Now that I’m home, I’ve picked up with a handful of high school friends like Brad. They still linger around the lake, buzzing like mosquitoes over a still pond. They know it’s a stagnant sort of life, working as waiters or tending bar, getting high before their shifts so that the glow from the spread of bottles behind the bar yields whatever meager magic to their empty, stoned eyes. “It’s like Christmas,” Brad said last night. “All those blues and golds and oranges and greens.” They tuck the memory of those illuminated bottles into their back pockets to help them get out of bed in the morning. Every night, with help from a spliff and some single malt, the bottles shine newly seen, my friends moving inside the restaurants like post-Lapsarian Eves and Adams. When Brad told me about the bottles that was when I asked him to sleep with me. I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. I’d had three whiskey sours and my lids were heavy and my stomach warm, and I could imagine it was Christmas and that Brad wanted me.
Helen, my mother, snores on in the next room. She hasn’t shared her bed with anyone since her third divorce was finalized a few years ago. She claims it’s because her face looks like a balloon that’s slowly losing its air.
“Nobody flirts with me like they used to,” she complains.
She never asks me why I don’t go on dates anymore. The smell of shit from outside settles in my hair. Brad’s cum crusts on my thigh. I’m starting in on my second year back in my childhood bed, and I can practically feel the pollen from the raging trees outside settle on my face. I hope it won’t be the last time that Brad can look past my nubbin of a calf and see the face he wanted so much when we were in high school. I must have denied him a thousand times back then, rebuffings for which I’m now grateful because my sexual life depends on the desire that the delayed gratification has swelled in him. When he came, I could feel the ten years flowing through us, his post-coital euphoria almost enough to make me forget my stump. I was ready to let him take whatever he needed, didn’t even complain that he hadn’t helped me climax. I hid my half-leg under the comforter and let him collapse on top of me, bracing my bones for his 225 pounds, holding him up with a taut stomach and veined forehead until I was entirely out of breath and had to roll him off me. Since the bomb, I seek out pain from unlikely places.
Before he ran out the door he said, “You’re sweet, Fair.” It’s a word I’ve always despised. So innocuous and soft. In the Army, I never heard anyone use it. We pulled and ran and pushed and fired and fought “sweet” far the fuck away. It’s probably why I liked the Army so much. It was a place where a girl, even a pretty one, could be mean and not apologize.
I touch the soft mound of hair where my legs are splayed out, my hips still open. Brad is also the first man I’ve slept with who didn’t tell me I was beautiful. Even the captain with a face like anger itself complimented me, after he snuck in my bunk and fucked me, just like he’d promised me the day before — mercilessly, until I cried. Then he had leaned in, kissed the spot above my left eyebrow, and said: “You’re fucking beautiful, you little cunt.” I knew it was a game, the way he talked to me; that it had something to do with the eighteen-year-old PFC he’d lost the week before; that it had to do with needing to create ugliness in spite of his desire for me, which had been palpable for weeks and had our whole company on edge. I knew my fellow soldiers were spending themselves in the shower every night, in anticipation of what I would do with the captain. We were a unit. We did everything collectively, even fuck, I suppose.
“Fair,” the captain had whispered the morning before he came to me. “Do you know the Egyptian fable about Naela?”
“No,” I’d said.
“She was the beautiful wife of the king of Egypt. Then the king was killed because his successor knew the king’s wife was a legendary beauty and wanted her for himself. Do you know what Naela did after she was forced to become the concubine of her husband’s murderer?”
“No,” I’d said.
“She knocked out every single one of her teeth with a brick, leaving her with a ragged smile that disgusted the man. He cast her out into the street. But at least she didn’t have to sleep with the motherfucker,” he’d said, laughing.
“So?” I’d said.
He’d leaned in really close, so that I could smell the Listerine on his breath. For all his toughness, he was always meticulously groomed. He’d once said it’s what kept him from becoming a complete animal — the civilizing power of Listerine and floss. I learned that trick from him and never failed to brush my hair before putting on my helmet.
“So what I’m saying, Fair,” he said, “is that when you get taken hostage by those goat fuckers and they’re lining up to rape you into tomorrow, you’re going to take a rock and knock your lousy teeth out.”
He took some dry cereal from the bin above the kitchen sink, grabbed a spoon, and walked away. I knew he wanted to use my face for escape. That’s the problem with tough guys. They give themselves away so easily and they are never aware they’re doing it. I made up my mind to let him take me, mostly because I knew he would help me escape. It would be a fair trade, which is more than could be said for most transactions in Iraq. Two days before, my friend Maurice lost the right side of his body, and later his life, when an RPG hit his Hummer. As far as I knew, all he’d gotten in return was a well-folded flag. When he was attacked, I rationalized that his uneven features and porcine eyes had made the strike possible, if not invited it outright. That was how I was raised. Beauty was not only my namesake and my birthright, but also, I believed it could lift me up above the plain and protect me. When I enlisted, when my mother and neighbors and friends told me I was being foolhardy, I felt an alien calm. My beauty was unimpeachable. I had no doubt it would bear me up and sail me over the sweating combatants.
