Born Slippy Read online

  Women hated Dmitry, Frank thought, not for the first time, precisely because he was the guy who reduced everyone to body parts. Frank might be occasionally self-deluded, but he was pretty sure he was the opposite. Yes, he could be attracted by this feature or that feature, but he was a feminist, dammit, he was interested in the whole person, he didn’t reduce people, he didn’t confuse his fantasy life and his real life. His love for Tracy had been total. The fact that he didn’t entirely understand her was proof that he was trying. The fact that she didn’t love him, he knew, was because he wasn’t entirely lovable. But not because he was a misogynist, like Dmitry.

  “It occurs to me, Franky, that it comes down to supply and demand, doesn’t it — if we saw gigantic bosoms everywhere, they would cease to be desired. We crave the abnormal — bigger than normal, smaller than normal, skinnier than normal, taller, shorter, bigger. And yet isn’t it funny that so many people want to be considered normal? We don’t want anyone to think we are strange, peculiar, deviant. We want to be normal.”

  “That’s not strange, that’s normal.”

  “Funny. But while we may want to be normal, we don’t want normal. We want rare. We want exceptions.”

  A day or two later, Frank stood in one of the framed-up bedrooms on the second floor trying to figure out why all the window openings were an inch too narrow. This was a major problem; the windows had already been delivered, and the openings were not, now, the right size. Dmitry said, “Have you ever noticed, Franky, speaking of things becoming stale à la Wakefield, that it is necessary, for the purposes of masturbation, to recharge one’s fantasy material on a regular basis?”

  The undersized window openings had Frank in a panic — it meant ripping out acres of framing, a mess, an enormous amount of extra work, a death blow to the schedule. It made no difference whatsoever to Dmitry.

  “It’s as if the images decompose,” he went on, “get dispersed amongst the neurons, and you can’t access them any longer. When we get recharged in the normal way, seeing some girl sashaying down the street, watching women on the telly, seeing our next-door neighbor bend over in the garden, we get recharged on the fly, without hardly noticing, right? If we were truly stuck out here in the woods in the dark, never seeing anyone except deliverymen and subcontractors all day, our fantasy life would wither and die. We would try and try to wank, give ourselves blisters, and retreat in despair. Thank goodness for Lucille’s. Lucille’s is making our world safe for masturbation.”

  Frank was about to cry. He turned and looked at Dmitry and considered firing him on the spot. It was obvious it was his fault. Whenever Frank sent him on a chore, to cut some pieces of framing, for instance, Dmitry would dawdle over to the saw, put his goggles on, leisurely pick up a 2x4, maddeningly slowly measure and mark it, put the tape measure back in his belt, take time to stick the pencil behind his ear, stop and say, for the umpteenth time, “Is it measure once, cut twice, Franky, or measure twice, cut once?” and then measure a second time, work a kink out of his shoulder, bend down to turn on the saw, take forever to line up the stud, push it through as if he were cutting a diamond, then stand, stretch, bend to turn off the saw, take off his goggles, thus dislodging his pencil, pick it off the ground and put it behind his ear, then remember he was supposed to cut four pieces the same length, put the goggles back on, losing the pencil again, starting the entire snail’s game over once more, with, if anything, even less urgency than before. Eventually he would wander back, with the gait of an oversized koala, forgetting half the pieces. All the headers were short because Dmitry had cut them short.

  He told himself that if he could find anyone else, anyone at all, he’d fire him without a second’s hesitation. Gustafson wouldn’t be back from Greece for another month. The guys at the lumberyard couldn’t help. Their nightly forays to Lucille’s, the precise place where you’d expect to find an out-of-work carpenter, turned up nothing. So despite Dmitry’s miserable work ethic, despite his being a total slob — the tent was a catastrophe from the minute he moved in — and despite the fact that he moved like an ancient, recalcitrant turtle, Frank put up with him.

  2012

  “You know, Franky, this is getting ridiculous,” he said as they ate a bowl of pho at a little noodle place on Western in Koreatown. “Our relationship has developed a frightful asymmetry. It’s time you came to Asia.”

  It had been a long spell this time, almost five years, in part because Dmitry had, out of all probability, fallen in love. It had never seemed real to Frank, for some reason, the idea of visiting Hong Kong or Jakarta, but why not? Why the hell not? He could do it now, easily afford it. Dmitry had moved to Taipei, and that appealed to Frank more than the other two anyway. Some of his favorite sloops and ketches were made in Taiwan.

  “Yeah, hey, really: why have I never done that?” Frank said. “And I’d love to meet — I’m sorry, what’s her name again?”

  “Yuli, Franky, like Yuli Andrews. But I must say, if I could raise my eyebrow right now I most certainly would.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to meet her?”

  “Christ, what do you mean, why? Maybe I’m just being polite.”

  “I don’t think so.” Dmitry looked at him sideways, like a raven trying to decide: bug or pebble? Then he looked across the street at a sushi restaurant.

  “Sugarfish,” he said. It sounded lewd, coming out of his mouth. “Sugarfish. A truly superb name.”

  “Have you seen Trog or Catherine?” Franky asked.

  “No, Franky, I’m afraid I’ve fallen out of touch. They seem to have fallen out with me mum, of all people — I don’t know nor do I wish to know the details, which are undoubtedly boring as cabbage soup — but, you know, people disappear, don’t they.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you in touch with them, Trog and Catherine?”

  “No, I keep meaning to.”

  “Match, set, point.”

  “I think it’s point, set, match.”

  “Whatever. My father’s still in touch with Trog, from what I glean, and I’m still in touch with you, but you can’t deny that people kind of float away.”

  “How are your parents?”

  “Why do people ask that?” he said, arms in the air, flabbergasted. “Why on Earth?”

  “I’m making conversation, like a normal person!”

  “It implies such a low standard for conversation, doesn’t it? No offense, Franky, but really. The fact is I can’t see why you should possibly care, but I see them once a year or so. I don’t believe I ever told you this, but when I made my first big pop, four or five years ago, I did what every stupid boy who makes a lot of money does and bought the grandest residence available in my old hometown. It’s an ancient Hawthornian manse, a hundred meters down the road from my mother’s little shack, the house where I grew up. When I was a boy I would look at it and think about how filthy rich you would have to be to live in something like that. I really felt that the big stone pile mocked our cheap little drum, mocked it every day. It became a titanic presence in my psyche — in fact, I may have even mentioned it to you. Did I?” He hadn’t. “No? Well, surprising, because it maddened me, made me crazy as you Americans say. So as soon as I could, I bought the old thing, and — this is the best part — I bought a Rolls Royce exactly like the one that used to park there when I was a wee lad. Except mine is newer.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Franky. I suppose you think it’s a horrid cliché.”

  “You bought a Rolls Royce as a lawn ornament for a house you don’t live in?”

  “Well, Franky, I do live in it, and I drive the car — well, actually, I get driven in the car — every year.”

  “Every year.”

  “Well, yes, Franky, and often” — with his accent it was off-ten — “more than once a year. I have to be in London or Paris every three or four months, and I sometimes manage a night in Liverpool on those trips. Then we go back every Christmas to see me m
um, practically next door, me, Yuli, and now the boys” — he already had two little sons — “and we usually spend a week or ten days then.”

  “And you bring your driver, to drive you around in your Rolls.”

  “No, Franky, we do bring the nanny, but I keep a small staff in England.”

  “Small staff. Really.”

  “Hey, yeah, no — I keep a butler and a maid there, although the butler drives and the maid cooks while we’re around, and the two of them take care of everything else while we’re away, so it’s enough. They’re perfectly willing to work the extra hours when we’re there, since, let’s face it, they have it unconscionably light the rest of the year.”

  He was eyeing the Vietnamese server — he had a way of gazing at waitresses that Frank was sure most of them found abhorrent, but was in its own way admiring, almost tender. This one wasn’t sure what to make of him, but was wary.

  “Speaking of which,” Frank said. “Did you ever reach your goal, the eightfold staff?”

  “Very good, Franky, the play on the Buddhist path, very good. I did, and it was the furthest thing from meditative peace one can imagine. I put together my staff of eight soon after I saw you last, while I was still living in Hong Kong, but it was a disaster, truly a disaster. The chauffeur and the chief steward were both in love with the upstairs maid — impossible to blame them, she was an almost perfect little girl from the mainland, with the cutest little Platonic triangle of pubic hair — and there was no end of drama in every direction. No end. The two of them got into fisticuffs, and ended up wrestling and ruining the shrubbery, the gardener went berserk and ran after them with a machete, and the downstairs maid and the cook’s helper would get into jealous catfights if I bent either of them over the kitchen table, which I couldn’t resist doing, even though I knew it would lead to grief, as you say. It was the least restful period of my entire life.” He slurped some pho. “I now have a nice tidy house staff of five, Franky, and I’m much” — again, mutsch — “much, much happier.”

  However weird the eight- or five-person staff seemed to Frank, as conspicuous consumption they both paled compared to the phantom staff in England — like characters in an Edwardian ghost story, they waited for the imperialist baron to descend on his semiannual visits.

  “And the pile in England, it just sits there?” he asked. “Empty the rest of the year?”

  “Well, except for the staff, yes. What do you want me to do, rent it out to a rock band or something?”

  “Why don’t you let your mother live there?”

  He looked confused. “But she has a house already, doesn’t she,” he said. He had never for a second considered it.

  “But you said, yourself, her house isn’t nearly as nice. I think you called it a shack. Or a drum?”

  He snorted. “No, of course it’s not as nice, Franky, and that’s the whole point.” He turned inward. “The fact is,” he said, with an uncommon pensiveness, “I realize now that I like the fact it’s empty, that it’s sitting there for me. It’s as if at any time, if I need to get out of there” — the big sweep of his arm suggested all of Asia — “I have a place to go. It’s my refuge. My escape clause. I have it for the same reason you want to build your ten-meter sailboat.”

  “It’s not ten-meter anymore. Now it’s a twenty-meter ketch. And I’ve given up on building it. I want to buy one.” And yes, the idea of buying it and sailing it around the world did function as an imaginative refuge and escape. Key word in Frank’s case: imaginative. “How many bedrooms does the pile have?”

  “Well, there’s no particular reason to count them, Franky. Quite a few.”

  “Your mother’s alone now, right? You could give her one bedroom, one bath? Would it make a difference?”

  Dmitry looked dark. He rarely brooded, but this conversation had depressed him.

  “Franky, Franky, Franky,” he said after a moment. “I don’t really know why, but I don’t want anyone living there except the staff. Maybe it is socially irresponsible, as you like to point out about most of what I do — although allow me to say that the little society of two I employ there would find it extremely socially irresponsible of me to close up the place. And I know it wastes an enormous amount of fossil fuel, and there are vast amounts of lawn to water — there, I’ve said it all, so you can skip it.” He frowned at the floor. “Anyway, I honestly don’t know why I’d want to put me mum there, no.” He watched the waitress walk past, and that cheered him back up.

  “So how’s married life?” Frank asked, a lighthearted dig, he thought.

  “Were you always this confoundingly conventional, Franky, or has it gotten worse?”

  “No, actually, it’s a serious question. The last I heard you were running around on sex-and-golf tours and managing several girlfriends and courtesans. I’m wondering how you’re managing the transition.”

  “Well, let’s just skip over whether there’s been a transition. Still, I get the question,” he said. “I was as surprised as anyone that I wanted to get married. Hadn’t been on my horizon at all, but I suppose that isn’t uncommon.”

  The waitress walked up and asked if they wanted anything else.

  “No, thanks,” Frank said.

  “Dangerous question,” Dmitry said to her, with the full-bore goofy grin.

  She put down the check and left.

  “In passing allow me to say, because this girl reminds me, you would love Ho Chi Minh City, Franky. The girls are very flat, boyish, the way you like them.” Frank let that pass.

  They paid and opened the door into the monoxidized heat of midday LA. “But my conversion narrative: Yuli grew up in Jakarta, or on the edge of Jakarta, because her father was a government minister. The best of everything inside the family compound and the best education outside. She went to Yale and Wharton Business, and was recruited by HSBC’s Jakarta office before she finished her degree, in the same way I had been recruited, lo, these many years ago. She came home in triumph as the hot new junior exec with bigtime connections.”

  “So she works for the same company,” Frank said.

  “Well, she doesn’t work for a firm now, does she, Franky? — but by that time, I had also moved companies three or four times. If you’re making money, you’re getting offers in this business, and I’d been gone from HSBC for years when she arrived. Not that it would have mattered, since the odd bonk between coworkers isn’t frowned on there the way it amongst you Shakers; I indubitably would have made a play hell or highwater.”

  “Play.”

  “Yes, indeed, thou Heroic Defender of Feminine Honor. When I met her, the first thing she said was Oh, yes, Mr. Heald, I’ve heard about you!

  “Have you now, darling? I said. And what have you heard?

  “In America, she said, the polite usage would be you are a serial monogamist.

  “That’s a damnable lie! I said, quite forcefully. A foul and putrid slur, cowardly disseminated by mine enemies! I am, my dear, and I’m willing to prove it to you if need be, a parallel polygamist, albeit somewhat extralegally.

  “The fact that she laughed at this, Franky, I mean really let out a laugh, was perhaps the beginning, but who knows? It just happened, in the way I hear it happens in books. I fell in love. I know I always made fun of you for being so moony about women, but I get it now, Franky, I really do. I’m in storybook love.”

  And, as in the books, it didn’t go smoothly.

  Frank had picked Dmitry up at his motel — as always, downmarket and in the middle of nowhere — and as they got back in Frank’s truck, parked at a meter on Western, to go the airport, he told the rest of the story. Yuli’s highly-placed, bourgeois, Muslim family, as might be imagined, was not very pleased about having a live-in sex tourist as a son-in-law, and Dmitry knew from the minute he met the parents that although the mother seemed nice and addle-headed, the father, the government Pooh-Bah, would be trouble. The father could see what kind of man Dmitry was, and was ready to marshal all his considerable power to get
rid of him. In those first wistful weeks of true love, Dmitry didn’t care, and he ignored all the pesky obstacles strewn in his path. Within a couple months Yuli was pregnant, and blithe, gleeful, giddy with the news, they announced to the parents they were getting married.

  “The minute we told them, Franky — it was on a Sunday in their horrible, stuffy living room in Jakarta, something designed from a picture-book of Windsor Castle, really, all knickknacks and gewgaws — it was clear that we had been living in dreamland. Her mother said, in Bahasa Indonesia — that’s the Indonesian language, Franky, although it is actually just a dialect of Malay; a very simple grammar, by the way, but I digress from my digression. The mother says, trembling with fear and looking at her lummox of a husband, God have mercy.

  “The father says, in an obnoxiously officious tone, as if he were cowing some subordinates at his ministry, And when were you planning on taking this extraordinary step?

  “Yuli says, On Saturday.

  “Yes, on a Saturday, he says, but when? Certainly not until next summer.

  “Buying time, he was. No, sir, I said. Saturday. The day after tomorrow.

  “Yuli’s mother was in paroxysms, and the father about to blow. I started to say something mature and reasonable, the way you’d talk to a traffic judge — I am sure this seems awfully sudden, sir, but I strongly assure you that, in the future… — that kind of thing, but before I could finish, the preposterous, round little man ran over to the mantle, where two stupendous, silly sabers, or scimitars, were crossed, and popping up on a chair, he grabbed one of them — and this is the funny thing, Franky, because while I was standing there, about to be sliced open by an enraged Muslim bureaucrat with a gleaming, four-foot medieval sword, I stopped to think in that bizarre mind-wandering that can happen in a crisis, What a risibly harebrained colonial remnant, this asinine fireplace, for who could ever possibly want a fire in Jakarta? and where does the word scimitar come from, anyway? Turkish, I think, as if I had nothing more pressing than to entertain such musings — and then he came crashing toward me, sword above his head, with a nimbleness and speed I never would have suspected, because you have to imagine him Franky, he sits at his big government desk and glowers, glowering has been his only exercise for thirty years, and he huffs getting out of a car. So I hopped over the sofa and turned to face him again, saying, Sir, really, this is uncalled for! hoping a little etiquette might spark a short circuit of some kind, but the women were screaming — Yuli’s sisters had run in to see what the ruckus was all about — and Yuli was exhorting him, using her best managerial tone, to behave in a civilized manner, which, again, oddly, I found amusing, the civilizing mission and all that, and my smiling redoubled his anger. Like a mother lifting a car off her baby, superhumanly strong all of a sudden, swinging the saber wildly, taking out lamps and an armrest, maniacally chasing me around the room, clambering over the furniture I had started strewing in his path. OK, get out! Yuli finally yelled at me. I’ll handle this. I gave the old man a footballer’s head feint and then sprinted out the front door, which slammed behind me. I heard a horrible clang, which I learned later was the scimitar, which her father had let loose, and which had cartwheeled past Yuli to strike against the door and break in two.