Fake House by Linh Dinh Page B

saw his hovering face. I remembered the sucking, swishy, swishy sound. I remembered my fingers clenching his prick.
“Am I hurting you?”
Air and light played on my body. I became conscious of my toes and of my armpits.
    I was an eating/peeing/shitting body, nourished and exercised through nineteen years, a body at the pinnacle of its perfection, destined to be slashed, killed, corrupted, destined for ugliness. I was a child, a naked woman. I had just been fucked.
    Snatches of Tom’s conversations, spanning two months,droned in my head—“Everyone knows Bonnard as a colorist, unrivaled at painting cats, dogs, and buttocks, but they forget that he was also a great allegorist. His paintings are not just bouquets.… Miró’s hovering assholes and cunts are traffic signs, devoid of sensuality.… Pollock is an inferior Monet”—and I thought,
Who gives a fuck!
    I did not go to class that morning. I thought,
If I go out, people will know
. I would give it away by how I walked, by how I smelled.
    I caressed my thigh languorously, probed my insides. I stroked myself without shame, with brio, but then I felt bad afterward. It was a regression, this relapse. It was a parody. The term
postmasturbation
came into my mind. Already I was polluting the memory of my first fuck.
    I closed my eyes and thought of our house in Swarthmore, of my father pulling weeds in the yard. He, too, has a prick. I thought of my mother. I was now her equal. There was nothing she knew that I did not know. When I woke up in the afternoon, I forgot, for a moment, that I had just been fucked.
    I walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the full-length mirror. I looked at my breasts. He had seen these breasts. I looked at my pubic hair. He had seen this pubic hair. He had seen what I saw. I cupped my ass with my hands, dug my nails into its cheeks. I walked up to my astonished face and kissed the reflection of my lips.
    As I brushed my teeth, I thought,
He has used this same toothbrush. We’re sharing a toothbrush. Hygiene! That’s what intimacy is: shared hygiene
.
    The toilet seat was up. On the rim of the bowl was a long pubic hair: his pubic hair.
He has pissed into this bowl
, I thought, smiling. I showered quickly, got dressed and left the apartment.
    It was very bright on the street. Trees, cars, and buildings all appeared in stark outlines, their colors saturated, fake-looking. Everything seemed made of plastic. It was a dressed-up yet degraded reality, a clutter of inconsequential objects, a charade of people scuttling about pretending to be doing things.
    I strolled along with pleasure, with defiance, with hole, with happiness. The silk of my pants fluttered against my calves and ankles. I was astounded by the pliant workings of my insteps in locomotion. Yellow, fan-shaped gingko leaves flecked the sidewalk. I squashed the stinky peach-colored fruits under my mules. As I passed a bare-chested, sturdy-looking boy standing on a ladder, I tilted my face up and shouted, “Hi!”
    I went to Rittenhouse Square and found a seat on the granite balustrade framing the reflecting pool, recessed from the flows of traffic in the dappled shade of the sycamores. There were many people in the square: mothers and nannies with their toddlers; aging white matrons accompanied by black nurses; paralegals, lawyers, and accountants in business attire going home from work; jeaned and T-shirted slackers.
Everyone has genitals
, I thought,
Let’s not make too big a deal out of this
. I felt a part of this pantomime, initiated into the conspiracy of the universe. Silly phrases flooded my consciousness:
People must stick together.… She’s stuck up.… If it’s sticking up, hammer it down.… A stick in the mud, he is.… I’m tired of your shtick.… The weather’s been sticky lately.… I drive a stick shift, don’t you?
    Nearby three boys of high school age, one with dreadlocks, were skateboarding. I looked at them with a knowing pleasure. I crossed, then