The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

weariness. He didn’t want to think about what any of it meant or where it would lead or how insanely and foolishly self-destructive this single act was, how it could ruin his marriage and his life and everything. He wanted to inhabit the experience, and he could not remember the last time his life offered up a moment sweet enough to deserve that kind of attention.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Someplace I can get a beer,” I said.

He paused for a moment, and then decided not to be shocked or surprised or concerned. He decided to go with it. In some sense, he decided I was in charge, and he knew he was deciding that, and it was possible he even liked it. Pete was not accustomed to drinking beer in the afternoon. He might do so at a weekend party, but on a weekday, when he ought to be working — that was something that had quite literally never happened before. When you are self-employed, working entirely without supervision, it is healthiest to view midday drinking as strictly for drunks and losers, the pathetically unproductive. He knew that, and yet now that I had suggested it, Pete could not help but find the idea appealing. More than appealing. Seductive. It was a doorway to an entirely different life, and he was surprised how easy it was to decide to step through it. “What time do you have to be back?” he asked.

I pressed myself into the seat. “I don’t. I don’t ever have to be anywhere.”

He took me to a Korean place off Walzem where we ordered barbecue and drank Japanese beer while we snatched up spicy pickles and potatoes and little tiny fish with our chopsticks. Pete hadn’t known what to expect when I ordered the first round of beer, but the waiter had only nodded, not so much concealing his reaction as never having one. Maybe he was used to parents ordering drinks for their underaged children. Maybe he never doubted that I was of age. Maybe I simply had that effect on people. Certainly, Pete reflected, he’d already done things with me and for me that he never would have imagined doing, so he simply assumed the waiter was no different.

The beer turned out to be just what he needed. It didn’t make the situation any less strange, but it helped him to settle in, to work up the nerve to say what needed to be said. “What exactly is up with you and Neil?”

I let the bottle of beer dangle between my thumb and index finger, swinging like a pendulum. “What do you mean?”

“Give me a break, Mason,” he said, loving the feel of my name in his mouth. “You know what I mean.”

“Nothing is up with me and your son,” I said. “He is my friend. I like Neil. I’m not dating him. We are not having any kind of sexual relations, if that’s what you want to know. Anyhow, I have a boyfriend.”

“You do?” Disappointment, followed by chastising himself for that disappointment. What possible concern of his could it be if I had a boyfriend or not? I had a boyfriend and had no interest in Pete in that way, just as he had supposed, just as he had always known. He felt utterly deflated and utterly relieved. He felt like the world was righting itself and, in the process, he was sliding off the surface and into the void.

“You don’t think I could have a boyfriend? You think ghouls don’t deserve love?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “Of course it isn’t. I’m just making conversation, I guess. Acknowledging that I heard you.”

“He’s older than I am,” I said. “I like older guys.”

This got his attention. “How much older?”

“Tenth grade.”

I could see the emotions swirl across his face like the time-lapse image of a hurricane. Never had Pete felt quite so many of his forty-five years all at once, all so bitterly. He ordered us another round of beer.

“His name is Ryan,” I said. “And he is so hot. God, I love him. He plays JV football, but he’s not the jock type. He’s really cool. You would love him. I can’t wait for you guys to meet.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how feasible that is,” he said.

“And he is so good in bed. Fuck. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. I know. I’m sorry. Cindy always says I need to censor myself better, and I swear I’m working on it.”

So now Pete knew. I wasn’t hitting on him, he concluded. He was an absurd, self-deluding, middle-aged clown. That much was now clear, wasn’t it? But then how to explain the flagrant flirting, the inviting him over to watch Showgirls? Could he have been so wrong about all that? How could he have misunderstood so many signals? He couldn’t have, but then how could he make sense of this new development?

It would have been so easy for him to escape. He could have done it right then, and to do it he only would have had to say precisely what was on his mind. He could have asked me what I thought I was doing with him. He could have asked me why I was flirting with him and then talking about my hot boyfriend. He could have said that he found this situation very confusing and strange, and maybe the strange part he could live with, maybe he liked the strangeness. He could have said how much he enjoyed me and being near me and talking with me and drinking three or four or five beers with me in the afternoon and blowing off that work he swore he would get done that afternoon because being with me was so much better than any of that, but he could not deal with how confusing it was. He could have said that he didn’t know if it was because of my youth or the generation gap or just the peculiarities of my personality or the fact that maybe I ought to be on meds, but clearly I did not understand the mixed signals I was sending, and he needed me to explain. That’s all it would have taken. Web snapped, snare broken. It would have been so simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy, and for Pete the hardest thing would have been to say the words that banished the illusion that a beautiful, impossible, unobtainable girl desired him. So he said something else. He said, “You know what? You should feel free to be entirely yourself around me.” “I will,” I lied as I took a piece of kim chi.

There were more texts. I sent him a message every day. Then two or three and then four or five times a day. I would sometimes wait an hour or two before responding to his. He always responded right away. There were more lunches with more drinks. We would sneak away, he from his home office and me from school, and we would eat and linger around the table at some obscure Asian eatery with stained linoleum floors and peeling wallpaper and delicious food — restaurants in forgotten corners of the city where no one he knew would ever go. We would get pleasantly, and never excessively, drunk. I put my hand on his arm while we talked. I hugged him hard both hello and goodbye. I pressed myself against him, and let him catch me breathing in the scent of him as though these hugs could sustain me. Those moments, he was sure, were the happiest of his life, so true and so hopeful and so full of sweetness.

Sometimes he would think that if he considered Mason, really considered her, who she was and what she said and did, then he knew he didn’t really want her. Even in some fantasy world in which they could be together, the relationship could never last, and it wasn’t because of the age difference either. It was because the things that made Mason so tantalizingly desirable were not the things on which real love was built. He knew it, and knowing it did not matter.

Roberta noticed nothing. That was the crazy thing. He kept waiting for her to say something, to discover the e-mails or the texts or smell the beer on his breath or my scent on his clothes, but she never did. He sat across from her at the dinner table, still half buzzed from lunch with his secret fourteen-year-old friend, and waited for the other shoe to drop. He cooked up explanations and excuses and narratives that would attempt to make sense of his relationship with me. But Roberta never asked or noticed, which only left Pete feeling emboldened.

And work. That was the crazy thing. Pete felt like he was in some kind of moralistic novel from the fifties, one in which his halfhearted efforts to escape from his life of quiet desperation would lead to his loud and chaotic destruction. His productivity fell off. He was sure of it, but no one at the company noticed. His superiors still sent him enthusiastic e-mails about his work. If he missed a deadline by an hour or two, no one seemed to mind, and it occurred to him that for years he’d been making himself crazy to hit deadlines no one but he cared about. Pete was crashing and burning, but no one troubled to take note. His work, his attention, his daytime sobriety weren’t missed.

Pete wrote his code during the day, and then in the evening he would sit through his quiet dinners with Roberta and Neil, and then Neil would slink off to his room and he and Roberta would watch some television in which neither of them was particularly invested. They would go to the bedroom and read for a little while, and now and again they’d have satisfactory if familiar sex. That was it. That was his life. That was the sum of his existence without me, and I outweighed all of it. He would have let it all go for me if he could.

He couldn’t, of course, and so he would spend long hours, awake in his bed at night, thinking that he would just need to wait until I was eighteen. Three years and seven months. That was all he would have to wait, and then Neil could go be Neil on his own. Roberta didn’t want Pete around anyhow. Not really. They were just a comfortable