By Nanci Namakura
Henry didn’t like the way I put on lipstick before we went to see his movies. I think he thought I wanted men to look at me. I didn’t. I only wanted Henry to look at me.
He’d take me to go see old movies mostly — ones that attracted the same handful of boys from retro video stores and film websites and their mothers’ small, post-divorce, 2 bed houses — where on any given night, having a dozen people in the audience seemed a “big showout,” and having any other couple there, usually “hipsters,” in Henry’s approximation, was a surprise.
I don’t know any of the names of those movies anymore — most were from Hong Kong and involved numbers and variations on other Hong Kong movie titles, and I wonder if Henry thought I understood Chinese.
Sometimes he’d take me to visit his ex-girlfriend too, his friend, as he insisted, a woman with a husband who helps run a gym, something Henry laughed about meanly sometimes.
She, Monica, stays at home with her kids while he arranges dumbbells and makes his customers protein shakes. Sometimes I’d ask Henry if he was jealous. He’d just change the subject to his movies. She wore lipstick too, his ex. I have my theories.
Sometimes I don’t know if he ever loved me. Sometimes I think that I reminded him of Moon Lee or Kara Hui or any of those Hong Kong actresses. I don’t think he cared about my writing or my quilting or my journalism.
Henry never read, he only watched movies. To Henry, a novel was a dumbbell, a front, something you use to alter yourself, to conceal your nature.
I only really pressed him once. We were eating dinner in our kitchen and he was trying to watch one of the cartoons he likes on that portable T.V. he wouldn’t throw away:
“It’s like all you care about are your movies, Henry.”
He chewed loudly.
“Don’t you care about me?”
“Why does everything have to be about your conception of the world?” He said. He took another bite of his mini-pizza.
I didn’t know how to respond. Sometimes statements are so heavily weighted by philosophy and ideology that you don’t know where to begin.
He chewed and swallowed. “Why can’t you just enjoy a movie? Why does a everything have to be an ‘outing’ with you?”
I didn’t know what to say.
It sounded like straight-forward misogyny at the time. He wiped his lips with his arm. “Everything has to be some make-believe, mask-wearing Stanley Kubrick shit with masks and shit — you can never just be, you know…”
He laid it on thick, as they say. I tried not to cry.
“And why do you think that seeing Monica makes me jealous? Are you jealous of her? Aren’t you projecting?” His tone was vicious. Unexpected.
I started crying. You start crying when you’re taken aback. I do at least.
“And you always cry — everything makes you cry. Fighting Madame II made you cry. What is your… fucking a… Jesus, Nanci.”
“You’re being so mean to me,” I said and I cringe now at my meekness. You have to be strong.
“Mean? I’m being mean?” His voice was raised. His argument made no sense.
“Yes, you’re being mean.”
“Oh, I’m being mean.”
“I wasn’t crying at Fighting Madame, I was crying because you were upset about the lipstick, Henry. I was crying about us. I want you to be — ”
“I wasn’t upset about the lipstick, god damn it. I was upset that…” He paused mid-sentence and waved me away with the back of his hands.
“Upset that what…” And here I started getting a little angry. “That you keep losing it when we have sex? That you think I’m trying to sleep with other men? Is that it?”
I had to be strong.
I glared at him the way my mother glared at me when I brought Henry to visit — Henry in his Donald Duck University of Oregon shirt with the holes and his sweatpants with the holes and the toothpaste stain at pelvis-level, his glasses that were never in style, his little, stupid looking fingernails.
He glared back at me, studying me from over his pizza, then stood abruptly. He walked toward me, raised his hand and, although he’d never hit me and I’d never been hit, I stood and threw my own hand up, my arm at a 40 degree angle, a yogic ‘play’ button above me, and grasped his wrist. He stared at me. I stared at him. He raised his other hand quickly, like he was going to strike. I grasped his other wrist.
He stared at me.
I stared at him.
“You’re hurting me,” he said. I kept staring and gripping. I’d stopped crying. “You’re really hurting my wrist,” he said.
“Were you trying to hit me?” I asked and I suppose “shock” would be the word to describe what his face was showing. I threw his arms away from me. “Were you going to hit me bro?”
He stepped back. He looked at me and fondled one of his wrists. He made some hyperventilated sound. He hissed like a cat and stepped up at me again.
He swung his right fist toward my face. I shoved it away with my palm. He swung his left fist at my face and I shoved it away too. He started throwing hooks.
One-handedly, I either pushed his punches away like I was using my old typewriter, or I ducked or dodged or I elbowed. He started groaning, frustrated. I doubt I showed any emotion. He started tearing up, flailing at me, and I think I might have smirked.
He tried to grapple me Brazilian style and I, with an arm around his right leg, dropped him to the floor. I put my full weight into my knee onto the side of his neck. He started hyperventilating again and hissing mucusfully.
In the morning I made us eggs and biscuits in my panties and his Dragon Ball shirt then emailed my parents on the East Coast while he rested in bed. I told them that I’d need to move back in with them until I got back on my feet.
I didn’t tell Henry where I’d gone. I just grabbed my backpack and left. I just kept dodging.
