Read Online Fake House by Linh Dinh - Free Book Online Page B

we waited for the light at the intersection of Nineteenth and South, a block away from my apartment, he clenched my shoulders, brought his face close to mine. I recognized his musk. It was our first kiss in a week.
    “Wait, Tom.” I pushed his chest away.
    “You crazy slut!”
    We entered my apartment like old lovers, a married couple returning from work. I did not flip on the light switch. We crossed the living room in darkness. “I’ve got to take a piss,” he said.
    He seemed relaxed, grateful. He was at home.
    “I’ll wait for you in the bedroom,” I said. My father would flush the toilet to drown out the sound of his own pissing. Tom had no such modesty. I listened to the sound of his piss hitting water with frank lechery as I took my clothes off. I lay naked in bed and waited for sex.
    As I watched him take his shirt and jeans off, watched him step out of his briefs, a tender grief welled up in me. Soon I would come to feel nostalgic over this naked body. He climbed into bed. That first touch along the length of our bodies was soothing. We kissed briefly.
    “Tom.”
    “Yes, Susan.”
    “Will you kiss me down there?”
    He understood. His face slithered halfway down my body, sank between my legs. He began by rubbing his nose against my hole. He lapped my vulva and nibbled the skin around it. For variety he kissed my ass. His face was working hard to convey its expressive range. It was competing against his prick. My vagina had become perceptive. He lapped and lapped and lapped. He was cleaning my toilet. It excited me that this mouth, which could talk so arrogantly about so many things, was smothered in my menstrual gorge, suckling my twat. I wanted to flush this face with urine, drench it with blood.
    “Tom,” I whispered.
    “Yes, Susan.”
    “Stop.”
    He wanted to fuck, but I wouldn’t let him. He asked me to jerk him off and I did. We slept. Or he slept and I pretended to sleep. I looked at his dark form and felt heat emanating from his back, from his asshole. In the middle of the night I got up and went to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and took out a can of Rolling Rock. I drank it staring out the kitchen window. The moon was a sliver of a smile in the starless sky.
    When I left home for college, my mother had given me one of those Chinese meat cleavers. “It can cut anything,” she said, “from carrot to chicken. The only thing it won’t do is vacuum your floor.” I had never really learned how to use this knife. I finished my beer and took it out of the drawer. To get the motion down, I hacked it through the air several times. I hacked it and hacked it and hacked it.

U NCLE T OM’S C ABIN
    N ineteen eighty-four was a very bad year for house painting. No one could get any work. By the middle of January, I was selling my books practically every day—hundreds of titles at a fraction of their original cost.
    “Come on, Jay,” I pleaded to the guy at the used-book store, “these books are out-of-print, man. Can’t you give me a little bit more for them?”
    “You know I always give you more for your books than I give anybody else,” Jay replied. (And he was right, of course. I had taken my books to him for years, and he had always been very sympathetic.)
    “You’re just going to drink it all away at McGlinchey’s anyway,” Jay said as I walked out the door. One could buy a generic brand of baked beans, Hormel Chili, ground beef, or spaghetti and some jive sauce—the kind that is laced with sugar or even corn syrup—for two dollars or less, and a pint of Black and Tan at McGlinchey’s was still less than a dollar.
    Being broke and idle is a very bad combination if it dragson for a while. I was going through old copies of
The New Yorker
looking for something new to read, jerking off, or paying for my beers at the bar with dimes and nickels. Whatever happened to all those losers I went to school with anyway? How come nobody’s rich or famous? So what if Laura Humes hit the jackpot