THE PERFECT BEING
DAVID McKENNA
Lesley startles Roger at lunch by declaring, “If Bob were human, I’d date him.”
“Some guys say the same about you,” Roger says through a mouthful of crabcake.
She licks hot sauce from a fat french fry. “What do you say?”
He swallows. “I say hurry up and eat. There’s a storm coming.”
From their table they can see the highway and, beyond it, a soybean field stretching to a horizon of dark clouds. Roger wolfs down sweet potato souffle and fresh buttered corn. Lesley’s hamburger is untouched, her fries piled high.
“Watch me, it’s easy,” he says, swabbing his plate with a buttermilk biscuit. With the way she’s staring, he could be gnawing a hunk of raw liver or gobbling chocolate-covered ants.
He positions the biscuit between thumb and ring finger, with pinky extended. “Miss Manners would hold it like this.”
Lesley pushes her plate to one side. “Did Miss Manners lecture at the county jail?”
His morose good looks and droll baritone used to amuse her, or so it seemed. She’s been miffed all day, since he scolded her for buying a hundred-dollar leash in Philadelphia. Maybe if he were a dog she’d think more of him. It’s disquieting, her glee when Bob licks his bowl.
Roger does such a thorough job with the biscuit, his plate is almost clean.
She frowns in mock disgust. “If it tastes that good, it must be bad for you.”
He shrugs. “So is sunshine and seawater.”
Clouds surge like crude oil on a clear lake. The sunlight is milky and dimming fast. He barely feels it on his drab brown hair. Lesley’s sun-bleached curls and honey-gold skin brighten. She looks lit from within. Their waitress, a well-fed brunette, drifts toward them like an abandoned ship. She wants to hear Lesley’s beauty secrets.
Lesley sighs. “I’m poor, I’m depressed, I eat.”
“I’d kill for those cheekbones,” the waitress drawls.
“They’re holding up the entire rest of my body.”
Lesley is built like a runway model: long limbs, small breasts, straight back. Nothing awkward or inelegant. A long, strong nose and sulky lower lip. She doesn’t blink. Her high-voltage smile is an act of will, not warmth. On their first date, when she invited him to her April Fool’s party, there was no chance he’d say no. He felt glad all over at the light in her eyes, like a druggie with a nickel bag and new needle.
“Those are so pretty,” the waitress says of Lesley’s amber ice cube earrings.
“Thank you. A gift from Donald Trump.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am,” Lesley says. “They cost two dollars at a flea market in Phiadelphia. You really like 'em?”
Roger frowns. It’s tiresome, her feigned insecurity and casual arrogance. At work she brags of his finesse and stamina, but those are trifles. Her beauty demands gestures of homage. If he loves her, he’ll drive her to Philly at dawn. He’ll accept Bob, to prove there’s more to his ardor than appetite. He’ll learn to live with dog hairs on his clothes and waking to Bob’s tail in his face. To the smell of moldy dog.
A sudden gust rattles the windows. Startled diners look outside, as if expecting the wind to take shape. He picks up the check and watches heads turn as Lesley glides to the exit in a white cotton chemise that accents the casual grace of her stride. A clap of thunder greets her as she bolts into the tentative rain.
He catches up in the parking lot. Raindrops drum against the cars at an accelerating rate. They’re soaked before he finds the key. Thunder rolls across the bean field to meet a white flash in a grove on the far side of the lot. The sky explodes with a great ripping sound and a deep boom. They face each other, startled and gaping. Her eyes are electric gray. He reaches to touch her face.
“The door,” she shouts, pushing his arm. “Open the goddamn door!”
Sheets of rain batter the Honda as they head east. A blackjack/cocaine dealer gave her the car in the spring, when a shore flood ruined the antique Mustang she got from her pit boss. She’s since dumped the dealer and burned out the original clutch. Roger wants to teach her to master the stick shift, but the storm has unnerved her.
“I don’t care if you have a death wish,” she grumbles. “Just don’t get me killed.”
“This car smells like dog,” he says, ignoring her tone. “It’s worse now that we’re wet.”
“Enough about my dog,” she snaps. “What does dog smell like, anyway?”
“Wet clothes on a radiator in a homeless shelter.”
“I guess you’d know, you eat like a street person. Or an ex-con.”
He’s sorry he mentioned the bad old days, before he got paroled on the drug rap and went to dealers’ school. What came over him? He took Lesley back all the way, to the funky streets of Fishtown and the boarding house when his mother abandoned him to a well-sedated aunt in order to stalk her true love, a tattooed stuntman on the West Coast. He remembers Lesley yawning. She’s not the ideal confidante, nor much of a road partner. It’s always too hot or too wet or too far from a good bar with a clean bathroom. There are too many cars, too few quality people, too many reminders of how boring it is to be anything but wealthy.
It could be worse. She might have brought Bob instead of trusting him to the care of her bookish friend Amy. Fortunately, she scared herself last week at the mall by leaving the ratty terrier sealed in the car in 90-degree heat. A vet labored for an hour to revive him, and Lesley vowed to never again expose Bob to such abuse.
The harder the rain, the faster Roger drives. He imagines himself submerged in a bathosphere or stuck in the splendid isolation of an automated carwash. A pathetic fantasy; two hours of solitude and he’d be phoning Lesley, or planning to ambush her when she clocked out. The beachfront casino with the tacky minarets would be a bleak place to work without her, though he shouldn’t have told her that.
“How can you see where you’re going?” she says nervously.
He leaves one finger on the wheel and shrugs. “I can’t. I’m counting on my Higher Power.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Roger, or you can pull over right now.”
“Say when, baby. I’ll put you out to pasture.”
The rainfall is so heavy he can barely hear her cursing him. It rolls over them in great white waves, then abruptly gives way to a dry road and sunshine on a sparkling windshield. It’s as if they just left a movie set.
“We drove right through it,” he says. “Happy now?”
“I need to stop for gum,” she commands. “My breath is disgusting.”
“Your breath is sweet. It’s your mind that’s foul.”
She keeps a bottle of mouthwash at her waitress station and uses it on breaks. Her apartment is crammed with cleansers, enough to stock a small dormitory. She retreats to the bathroom for long periods after sex, leaving Roger to fend off Bob and nurse a nebulous dread. Making love to her seems a defilement, a debased form of appreciation, even when she appears to enjoy it.
He waits outside the car in the Wawa parking lot, trying to figure where Bob fits in. Surely she could find a tidier way to torment him. Near his feet, ants circle a discarded bag of spiced nuts. A lone ant tries to carry off a nut fragment. The rest, he guesses, keep their distance because the meal is too hot.
The passenger door slams. Lesley exhales loudly. Her glamorously tangled hair and cotton dress are still wet. She looks like a starlet playing a shipwreck survivor. He remembers her dream of heading west to do screen tests.
“They don’t bury their dead in New Jersey,” she says, unwrapping a stick of sugarless gum. “They put them to work at Wawa.”
Last night a high roller with pinky rings on both pudgy hands tossed her a $500 chip, which she’s converted into earrings, two meals, a new leash, a $27 tube of lipstick and a $250 linen suit for Roger, to pressure him into trying for a supervisor’s job. She’s determined to spend what’s left before they drive to her place, just across the bay from the casinos.
“Don’t take the bridge exit,” she says, popping her gum. “Let’s have some drinks.”
They speed past fast food joints and a billboard promise from the casino that employs them: ONE CARD CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. The garish logos of the gaming halls glow in the distance. Now it’s Roger who’s annoyed.
“I see enough of this crummy town on work days.”
She pinches his cheek. “Don’t be a party pooper.”
“Bob will be pissed,” he cautions.
“Amy’s there,” she reminds him. “Besides, I’ll make it up to him.”
They barrel off the expressway into immediate heavy traffic. Atlantic City is seagulls and smog, solitary buildings, a succession of black-topped parking lots. Roger refuses to drink where they work, or in the other casinos, which stand in a row along the shore. He makes a sharp turn near the Inlet, narrowly missing a doubledecker bus and a black cyclist with a boombox on his head. Up ahead is the boardwalk, a sliver of beach, a few stumbling vagrants.
“Let’s play chicken,” he says. The car lurches onto a lot, narrowly missing a trio of bow-tied slot machine attendants who curse and wave, then resume their sluggish trek to the Taj Mahal.
Then, alluding to her most recent flirtation, “How many points for a bisexual roulette dealer?”
“You hit someone, Roger, I don’t bail you out.”
They bicker about bars and settle on a popular dive on South Carolina Avenue called the Last Resort. The off-duty casino workers at the bar, in rumpled black and white, look like guests at the tail end of a rowdy reception. Roger gulps a whiskey and soda and orders another. Two months of loving Lesley have nearly worn him out. His tough-guy veneer agrees with her, so long as she gets her way most times. It’s like walking a high wire without a net. Sooner or later he’ll crash in a broken heap.
“Don’t sulk, you look like a monk,” she says.
“I’m commiserating with myself. That guy is sulking.”
Sitting across the crowded circular bar is a large black man with a shaved head, wearing dark glasses and a T-shirt that says: CONGRESS STAY OUT OF MY VAGINA.
Lesley signals the bartender. “Give Mr. Vagina another Coirvoisier and Coke.”
The black man intones the word “Martel” without smiling. Roger recognizes him as a craps/cocaine dealer who works graveyard at the Avalon.
“Would you mess with that man’s reproductive rights?” she says as her own glass is refilled.
Roger crosses two fingers and shakes them at her. “I’d have his tubes tied.”
All eyes are on her, as they would be on a fire raging next to Roger.
“It’s no joke,” she says, suddenly somber. “Women lead such dirty lives. We stand up and there’s stuff leaking out of us, or we’re cleaning up somebody else’s stuff.”
“You mean Bob’s.”
She asks him to play “Everything Is Beautiful” after he tells her it was a favorite of a serial killer in Philly who used loud music to drown out the screams of victims chained to his basement wall.
“Didn’t this guy have any neighbors?” Lesley asks.
“Your victims are much better behaved,” he says, ignoring the question, strolling to the jukebox.
Returning, he sees her crying in her Kahlua. Other men are drifting closer and eyeing each other like tomcats. The Vagina Man is saying, “Can I help you with something, honey?”
“Her dog,” Roger says, resuming his seat. “He has a skin disease and needs a full-time nurse.”
It’s getting to be a regular thing, the partying and then the tears and the maudlin remarks about growing up an only child in a trailer park, which means she must have been in roughly the same income bracket he was, though she has an amazing talent for making him feel like a street urchin in the presence of a princess.
Now she’s going on about her stepfather — his name, oddly, was Bob — who died three years ago, right after she moved to the shore and landed a casino job. “Bob was always there, no matter how badly I screwed up. A skinny little guy, sickly even, but the smartest and kindest man I ever knew. He told me I was beautiful, and made me believe it. I should have been more grateful.”
Roger thinks that one over, stroking her thigh and fingering the square patch of scar tissue where her knee was dented in a teenage motorcycle crash. Another contradiction, her fascination with outlaw bikers, but one she refuses to discuss. Sometimes when they make love he kisses the scar, grateful to it for humanizing her perfection.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Your stepfather’s name was Bob too?”
“Bob One,” she says through her tears.
He shakes his glass and examines the ice, in the manner of a witch doctor rolling the bones. “You named your dog in your stepfather’s honor. Is that what you mean?”
“That little fellow is totally dependent on me, totally forgiving. He demands nothing.”
Roger says, “Shit. Only because he can’t.”
She blows her nose on a bar napkin and dabs her faraway eyes. “Honestly, I have to tell you, Bob is the perfect being.”
Roger is stumped. “Bob One or Bob Two?”
“Both.”
The Vagina Man, back on his stool, mouthes the words to “Achy Breaky Heart” and salutes Lesley with his glass. She taps the bar with her cocktail straw and studies the jukebox, which has a glass case with three decorative CDs rotating slowly in bright light. The smile on her closed lips is proud. She could be a cheerleader thrilling to the national anthem.
Roger glares. “This Bob thing is giving me indigestion.”
“Bob Two is the reincarnation of my stepfather,” she explains brightly. “Have you looked into his eyes? Can’t you see the intelligence?”
She pushes her hair behind her right ear, resting her elbow on the bar and her cheek on the heel of her hand. She tilts her head downward with brows arched and eyes turned upward. Her ice cube earring flashes in the bar light. He can’t tell if she’s vamping or trying to demonstrate Bob’s facial expression.
“Intelligence is a trait I don’t associate with dogs, or most people,” he says.
“Bob isn’t most people.”
Her mood sours again on the road home. She reproaches herself for the locked car incident and other crimes against Bob. She wonders aloud if subconscious malice is a factor.
“I feel so guilty,” she says, slapping the dashboard. “I never put my arms around him and said 'I love you, Bob.’ “
“Bob Two?”
“Bob One. And why don’t I like oral sex? Maybe I’m repressing a terrible childhood memory.”
“Is it a memory if you can’t remember?”
“It’s repression,” she says, clearly annoyed. “Don’t confuse the issue.”
The bridge comes into view. Lesley’s staring out the window at the moon hanging over the bay. Roger vows to look straight ahead and say no more.
“So,” he says as they reach the bridge. “You’re inhumane to Bob Two because of repressed anger at Bob One.”
She rolls down her window and sighs. “Fuck you, Roger. You’re a great one to psychoanalyze.”
Her apartment is dark, a bad sign. Amy was supposed to drop in twice to attend to Bob, and leave on the lights, as he gets scared at night.
“It’s hard to believe,” Lesley says, rushing past Roger with her bagful of purchases from Philly. “It’s like I keep having the same bad dream.”
Lesley, it turns out, forgot to inform Amy that she and Roger pushed up their day trip from Thursday to Wednesday after she lucked into the $500 tip. Roger pictures Amy lounging on the beach with a romance novel while Bob was home alone, growling for Gravy Train or a drop of canned soup, Lesley’s specialty.
He follows Lesley up wooden stairs to the bayside entrance. Bob yips and leaps at her as she gropes for the kitchen light. His food and water bowls are empty. Puddles and piles of excrement foul the white tile floor.
“This apartment smells like dog.”
“It’s not funny,” she snaps, grabbing a can of Chicken and Stars from a cupboard. “Here, open this.”
He cuts through the top with a can opener, the kind with one metal tooth and a little sprocketed wheel. She dumps the soup into a bowl, places it in the microwave, sets the timer for three minutes.
“Look what mommy bought,” she says, dangling a rhinestone-studded leash.
Bob clearly has more urgent needs. He leaps at Lesley, scoring her slender brown calves with thin red wounds.
“Again,” she says, stamping her foot.
The dog’s legs are bony and bent, with long nails that click frantically on the tile. His brown fur is drab as an old throw rug, with pinkish bald spots where he gnaws himself.
She throws the leash. “I did it again.”
The microwave hums. She bites the knuckle of her curled index finger, as if to stifle a scream. He pictures her on TV as a reckless suburban girl who runs off with a biker gang and gets more than she bargained for.
“I take him to the vet and forget his medicine,” she says. “I take him shopping and almost suffocate him. I go away and forget to feed him. I blame myself.”
The microwave beeps. She removes the steaming bowl and places it on the floor. Bob leaps at it, yips and backs away. He repeats the sequence several times, as if practicing a grotesque trick. He yips more loudly with each failed attempt to ingest the scalding soup.
Roger picks up an empty bowl, fills it with water, places it next to the soup. Bob splashes half the water onto the floor and quickly drinks the rest, then retches like an old drunk. He attacks the soup again, this time with more success, after Roger dilutes it with cold water. When the bowl is empty, Bob continues licking it.
“Yes, I can see his intelligence now,” Roger says, crouching to eye Bob at his own level.
“You think I’m silly,” Lesley says.
Bob growls and shows his tiny yellow teeth. Roger glares. “His kindness too.”
She grins. His sarcasm obviously amuses her. He’s on the floor, after all, waiting on her dog.
Roger crawls to embrace her from a kneeling position. He slides his hands up the back of her bare thighs and pushes his face against her belly, which is rumbling like a thunderhead.
“You smell good.”
She wriggles free, eyes flashing. “Don’t be disgusting, I need to bathe.”
She steps around him and disappears from the kitchen. Bob dashes after her into the bathroom, before Roger can punch him. The bathroom door slams.
All Roger smells now is dog. The stench annoys him; he can only imagine Lesley’s revulsion. The bathwater is running, Bob yips. It’s a dog’s life, but all is well. Roger checks the cabinet under the sink, to make sure Lesley has everything. Paper towels and a dustpan, a big can of room deodorizer. He’ll fill a bucket and mop up, but not before she finishes her shower.
He picks up the new leash, careful not to step in any messes. When they reappear, he’ll take Bob for his walk. A practice walk, the first of many. He’ll pat Bob on the head instead of just yanking him around. Think about the new places they’ll explore. Out by the bay, past the bridge. Here, little father, fetch the stick. When the marsh sucks him up, Lesley will be angry, but in the end she’ll blame herself.
—END—
