The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  “They look like snakes, right?” Walker turns to me excitedly, his eyes glassy. “Two killer cobras, dancing with each other. Hoods flared, fists up.” I dig his mind, his stored-up knowledge, the way he sees the world. Everything is theater.

  The Thai now bends forward to watch the fight more closely, simultaneously pressing his leg against mine with some urgency. That’s it. Time for Walker to punch him out.

  “Walker . . .” I whisper, lightly swatting his arm. The koi seems to jump in surprise. But just then, the weaker fighter makes a surprise flying knee move and catches the other in the eye, who goes down. Hard. Blood spurts from the brow as if squeezed from a lemon, arcs into the brightly lit air and seems to hang there, suspended like a necklace of blood in the lights, then finally splashes onto the dirty white canvas. I am sickened to find myself exhilarated. Without realizing it, I’ve risen to my feet, a floating ghost maiden filled with lust. Walker is already up. The Thai hunk, also standing, elbows me in the side.

  “Hey! What is up with you?” I say. But the Thai hunk merely grins. Maybe this can all be chalked up to the cultural divide. Otherwise, he’s a real asshole.

  “A beautiful girl like you enjoys such violence, hmm?”

  I scowl, but feel a pang of discomfort. Impulsively, I grasp Walker’s hand, as if to steady myself, or to prevent a kind of falling into something deeper. I have to refrain from touching him more obscenely. I imagine wrapping my arms around his neck and wonder if, in this very moment, I’m gone for him. My blood pounds along with the speeded-up drums.

  “Fuck me dead. That guy’s hot,” says Walker, staring off at a group of men who stand at ringside. “I’d let him fuck me.”

  The words are like a blow. An elbow to the temple. A knee to the psychic shin. Like something’s just a little off now, tilting the landscape enough to make you seasick.

  It would be one thing if it were some vampy ring girl. Some saucy, slant-eyed delicate dish with a curtain of black hair and schoolgirl tits, a delectable gap between her smooth legs, holding a round number card in her hands. That I’ve been preparing for, engaged in my own erotic Muay Ram, trained by the passionate, insatiable Master Walker. I was already wary about the downside of a man with a raging libido, especially one so skilled—once the focus slipped or the novelty wore off. But what is it really to be involved with a man who is turned on by other men? The whole world splits open, tsunamied with possibilities.

  I follow Walker’s gaze to a slender fighter in a pink silk robe that is patterned with red spots like silk measles and inscrutable Thai lettering, also in red. He is charismatic in a creepy way. His hair is cut wildly, probably a home job, short on top, with strange furrows here and there, like leftovers from bad ideas. When he stops talking, his mouth settles into a cruel expression. His lean body seems to vibrate with barely contained manic energy. Pumped up. Edgy. So this is the object of Walker’s attention. My rival. I look at Walker and am surprised to see an innocent look there, a vulnerability, as if he’s stricken with a schoolboy crush. I am in a man’s world, a man’s stadium, but I can see things. Beyond the crush, I recognize the look of a man who worshiped his father, who missed those arms and never got enough of them.

  In the background, the first regular fight has begun, and the two men are dancing together, oiled and rock hard, measuring each other, unleashing kicks and elbows, knees and punches. They’re using all eight limbs of the Muay Thai, as if they can’t bear the masculine grace there before them, and the narcissistic desire it kindles. Walker’s clearly obsessed with the hopped-up fighter in pink, who’s taken the ring with a squat Thai who’s just roundhouse-kicked Pink into the ropes with a resounding thwak on Pink’s chest. One point. Two if it had been the head. Part of the crowd hisses, and part cheers.

  “The Stanislavsky School of Muay Thai, huh?” I say, pointing out the sneer on Walker’s crush as he arches his back insolently against the rope.

  Pink refuses to give satisfaction, and Walker ignores my comment. At the end of the three-minute round, Pink’s trainer lifts up the fighter momentarily to relieve his legs. There is so much touching of men and men here. The watering of faces and mouths, the tousling of hair, the shaking out of cramped limbs, the embraces. When I look around at ringside spectators, I am stunned by the rapture on the men’s faces, their eyes pinned on the action. The only women I see at ringside are Westerners, farangs, and some have averted their carefully made-up eyes from the spectacle. Blood splattered on canvas, gaudy trunks, the dissonance of flower arrangements used for infernal purposes—I wonder if they appreciate the jazz fusion of blood and beauty. In the States, this is better hidden, in the country’s communal dream sport—behind the crash of football helmets and the seemingly hostile tacklings, with the nubile cheerleaders reassuring everyone of the heterosexual aggression taking place on the field.

  “Sonchai’s got heart. The panache of the underdog. I bet he grew up poor, in the provinces. I’m sure of it.”

  “How do you know his name?” I am as disoriented as if I had been slugged.

  Walker taps the rolled-up program against his thigh by way of an answer. The bell sounds, the round ends, but Walker keeps his eyes on Sonchai as he walks with attitude to his corner. The loss of Walker’s full-on attention acts like an ice pack on my heart, numbing it out. Even his voice sounds distant, and the delivery is stiff.

  “In the old days . . . they’ve been doing Muay Thai for three centuries . . . the way they’d measure rounds? They’d mark the competition ring in the dirt, then float a coconut in a pool of water nearby. The coconut shell, it’d have a small hole in the bottom. When the water filled that hole, when the shell sank, that’s when the round would be over. Too bad they don’t sell coconut.”

  Walker slings his heavy arm over my shoulders like a flesh boa and draws me in for a squeeze. I remember how we got stuck one day last week in the middle of the insane Thai traffic, stranded on a thick island of sidewalk at Silom Road, for almost an hour. And how Walker had wrapped his arms around me while I tried to breathe through my shirt, and he’d said, “Every minute that we stand here, breathing, I swear I can feel pieces of me dying.” And held me tighter, as if the dying would be okay, would be bearable, if it were in each other’s arms. We’d sucked down some young coconut juice on our return to the River City Guest House and had revived completely, and instantly. It had felt like a miracle. Like we’d both been saved for something. I made the mistake of thinking it was about us.

  The next round begins. Sonchai immediately doles out a slamming low kick, gives the other guy his own orchid bloom on the shin.

  “To condition their legs, they break Coke bottles against their shins. Used to be they’d hammer them with banana trees. Weird thing is, there’s a high rate of shin cancer in Thailand.”

  “That the kind of fighting you favor?”

  “Street fighting’s what I like. Practical. Take from here, from there. The Thais are some of the toughest fighters in the world. At the Bangrajan Muay Thai Camp, where these fighters train, I learned a lot of moves. I use their elbow techniques. Other stuff’s not so practical, someone fucks with you in close. Then you use wrestling moves. They throw you to the ground? Jujitsu’s the ticket. A man’s got to be able to defend himself. I do not welcome shit. I am not beyond using a pair of brass knuckles if I need to. Or a brick. Whatever. I tell you the time the cops stopped me on my way to a Hollywood meeting? I happened to have a cricket bat in the truck. These cops, they wanted to know, what was I doing with a cricket bat in my truck? I don’t even think they thought it was a weapon. They were laughing. ‘We know what you use this for,’ they said. I don’t know what the fuck they thought.”

  I look at Walker but can’t read him. Maybe that’s another appeal—this sense that there’s a glowing ball of mystery floating in his head, a ball that explodes at random, like a radioactive piñata. With him, I am constantly alert, alive. One of the fighter’s kicks lands and makes a resounding, sickening thud. I can’t imagine how mu
ch force must’ve been behind that kick. What kind of snap. I can’t imagine what I’m supposed to be learning here.

  The bell sounds and the rival comes out dancing, but Sonchai is on; Sonchai is a blur of movement. With a flurry of jabs, Sonchai gets in close and executes a deadly low kick to the shin, followed by a smashing uppercut to the jaw. The crack is thunderous. For a split second, the rival looks surprised as he hovers there, uncertain. Then a shower of sweat—or is it sparks?—flies off the falling body as he crashes to the canvas, out. Down for the count. A rush of dark blood leaks from his mouth and the trainers and medics leap into the ring, surround him so he can’t be seen. The crowd explodes. Walker rises to his feet, punches his fist in the air, and yells out, “Sonchai! Sonchai! Sonchai!” along with all the sports-crazed, beer-high, money-mad, adrenalized Sonchai bettors and fans. The fight is over.

  That night I tell him. We are both sprawled on the scratchy bedspread, each reading—him, some Orton; me, a book on Thai divination, this part about how pimples are portentous—and he has just said, “I love you.” Those words that change the world, or not. I take a breath. “I want to date other people,” I say. Walker sits bolt upright, fury gathering in his eyes like a fuel injection. He’s wearing a black Ren & Stimpy T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the neck cut out Flashdance style, so his beefy arms and chest are on display. He moves so suddenly that the T-shirt slips and hangs unevenly off his collarbone. A vein throbs in his neck, in between a few thick folds, like a trapped worm.

  “That’s not acceptable.” And I, immediately panicked, and flattered, and panicked, and freaked, I hold onto my skinny raft of honesty, even though the world has become white-water rapids.

  “I just told you I loved you. I’m in too deep,” he says, choke-voiced, throaty, pleading. “I am in love with you.”

  “Walker, we’ve only known each other a month or so . . .” You want to fuck men.

  “I’m in love, goddammit. I’m willing to move back to L.A. for you. I have to be with you.” He sees my face is unchanging, slams a fist into the headboard, hard enough so it rattles, and pushes all one hundred and ninety pounds off the bed with breathtaking speed for such a large man, so solidly built, well over six feet. “What the fuck did you come to Bangkok for then? Huh? What do you think I am, a mark? You think I’m some kind of fucking mark?” I can see flashes coming from his eyes, his face is so close. His voice is harsh now, shredding words. The demon tat won’t stop grinning, flexing. The koi tries to break through the surf, knock the demon off his aching fish head once and for all, but it’s no go. Not in this lifetime.

  “Walker. Calm down. I can’t make that kind of commitment so soon—you don’t even live in L.A., I don’t know you . . . I came to check things out with you . . . we’re seeing . . .”

  Without warning, Walker launches a killer punch right into the wall and, presto, knocks a raggedy hole in it. I watch the plaster drift down, in clumps, and in a fine kind of sifting of smaller bits.

  “Fuck that shit. You think I’m not good enough. Not good enough for your middle-class, college-educated ass. I’m going out. You should go back to L.A. Tomorrow. Tonight. Right the fuck now. I can’t stay here.” He glares at me, and I, I shrink, that’s how fierce the glare is that he trains on me. A withering gaze, now I understand that phrase. He is burning the skin from my bones, frying the fat truth away from my brain’s hard kernel.

  “Fuck you,” he says. He says this with incredible precision and relish, and vicious conviction, like an actor who’s finally cracked his character, who’s made his pivotal choice, and it fits him like a glove.

  The words crucify me, nailing my limbs to the blanket. I can’t move. All I know is that I am curled on the bed, looking at the wall, where there are strange discolorations and stains.

  Walker gets up, slams around his belongings—it’s funny how books sound one way, with their shudder-flutter of pages, the crisp smack of hardcover binding against tile; and clothes another, like soft, draping exhalations, sighing onto the floor; bottles yet another way, plasticky and sloshing, staccato and plinky. Walker crashes into the bathroom, throws articles into a bag, drops the bag on the floor, kicks it against the door. God, he’s strong. He has that muscle burst of energy—is that what bodybuilders have? Where they concentrate the bunches of muscles to do low reps, with massive weight.

  Walker comes back, I feel the air churning; he comes back to the bed. Me, I don’t move. There’s no noise, but it’s deafening. What if I were in a trench right now, enemy peering overhead? I would play dead. I would not move. No breath would escape from me. I would not be there. And if they saw me, somehow, and if they shot me, or ran me through with a bayonet, or cut my throat with a gaping slit smile, I wouldn’t even feel it, I wouldn’t even give them the satisfaction of a cry or gasp, because I wouldn’t be there, and it would all be their stupid G.I. Joe war fantasy anyway.

  Is he standing at the foot of the bed? Yes. The bed creaks. Why? The saggy bed tilts toward him. I strain my muscles to maintain my chosen spot, my area. He is lying down again. Close, very close, but not touching me. Around my body, I have fashioned a magical flexible net of finest threads and wires, all of remarkable tensile strength, impenetrable.

  A hand grips my thigh. It is a meaty hand, a hand shared by his Polack ancestors—did they have pogroms?—a hand that does things, can hoe and build and plant and please. Once upon a time, there was a comic book called The Flailed Hand. In it, the hand, unattached to its body but still suffering after death, went on digital rampages around I think it was a rural British country town, inspiring horror. I remember being amazed at what one hand could do and how it could be more frightening than two hands of a whole person. Those comic books would be worth a lot today, but unfortunately my grandmother stuck them in the incinerator, thinking they were tasteless, creepy, and inappropriate for teenagers. She was the type who only read Dickens and Jane Austen, and equestrian magazines.

  A hand manifests between my legs, trapping my cunt. I am amazed at how heavy it is, as if the skin is packed full of earth. He’s got me pinned, my legs close to falling off the edge of the bed and my upper body wedged near the headboard. I can’t think.

  “You’re burning up,” he says. In wonder, his voice throaty and soft. Maybe I breathe. My cunt is a cute little furnace. The little cunt that could. He takes me in his arms. “What’re we going to do?” he whispers.

  “I love you,” I say, for the first time. Red Rover, Red Rover, send Blaise right over. And just like that, I am on the other side.

  NIGHT MARE

  By Pam Houston

  night·mare ’nt-‘mar, -‘mer noun [Middle English, from 1night + 1mare] (14th century) 1: an evil spirit formerly thought to oppress people during sleep. 2: a frightening dream that usually awakens the sleeper. 3: something (especially a dating experience, situation, or object) having the monstrous character of a nightmare or producing a feeling of anxiety or terror.

  What I was supposed to do that night was to give a reading from my latest book at a tiny but wonderful bookstore in Laramie, Wyoming. Where I found myself instead was in coach class on United Flight 956, from Denver to Chicago, nothing but fog outside the window and the glow of a runway whitened with snow.

  “Just tell them your fiancé was in an automobile accident,” my publicist said.

  “We broke up last month,” I said, “he couldn’t handle the book tour.”

  “That makes it all the more believable,” she said, “the unexpected twist.”

  The audiences at the little bookstore in Laramie are always generous, intelligent, forgiving, and the very best part is that there is an apartment off the back where the visiting writer gets to sleep for the night. After the owners lock up and go home, you can walk through the aisles with just your socks on and squint through the darkness at all the books.

  So it was against my better judgment that I lied to the nice people in Wyoming, people who understood me, people who would have been delighted to shar
e an evening with me. And all for what? To go on a blind date with Cupid.

  The magazine thought it would be perfect. A double publicity stunt. Pam Houston, the author of a new book filled with tales of failed romance, goes out on a date with Cupid, just as he gets ready to launch his TV show by the same name.

  “They’ll do a photo shoot with him all day,” my publicist says, “I mean, since he has, you know, visual recognition, and then you’ll fly in and meet him for your date. You’ll start out at Michael Jordan’s restaurant, Blue, I think it’s called, and where you go from there,” she added, her voice turning mildly suggestive, “is entirely up to you.”

  “And then I’ll write about it,” I said.

  “Two thousand words,” she said, “by Monday.”

  “And what if nothing interesting happens?” I said.

  “Come on,” she said, “he’s a star.”

  The plane landed a half hour late into sheets of Midwestern December rain.

  I’ll admit right now that, considering I would be in Chicago a total of thirteen hours, I had brought way too many things to wear, too many choices. Black jeans and a new Eskandar blouse, a black velvet skirt with a slit up the back, and a high-collared wool jacket. Three pairs of shoes. And even though I was the only one who had to know about the consideration, the indecision I had gone through, it suggested a shred of expectation that I was embarrassed to admit.

  At the hotel, a woman in a tight blue suit informed me that she was terribly sorry, but the room that my publicist had booked was not, after all, available. Unforeseen circumstances, a couple on their honeymoon who decided that they weren’t quite ready to go home, but they had put me up at another hotel only a few miles away, and their shuttle driver would be happy to . . .

  I looked at my watch. I would certainly be late to meet Cupid.