. Nobody appeared too concerned about my electric bills. I certainly didn’t care anymore.

There was no ham, cheese, or tuna left. No bread or mayo. Karen hadn’t gone shopping in a week. The vodka and gin bottles were both empty. The music was cranked.

On the breakfast table was the steel briefcase, its lid open. I stepped closer and looked into it. Inside were eight pristine glass orbs, each one snug inside its purple foam cut-out. The case alone was worth a grand or two, Trang had claimed the day before, stopping me outside the bathroom to explain the history behind its acquisition. Trang had found it in a pawnshop in Niagara Falls. The proprietor had no idea what he held in his possession. Trang paid him fifty bucks and laughed all the way to the casino. According to Trang, the steel briefcase had once been owned by Umberto Granaglia, the world famous Bocce master. Oval scoops in the purple foam interior once held the superstitious Granaglia’s lucky balls; now they cradled Trang’s vintage collectibles.

A yellow tack cloth was folded lengthwise and rested on a Paris Art Deco globe. I pulled out one of the prettiest ones — a pre-fire Cocoanut Grove, circa 1941 — and inspected it closely, turning it under the light. I shook it, flipped it upside-down. The more I looked it, the better I understood. Sure, there was something appealing about it. I understood why he loved it so.

I smashed it on the kitchen floor. The glass shattered beautifully. Water dribbled out. Silently I stared down at this mess at my feet. I felt a momentary stab of guilt. Then I pulled out each of the remaining seven globes and repeated the process again and again. Giggling, I lifted my arm over my head and heaved one down on the peeling linoleum. “Oops,” I said. I chucked one into the sink and another against the ugly wallpaper. I destroyed two and three at a time, behind my head, through my legs. I felt exalted. It was an orgy of demolition. God must have felt like this every day, striking down innocent people and animals, destroying entire villages.

A few of the spheres — Plexiglas ones — would not break. They bounced and skidded into the baseboards. No matter how many times I struck them down they remained intact. So I had to pulverize them with a rolling pin.

When the case was empty, I shoved it off the table. It clattered on the floor. My face was damp with sweat. I walked over to the window and stopped the CD. No more Slowhand. “Trang,” I called out, standing serenely by the crime scene. “I think I dropped something of yours. Better come and look.”

The screen door banged open. I heard the drumbeat of approaching footsteps. “Oh my God,” Karen said, staring wide-eyed at the floor. “What have you done?”

Trang followed her into the kitchen. He gawked at the wreckage, open-mouthed. Slowly his hands curled into fists.

“Oh my God.” Karen looked up at me with pity and tenderness. “Robby,” she said, low. “Are you crazy, honey?” She took a step toward me. “This is so bad.”

Grinning, I leaned back against the counter, and waited. Goose bumps pebbled my forearms.

Something had to happen soon. Everyone in the house could feel it.