Flesh Wounds

by Jasmine Odessa Rizer

My cousin, Edwin, aged twenty, was having another fight with his thirty-five-year-old boyfriend. This time, they were fighting on my front lawn.

I sat on my front porch and watched them tumbling around in the grass, biting, punching and slinging melodrama.

"If your lush of a cousin hadn't put her nose in where it didn't belong," the boyfriend screeched, smacking my cousin across the face, "we wouldn't be fighting right now!"

I had to admit that this was true, except for the "lush" part. I hadn't been a proper lush in years. Besides, I didn't think a guy who was drunk on my lawn at seven-thirty in the evening really needed to be criticizing anyone else for her drinking.

I had thrown a small dinner party that evening, at the instigation of Edwin's mother, my Aunt Rose.

"It's not so much that he's gay," Aunt Rose had explained tearfully. "I just wish he'd meet someone nice. Someone his own age. Someone who's gay, too. I heard this man was engaged to a lady when Edwin met him!"

Because I was a chump, I had agreed to try and help Edwin meet some nice young people. I had invited all of the pleasant, eligible young men and women I knew to the dinner party.

Ten minutes into dinner, however, Edwin had stood up and begun lecturing my friends and me on what bourgeois pigs we were. During his lecture on the virtues of hard drinking, marijuana, cheating on and slapping around your boyfriend, and other things that none of us particularly wanted to think about over dinner, there had been a loud bang from out front of my home.

The source of this noise had proved to be Edwin's boyfriend, Fred, drunk on my lawn, throwing rocks through my windows. Cousin Edwin had promptly stormed out the front door to meet him, and the fight had ensued.

"Shouldn't you call the police?" my friend Mattie asked me now, sticking her head out the front door. She was my best friend, and now, my last remaining dinner guest.

I stood up. "I'd prefer to try to break it up myself."

"Oh, be careful," Mattie implored.

"Edwin," I said when I reached the squabbling pair, "stop it. Fred, give it a rest."

Fred cursed, took a swing at me, and missed. For a swinger, he didn't have much of a swing.

"Edwin," I said calmly to my cousin, "I'm going to call you a cab back to your apartment. Please don't come back here until you can learn to behave yourself. I invited you over here as a favor to your mom, but now I don't care. You can have affairs with all the old straight dudes you want to--"

"I'm not that old," Fred slurred resentfully.

Edwin kicked me, something he had been doing since his teenage years. I ignored the blow, barely even feeling it. "You," I said, grabbing the boyfriend, who was saner as well as physically weaker than my cousin, "you come with me. Somebody is going to listen to me tonight, and you seem the most likely candidate."

As I dragged him through the house, kicking me and calling me names, I called out for Mattie to phone for the taxi, adding, "Take the phone out in the front yard and make sure Edwin doesn't make any more trouble before his cab gets here."

In my kitchen, I pushed Fred into a chair and put a cup of coffee in front of him.

"Not a word out of you until you drink every drop," I said.

I was always hearing that coffee didn't really sober a person up, but I didn't care. I didn't have a lot of time to waste on Fred, and coffee had worked wonders for me in the past.

The coffee did seem to bring him back to his senses a little bit, and eventually he muttered an apology for breaking my front window. "I was drunk," he explained.

"You're still drunk," I said.

He didn't answer me.

"Fred, I don't get it," I said, sitting down beside him and looking at the fresh bruise on my ankle. "You spend all your money on my cousin. You broke off your engagement for him. He rewards you by cheating on you and slapping you around. Why do you want to be with someone like that?"

"I love him."

"You love having a younger man fawning on you," I replied unkindly.

"That, too, maybe."

"Stop being so decent," I frowned. "I'm making a real effort to believe that you led my innocent young relative astray."

"I did," Fred said miserably.

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "It seems like there's some fault on both sides. You know, ten minutes into dinner tonight, Cousin Edwin started bragging about how he seduced you two hours after he met you. I'm sorry," I added as soon as I took a look at his face. "That was an awful thing to say."

The boyfriend smiled ruefully. "He's always reminding me of that incident, too."

"Well, that's stupid," I said irritably. "I'm sure nobody remembers it better than you do."

The boyfriend looked at me and started to laugh.

Fred was not a beauty, by any means. He was too skinny, and his nose was too long. His top lip hung down over his bottom lip when his mouth was closed, making him look exactly like a sock puppet.

When he started laughing, though, he went from ugly to flat-out stunning. My stomach turned over in an elated, somersaulting kind of way as I looked at him. Not only did this sleazy boyfriend's laugh render him utterly pretty, it also made me want to hold his hand in darkened corners, and kiss him for hours in a candlelit room. His laugh lit him up from the inside, making him almost unbearably attractive. Edwin must have met him while he was being told a joke.

"You must think I'm a despicable human being," Fred mused after he had finished laughing.

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm sorry I called you a lush." He looked at my ankle. "Did I do that?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "You both kicked me."

"Sorry. I couldn't remember." He laughed nervously--only a little laugh, but enough to make my insides to do another cartwheel. For one insane moment, I thought about climbing into his lap and kissing him until he forgot about my cousin, until he forgot about the black eyes and flesh wounds he had received at Edwin's hands, until he forgot his own name and where he lived. Then I thought about what Edwin would do to me if he caught me kissing his boyfriend, and about what my mother would say if I wound up in the hospital, having my face put back together after Edwin took it apart.

"You kissed that dirty old man?" my mother would say. "You've probably got hepatitis as well as a broken nose."

She would be right, of course.

"How did you get here, anyway?" I asked the boyfriend.

"Walked," he muttered, clearly abashed. "When I was, you know, drunk, it didn't seem like all that far."

"I'm familiar with that phenomenon. After Edwin's left, we'll put you in your own cab," I said. "Yellow Cab is going to love me tonight. Tonight's on me, but I wish you wouldn't do this again. I think it would be best if you tried to meet someone your own age. Or at least someone who isn't crazy."

He threw back his head and laughed again, and I thought, One little kiss couldn't hurt anything. I got out of my chair and took a step toward him. Fortunately, Mattie walked into the room at that moment.

"Your cousin's gone home," she said. "Is everything okay in here?"

"Yes," Fred laughed. "It's fine."

It wasn't just me. I saw Mattie's eyes flicker with surprise as she looked at Fred, apparently seeing him in a whole new light.

"That was weird," Mattie said, half an hour or so later, as Fred's cab pulled away. "I hate to say it, but your cousin's sleazy boyfriend is kind of cute."

"It's the laugh," I said. "His laugh is terrific. I nearly kissed him two or three times before you came to the rescue."

"Do you think they'll break up now?" she asked me.

"I don't know," I sighed, "but if they do, I hope he comes crying to me. That man can sober up in my kitchen any time."

"I know what you mean," Mattie admitted ruefully. "He's not half bad, for a dude who looks like a hand puppet."