Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [70]
“Where’s this comin’ from?”
“Just curious.”
“You thinkin’ about that girl?”
Johnny didn’t say anything. The needle throbbed in his hand.
“Well, you wouldn’t have to worry about knockin’ her up.” Rooster laughed, bumping the needle.
“Don’t laugh, man!” Johnny let up on the pedal and withdrew the needle. “You fucked up the eyeball!” He wiped at it with his cloth. The needle had scratched the dragon’s cornea, tracing a red tail through it. “It looks like he’s crying blood!”
“Can you fix it?”
“Fucking A.”
“Fuckin’ right.”
Johnny snapped off his gloves. Rooster sat up. His chest was dark with the same stubborn, wiry hairs, and imprinted with the texture of the tousled sheets. He wasn’t laughing anymore. For months, before Johnny had gotten his own apartment, this was the bed he’d slept in. He’d never quite been able to bring himself to leave it.
“Why don’t you sleep in my bed?” Rooster had asked him that first night he’d rescued him from Tompkins, almost two years ago.
“No, man,” Johnny had said. “It’s your bed. You take it.”
Rooster had looked at him, placing the big, calloused palm of his hand on Johnny’s neck, and said, “That’s not what I meant.”
Rooster did the same thing now, stroking Johnny’s Adam’s apple with his thumb. He was gentle, always gentle, but Johnny felt his breath stop, choked with indecision.
“You want to know what it feels like? Bein’ with a girl?” Rooster dropped his hand. “It feels like bein’ a fuckin’ coward.”
Ten
In the kitchen, Neena was butterflying a leg of lamb, an indelicate procedure that recalled neither lamb nor butterfly, but a bloody approximation of log splitting, diapering, and liposuction. She had learned the method from her grandmother, a billy goat of a woman four and a half feet tall, in the kitchen of the hotel where she worked in Chandigarh. Until she came to America, it was the biggest kitchen Neena had ever seen. This kitchen, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, thirteen stories in the air (it had taken some time to explain to her family back home why the address was the fourteenth floor), had a six-burner gas range, a refrigerator that dispensed ice crushed or cubed, and a wine rack so full that taking a bottle home now and then was like taking a pin from a pin- cushion. The boyfriend (he was not a boy, but he was dressed like one, in sandals and cutoff jeans and an untucked Hawaiian shirt) was opening the second bottle of the evening. He refilled his glass and then Neena’s, spilling a puddle of wine on the counter. “Looking good, girl,” he said with a whistle, at either Neena or the lamb, and, taking the bottle, drunkenly exited the room.
Stepping into the air-conditioned parlor, away from the aromatic, ovened kitchen, Les saw that the guests had arrived and were arranging themselves on various pieces of furniture. Eliza sat on the ottoman beside a pyramid of gifts, Johnny and Jude in the pair of wingback chairs. “Wow,” said Johnny, who was wearing, of all things, a linen sport coat, “your home is really beautiful, Ms. Urbanski.” He took in the claw-foot coffee table, the baby grand posed like an open-jawed shark. He was eyeing the painting hanging over the piano, the backside of a reclining male nude.
“That’s Pierre,” Les explained.
“Thank you, Johnny.” Di draped herself over the divan. She was wearing jeans and ballet slippers and an indigo-colored leotard, which swept low on her very fine back, and she was balancing a wineglass in her many-ringed fingers. This left Les standing at the margin of the room, but he was glad to keep his distance. Di hadn’t looked at him since earlier that afternoon, when she’d sent him out to pick up her order at the bakery.
He was content being her errand boy: that was how he atoned, how he returned to her good graces. He had done his best this afternoon, and now the living room was festooned with the pink wishes