Eczema was erupting along his jawline, the beard’s fault for sure, and he couldn’t wait to shave. Sweat clung to its scraggles, stinging the cracks in his face. Why hadn’t she fixed the A/C, god damn it? Desmond. It was something Des would have done.
“You’re being ridiculous.” Maddie stood in the doorway, her almond skin wrapped in a peach sundress, thriving in the heat, ripe summer stone fruit. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“You actually believe that, don’t you?” John batted away the flies swarming his bottle and downed another swig of mezcal. “Like you don’t know exactly what you’ve been doing.”
“What have I been doing?”
“Turning me into him.”
It was obvious, wasn’t it? He was standing in the poolhouse his old friend had built for her, surrounded by palm trees, John’s stuff still packed in the corner these six months—no, seven. He was drinking El Jolgorio nicked from the Ki’ichi office, Desmond’s sneaky treat. He was wearing the cream linen suit Maddie had packed for Goodwill after the funeral. “Just try it on,” she urged, the Coral Gables summer too hot for John’s jeans, flannel, Reds cap. Had she forgotten their time in Cincinnati, its midsummer swamp?
The beard too, that was new. Scruff, really, but it marked another phase in his transformation. Des had always sported facial hair, from the first crustache of puberty through his final Van Dyke that shriveled away on a bed at Baptist. Each style had upped his ruggedness, while John’s imitation only sanded the ridges off his face, patched over the years he wore in them.
“It’s just a tattoo!” She chased him into the kitchenette. “I thought you wanted one.”
He’d given that impression, that was true. Hell, he probably did want one before he cracked her motives. Maddie and Des both had luscious complexions, skin to envy, and their ink underlined their gifts. Next to them, John’s body was a mottled mess of scars and blotches. He praised, in honesty, how Des had carried off the jaguar tracing his calf, the songbirds on his shoulder. Even now, John’s blood, bones, surged whenever he traded glances with the skull, its marigolds, peering out from Maddie’s thigh.
He liked the Ki’ichi logo too—its cleaved oval, its sly petals his friends had spun from Maddie’s bored doodle into an empire. He just liked it on the boardroom wall, the bottles of moisturizer — not on him.
He tore past her, ripping the office fob from his belt and banging it on the table, jostling the photo of that final trip to the orchards — Desmond and Maddie, laughing in the heat, pulling sapodillas from the trees. She and John had knocked it over their first night together and, collapsed again, it served as another lifeless reminder of the world he now inhabited.
“You really don’t get it,” he hissed. “None of this is me, none of it. The clothes, the hair, the Tesla. What am I drinking, tequila? I hate tequila.”
“I just—” She trailed him across the room, grabbed his hand, searched his face for clarity. “I just don’t get where this is coming from. I thought you were happy. I thought you liked it here—your job, me.”
He did like her, loved, really, had forever, or damn near it. From the afternoon he and Desmond found her tanning at Ault Park, body blooming, fragrant in the sun, he was enamored. His feelings only deepened as he learned the things that drove her—her passion for nature, her art habit, her fixation with the Maya, each one a field he cared nothing about except how they made her realer, more herself. He thrilled to watch her rejuvenate in the rare moments she put work aside, turned to her charcoal, and drew, effortless but rapt, adorning the paper with treasured glyphs to ground her—monkeys, quetzals, turtles, corn.
He bent double when she moved into their apartment and joined Desmond in sweating out the sheets, the mattress. Pangs wracked him as his friends gorged on each other, while he scrounged the dust left in passing—glances stolen through sleeves, traces of kukui nut lotion, tastes of lipgloss smeared on spent roaches.
That’s when his scratching returned in earnest, tunneling through the walls built up by his doctor, his therapists. The eczema started it, probably, chronic but aggravated by the stress of a new job, the twentysomething diet. It soon graduated to torn cuticles, picked scabs. By Thanksgiving he was inventing wildlife encounters to cover his compulsion, his need to feel the skin under his nails, to let the blood beneath it breathe: “Crazy raccoons, they really come out of nowhere.” His limbs got some relief when the lovebirds found their own place, but it was years later, after they decamped to Miami, before John’s derma earned back any shred of smoothness, any even tone.
Now in the poolhouse, with total access to the woman he craved, John pulled away, gulped back two, three mouthfuls, who was counting. “I love you, I don’t know, that’s not the point. It’s just—I’m not Des. You can’t slap a tattoo, a beard on me and, boom, I’m your husband.”
His words stung, pulling her eyes tight as she shrank to the loveseat. “That’s awful, John. I never…”
Tears drew him around. God, this isn’t what he wanted, was it? Not this, surely. His heart pounded, drowning out the howl of crickets in the garden. Had he put too much on her?
It had always been there, of course, rubbing him raw, his sense that Desmond was John in richer hues and deeper shades. Des was taller, for starters. Quicker, kinder, natural with eye contact, listening—not forced like him. They shared a lot, but Des had the edge, always. John scored an A, Des an A-plus. John played the bass, Des lead guitar. John signed a clipboard, Des grabbed the bullhorn.
No, he was right about Maddie. Her grand scheme was real, he was sure of it.
“It’s been like this since the funeral!” he barked. “You acted like you wanted me, but you never wanted me. You just wanted Des back.”
She sprang to her feet. “Wanted you? Are you nuts?”
She stamped around the sofa, stared him square in the jaw: “I—he was just cremated, John! The man I loved for fourteen years. That man. I paid a man and that man put him in a box and put that box in an oven and burned him up. They turned on the fire and it turned his bones to dust. I did it earlier that day.”
Maddie paced through the room. “And then you kissed me. And, no, I didn’t want you — not at all. But I needed someone, something, anything, or…”
Her fists clenched and released like lungs gasping.
“But that was months ago, John. What do you think has been happening since then?”
His chin — stuck out in defiance, wet with sweat and liquor — fled as he considered the question. What had happened, was happening? Was it anything at all? He tugged at his beard, clawed it, drove the hair under his nails, old friends at a reunion.
“I thought—”
“What? I don’t care about you?”
“I thought—”
“Why you?” she stomped. “You think there’s no one else? No jungle-trekking founder type with a beard and a tattoo? Not a thousand of them? I have to create one?”
“But the—”
“That I’m so desperate I need a man to swoop in and save me before my husband’s ashes have cooled?”
“It’s not like that. I—”
“Like I don’t have anything else going on to fill my life — no company to run, no drawings to finish, nothing to keep me going.”
“You know that—”
“The World Series, the Dave Matthews show? Why would I do any of that if I just wanted another Desmond?”
“Because the—”
“You think I made three-way chili because I like it?”
Now John fell to the loveseat, head in hands, pawing at his cheek. Maddie loomed as she reached for the bottle and winced down an ounce, then two. Had he got it wrong? True, she had done these things and they had been for him — not her, not Desmond. Yes, he had thrilled at the shifts in his life, the suit, the city, the sight of Maddie on the sheets beside him. But, what was her end in all this? Or did it even matter?
“But,” he mumbled, “the job? Why would you—”
“I needed somebody! I can’t run Ki’ichi myself!” Maddie’s shoulders heaved as she shoved off her words. “The reseller agreements, never mind the lab, the FDA.
“And you have 12 years with P&G. Plus, I know you. Why wouldn’t I…” She yanked her hair through her fingers, marveling at his dimness, as he traced his beard with his nails, connecting the dots Maddie had laid out.
“What about the beard?”
“You grew it first, remember? ‘Too hot to shave’ or something. I just liked it.”
Memories of the past few months crawled back as his fingers wove through his facial hair to reach the roots beneath. He had appeared at the wake, unannounced, unheralded. He had asked her to dinner, listened as she released the agony of the year, the chemo, the one-last-times. He had pulled her in, kissed her, right here on the loveseat, after the mourners left, the mood all wrong but his days of resistance frayed. He had pushed things forward from the beginning. He had crept into her life through the gap that had opened and she had simply let it happen.
“The tattoo?”
“Who cares about the tattoo?”
Finally, he broke through, the skin relented, and blood seeped into his beard, warm and thick as it struck the air, tension pouring from the gash. Maddie sensed the change and climbed onto the cushion beside him. He took the bottle, sipped it.
“I’m sorry. I just thought…”
“Idiot!” she shoved him, stern more than playful, before spotting his wound. “God, John, your face…” She dabbed his beard with her finger as she searched for a napkin.
“No, it’s OK—” He reached for her hand, drew her into his arms. They held each other, spiting the heat, as the sounds of their own private jungle descended, moths rustling, nightjars hunting through the dark. He stroked her back and pressed his chapped face into her neck. How was she still hotter than the steaming night around them?
She raked her fingers through his chest hair, found his nipple like a sapodilla in the brush, pinched it. “I just think the logo would look good, is all.”
The words wrenched John to his feet, sent Maddie slapping to the tile beneath them. Doubts shredded, suspicions confirmed, he grabbed the bottle and raced to the bathroom, slammed the door, locked it.
The extractor fan whirred and clicked overhead, clogged with dust, another thing to fix. He stared into the mirror, the vanity lights casting a jaundiced glow on his face. Maddie pounded on the door, shouting, probably, but he tuned it out, done with all that now.
He found his toiletry kit by the sink and dug around for the razor, pulling out floss, sunscreen, travel toothpaste. Right, the ensuite. He’d left it there when the weather turned. He dumped the rest on the counter and scoured its contents for anything sharp enough to peel away the facade he was wearing. Not tweezers, no, useless, those nail clippers are old, blunt, damn it.
The drawers held nothing either, just towels, an old thermometer, expired dramamine. But in the mirror, behind it — cuticle scissors, stuck to the shelf, forgotten for years.
The ringed handle crushed his fingers, but its blades cut true as John drew tufts of his beard, hacked them away, scattering the free hairs in a loose pile on the floor drain. The rest clung in the blood on his face, a petty tar-and-feathering. Five minutes later, ten, who was counting, it was done, and John again saw the man he had lost beneath the layers put upon him, set in place every time he kept quiet, every time he shrank back to let Desmond take the lead. Patchy, itchy, bleeding, he was home.
The door popped open and Maddie leaned against the jamb, the bar knife still in the safety release slot, a pluot bruise forming on her thigh.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” she said. “I really didn’t mean anything by it. Can we just, please, calm down and start again?”
John watched her reflection as she squinted into the room, shading her face from the glare. “I don’t know, I don’t know that we can.”
Maddie bobbed from foot to foot, shifting her weight, her body tired, sore. The motion shook her dress, revealing her chest, unblemished, her legs glistening with sweat, the tattooed skull, its flowers. God, she was beautiful. God, he loved her.
But, where was she looking? At the hair on the floor? Had she come to check on him or was it the beard this whole time? Or, just the mezcal, the harsh lighting?
“OK, well, come to bed if you feel like it.”
She spun and left the bathroom, the poolhouse, stalking past the water, the palms, the moths and the crickets, and returned to her house, the house they were sharing, somehow, against all odds, her beauty drawing in light and shimmering through the dark, skin he longed to touch, could be touching now. And he stood by the drain, raw and bleeding, waiting for Desmond to tell him which way to go
