You

25

IF you live alone, you’d be a fucking masochistic freak to buy an opaque shower curtain. I started thinking about this in the Silver Seahorse, where the shower curtain was white, save a few spots of mold on the bottom. It’s like they were trying to make the rooms feel like Psycho. I thought buying a shower curtain would be the easiest fucking thing in the world but you go to Bed Bath & Beyond and they have like six hundred opaque shower curtains that are obviously not an option. And then you go online and there are thousands to choose from. I didn’t buy a totally clear one because you need something to look at while you’re on the can, but when you think about it, this shower curtain is something you are going to look at

Every.

Fucking.

Day.

So I started going through hundreds of options online. Most of the designs are bullshit you could never stomach every day (a map of the world, go fuck yourself, fish, a map of Brooklyn, really go fuck yourself, snowmen, the Eiffel Tower, nautical signs—I mean, I’m not some fucker who buys scarves at Urban Outfitters and rates movies on IMDB). I just wanted something funny and classic.

I finally settled on a clear shower curtain with yellow police tape marked POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS slapped across. And when I bought this shower curtain, I never imagined that you would be on the other side of the police tape, those damn yellow stripes blocking my view of you. Next time I’m going for an all clear, Beck. Lesson learned.

And really it’s all for the best because I don’t have time to watch you shower. I have to take this opportunity to hide all the Beckmobilia and hope that you didn’t do any snooping when you woke up. I retrace your steps. You left the bathroom closet door open (typical woman) after you got a towel. Fortunately you took the towel on top and you didn’t find your bras stashed under the bottom towel. Hopefully, you didn’t open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and find your scratched-up silver hair clip (I stole it the first day I stepped into your apartment, those clips are everywhere, you’d never miss it, right?). I needed it because a few delicious strands of your hair are woven in, holding your DNA, your scent. Did you open the refrigerator door and find your leftover bottle of Nantucket Nectar diet iced tea, half-empty? Your lips touched it and I wanted to keep your lips in my refrigerator. You did pour a glass of water and there is always the possibility that you would have mistaken your iced tea bottle for my own.

The bathroom door is the one thing in here that is actually not even slightly broken and you could have closed it all the way, but you didn’t. It’s like you want all doors open at all times, the way your windows have no curtains in your apartment. And I can’t help but feel excited that in some way, you wanted me to sneak a peek at you in there, right now, blocked by that Big Bird–colored police tape. You arch your back and let the water hit one tit and another tit and then you turn around and you like it here, in my shower, in my home and you let the water go at your neck and drip down your back and you take the bar of Ivory soap (my soap), and hold it between your breasts and move it down and let it fall and then you rub the suds on your belly, lower, lower until your hands are down there and then as soon as they’re down there they’re back up on your neck and you’re holding back and you’re so hot for me right now and I should take off my clothes and get in the shower but if I did that, you would look at the moving door and realize that your white bikini top is hanging on the doorknob. I know you didn’t notice it yet. And there’s a chance you will never notice it since you didn’t close the door all the way. I can grab the bikini and pray that you’re so wrapped up in your sopping wet—double entendre, baby—self and don’t notice or I can leave it there and assume that when you do finish—cleaning, not fucking—that you will be so preoccupied with drying off and blinded by the steam that you won’t notice your own bikini top.

Who am I kidding? I have to get that bikini top. I close my eyes. I pray. My hand is shaking when I reach around to the interior side of the door and pull it off the doorknob. You don’t notice and everything is safe again and I really need you to get the fuck out of my apartment. I put your bikini behind the frozen Stouffer’s things I buy but never eat and then you are out of the shower, out of the bathroom and you call out.

“Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?”

For a second, I panic. You know and the bikini is a gun and I am fucked but you are in a towel, dripping and I look like a fucking lunatic against the fridge.

“I’m just kidding,” you say. “I know it’s a bad joke, but it’s not that bad. Chill out.”

“I guess you found the towels.”

“I hope it’s okay,” you murmur, and my home is no place for bare feet and you keep moving around because the floors are sticky and dirty and you’re looking down at my typewriters and asking too many questions and you’re picking up my taxidermy miniature alligator head that I would have hidden if I knew you were coming and this is wrong, all wrong, this is not right in the morning light and you got to sleep here and shower and soap up without making love to me and in what universe can that possibly be a good thing? Your clean hands are too clinical right now and you’re examining this place like it’s a crime scene. Maybe that yellow tape put you on guard. You are asking when I started collecting typewriters and dead animals and jokingly asking if I’m a serial killer and pointing at the hole in the wall and saying, “Joseph, tell me again about the hole,” and, yeah, you’re laughing and you don’t mean for me to defend it all but this is not good for us and you’re too clean and I have sleep in my eyes and morning wood and no coffee and no eggs to make for you. The faucet drips (you didn’t shut it off all the way) but I can’t shut it off because you can’t be alone in my living room. You excuse yourself to the bathroom and you wash your hands with a lot of soap (taxidermy and typewriters). When you get out of my bathroom with your freshly scrubbed hands, you’re all done with me, talking about school, kissing me good-bye, no tongue.

When you leave, I sit in the wet tub and breathe you in. All of you.

“DUDE, you don’t think that’s a little harsh?”

Curtis is pleading his case and turning red and the little shit has never been fired before and suddenly he loves it here at Mooney’s and suddenly he gives a shit and suddenly my pothead minion is never getting stoned again.

“Curtis, the right thing to do now is just say ‘Okay, boss.’ ”

He flares and a fat little woman knocks on the counter like it’s a door. “S’cuse me, guys, but do you have any Zone cookbooks?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I am about to say where but suddenly Curtis actually works here and actually gives a shit and he’s zipping behind me and leading the sweet little fatty to the cookbooks and talking to her about our ability to special-order any Zone book her fat little heart could desire and telling her about our return policy, so loudly you’d think she was deaf, not fat, and it’s amazing, how people only shape up until they have a gun against their head and then I hear you (Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?), and that morning was all his fault and he will pay. He must pay and the fat lady wants to pay part by check and part by cash and part by credit card and I have to wonder how she will afford to buy the ingredients in the Zone book recipes and suddenly Curtis is a fucking Volunteer Police Man, all about double-checking her driver’s license like I taught him to do, like he never does, and running the credit card the right way, hard and tilted so that the weak old machine picks up the swipe. He’s inserting a bookmark in each fucking cookbook and, man, this kid, only a nut job psychopath perfectionist mother fucker would fire this kid, so good he is, so dedicated.

The little fat lady is pleased and she whistles at me. “Yoo-hoo, hon.”

I nod and I smile and she should have addressed me as sir.

“You should give this young man a raise,” she says and she’s pink all over from hustling around the store. “I tell you, I was in another little shop uptown for two hours before someone came to help me and this young man you have here was a wonderful and gracious host to me. And knowledgeable too.”

I’d like to tell her that in both bookstores and coffee shops, it’s actually polite to leave browsers and readers alone. When you harass people and offer to help them too much, they feel like you’re nudging them out the door. This lady doesn’t know anything about the world and she’s still raving about this friendly young man and I would like to tell her that overeager Curtis (did he start doing meth or something?) has actually driven customers away today because most people don’t want to be interrupted when they’re reading the first few pages of a novel. Oh, I want her to know that Curtis smokes pot four times a day and steals bicycles and fences them for spare cash. I could tell her that he is late every fucking shift and that he shits in the bathroom on a regular basis (rude), and that he’s cheated on every girlfriend he’s ever had, and that when she exits this place, were he not getting his ass fired, he’d mock her to high hell and possibly even write down her checking account information. Yes. She pays with a check.

Instead I just smile at the gal. “You’re the exact reason that we open up shop every day,” I say. “We’re in the business of helping people buy books.”

“This is just like that Meg Ryan movie.” She squeals. “You know, where the nice girl has the small shop and she falls in love with the man with the big shops?”

Curtis fucking sings, “You’ve Got Mail!?”

“You’ve Got Mail,” she cries and she laughs. “Oh, I love that movie! Do you have that here? DVDs?”

This sloth won’t use her cookbooks. She will buy a small shelf at Target and have someone nail it into the wall in her kitchen. She will line up those cookbooks and love the way they look and throw a pizza in the microwave and tear into the DVD of You’ve Got Mail that she’ll truck across town to buy. She’ll never come back here again.

When she goes, Curtis gets it somehow. He knows he’s done.

“Dude,” he says. “For what it’s worth, I thought I was helping you out. That chick was hot. Bangable hot.”

“You don’t give out my address to strangers.”

“She said she knew you. And did I say bangable? Mad bangable.”

Let it be known that I only punched him once and not in the face. You better remember that, Beck. It’s not like I’m some monster and it’s not like I hurt him. I fired him, man to man, boss to worker. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t hardcore and that fat lady was the first customer he treated well since week fucking one. Also, you’re not bangable, Beck. You’re beautiful. There’s a difference.