He thought the matter was just beginning, that the ooze would require now a more involved and protracted dealing with the emergency of its emergence, but he was wrong. The woman handed the bad-eyeball boy a tissue and let him up and turned to the college-teacher boy and said, “You.” Then she waited. The college-teacher boy looked to the bad-eyeball boy for help, but the bad-eyeball boy merely twisted the tissue in his ear and shrugged.
The college-teacher boy felt eminently foolish and he felt if he talked down to this woman he would deserve to feel foolish, so he let her have it: “My wife is obsessed with another man. She has not become his lover yet, but does not conceal that she would like to. I have offered to facilitate that and get out of the way, but she says no. She dreams about him and writes to him and writes about him. He writes to her. I stand around in the lee of L.U.V. I am not entirely clean. I have hurt my wife similarly, maybe worse. I am due some punishment. I am not a good boy.” He looked at the bad-eyeball boy to see if this played any better than it sounded, and the bad-eyeball boy, who was examining his tissue, gave him a thumbs-up, so he continued.
“She can have the son of a bitch — he’s a ‘man of principle’ and tall and dark and strange and handsome, and I am none of these, as you can see—” The Chinese woman here blinked very slowly and looked directly at the college-teacher boy, a perfectly inscrutable blink that said either “This is true” or “No, this is not true.” He waited for her to intrude with her meaning and she did not. Of course she did not. They had come looking for a good mother, and they had by God found one. The bad-eyeball boy had stretched out on the floor for a nap.
“I do not care if the man is in my wife’s life. She should have that. Fifteen years of only me is enough for anyone. But I want him out of mine. I want this Turk out of my head. He is in it constantly, every waking moment, not in every sleeping moment only because I am too disturbed to dream, I never dream, I would like to dream, if my wife can dream I might deserve to dream myself.” The bad-eyeball boy opened one of his eyes and looked at the college-teacher boy as if to comment on the excessiveness of this last speech, and in fact the college-teacher boy had in making it lost some of his resolute calm. He was nervous that in his silliness he had put the woman in a perfect position to do the perfect prototypically mothering thing—“Grow up!”—and for this he need not have come down to the dungeon and witnessed an ear-blackening head redbelly or anything else.
The Chinese woman had unwrapped a cloth roll of needles and showed the college-teacher boy to a chair. The last thing the college-teacher boy managed to say, warily eyeing the roll of needles and allowing the Chinese woman to rather roughly push him into the chair, was “I need a doctor.” This elicited another thumbs-up from the bad-eyeball boy, who opened neither eye.
The Chinese woman firmly held both the college-teacher boy’s shoulders against the back of the straight chair and then released him with a slow, cautionary withdrawing, as if instructing a dog to stay. He stayed. She put one of the needles in her mouth and sat on his lap. He glanced at the bad-eyeball boy, who was apparently asleep. With the needle still in her mouth, the Chinese woman began to trace the contours of the college-teacher boy’s face. The needle was so sharp that despite the woman’s fine touch the college-teacher boy was certain he would have hairline cuts from the tracing and look like an old china doll when this was over, and this idea, coupled with a sexual nervousness that the woman’s sitting on his lap engendered, made him giggle, which he thought would evoke a reproof from the woman, but it did not. She smiled, holding the needle with her teeth to do so, and said, “Git.” The college-teacher boy took this to mean “Good.”
With the point of the needle the Chinese woman worked his face with such attention to surface that the college-teacher boy, already in a transport of erotic tenderness, could only think of the way he’d once seen overbred beagles work rough terrain for rabbits in a field trial. The dogs were so meticulous, sniffing every pad print of the rabbits, that they made virtually no forward progress. The “best” dog in this venture was the one necessarily the farthest behind his prey. This kind of field trial, in which the game was forsaken for a process itself, was happening on his face.
His face felt sweetly and wonderfully on fire, as if he were bleeding tears. She went on and on. She walked the needle in a crenellation between and around his very eyelashes with such dexterity that he did not even squint. She departed for an ear and he stole a glance at the bad-eyeball boy, who was looking at him with one eye, then the other. He could not recall which of the bad-eyeball boy’s eyes was bad, and neither of them looked worse than the other, and there was a tired smile on the bad-eyeball boy’s face that suggested he didn’t know which eye was bad, or care, either. They had come to a fort with a weird woman in it, and it had worked. The Chinese woman detailed the needle from pore to pore in a way that stung now so badly and agreeably that the college-teacher boy began to wave, in a vision, to his wife. He began to look at the skin of the Chinese woman. He was excited where she was sitting on him, but she acknowledged nothing in this respect. She slowly pulled back and away with the same dog-stay order as before and put the needle back in its roll carefully. The college-teacher boy sat breathing easily, upright, alive, bleeding and weeping without bleeding or weeping, waving happily to his dimming, diminishing wife — it was the way things went. His wife had said of her unforgettable time with her Turk, “It was light, delightful, without promises.” But the Turk had kissed her, and there was promise inherent in a kiss, and the Turk would break it, as he, the college-teacher boy, had. He was going to get out of the way of the bull and let the bull break his promise. Without any means of applying those long, colorful barbed darts he could never remember the name of, or of otherwise bleeding the full hump of the bull’s exotic lust, there was nothing to do but quit the arena. Capework was silly.
The Chinese woman shifted and was suddenly at his ear with warm breath. She nipped one lobe and crossed before him, brushing him with her hair, which looked fine and black but felt as coarse as broom straw on his face, and nipped the other lobe. She exhaled a long, hot, slow breath in his ear. The college-teacher boy had begun to hold her, to hug her, with what little purchase he had, sitting back as he was. She made no protest or adjustment. He held her still, aware now that he was holding her. She let another hot breath into his ear. Then she said, “You fine.”
And he was.
About the Author
Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star, and the Paris Review, and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.