I didn’t need him. But he’d ring the bell and I’d let him in, and, even if I was wearing my dead father’s filthy bathrobe and I hadn’t showered in five days, he’d tell me, You look fantastic, Alice. I knew he actually meant it, that he saw something fantastic in my limp brown hair and puffy face and the zits I’d started getting suddenly at age thirty-six. It was embarrassing. The zits, the fact that I was letting this big oaf come over to nuzzle at my unbathed flesh, the little dog who’d sit at the edge of the bed watching as me and Clayton, the big oaf, went at it.
My life was a shambles. So I vowed to end it with Clayton. I vowed it on a Tuesday at seven a.m. after waking up with an unusual sense of clarity. I opened my eyes to find thin winter sunlight sifting in the windows of the house my dead father left me. Candy, the trailer trash dog, was sitting at the edge of the bed, politely waiting for me to wake up because that’s the thing with strays, they’re so grateful to have been taken in that they defer to your schedule and needs. So, Candy was at the edge of the bed and sun was coming in the windows of my dead father’s place on 47th Road in the borough of Queens in New York City. And I felt clear-headed. Who knows why. I just did. And I felt I needed to get my act together. Shower more frequently. Stop smoking so much. Get back to yoga and kickboxing. Stop burning through my modest profits as a modest gambler. Revitalize myself. And the first order of business was to get rid of the big oaf, Clayton. Who ever heard of a guy named Clayton who isn’t ninety-seven years old, anyway?
I got into the shower and scrubbed myself raw, then shampooed my disgusting oily head. I took clean clothes out of the closet instead of foraging through the huge pile in the hamper the way I’d been doing for weeks. I put on black jeans and a fuzzy green sweater. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My semi-dry hair looked okay and my facial puffiness had gone down. Even my zits weren’t so visible. I looked vaguely alive.
I took my coat off the hook, put Candy’s leash on, and headed out for a walk along the East River, near the condo high-rises that look over into Manhattan. My dead father loved Long Island City. He moved here in the 1980s, when it was almost entirely industrial, to shack up with some drunken harlot, right after my mom kicked him out. Long after the harlot had dumped my father—all women dumped him all the time—he’d stayed on in the neighborhood, eventually buying a tiny two-story wood frame house that he left to me, his lone child, when the cancer got him last year at age fifty-nine. I like the neighborhood fine. It’s quiet and there are places to buy tacos.
“Looking good, mami,” said some Spanish guy as Candy and I walked past the gas station.
I never understand that mami thing. It sounds like they’re saying mommy. I know they mean hot mama and, in their minds, it’s a compliment, but it still strikes me as repulsive.
I ignored the guy.
As Candy sniffed and pissed and tried to eat garbage off the pavement, I smoked a few Marlboros and stared across at midtown Manhattan. It looked graceful from this distance.
The air was so cold it almost seemed clean and I started thinking on how I would rid myself of Clayton. I’d tried so many times. Had gotten him to agree not to call me anymore. But then, not two days would go by and he’d ring the bell. And I’d let him in. He’d look at me with those huge stupid brown eyes and tell me how great I looked. Alice, you’re fantastic, he’d told me so many times I started thinking of myself as Alice Fantastic, only there really wouldn’t be anything fantastic about me until I got rid of Clayton. When he would finally shut up about my fantasticness, I’d start in on the This isn’t going to work for me anymore, Clayton refrain I had been trotting out for seventeen weeks. Then he’d look wounded and his arms would hang so long at his sides that I’d have to touch him, and once I touched him, we’d make a beeline for the bed, and the sex was pretty good, the way it can be with someone you are physically attracted to in spite of or because of a lack of anything at all in common. And the sex being good would make me entertain the idea of instating him on some sort of permanent basis, and I guess that was my mistake. He’d see that little idea in my eye and latch onto it and have feelings, and his feelings would make him a prodigious lover, and I’d become so strung out on sex chemicals I would dopily say Sure when he’d ask to spend the night, and then again dopily say Sure the next morning when he’d ask if he could call me later.
But enough is enough. I don’t want Clayton convincing himself we’re going to be an everlasting item growing old together.
Right now Clayton lives in a parking lot. In his van. This I discovered when, that first night, after I picked him up in the taco place and strolled with him near the water, enjoying his simplicity and his long, loping gait, I brought him home and sucked his cock in the entrance hall and asked him to fuck me from behind in the kitchen, and then led him to the bedroom where we lay quiet for a little while until he was hard again, at which point I put on a pair of tights and asked him to rip out the crotch and fuck me through the hole. After all that, just when I was thinking up a polite way of asking him to leave, he propped himself up on his elbow and told me how much he liked me: “I really like you. I mean, I really like you,” looking at me with those eyes big as moons, and even though I just wanted to read a book and go to sleep, I didn’t have the heart to kick him out.
All that night, he babbled at me, telling me his woes, how his mother has Alzheimer’s and his father is in prison for forgery and his wife left him for a plumber and he’s been fired from his job at a cabinet-making shop and is living in his van in a parking lot and showering at the Y.
“I’ve got to get out of Queens soon,” he said.
“And go where?”
“Florida. I don’t like the cold much. Gets in my bones.”
“Yeah. Florida,” I said. I’d been there. To Gulfstream Park, Calder Race Course, and Tampa Bay Downs. I didn’t tell him that though. I just said, Yeah, Florida, like I wasn’t opposed to Florida, though why I would let him think I have any fondness for Florida, this leading him to possibly speculate that I’d want to go live there with him, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to be kind to him.
“Just a trailer is fine. I like trailers,” Clayton said.
“Right,” I said. And then I feigned sleep.
That was seventeen weeks ago. And I still haven’t gotten rid of him.
Candy and I walked for the better part of an hour and then headed home, passing back by the gas station where the moron felt the need to repeat, Looking good, mommy, and I actually stopped walking and stared at him and tried to think of words to explain exactly how repulsive it is to be called mommy and how it makes me picture him fucking his own mother, who is doubtless a matronly Dominican woman with endless folds of ancient flesh, but I couldn’t find the words and the guy was starting to grin, possibly thinking I was actually turned on by him, so I kept walking.
Once back inside my place, I gave Candy the leftovers from my previous night’s dinner and sat down at the kitchen table with my computer, my Daily Racing Form, and my notebooks. I got to work on the next day’s entries at Aqueduct. No matter how much I planned to change my life in the coming weeks, I still had to work. It wasn’t much of a card, even for a Wednesday in February, so I figured I wouldn’t be pushing a lot of money through the windows. But I would watch. I would take notes. I would listen. I would enjoy my work. I always do.