Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

CLAP IF YOU BELIEVE

I understand her parents’ wariness. A woman like my Tinkerbell is bound to attract the amorous attentions of the wrong sort now and again. So when they open the door and appraise me like a suspect gem, not smiling, not yet inviting me in, I understand and forbear. “Good evening,” I say, and let the silence float like untroubled webs of gossamer between us.

After a time, Mr. Jones turns to his wife and says, “What do you think?”

“The eyes look reasonably sane,” she replies, to his nod,

“though that’s not always an airtight indicator these days and there is a worrisome edge to them.”

I look down, stifling the urge to defend myself, and am gratified to hear Mr. Jones say, “Man with his hobbies and profession is bound to have sharp eyes. I say we give him the benefit and let him in.”

She sighs. “Oh, all right. Come in out of the heat, young man. Put your shoes there.” A serried rank of them faces the wall like naughty students: practical ones for Mr. and Mrs.

Jones, scuffed high-tops for twelve-year-old Melissa, and, looking more like shed leaves than footwear, Tinkerbell’s familiar green-felt slippers. I unknot and loosen my buffed black Florsheims and set them beside my beloved’s footwear, thinking what a marvel her tiny feet are and how delightful it is—ensconced alone in her cozy apartment after a date—to take her legs, right up to the thighs, into my mouth and lightly tongue those feet, her tiny soles, the barely perceptible curve of her insteps, the sheer white-corn delicacy of her ten tiny toes. How ecstatically my darling pixie writhes and wriggles in my hand, her silver-sheened wings fluttering against my palm!

“Hi, Alex.” I look up and there’s Melissa standing by an archway that leads to the dining room.

“Hi, Melissa,” I say, wiggling my fingers at her like Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie. The zoo is only four blocks from their house and we’ve begun, Melissa and Tink and I, to make a regular thing of meeting there Saturday afternoons.

Once, over snow cones, Melissa told me that Tink had been miserable for a long time, “but now that you’ve come into her life, Alex,” this from a twelve-year-old, “she flits about like a host of hummingbirds when she drops in for Sunday dinner and makes loads of happy words twinkle in my head, in all of our heads.” Hearing Melissa say that made me glad, and I told her so.

Melissa giggles at my finger-waggling and says, “Come on in and sit down.”

I look a question at the Joneses. Mrs. Jones gives an unreadably flat lip-line to me. Mr. Jones, instead of seconding Melissa’s invitation, comes up like an old pal, leans in to me, and says, “You and me, after dinner, over cigars in my study.”

I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but I feel as if he’s somehow taken me into his confidence. I say, “That’s fine, sir,” and that seems to satisfy him because he steps back like film reversed and stands beside his wife.

A familiar trill rises in my brain. The others turn their heads, as do I, to the stairs, its sweeping mahogany banister soaring into the warm glow upstairs. And down flies my beloved Tinkerbell, trailing behind her a silent burst of stars. Her lovely face hovers before me, the tip of her wand describing figure-eights in the air. “Hello, Alex my lovely,” she hums into my head. Then she flits to my cheek, the perfect red bow of her lips burning cinnamon kisses there. Recalling the sear of those kisses on other parts of my anatomy, I feel a blush rising.

“Tinkerbell,” I say, using her full name, “perhaps we should—”

“Yes, daughter,” Mrs. Jones breaks in, clearly not at all amused, “your young man is correct. Dinner’s on the table.”

She glares at me and turns to lead the party into the dining room. Melissa comes and takes my hand, while Tink flits happily about my right shoulder, singing into my head her gladness at seeing me. When she holds still long enough for me to fix a discerning eye on her, I’m relieved to see that she’s not yet showing.

Once dinner is under way, the ice thins considerably and in fact Tink’s mother rushes past her more cautious husband to become my closest ally. Maybe her change of heart is brought on by my praise for her rainbow trout amandine—which praise I genuinely mean. Or maybe it’s brought on by the dinner conversation, which focuses on me half the time, on Tink the other half. Mrs. Jones asks surprisingly insightful questions about my practice as a microsurgeon, pleasantly coaxing me into more detail than the average non-medico cares to know about the handling of microsutures and the use of interchangeable oculars on a headborne surgical microscope. I’m happy to oblige as I watch Tinkerbell hover over her dinner, levitating bits of it with her wand—nothing flamboyant, merely functional— and bringing it home to her mouth.

After some perfunctory questions about my butterfly collection (I’ve sold it since meeting their daughter, as it disquiets her) and my basement full of miniature homes and the precisely detailed furniture that goes with them (I met Tinkerbell at a show for just such items), the talk turns to their daughter. It’s a little embarrassing, what with Melissa beaming at me, and Tinkerbell singing into me her bemusement at her mother, and her father looking ever more resigned, and his wife going on and on about her tiny daughter, giving me a mom’s-eye view of her life history as if Tinkerbell herself weren’t sitting at the table with us. Mrs. Jones is in the midst of telling how easy it was to give birth to a pixie and how hard to live with the fact thereafter when I suddenly laugh, quickly disguising it as a choke—water went down the wrong way, no problem, really I’m all right. Tink has made me a lewd and lovely proposition, one which has brought to mind the heartaching image of her as last I enjoyed her, looking so vulnerable with her glade-green costume and her slim wand set aside, arching back on her spun-silver wings, her perfect breasts thrust up like twin peaks on a relief map, her ultra-fine fingers kneading the ruddy pucker of her vulva, awaiting the tickle and swirl of my ultra-fine horsehair brush, the hot monstrosity of my tonguetip, and the perfect twin-kiss of my cock-slit, as we began our careful coitus.

I give Tink a quick stare of admonition—a joke and not a joke. She beams, melts me, and goes back to her meal. The entire scene suddenly amuses me greatly, this whole silly ritual of meeting the parents, getting their approval for the inevitable, most of which—in particular the essential proof of the rightness of shared intimacy— has already come to pass.

But I contain my laughter. I act the good son-in-law-to-be and show these kind narrow people, under whose love and tutelage my fiancée grew to maturity, the esteem and good manners they expect.

“Alex, would you please pass the peas?” says Melissa when her mother pauses to inhale. Mrs. Jones has launched into yet another diatribe against an educational system too unfeeling, too inflexible for special students like her Tinkerbell. Already under fire have come the lack of appropriate gymnastic equipment, the unfeeling cretinism of a certain driver-ed instructor, and Tinkerbell’s unmet needs for special testing conditions in all her academic subjects. As I pass the peas, the head drama coach falls into the hopper of Mrs. Jones’

tirade for refusing even to consider mounting a production of Peter Pan and giving Tink a chance to perform the character they’ve named her after, a casting inspiration Mrs. Jones is certain would have brought her daughter out of the cocoon of adolescent shyness years earlier than had been the case.

“But the worst of it, Alex,” she says, and I thank God that she’s spoken my name for the first time (and that it dropped so casually into the conversation), “is that no one in all those years has had the slightest clue how to teach Tink—or even how to discover—the uses of her wand, other than as an odd utensil and for occasional cleaning tricks. It might have kept this family solvent—”

“Emma,” warns Mr. Jones, defensive.

“—well, more solvent than it was. It might have saved peoples’ lives, cured disease, made world leaders see reason through their cages of insanity, brought all kinds of happiness flowing into peoples’ hearts the world over.” She asks me point blank to help her tiny daughter discover the full potential of her wand, and I promise I will. I don’t mention of course that we’ve already found one amazing use for it in our lovemaking, a use that makes me feel incredibly good, incredibly potent, and incredibly loving toward Tinkerbell. It occurs to me at that moment, listening to Mrs. Jones’ spirited harangue, that the wand might indeed have other uses and that perhaps one of them, a healing use, might reduce the failures and increase the triumphs I witness every day in the operating room. I get excited by this, nod more, stoke food into my mouth faster than is strictly polite. We’re bonding, Mrs. Jones and I. She can feel it, I can feel it, Melissa is grinning like an idiot, and Tink is humming snatches of Lohengrin into my head. “I love you, Alex,” she wind-chimes, “I love you and the horse you rode in on.” Looking aside, I watch her playing with her food, wanding a slow reversed meander of mashed potatoes into her mouth, biting it off in ribbons of white mush. Her unshod feet are planted apart on the damask and her wings, thin curved planes of iridescence, lie still against her back.

After dinner, Mrs. Jones is ready to usher me into the parlor for more bonding. But her husband holds up his hand to cut her off, saying, “It’s time, Emma.” “Oh,” she says. He’s got some bit of gristle in his craw, some one thing that’s holding back his approval of me.

“Ah, the study,” I say. “The cigars.”

“Just so,” he says in a way that suggests man-talk, and pretty serious man-talk at that. I follow him out of the dining room. Mrs. Jones and Melissa have odd looks on their faces.

Even Tink’s hum is edged with anxiety.

The study is dark and small, green-tinged and woodsy.

There’s a rolltop desk, now closed, and the rich smell of rolled tobacco and old ledgers pervades the air. He fits a green eyeshade around his head, offers me one. I accept but feel foolish in it, as if I’m at Disney World wearing a Donald Duck hat, bright yellow bill as brim.

Mr. Jones sits in a rosewood swivel chair and motions me to a three-legged ebony piano stool in front of him. I have to look up a good six inches to meet his eyes. “You smoke cigars?” he asks.

“Not unless you count one White Owl in my teens.”

He chuckles once, then drops it. With a soft clatter of wood slats, he scrolls up the rolltop and opens a huge box of cigars.

He lifts out two of them, big long thick cylinders of brown leaf with the smell of sin about them and the crisp feel of currency in their wrappings. I take what he offers and follow his lead in preparing, lighting, and puffing on the damned thing. I’m careful to control my intake, not wanting to lose face in a fit of coughing. The cigar tastes peculiarly pleasant, sweet, not bitter, and the back of my head feels like it’s ballooning.

“My wife,” he begins, “likes you. I like you. And Tinkerbell likes you, but then she’s liked every last one of her boyfriends, even the slime-sucking shitwads—can we speak man to man?—who used Tink for their own degenerate needs and then discarded her.”

I don’t want to hear this.

“Not that there’ve been lots of men before you. She may be a pixie, our daughter, but she’s got the good sense of the Joneses even so. But you know, Alex my boy, you’d be surprised at the number of men in this world who look and act perfectly normal, men whose mild exteriors cover sick vistas of muck and sludge, men who make regular guys like you and me ashamed to be called men.”

“I assure you, sir, that—”

“—and I’d believe those assurances, I really would, even though I’ve believed and been fooled in the past. My little girl, Tinkerbell Titania Jones, is special to me as she is; not some freak, not a thing of shame or suspicion, no, but a thing of grace and beauty.”

“She is indeed, Mr. Jones.”

He fixes me in his glare and exhales a puff of blue smoke.

It hangs like a miasma about him, but he doesn’t blink. His eyes might be lizard eyes. “I had doubts when she was born, of course. What father wouldn’t? No man likes to be deceived by his wife, not even through the irresistible agency of a stray faerie or incubus, if such there be in this world. But there are mannerisms of mine I recognized quite early in my daughter, mannerisms I was sure were neither learned nor trumped up by some phantom lover bent on throwing a cuckolded husband off his trail.”

He cranes his neck and stares, about fifteen degrees askew of my face. It’s a look I recognize from my first meeting with Tink at the miniaturists’ show in Sacramento the previous winter. I’d asked her to dinner and she went all quiet and contemplative, looking just this way, before finally venturing a twinkled Yes. I could tell she’d been stung before, and recently.

“She’s mine,” he says. “Some mutation if you want to be cold-bloodedly clinical about it, but all mine. And I love her dearly, as parents of special children often do.”

He takes a long puff, exhales it, looks at me. “Now I’m going to ask you three questions, Alex. Only truthful answers are going to win my daughter’s hand.”

I feel odd about this turn in the conversation, and yet the setting, the cigar smoke, the close proximity of this beast in his lair, make it seem perfectly normal. I nod agreement and flick a squat cylinder of ash into the open glass hand, severed, of a four-fingered man.

“First,” Mr. Jones says, not stumbling over any of the words, “have you had sex with my daughter?”

My head is pounding. I take a long pull on my cigar and slowly exhale the smoke. My hand, holding it, seems big and beefy, unworthy of my incisive mind. “She and I have… made love, yes. We love each other, you see, and it’s only natural for—”

“No extenuation,” says Mr. Jones. “Your answer is Yes.

It’s a good answer, it’s the truth, and I have no quarrel with it. I would think you some sort of nitwit if you hadn’t worked out some mutually agreeable arrangement between you. No, I don’t want to know how it’s done. I shudder to think about it.

When she drops in, she seems none the worse for wear. If she’s happy, and you’re happy with her—and with the limitations you no doubt face—then that will content her mother and me.”

I think of course of vaginal sinkings, that nice feel of being gripped there by a grown woman. And I think back years to my first girlfriend Rhonda, to her mouth, to the love she was kind enough to focus down below from time to time though less frequently than I would have preferred.

“That leads, of course, to my second question,” says Mr.

Jones, putting one hand, the one without the cigar, to his temple. “Will you be faithful to Tinkerbell, neither casting the lures of temptation toward other women nor consenting to be lured by them?”

I pause. “That’s a complex question.”

“It is indeed,” he says, with a rising inflection that asks it all over again.

“I don’t think,” I tell him, my hands folded, my eyes deeply sincere, “I will ever fail my beloved in this way. Yet knowing the weakness of myself and other men, the incessant clamor of the gonads that I daresay all males are prey to, I hesitate to say Yes unequivocally to your question. But Tinkerbell gives me great satisfaction, and, more importantly, I believe I do the same for her. Something about her ways in bed, if you will, seems to silence the voice of lust when I’m around other women. Besides which—and I don’t mean this flippantly—

I’ve grown, through loving Tinkerbell, to appreciate smaller women. In fact, on the whole, I’ve come to find so-called normal-sized women unbearably gross and disgusting.”

Mr. Jones looks askance at me. “Alex, you’re a most peculiar man. But then I think that’s what my daughter’s going to need, a peculiar man, and yet it’s so damned hard to know which set of peculiarities are the right ones.”

I’m not sure how to take his comment, but then I’m in no position to debate the issue. “Yes, sir,” I say.

“Almost out of the woods,” says Mr. Jones, grinning. “The third one is easy.” He tosses it off like a spent match: “Do you love Tinkerbell?”

This question throws me. It seems simple enough, but that’s the problem: It’s too simple. Does he want a one-word response, or a dissertation? Is it a trick question of some sort?

And is the time I’m taking in deliberating over it actually sinking my chances? What is love, after all? Everybody talks about it, sings about it, yammers on and on endlessly about it. But it’s so vague a word, and so loaded. I think of French troubadour poets, of courtly love and its manufacture, of Broadway show tunes and wall-sized faces saying “I love you” on big screens, saying it like some ritual curse or as if it signaled some terrible loss of control akin to vomiting.

And I say, “Yes and no,” feeling my way into the open wound of shared camaraderie, ready to provide reasons for my equivocation, a brief discourse which will show him the philosophical depths of my musings and yet come about, in the end, to a grand paean of adoration for his daughter.

But before I can begin, he rises from his chair and reaches for me, and the next thing I know, the furniture hurtles by as if in a silent wind and the doors fly open seemingly without the intervention of human hands and I’m out on the street in front of their home, trying to stop my head from spinning.

It’s dark out there but muggy. I ache inside, ache for my loss. It’s not fair, I think. She loves me and I love her and by God we belong together. I’ll call her in the morning when she’s back in the city, I’ll send roses, I’ll surprise her with a knock on her door. We’ll elope. This isn’t the Dark Ages, after all. Tinkerbell and I don’t need her parents’ permission to marry.

Doors slam in the house. Downstairs, upstairs. A high-pitched voice, Melissa’s, shouts something childish and angry, is answered by falsely calm parental soothings. None of the words can I make out.

The first floor goes dark after a while, then bit by bit the second. From where I’m standing, it looks like a miniature house, one of my basement models. I raise both hands and find I can obliterate it completely.

There is one golden glow of light hovering behind a drawn tan shade upstairs. Her bedroom, the room she grew up in. I want to clap my hands, clap them in defiance of her parents—

she’ll know what that means, she’ll surely understand. But the energy has drained from my arms and they hang useless at my sides.

Behind the shade, my lost love’s light moves slowly back and forth, back and forth, growing dimmer, casting forth ever smaller circles of gold with each beat of my heart.