Drips Dropped

Drips Dropped

Drips dropped

Drops dripped

Drip Drop

Plip Plop

Honor Matter Payer

Honor Matter Pay ʼer

On ʼer Matter Payer

On ʼer Matter Pay ʼer

On ʼer Mat … er … Pay ʼer

Cryptic clue—could go on like this forever and probably would but for it was freezing in here. And where the hell was that water coming from? And he was coming to … kind of. Was it a hangover or emergence from some opioid stupor? He hadn’t had a proper hangover since 1970 something, and that bottle of pills sat untouched since he had the four teeth out. Too scared to take them and get addicted, like that Limbaugh fella. If it could happen to him …

Onomatopoeia—some Greek word probably. Bollocks, though, isn’t it really? Too many syllables. Not necessary. But it was freezing. That was the problem. He was going to have to move, even though he didn’t want to. But you can’t just sit there when it gets cold. If you do that, you’re fucked, the doctor had told him. Well, she hadn’t exactly put it like that. More like circulation problems and increased risk of hypothermia (more Greek bollocks?). Chinese chick, no nonsense. Yeah, shoulda fucked her when he had the chance. Not the doctor. God no. Too old. But reminded him of that other Chinese chick from way back then. Coulda been her mother. Maybe was. Better not ask. Anyway, Fuckability Rating 10 he’d told her, not the doctor, the other chick, after giving her that True Love Story book. Took a bit of courage, that.

Well yeah! Look at me! Not easy, though, she said, but better than a 1 or a 2 or 9. When you’re a 10, Johnny, you don’t pay for shit!

            Could he have, though? I mean, yeah, he should have by the cultural rules, the norms of the day. The societal expectation was that he should have, but would he have? Silly question. He did not, so he would not, but could he. Well for sure, physically, he could have. Definitely. And frankly, she probably wouldn’t have complained, at least not out loud. He was old, even back then, but not icky-old, like now. And he would have made sure she enjoyed it, as much as she could under the circumstances. Hard to imagine now, with it being so cold and him so icky-old, but yeah, enjoyment would have been created and shared between them, unevenly probably.

What the heck did she see in him? She was a Chinese supermodel—well, not really. A student was all she’d let on. Math. All those details were deliberately hazy, but smart as fuck, for sure. Explained the whole Fibonacci thing in front of an exhibit at the natural history museum for thirty minutes on their first date—thingy—whatever. He forgot to close his mouth. Stacked. Unusual for an Asian, in those days, anyway. One hundred and ten percent Chink, she’d say, with the extra ten percent up here. So cheeky. Dressed. Just perfect. Color. Fit. Style. Time. Place. Is there a Western woman that actually knows how to dress any more? Probably not. Not even the frogs.

But look back to the train of thought, a cold train but thinking still. It’s too cold to vacillate—is that a word? Should be. Sounds like vessels and capillaries and something with blood, and he should move ʼcos it’s cold and he’s fucked if he doesn’t. He shoulda and coulda but didn’t (fuck her, that is). And that was his choice, probably. Yeah, definitely his choice. I mean certainly she had a choice, obviously. He didn’t mean it like that, but the thing is, it was him choosing not to that meant it didn’t happen, because it could have if he chose it to.

Is this making any sense? Is this a freewill discussion? Is the universe deterministic? That’s not the point, though. That’s not the train of thought. Where’s that water coming from?  Hell, it can’t be that cold, ʼcos if it were, you wouldn’t have those drips and it would all be frozen and not so annoying with the drips dropping and the onomatopoeia and all that, but then, if it’s frozen, he’d have to move even more, and he doesn’t want to ʼcos it’s cold, but if he doesn’t he’s fucked, said his Chinese doctor.

Knowing he could (fuck her that is, not move—it’s too cold to move) was enough for him … back then. They went to that club in New York. A tong club or something like that for Chinky gangsters, or so he imagined. They looked like gangsters. Big heads, expensive suits, sometimes tuxes. Old men, well, his age, so young then, not really—and young women. Mostly 8s some 7s. Chinese, some Russian, probably. Fashionable, tart-ish, expensive, a bit gaudy. He walked in with her and all eyes—yeah, that cliché really happened—even the barmen who must have seen it all. But it was the women who undressed her and re-dressed her and catalogued the skirt—tartan, cashmere, not-cheap—and the top, black (Prada?), skintight but not too tight (how did she do that?), and shoes—Manolos? Louboutin? Nah, too classy for red-bottoms and how much they cost and were those real and what about the lips and the lashes and the cheekbones and how old even was she, and God, that jet-black waterfall hair is gorgeous—probably not even extensions—and I hate her, but we could be friends outside here. I’d kiss her.

That always amazed him—between women. Was it a lesbian thing or were they competitors or part of some larger female superorganism. The men registered her first, then considered him. Who the fuck was he, coming in here with that. They took a round table—polished dark hardwood, red-leather padded corner booth—softly lit, center stage. She clearly wasn’t his daughter but could have been adopted he supposed, so he put his hand firmly below the hemline above the knee and leaned in and said something he doesn’t remember to make her laugh. Message received by the big-heads. They were fucking. Oh yes, they certainly were and every big-head Chinky gangster in the place knew it. And that made him the uber-mensch and them jealous as fuck and he liked that.

            But the question is, why didn’t he? It wasn’t because of the cold, no, it was warm back then. And it wasn’t that drip-drip-drop thing going on. It was dry. It was warm. No excuses there. Some conscience, some morality maybe that created a guardrail that wasn’t to be passed. But could there also have been fear. Afraid? Him? Well yeah, fear was there a lot. He faced his fear. He permitted it to pass over him and through him—he read that somewhere, didn’t think of it himself. But it was there. And it drove the morality, or maybe no. The morality drove the fear more likely, because look, here’s the thing. What if, right, things progressed—first base, second base, all that, whatever the bases were. And he got to that point and then all this guilt kicked in, and morals, and he said, No I just can’t do this because I’m married, and it’s a sin, and you know you’re barely older than my daughter, and all that stuff just barges in and you stop, and she thinks it’s just you being old and nervous and isn’t that just typical. And so, far better than to just know that … yeah, you coulda but you don’t cos you’re a gentleman and it’s enough for you to know that they, the people in the museum and the big-heads, they see and they think, Yeah, he’s the big man with the 10 half his age, so he’s either rich or, you know, otherwise endowed. Sure, they’re a bit jealous and not sure they could keep up with that. Maybe that was enough. Better than actually going through and doing it and risking the guilt and the self-doubt and the secret his conscience would have to carry around forever, probably. Does that make sense? The coulda plus jealousy of the crowd exceeds the emotional end-result benefit of actual fucking. Yeah, that makes sense.

            Funny thing is, he never actually learned her name until the second “date.” When they first met, she’d introduced herself and, frankly, it sounded like a bunch of syllables fighting inside her mouth. He gave her his card and of course she didn’t have one and never signed her texts. So he got by referring to her as young lady. Which was lame ʼcos he sounded old. So in that Greenwich coffee shop with the hookahs and folk music and vanilla and faded purple and old books and musty people, he’d casually asked, So how do you pronounce your name properly again? Meaning,  Of course I know your name, I just want to make sure I’m pronouncing it properly, like they do in China, you know? Again, her syllables tussling over some word, maybe. Hmm. He sat. She enjoyed his discomfort.

             “Just call me Choo.”

            “Chew?”

            No, Choo—like a train, Choo-Choo!”  When she made him laugh it actually squeezed his heart—weird—like she couldn’t be that beautiful and that funny and so something else in the universe had to give. Made him nervous.

            “Ah, onomatopoeia. that’s when …”

            “A word sounds like the thing it describes. I speak English, you know, Johnny—but Johnny, do I look like a train to you?” Pout, grin, smiley eyes.

            “A Formula One racecar that sounds like a train, maybe?” He was already running out of ways to compliment her and tried to ration his use of gorgeous.

            Thing about that coffee shop, it was warm, nice and warm and fairly dry even when  the door opened. So that was nice and so was she, nice and warm. It wasn’t her personality. But that wasn’t cold either. No, it operated on a different axis, as that of all beautiful girls did. No, he was talking physical. She exuded actual warmth. He never worried about the heat death of the universe when he was with her. And that was something he thought about a lot. She could talk about it for hours, which worried him a bit. Women weren’t supposed to obsess about that sort of thing. Told him she and her professor were working on a paper. He thinks I have some good ideas, she said.

Yeah, I bet he does.

            But that coffee shop is where it all came together. Whatever it was. But it came together. And the tips of his fingers hadn’t been blue, or even white. They were normal color and they felt everything back then, even stuff that wasn’t there. And they set flat on the painted softwood touching hers, like they were at a séance, eyes wrestling, thinking—God knows what she was thinking, but he was thinking precisely nothing. Wasn’t that his head was empty, just that the action was there in the gap where the eye wrestling was. And each pull and tug he felt in his stomach, and she was pulling it out of him.

She’d tapped the back of his left hand with hers and broke eye contact to look over at the two old women by the Janis Joplin poster. Old—well, his age, so young but not really. Gray. Ban the bomb. Save the whale. Free the witch. Goldfish mouthing their disapproval at each other, of him and her. They owned some unnecessary pounds. Years of dope, pizza crust, and sitting. Administrators at some crap institution that had once been great when it was run by slim women in pencil skirts and kempt hair. His wife’s age, probably. Strange to think. They weren’t even the same phylum, the same genus, the same species. But what was good, even cool, was that he realized he could hold a thought about his wife while goldfish-gawped, fingertip to fingertip with the F-Rating 10 Choo in a downtown coffee shop. Did that mean she was his girlfriend, his mistress—something, whatever. They were sharks in the coffee-warm pool and when they stood up to leave, the goldfish shivered.

            A warm film came in to cover his eyes. Not hazy. Not wet. Warm. He hoped it would last ʼcos it was the first warm thing today ʼcos he hadn’t moved. He was going to but not yet. But he would ʼcos he didn’t want to be fucked like his doctor told him, just not quite yet. He knew what had done it, of course, the warm film. His dear wife June. Dear didn’t do it. Not at all. Dear was dismissive, patronizing, clichéd. He wasn’t those things when it came to dear June. She lived in the center of his heart. Always had. Even when Choo was there—Choo got everywhere in his body—June remained, regarding. Not like the tong-club women or the goldfish. Just allowing the information in, not out. Did that mean they were a family? Or maybe a solar system with him at the center and them orbiting. One knew of the other—I love your wife. I wanna meet her. The other sensed the one. Information asymmetry. A real three-body problem. (He got that from a book. He hoped the drips weren’t dropping on it. He loved that book. Chinese guy wrote it. Choo said she knew him.) Three-body problem—sounded a bit naughty. But he really never thought about it like that. He loved June. Obviously, I mean they were married weren’t they. Juney, June-bug, June-love. He loved Choo, but he never said it. He practiced—I love you, Choo—but the words never got out. Did that matter? Was it even possible to love two women, in that way, at the exact same time? Hmm … maybe if it weren’t so chilly, but it wasn’t back then so … maybe not.

            They met during the war. He and June. Not Choo. Which war though? He was never quite sure on that one. It wasn’t a History Channel war, so not I or II, right? More like a CNN war or even Twitter. Vietnam? No, that’s History Channel. So, some war, anyway, not that they were in it, but it was going on—on the TV or Twitter or Instagram, something. Cold war, that was it. Fuckin’ freezin’ war. Why did they have to do that? Looking back it was frightening. At the time it was fun if you were a certain age. His friends joking about the four-minute warning. What would you do if the alarm went off—fuck that chick that works at CVS! Oh yeah, and what about the other three minutes fifty seconds—smoke this fatty man, yeah.

June grew him up, she’d say. What was he? A tomato plant? Didn’t even make sense, ʼcept it did.  Marriage, kids, school, more school, more kids, money, no money, money, hospital, ICU, flatline, Hail Mary, not her time, I’ll never take you for granted again. Each moment, treasure it. Did he really, though? Did he? It felt like it most of the time. But then he’d say things, or at least think them. Like the other day, about the doctor—shoulda fucked her—ah. God no. Not the doctor. He gets them mixed up, her and Choo. He meant Choo. Shoulda fucked her when he had the chance because he did, you know, have the chance. But he didn’t and it was clear why. June. She stopped him. She grew him up and stopped him. Well, he stopped himself because of her and growing up.

            June was the one with the warm personality. That didn’t mean she wasn’t beautiful. She outranked the other wives by a mile. No, she just operated on the personality axis and owned the warm end. Everyone said so and they were right. His personality? Meh. He could fake a good one—the interest, the kindness, the cheer, the bonhomie—but it would never last. June and he were matched. She warmed him, thank God. He was never cold with her but when she left the room, the temperature dropped. He’d think about that a lot. How long before heat death? If she never came back, how long could he last before absolute and total heat death. He’d learned about it in middle school and studied the shit out of it in the library on his own on cold Saturdays. Heat death occurred—books always put it like that. How nice. It didn’t occur. It sank its cold yellow teeth into your chest, slowly. But anyway, it was when everything stopped moving. Heat was movement, so by the way, all casual-like—it was life. And when those little fuckers stopped moving—the cells, particles, atoms—when they just, you know, just stopped ʼcos they can’t be bothered any more. Well, Johnny. Then you’re fucked.

So the answer to that question from earlier, before the drips dropping put him off, that question—what was it? Shoulda. Of course he shoulda. That wasn’t even actually a question. Even that guy on the news with the blue tie and all those chins leaned into the camera at six o’clock and said, Shoulda fucked her, Johnny. Even his news moll with cleavage agreed. Coulda.  Yes, no, of course he coulda. He knew that. No, it was Why not? And honestly, it wasn’t just that June stopped him. That almost made him noble. No, there was also the fear and not just of failure—the other one. Yeah sure, he faced it and permitted it to pass over and through and all that. But where the fear had gone? It was cold. Stuff stopped moving and fear took hold, and he was scared that June wouldn’t be warm anymore. And he’d die. But look, he loved her with permanence and yearning that he never put anywhere else.

That time they went to the poetry reading for peace in the city—God knows why, nothing rhymed—smelled like self-pity. And those women with round glasses, furrowed brows, and drab partners, emoting like Sarah Lawrence undergrads. June had breathed her lines, sat bolt upright, silhouetted the fuck out of the room. Everything glistened, zero pretension, totally open, warmth, and everyone was like, Who the fuck … And he’d looked at the drab boys, Yes, gentlemen. That … is a woman. And he’d enjoyed their despair and bleak realization that they were consigned to a life of glasses, furrows, and Sarah fucking Lawrence, while he went home after this non-rhyming bullshit ended with a living, breathing, heat-generating woman. And that made him feel good.

That was love, right? He still felt it. Long after June was gone. He still missed it and her. Where was she? It was hard to move without her. Where did she go … and why? Was it something to do with Choo? He couldn’t remember but it couldn’t have been, could it? I mean, he didn’t do anything bad, right? He coulda … yeah, we know that, but he didn’t, so she wouldn’t just leave and let him get cold, would she? No, not that, not just leaving him there where everything gets slower and stops moving and gets colder and colder and things change color and you have to move but you can’t so you’re fucked, Johnny. But then where was she? She should be here, but there’s just him and the drips and the drops. It’s an honor-matter, isn’t it, but where’s the honor in this. It’s freezing. Something’s not right. He would cry if it helped but tears just freeze and so best keep them in. Conserve heat. Something not right. Just not right. No.

            Key in the door. He knew that sound. Meant something changing, maybe the wrong thing to right. He wasn’t scared.

            “Hi Johnny. It’s me. Juney—Choo Choo!”

            “June? Choo?”

            “Er, yes, John Mark Floyd. How are you, honey? Just a minute, I’ll put these veggies away and you’ll tell me about your day. But my day … I have to tell you. Math majors! They don’t want to know math anymore. Don’t want to know the Fibonacci theorem or any of it! Oh … you’ve left that tap running again, darlin’.”

June. Warm. Back. Of course. It was getting warm already. Easy to move, now, to where he had to go. To the warm. To the light. Better, easier, not fucked anymore. Warm. Nice. Going to move now. Got to go. It’s good. It’s warm now.

            “Johnny. Johnny? Oh … Johnny.”

–  End   –