Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [66]
“Johnny didn’t tell you? He picked me up in Jersey.”
“He didn’t tell me anything. I went to his place and he wasn’t there. I went to the station and you weren’t there.”
Eliza sat up in bed. She slipped her hand under her nightgown and over her stomach. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t know. She told him about Johnny’s idea, relating the details as they came back to her, aware of the stony silence accruing on the other end of the line. “It’s the best thing,” she said, “don’t you think?”
Jude skipped temple the next day. He told Johnny he had a headache. Instead he went to Johnny’s, sat down on the couch, and picked up The Laws of Manu. A new set of passages was marked by the envelope and underlined in blue ink.
59. On failure of issue (by her husband) a woman who has been authorised, may obtain, (in the) proper (manner prescribed), the desired offspring by (cohabitation with) a brother-in-law or (with some other) Sapinda (of the husband).
60. He (who is) appointed to (cohabit with) the widow shall (approach her) at night anointed with clarified butter and silent, (and) beget one son, by no means a second. . . .
63. If those two (being thus) appointed deviate from the rule and act from carnal desire, they will both become outcasts, (as men) who defile the bed of a daughter-in-law or of a Guru.
“What’s with this voodoo shit?” he asked when Johnny came home, a full three hours after the ceremony had ended. Jude had been dozing on the couch, and now he did have a headache. He held up the book. “Fucking clarified butter?”
Johnny dropped his tattoo case and placed a styrofoam container of leftovers on the record crate in front of Jude. “It’s all that was left.”
“You got it for me?”
Johnny crossed to the kitchen and brought back a fork. “You can have it.”
Jude, in fact, had not had dinner. He removed his retainers, opened the box, and began efficiently to eat, unhappy with himself for being hungry. Johnny returned to the kitchen sink, the single sink in the apartment, and dispensed a caterpillar of toothpaste on a toothbrush.
“Did Eliza go with you?” Jude asked, his mouth full of naan.
“She did. She likes that voodoo shit.” Johnny jammed the toothbrush in his mouth. “She’s a spiritual person.” He cleaned his teeth with a ritual fervor that involved both arms, his eyebrows, and his hips. A yeasty lather of Colgate drooled down his chin.
“Where have you been, though? It’s like midnight.”
Johnny turned to the sink, spat, and rinsed his mouth. When he faced Jude again, a spot of toothpaste had blossomed over the heart of his T-shirt, white on white. Jude pointed it out.
“I had a house call.” Johnny peeled off the shirt and tossed it into the empty laundry basket. Across the rather pale, rather hairless plain between his nipples, Krishna was playing his flute. This among rubies and sapphires, ocean and fire, sinuous Sanskrit dictums the meaning of which Jude did not know, Xs and more Xs, TRUE TILL DEATH hanging from his clavicle like the iron plates of a necklace, none of which Jude had glimpsed but through the tissue of Johnny’s T-shirt, though he wondered now if Eliza had.
“You just did a tattoo?”
“I can’t even see straight. I’m taking a shower, and then I’m going to bed.”
“When you going to tattoo me, man? You said.”
“You don’t want to start, man. I’m telling you. You won’t stop. Good night. Or stay if you want, since you’ve made yourself so comfortable.”
“What if I pay you?”
“Maybe,” he said, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Any more questions?”
Jude stared at the inside of the wax container, the oily, electric orange residue of his meal. When he’d told Johnny