Difficult Women Read online

  William’s fist connects with Sarah’s jaw and a sharp pain sinks through the bone. Hot tears stream down her face but she tries to hold it together. She tries to focus past William’s pudgy body looming over her. She tries not to pass out so she might bear witness.

  William kneels between Sarah’s thighs. He uses a condom. He doesn’t know where the stripper has been. He practices some of the lingo he has learned from years of listening to rap music. “I’ve wanted to get all up in that since the day I first saw you, Sierra. I love your phat ass.” Sarah moans and heaves, reaches for her cell phone on the coffee table. It is just beyond her reach. William flips her onto her stomach, and then he’s inside her breathing hotly into her ear, telling her that fucking her is just like fucking a black girl without having to fuck a black girl. He smacks her thigh and tells her to do as Lil Jon instructs and bounce, bounce, bounce that ass.

  Sarah focuses on her fury. She lets it bind her chest and her heart. She lets it cover her skin. She feels it in her blood. Her fury coats her mouth.

  He doesn’t take long. With a final thrust, William groans into her ear. He presses his thin lips against her shoulder, a small token of affection. Sarah cringes. He lies on top of her, his sweaty weight pressing her farther into the floor. She tries to crawl away but he is too heavy with liquor and food and fat. Eventually he stands, admires Sarah’s perfect ass again. He dresses and sits on her couch. He sets ten crisp hundreds on her coffee table and says, “We could have done this the easy way, Sierra.” As he’s about to take his leave, he looks down at the picture of Sarah’s mother and pauses. “This black woman looks just like you,” he remarks.

  Sarah reaches for her towel, shields herself. She steadies, inhales deeply. “You should leave now,” she says, willing her voice strong.

  William holds the picture up, pointing angrily. “Why does this woman look like you?”

  At the door, Alvarez hears the tension in Sarah’s voice, pushes into the apartment. He eyes William, surveys the disarray, understands. He carefully puts his coat around Sarah’s shoulders and stands in front of her. She rests her cheek against his back. She wraps one arm around his waist. She breathes.

  William’s face is flushed through bright red as the picture falls from his hands. He backs out of Sarah’s apartment, shaking his head. Alvarez moves to follow but Sarah tightens her grip around his waist.

  “We have to go to the police,” he says, but Sarah shakes her head.

  “Occupational hazard,” she whispers, forcing her lips into a semblance of a smile. “I’m too tired.” She is beyond tired, really. She is empty and she wants quiet. She wants quiet.

  Alvarez turns to look at her, at the bruises on her face, her arms. He worries about the bruises he can’t see. He runs her another bath. She sits in the tub, her arms wrapped around her knees. Sarah is silent as he tries to wash her clean again. Later, they will lie in bed together, breathing softly, perfectly still. They won’t touch but Alvarez will keep watch. He will forgo his worries and tell Sarah he loves her. He will remind her of Estrella and in the darkness, she will finally smile. Sarah will want to tell Alvarez she loves him, too, but won’t, not with her body still bearing the weight of William Livingston III. Instead, she’ll reach across the short distance between them.

  Instead, she’ll hold his hand and hope it’s enough.

  William settles into the leather of his BMW and is instantly comforted by German engineering. He speeds away but pulls over as soon as he puts distance between himself and the stripper’s apartment. He leans out of his car and vomits, the acids burning his throat and mouth. There is whiskey in the glove compartment. He takes a long draw from the bottle, wipes his lips with the back of his hand. He pours some whiskey down his pants. Tries to clean himself. His skin burns. Penance, he thinks. And absolution.

  As he drives, he ignores the sour coating on his lips, teeth, tongue. He is horrified. He is gleeful. He catches his reflection in the rearview mirror, ignores his father’s disapproval staring back.

  William sits in his driveway, his forehead pressed against the leather-wrapped steering wheel for a long while. He tries to make peace with the fact that he has done something generations of Livingstons have had the discipline to avoid.

  He hears footsteps and looks up. William Livingston IV is whistling to himself as he walks back toward the main house from the garage. The older Livingston feels a huge weight being lifted as he watches his carefree boy. He gets out of the car and waves. The younger Livingston stops, smiles, waits for his father. “It’s a brave new world,” William tells his son, clapping the boy’s back with his greedy, grabby hands before wrapping his arm around his son’s shoulders and leading him inside.

  Baby Arm

  I’m dating a guy who works as a merchandiser for a large department store and one of his duties is designing window displays. He tells me this on our third date. We have already slept together, twice. I’m not a hard sell. When he tells me about his job, we are at a sleazy bar, drinking beer from the tap in frosted mugs. I tap my foot against his. I say, “I’m ready to go back to your place whenever you are.” I am anxious about all the “getting to know you” conversations we are having. I’ve never enjoyed sitting through previews at movies. It always seems like such a waste of time. He tells me he dresses windows and has access to a storeroom full of mannequins and mannequin parts. I say, “Like in the movie Mannequin,” and he doesn’t get the reference—disappointing. I explain about Andrew McCarthy and Meshach Taylor and Kim Cattrall frolicking in the middle of the night in a department store thanks to the magic of an ancient Egyptian necklace, all set to a synthesized eighties sound track. On our way to his place, we stop at a Redbox and rent the movie and he loves it and for the first time I think the guy is not a complete tool. A couple of months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex and he’s holding a fiberglass baby arm, painted the color of flesh. He hands it to me and says, “I thought you might like this,” and I take the baby arm and tell him if he’s not careful, I will fall in love and he says he would be fine with that.

  We take a bottle of wine and the baby arm to my bedroom and I caress it while we kill the cheap red. My mouth tastes fruity yet sour, cheap. I don’t mind. I’m quickly becoming enamored by the scraggly beard unevenly covering my lover’s face and his thin lips and the sensation of him rubbing my back in lazy circles because he never knows how to make a move, still doesn’t understand he only needs to push me on my back and tell me to spread my legs. I set the baby arm on my nightstand and provide him with a little seduction instruction. He follows directions well so I lie beneath him and imagine a little more hair on his chest, a little more muscle wrapped around his bones. He grins and I think about my best friend Tate. Tate and I work together as publicists for a record label and often lament how we are sacrificing our souls. We are not motivated to change our professional circumstances. We have to look pretty and make people believe in false idols and hold our liquor. For that, we are handsomely rewarded. We write off our gym memberships and depilatory regimens. Our offices are right next to each other but we spend most of our time on the phone to each other talking about our all-girl fight club, no boys allowed. Boys don’t really know how to hurt girls.

  “Hey,” he says. “Are you with me?” I open my eyes and look up at him. A thin line of sweat beads along his hairline. I smile. I tell him to hate me more. He does, and a pleasant soreness begins spreading from between my thighs and my head is slamming against the headboard. Now I’m with him.

  Later, I am still awake because I’m not very good at sleeping and I’m achy so I’m feeling tender toward him. Instead of nudging him awake, telling him to go home, I watch him sleep. I hold the baby arm and marvel at how small and perfect it is, how each finger is exactly where it is supposed to be, slightly curled toward the wrist. I use the baby arm to trace my sort-of boyfriend’s arm. His name is Gus.
Now that I’m sure of his name, I no longer call him Hey You, or refer to him as “the dude I’m nailing” when talking to my friends. I hold the baby arm to my chest and eventually I fall asleep. I really underestimated Gus.

  The next morning at the office, I call Tate and tell her how well Gus takes direction. She says, “Next time you fuck him call me so I can listen to the two of you and when you come, say my name.” I tell her I will. That’s what friends are for. We talk about the baby arm, how it almost articulates. I tell her how I lovingly cleaned it with a baby wipe and how I kissed each fingertip. She says, “I want a boy who will bring me a baby arm.” She asks me how I got so lucky and I am at a loss until I consider the sequence of events bringing Gus into my life. I explain I got so lucky because of a lifelong dedication to slutty and inappropriate behavior and my ability to drink tequila straight. She murmurs approvingly. I want to tell her it’s fate but she’s hard-core and would probably laugh. I tell her I will ask Gus if he has any straight friends in merchandising. She says, “This calls for a celebration. We’re having a fight club tonight,” and she recites an address I don’t recognize. “How are we going to make a thirteen-year-old pop singer popular?” I ask, briefly steering the conversation toward work. Tate is silent for a few moments. Finally she says, “Old white ladies who perm their hair.” We are very good at our jobs.

  When it’s time for fight club, I show up at a sketchy strip mall, the kind that includes a depressing house of worship filled with posters of black Jesus and folding chairs; a chicken shack with two tables and a dirty counter promising a soupçon of salmonella; a retail emporium for strippers and their friends; and an urgent care clinic. This strip mall is the most perfect place in the world. Tate told me, before I left work, to go into the stripper emporium, and to ask to be escorted to the basement, making note of a pair of clear Lucite heels that would look spectacular on me. Tate is waiting in the basement, her dirty-blond hair slicked back in a fierce ponytail. She’s wearing jeans and a wifebeater and a leather jacket and so am I. So are all the girls we’ve invited, ten of us who are pretty and fucked up, girls who keep their ugly beneath the skin where it belongs, even though sometimes, it’s hard to keep it all in. We all look hot. I say, “This room is a wet dream,” and everyone laughs nervously, and Tate says, “Let’s rock this shit.”

  She runs up to a thin redhead, a model who is moderately recognizable and lurking near the edge of the room. Tate punches the model in the gut and I feel tingly all over and then someone’s knuckles connect with my face and I can taste blood in the back of my throat. I get so angry I start swinging. I don’t care what I hurt. We don’t waste any time making any rules or pontificating about the meaning of our fight club. We don’t do any of that girl-fighting shit. There’s no hair pulling or scratching or screeching helplessly. We’re all about closed fists and open-handed face slaps and knees to flat stomachs. We hold throats between our fingers until desperate hands claw at our wrists. We wrestle on the sticky floor and call each other terrible names until the room is sweet with sweat and heavy bruising. We fight until our arms are so heavy and sore we can’t lift them and one girl, who is pinned by a large, scary-looking tomboy, suddenly shouts, “Get off me, you fat ass!” Her words are so sharp, we all hear them through the fists falling against flesh and the grunts and the heaving. We all gasp because the tomboy is big-boned but she’s not fat.

  Tate stops slamming the head of a pixie girl with pink hair against the floor and stares at me across the room. She mouths, “I love you,” and I smile even though it hurts and another set of knuckles connects with my face, ruining the moment—bitches ruin everything. My jaw feels loose and some hideous bruises are forming along my cheekbones. I’m pretty sure a couple of ribs are broken. I crawl toward a nearby wall and sit with my knees pulled to my chest. Tate slowly lowers herself next to me. She holds my hands in hers, kisses each of my fingertips, the undersides of my wrists. She says, “See? No one can hurt like a girl.” We’re all slumped in piles of damage. We try to pull ourselves together while contemplating cosmetic strategies for work the next day. I buy the Lucite heels and other necessities on the way out and Tate and I flirt with danger by eating at the chicken shack. We tear greasy fried meat from warm bones with our teeth. Our hands are scraped but shiny and slick. We smile at each other. This is the most I will ever love another person.

  When Gus comes over a few nights later, he is holding a chubby baby thigh. He has shaved his beard. I tell him if he keeps this up, I might marry him. He says, “I can live with that.” Gus hands me the baby thigh, dimpled around the knee, and kisses my cheek. I turn and crush my lips against his even though there isn’t an inch of my body that doesn’t hurt. We don’t bother with wine. We’re all teeth and tongue. We tear each other’s clothes off and in my room he throws me onto the bed. I’m impressed. He’s such a quick study. Gus traces the bruises along my rib cage and on my face, even presses them until I wince. I say harder. He obeys. I hold up my hand, say, “Hold that thought,” and dial Tate. I hand him the phone. I say, “She wants to talk to you.” He smiles the sleaziest smile and says, “Two chicks. That’s hot,” and I tell him not to talk too much so we can still fall in love and get married and he can continue to woo me with fiberglass baby parts. Gus puts Tate on speakerphone and she tells him all the terrible things she wants him to do to me. I marvel at her creativity and her cruelty and how much she loves me. Gus does as he’s told. He’s a good boy. He fucks me like a bad, bad man and when I come, hard, his fingerprints around my throat are still throbbing. I am barely breathing, I can’t find the air. I call out Tate’s name until it feels like my throat muscles will unravel. I can taste her in my mouth. The next time I talk to Tate I will tell her she’s the man of my dreams.

  While Gus sleeps, I hold the baby arm and the baby thigh, so hard and smooth and adorable. I think about how the longer I date Gus, the more baby parts he’ll bring me and maybe, eventually, we’ll have a little family of fiberglass child parts that will never become anything more than what they are.

  North Country

  I have moved to the edge of the world for two years. If I am not careful, I will fall. After my first department meeting, my new colleagues encourage me to join them on a scenic cruise to meet more locals. The Peninsula Star will travel through the Portage Canal, up to Copper Harbor, and then out onto Lake Superior. I am handed a glossy brochure with bright pictures of blue skies and calm lake waters. “You’ll be able to enjoy the foliage,” they tell me, shining with enthusiasm for the Upper Peninsula. “Do you know how to swim?” they ask.

  I arm myself with a flask, a warm coat, and a book. At the dock, there’s a long line of ruddy Michiganders chatting amiably about when they expect the first snow to fall. It is August. I have just moved to the Upper Peninsula to assume a postdoc at the Michigan Institute of Technology. My colleagues, all civil engineers, wave to me. “You came!” they shout. They’ve already started drinking. I take a nip from my flask. I need to catch up. “You’re going to love this cruise,” they say. “Are you single?” they ask.

  We sit in a cramped booth drinking Rolling Rocks. Every few minutes one of my colleagues offers an interesting piece of Upper Peninsula trivia such as the high number of waterfalls in the area or the three hundred inches of snow the place receives annually. I take a long, hard swallow from my flask. I am flanked by a balding, overweight tunnel expert on my right and a dark-skinned hydrologist from India on my left. The hydrologist is lean and quiet and his knee presses uncomfortably against mine. He tells me he has a wife back in Chennai but that in Michigan, he’s leaving his options open. I am the only woman in the department and as such, I am a double novelty. My new colleagues continue to buy me drinks and I continue to accept them until my ears are ringing and my cheeks are flushed. Sweat drips down my back. “I need some fresh air,” I mumble, excusing myself. I make my way, slowly, to the upper deck, ignoring the stares and lulls in conversation.

  Outside, the air is crisp and thin, th
e upper deck sparsely populated. Near the bow, a young couple make out enthusiastically, loudly. A few feet away from them a group of teenagers stand in a huddle, snickering. I sit on a red plastic bench and hold my head in my hands. My flask sits comfortably and comfortingly against my rib cage.

  “I saw you downstairs,” a man with a deep voice says.

  The sun is setting, casting that strange quality of light rendering everything white, nearly invisible. I squint and look up slowly at a tall man with shaggy hair hanging over his ears. I nod.

  “Are you from Detroit?

  I have been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to the area. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four-digit number. Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa. They will nod and exhale excitedly and ask about my tribe. I don’t know that in this moment so there is little to comfort me. I shake my head.

  “Do you talk?”

  “I do,” I say. “Are you from Detroit?”

  He smiles, slow and lazy. He’s handsome in his own way—his skin is tanned and weathered and his eyes are almost as blue-gray as the lake we’re cruising on. He sits down. I stare at his fingers, the largest fingers I’ve ever seen. The sweaty beer bottle in his hand looks miniature. “So where are you from?”

  I shove my hands into my pockets and slide away from him. “Nebraska.”

  “I’ve never met anyone from Nebraska,” he says.

  I say, “I get that a lot.”

  The boat is now out of the portage canal and we’re so far out on the lake I can’t see land. I feel small. The world feels too big.

  “I’d better get back to my colleagues,” I say, standing up. As I walk away, he shouts, “My name is Magnus!” I throw a hand in the air but don’t look back.