Pretend I'm Dead Read online

  “Let’s see,” he said.

  She hesitated and then pushed up her sleeve and made a muscle.

  “What are these?”

  He was pointing to the scars on her upper arm. They were so old she didn’t even see them anymore, but she looked at them now. There were four in that spot, about two inches long each. The cutting had started her sophomore year, immediately following her first dose of rejection by a boy she’d met at a Circle Jerks show.

  “Teenage angst,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “Maybe that’s more embarrassing than the muscles.”

  He made a sympathetic noise and traced one with his finger. Usually she flinched whenever someone touched her arm, but she liked the feel of his hand. She felt something shift inside her—a gentle leveling, as if she’d been slightly out of plumb her whole life without knowing it.

  He squeezed her bicep. “Are you a gym rat, love?”

  “God, no.” She laughed. “I vacuum. I’m a cleaning lady.”

  He blinked at her. “What—like a janitor?”

  “Residential.”

  “So you clean . . . houses.”

  “Two or three a day,” she said. “In Belvidere, mostly.”

  “You clean for a bunch of rich turds,” he said, finally wrapping his head around it.

  “Basically,” she said. “Why the surprise?”

  “I just think you’re a little above that kind of thing. Seems like a waste.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve always felt a weird affinity for monotony and repetition.”

  In fact, vacuuming was among her favorite activities. On applications she listed it as one of her hobbies. Even as a child she preferred vacuuming over things like volleyball and doll play. Her classmates had been forced to learn the cello and violin, but her instrument, and strictly by choice, had been a Hoover Aero-Dyne Model 51.

  As a teenager she developed a preference for vintage Eurekas. Now she owned four: models 2087, 1458, an Electrolux canister vacuum, and a bright-red, mint-condition Hot Shot 1423, which she christened Gertrude. She’d found Gertrude in a thrift store. Love at first sight.

  “Anyway, I’d much rather push Gertrude around someone’s house than sit in a generic office all day. I’ve always felt very relaxed in other people’s homes, and I like the intimacy involved, even though it’s not shared—these people don’t know the first thing about me. But yes, the rich turds, as you call them, can be a bitch to work for—it’s true. I think many of them struggle with the, uh, intimacy.”

  “Why—are you sleeping with them?”

  “Of course not.” She laughed. “I never see them. Many of them I’ve never met in person. But I know as much as a lover might—more, maybe—and they seem to resent me for that.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You’re a snoop.”

  “I’m thorough,” she said. “And . . . observant. You learn a lot about a person by cleaning their house. What they eat, what they read on the toilet, what pills they swallow at night. What they hold on to, what they hide, what they throw away. I know about the booze, the porn, the stupid dildo under the bed. I know how empty their lives are.”

  “How do you know they resent you? Do they leave turds in the toilet?”

  “They leave notes,” she said. “To keep me in my place. Funny you mention toilets—yesterday a client left me a note that said, ‘Can you make sure to scrub under the toilet rim? I noticed some buildup.’ And I was like, Oh wait a minute, are you suggesting I clean toilets for a living? Because I’d totally forgotten—thanks.”

  He scowled. “I’m glad I don’t have to work for assholes.”

  “Why don’t you?” she asked.

  He smiled and told her he made his living as a thief.

  Awesome, she thought. Well, he lived in a hotel so he was definitely small-time. She pictured him running through the streets, snatching purses.

  “You don’t take advantage of old ladies, do you?” she thought to ask.

  “I do, in a way,” he said matter-of-factly. “I mean, sometimes I do.”

  “Well, are you going to elaborate, or do I have to guess?”

  “I work for a flower distributor,” he said. “I supply him with pilfered flowers.”

  “You’re a flower thief?” Now it was her turn to be baffled.

  “That’s right. It’s seasonal work.”

  Well, it explained the dirt under his fingernails and the scratches on his hands and arms.

  “It’s hard work,” he said. “There’s a lot of driving and sneaking around. And I have to work the graveyard shift, obviously.”

  “What kind of flowers do you steal?”

  “Hydrangeas, mostly. Blue hydrangeas.”

  “You just wander into people’s yards?”

  He nodded. “Just me and my clippers! I can wipe out a whole neighborhood in under an hour,” he said, clearly pleased with himself.

  She thought of the hacked bushes she’d seen in the Stones’ yard last week. “I think I’m familiar with your work, actually,” she said. “So what do you steal in the winter?”

  “Why not ask me in December?” He winked.

  “How’s the pay?”

  “The guy I work for is a friend of mine. He pays me under the table for the hydrangeas, but he also keeps me on the payroll so I get benefits. It’s like a real job. Anyway, don’t look so upset. It’s not like I’m stealing money. They grow back.”

  Against her better judgment, which had left the room hours ago and was probably on its way to the airport, she hung around. They continued talking and swapping war stories, sitting side by side on the bed. By the time the streetlights came on, he took the liberty of leaning in for their first kiss. It was just as she’d imagined it all those months—dry, sweet, a little on the solemn side.

  * * *

  IT WAS LIKE DATING A recent immigrant from a developing nation, or someone who’d just gotten out of jail. They went out for dinner and a movie, usually a weekly occurrence for her, but Disgusting’s first time in over a decade. The last movie he’d seen in the theater was The Deer Hunter. At the supermarket she steered him away from the no-frills section and introduced him to real maple syrup, fresh fruit, vegetables not in a can, and brand-name cigarettes. He showed his thanks by silently climbing the fire escape at dawn, after his flower deliveries, and decorating her apartment with stolen hydrangeas while she slept. Easily the most romantic thing anyone had done for her, ever.

  Besides the flowers, his first significant gift was a series of drawings he found in the basement of a condemned house. There were seven in total, about five by seven inches each, loosely strung together in the upper-left corner with magenta acrylic yarn. They were crudely drawn in black and red crayon, seemingly by a child. She liked them instantly but was much more fascinated with the captions scrawled across the top of each one. The captions read:

  There was a house

  A little girl

  Two dogs

  One Fat Fuck

  It was a nice skirt

  Fat Fuck was found with no hands

  Fat Fuck is dead

  He thought the best place to display them was the bathroom. “It’ll give us something to contemplate on the can,” he said. “We can come up with Fat Fuck theories.”

  They decided to hang them side by side above the towel rack, and she stood in the doorway, watching him tap nails into the wall. She’d never been in a relationship with someone who owned a hammer. He was wearing a pair of checkered boxers and his Jack Kerouac T-shirt, which had a picture of Kerouac’s mug on the front, along with the caption “Spontaneous Crap.” He’d made the shirt himself and usually wore it during the annual Kerouac Festival, when Kerouac’s annoying friends and fans descended upon Hole to pontificate about the Beat Generation. He called himself president of the I-Hate-Jack-Kerouac Fan Club.

  His teeth, she noticed, were resting on top of the toilet tank. As usual, the sight of them produced a buzzing in her brain, like several voices talking over one
another. She wanted to put them back in his mouth, or in a jar, the medicine cabinet, a drawer. They needed some kind of enclosure.

  “Ever been with a fat guy?” he asked.

  She told him yeah, she’d gone to the prom with a fatty named Marty, a funny and friendless guy she knew from art class. He’d been a couple years older than her and, at age seventeen, had already been to rehab twice. Since his license was suspended, his mother had driven them to the prom in her Oldsmobile, and they’d sat in the backseat as if it were a limo.

  “Did you wear a dress?” he asked.

  “I did,” she said. “It was black and made of Spanish lace. I found it in a thrift store. It came with a veil, but Sheila wouldn’t let me wear that. In fact, she insisted I wear this really gay red flower in my hair.”

  “I bet you looked like a hot tamale,” he said.

  “I’ve always wanted to be more Spanish,” she admitted.

  “How Spanish are you?”

  “A quarter.”

  “How was it, being with a fat guy?” he asked. “Were you on top?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Never happened.”

  “Did you get loaded?”

  “We split half a gallon of chocolate milk on the way there. Then he had a panic attack, so I fed him some of my Klonopin.”

  He scratched his beard. “We should start a band called Klonopin.”

  She brushed by him and retrieved an old canning jar from under the bathroom sink. She filled it with water and then dropped the dentures into the jar and placed it on the counter, next to her toothbrush. When she looked at him she was startled to see tears in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “It’s just a jar.”

  He shook his head. “You’re the first woman to touch my teeth without wincing.”

  “I clean toilets for a living,” she reminded him. “It’s hard to make me queasy.”

  “Makes me want to marry you.”

  She laughed. He’d been saying that a lot lately.

  * * *

  IF ONLY THEIR SEX LIFE were less difficult. He referred to his organ as either “a vestigial, functionless appendage” or “the saddest member of the family.” As for hers, he paid it a lot of attention and talked about it as if it were his new favorite painting—how young and fresh; what extraordinary color and composition. “You have the most beautiful pussy I’ve ever seen in person,” he marveled. “And I’ve seen dozens. You can’t imagine the shapes they come in.” Since he’d taken care to qualify the compliment with “in person”—obviously, he’d seen more beautiful pussies in print or on film—she thought it must be true, and it popped into her mind randomly and without warning, while cleaning out someone’s refrigerator or vacuuming under a bed.

  He made love to her primarily with his hands and mouth—like a woman would, he said—and also with his voice. She wasn’t read to as a child, which he considered an outrage, and so, after sex—or sometimes before—he read to her from Kipling’s The Jungle Book (his choice), which suited his voice perfectly, because if wolves could talk they would sound just like him, and then short stories by Hemingway, whom he called Uncle Hem, and Flannery O’Connor and Chekhov and some other people she’d never heard of.

  On Sundays they climbed the fire escapes of the abandoned mills downtown—their version of hiking—and rolled around on the rooftops. If the weather was nice they smoked cigarettes and took black-and-white photographs of each other with her old Nikon. After one such expedition near the end of August, they were walking back to her apartment when Disgusting veered toward a large pile of garbage someone had left on the street.

  “Mind if I sift through this stuff?” he asked.

  She waited on a nearby stoop. She heard someone exit the building behind her and blindly scooted over to let the person pass.

  “Mona,” a voice said.

  It was Janine Stromboni, an old acquaintance from high school, one of the few girls Mona had liked, even though they’d had zero in common. Janine looked much the same: huge hair, liquid eyeliner, fake nails, tight jeans.

  “Wow,” Mona said. “You live here?”

  “Just moved in,” Janine said, and sat down. “You still smoke?”

  Mona fished two out of her bag and lit them both before passing one to Janine. They chatted for a few minutes and then Mr. Disgusting waltzed up carrying a green vinyl ottoman.

  “A footrest for my footsore princess,” he said, and gallantly placed it at her feet.

  She introduced Disgusting to Janine. To Mona’s relief, he looked good that day, like your average aging hipster. He had a tan, recently dyed black hair, and was sporting a Mexican cowboy mustache. His denim cutoffs were a little on the dirty side, but his shirt was clean, and Janine would never know the shoes he was wearing had been retrieved from a Dumpster.

  Janine, however, looked plainly disgusted by Disgusting, and for a split second she saw him through Janine’s eyes: an old dude with dirty hair and no teeth, what Janine would refer to as a “total creature.”

  Janine bolted right after the ciggie. The encounter permanently altered Mona’s perception of Disgusting, and from that day forward, depending on the light and her angle of perspective, he alternated between the two versions—aging hipster, total creature, aging hipster, total creature—like one of those postcards that morphs as you turn it in hand.

  Her feelings for him, however, didn’t change. If anything, she grew more attached. Like cancer, he had a way of trivializing the other aspects of her life. Things that had previously seemed important were now pointless and absurd, her college career in particular. So, when the time came to register for the fall semester, she blew it off. Her major, studio art with a concentration in photography, seemed like a joke now, especially in busted and depressing-as-hell Hole. If she was going to study art, she reasoned, didn’t it make more sense to go to a real art school in a city that inspired her?

  “Fuck art school altogether,” Disgusting said. They were in bed, wearing only their underwear and listening to his collection of psychedelic records, which he’d brought over to her apartment on their fourth date and to which they’d been dancing ever since. Dancing, Disgusting maintained, was the key to salvation.

  “I can see going to college for math or science,” he said. “But art? Waste of time. All you really need is persistence and good taste, which you already have. The other junk you can pick up from books.” He smiled and slipped his hand into the front of her underpants. She was wearing one of her days-of-the-week underwear, the green nylon ones with yellow lace trim, the word “Wednesday” stitched across the front in black cursive. It was Friday.

  “You smell different today.” He removed his hand and thoughtfully sniffed his fingers. “You smell like . . . hope.”

  “What do I usually smell like—despair?”

  “Like a river,” he said. “A little-known river in Latvia.”

  She pulled at the waistband of his boxers, but he stopped her. “Let’s leave my genitals out of this.”

  “Why?”

  “Too sad and disappointing.”

  “But I like your sad and disappointing genitals,” she assured him. “Besides, they wouldn’t be so sad if you weren’t so mean to them.”

  He kissed her hand and placed it on his chest and she traced the words “Homeward Bound” with her finger. “Move in with me,” she heard herself say.

  He was silent for a minute. “I’m pretty high maintenance right now.”

  “I can handle it.”

  He cleared his throat. “Let’s embrace our lone-wolf status. Few people have what we have, which is true and total freedom. No parents, siblings, spouses. No offspring. Nothing to tie us down. We can roam the earth and never feel guilty for leaving anyone behind, for not living up to someone else’s expectations.”

  “Sounds lonely,” she said.

  “Don’t think of loneliness as absence. If you pay attention, it has a presence you can feel in yo
ur body, like hunger. Let it keep you company.”

  “That’s not the kind of company I want.”

  He kissed her mouth. “We’re lucky we found each other,” he said. “Two orphans.”

  * * *

  SHE VISITED HIM IN HIS room at the Hawthorne twice a week. Once, after a reading session, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, located down the hall, and while he was gone she heard someone tap on his door with what sounded like acrylic fingernails.

  “It’s me,” a female voice sang out.

  Mona opened the door to a shapely woman with a pretty face and a crazy look in her eye. She looked American Indian—brown skin, tall nose, long black hair parted down the middle—and was wearing a red button-down blouse with open-toed stilettos half a size too small. She’d apparently forgotten to put pants on, but had had the presence of mind to wear underwear. Mona wondered whether she was a prostitute, insane, or both.

  “Is he here?” the woman asked.

  “He’s in the bathroom,” Mona said.

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.” Mona snorted. “Why, do I look like a cop?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Mona said.

  “Just slumming then, I guess,” the woman said, but not unpleasantly.

  She shrugged. You may have bigger tits than I do, she thought, but otherwise we’re not so different. We both have jobs that require us to work on our knees.

  “Well, tell him I came by,” the woman said as she walked away.

  When Mr. Disgusting came back he launched into a story about his near suicide in Oaxaca, where he’d planned to shoot himself in the head with a gun he’d purchased in Mexico City, but had been too distracted by the scorpion on his pillow—

  “Do you have a date tonight?” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Some chick came by looking for you.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “A pantless Pocahontas.”

  “Roxy,” Disgusting said. “She’s a sweetheart. You’d really like her.”

  “Is she your girlfriend or something?”

  “God, no,” he said. “I look after her and a couple of her friends.”