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1
One day, a light.
It is opaque and weightless and is created from the back of a starless sky. It comes twirling down through the gravity-less expanses, through galaxies we'll never know, finding eventually the Milky Way, then planet Earth, its eastern hemisphere, the United States of America. It hits Boston, Massachusetts, on a Thursday night in November when there's already snow on the ground. Muddy slush is hit by Greek bus drivers who are grayheaded and have bad knees, barely missing the shivering legs of girls going home alone from discos (this is the 1970s), smoking cigarettes and hugging themselves, walking briskly, heads down and highheels clacking. Men sit at bars talking about the Colonials game. The city of Boston is alone and oblivious. The light goes to a posh apartment in The Berkshires building in the Back Bay. It buries itself into the ovaries of a Japanese woman -- not much more than a girl herself, actually -- as her husband, a Colonial, comes inside her after returning home from the game. Somewhere down in the street a man is yelling something.
Her husband's name is Mervin Marcus. Former army private, current professional pine jockey. They've been married two years. Their apartment is enormous and highly coveted, in a building with a surveillance camera pointed at the sidewalk and a doorman. He plays for the Colonials and tonight they played New York, the Boston Center halfempty and desolate, ever-lingering warm stench of human sweat. Both Mervin and Sue are fit and attractive and young. After a Thursday night home game, the players' routine -- because Friday practice isn't until eleven -- is to shower, dress, and seep out into the city's private rooms, for expensive food, comped drinks, pussy, and anxious club owners leading them through the crowd. Not Mervin though, he doesn't like to go out with them -- makes him feel absorbed by the masses. He believes that to be great one has to exist alone, different and weird and even unliked, unbound by social responsibilities and uncompromised by friendship. And he'll be great, soon enough. Just not yet. For now he'll have to settle with watching John McNeal be the starting point guard. The reason they don't invite Mervin out is because they used to but he never goes out, always has something like he's not feeling well or he has to study film or practice free throws or hit the weights. Though the truth is most nights he goes home and argues with Sue. Like tonight, a sort-of argument because he doesn't care about the candle she bought today.
When he got home tonight after the game he wanted her to speak to him about him. He wanted her to say, -- I saw you on TV.
He wanted to shrug as he undressed and go, -- That? That was nothing, baby . . .
-- Sure it was. At least you got a chance. I was so proud.
-- You call that a chance? That wasn't no chance.
-- Called my mom. Sister. Denise.
-- I don't mean to be overly negative baby and I appreciate you saying that. But the towel guy could have done it. They could have gotten some dope from the stands to run around like a moron for thirty seconds and not even touch the ball while John McNeal got his ankle looked at.
-- Thirty-one seconds.
-- That wasn't a chance. I'm sorry baby and I really do appreciate you calling them and saying that. But that wasn't shit.
-- Don't worry baby, was all he wanted his loving sexy young wife to say. -- You'll get your moment.
And he wanted her to rub his shoulders and make him something to eat and sit across from him at the table with her chin in her hand, watching her husband eat.
Got out of the cab, which he took home even though the Boston Center was not even a mile away. He nodded coldly to the doorman and stood in the elevator staring back at his reflection, liking how he looked. He walked down the hall and opened the door, turning the key the wrong way first and almost kicking it in. Before he could turn and take the key back out once inside, Sue was in his face blabbing about a goddamn candle and he told her, -- That's fucking great, Sue. A candle. Wow. I give a shit. Fucking amazing.
Her Asian features, her eyes like inexpressive notches, her mouth spastic.
And she stared at him, walked away and into their bedroom, slammed the door, protecting the candle in her arms like a baby. Mervin apologized, and then they screwed, tired and uni-position. He got the idea to spice it up a little by putting a finger up her butt. She told him once that she liked it and he remembered they hadn't done it in a while. At least eight months. He has a mustache. Sue had been drunk when she told him that she liked it when he put his finger up her butt and had said yes she liked it because he had asked her specifically if she liked it and she'd wanted to answer correctly so that he would be pleased. Their apartment has four rooms and wood floors. Mervin's mustache is neatly trimmed. The alley next door has a sign posted that says it is under surveillance. His hair is grown poofy and makes him look like a dandelion. Sue has the same hair. She searched his face as he had sex with her. He watched himself, dipping in and out. She wanted him to kiss her, to feel his thick jaw against hers, his tongue and heavy breath in her mouth, the stubble, dangerous but safe. She grimaced and yanked his hand away, and he felt ashamed and alone, started thinking about the taxi ride and the gray of the road in the driver's windshield, then Philadelphia (Saturday night) and their defensive schemes, which is when he shot it and got off her.
Sue and Mervin go for weeks without it, Sue not noticing but Mervin notching the wall behind the nightstand, and she likes to converse from the other side of the apartment, so most of their conversations consist of what? huh? who now? And in the rare circumstance when they do find themselves doing it, it's boring and cold, and he finds himself either thinking of other girls or thinking of offensive schemes. He thinks on his way downstairs to a cab waiting to take him to practice one morning, This shit has to stop. I know what I'll do. Go down to Victoria's Secret. Get her some sexy drawers. That's the problem here. Put some sexy drawers on her, that'll heat things right up. Girls love that sort of shit. Get her a couple thongs. Asian girls like her don't have much ass to work but she'd still be sexy in a thong. Sexier than she is in those damn big-ass granny panties she wears all the time.
Met in a bar in Japan when he was stationed in Nagasaki his second year in the service, as he calls it. He spoke to her slowly and loudly for the first couple of hours until she told him she not only understood English but was from Boston. They fell in love, fucked in the barracks when no one was around, and in the canteen and the shitter, after breakfast, before breakfast, during breakfast. Squeezed into his bunk when he was supposed to be asleep and she was supposed to be gone, knowing the others could hear them, but that only made it better. High school basketball star from the grit of Dorcester serving his country and becoming a man like his own father before cashing in his full-ride scholarship offer from Boston College and the English major from Emerson going at it like mad jolly elves in empty public libraries, alleyways in the city at night, feet in trash, in the bathroom at bars while angry drunk soldiers pounded on the door, closets, cars, the firing range over spent shell casings in the moonlight, three times a day sometimes, exhausted and grinning and their privates aching and useless, in love. Got married, played so well at B.C. that he quit school and declared himself a pro after two years but no one signed him. Tried out for the Colonials as a free agent and made it only because the team was in such a dour state at the time, with the retirement of Q____ and T______ and the rest of the core that had dominated for nearly two decades. A rebuilding era. He was promptly put on the bench, where he stayed.
And now, ever since, it's only once a month.
But some red panties will change that, Mervin thought. Small red ones, lace, so her ass hangs out and you can almost see that little tight coochie, yeah, and black too, a whole truckload of them, call Filene's and tell them just dump a load on our roof from a helicopter so Sue can go up there every morning and grab a new pair, no excuses. That's what you do if you want your life to be the best, Mervin thought, remembering the military: take responsibility, make changes, put some effort into things, work a little. That's the matter with people who aren't happy, is Mervin's opinion on the matter -- they don't want to motherfucking work. If you're unhappy it's because you're too motherfucking lazy to do anymotherfuckingthing about it.
Mervin Marcus masturbates in the shower every morning. Sometimes he stands before the bathroom mirror in the bathroom with the door locked pretending to be shitting. Mervin watches Sue come into the room and walk over to the oak dresser and bend down to the lowest drawer, slightly bow-legged he's noticed, pouting in the way she does when she's tired. As she bends down her ass beneath her sweats flattens and morphs into her back, the elastic waistband of her big gray panties, uninviting and nonsexual. Could be a man's ass.
An ass is an ass, he thinks.
Mervin pulls himself out of Sue and wipes himself off with Kleenex from the box on the nightstand and lies beside her for a second, where they both stare at the ceiling. His sperm begins swimming up her birth canal and they stare. He goes into the living room to watch game tape with his notepad as sperm by sperm die out, until one is left, and it approaches the membrane skin of an ovary.
She goes into the bathroom where she knows he masturbates nearly every morning when he's home, pretending to be going to the bathroom. Her feet are cold on the tiles of the floor, her skin veiny and purple in the fluorescent light. She touches h...
