But what if her conspicuous generosity was intentionally conspicuous? What if the sizable loan wasn’t merely an act of kindness, but a subtle, or not-so-subtle, communication? What if she was trying to tell me something? What if she was trying to tell me she loved me? Was that not a possibility?
Granted, no one had ever fallen in love with me. I was under no illusions about my prospects, nor had I been—not even once—since childhood. But that was the thing. I had for so long been so entirely free of any suspicion that I might be someone’s object of romantic interest that the novelty, itself, of having the thought—the thought that a person was possibly in love with me—appeared to lend the thought credence. Maybe Lotta’d displayed some kind of love behavior that, owing to my inexperience, I couldn’t put my finger on despite having sensed it. Or maybe it was just the fact of the loan. People announced their love for one another in all kinds of different, sometimes subtle ways that didn’t entail using the phrase(s) “I(’m in) love (with) you.” It happened all the time. In books, at least. In certain movies, too. Was it crazy to think that an overly generous short-term loan could serve as a proclamation of love?
One thing I was sure of was I didn’t love Lotta. And if she loved me, and I accepted her loan—if, in fact, I didn’t return it, unused, ASAP—it might lead her on, suggesting to her that I did in fact love her, or would love her soon, for what kind of person would accept a loan being offered out of love when he could not himself imagine reciprocating that love? A duplicitous sleaze. A blackhearted dirtbag. Just the kind of person who nice, smitten girls always seemed to have the most trouble getting over. Not the kind of person I wanted to be. Not, at least, to the ostensibly smitten, nice girl in question.
Then again, if Lotta loved me and I didn’t use the loan, it might suggest to her that I wasn’t merely not in love with her, but that the thought of her loving me repulsed me so much that I’d rather suffer the hovering anxiety and physical discomfort of nicotine withdrawal than accept a simple act of kindness from her. That could cause her more pain than would being led on.
Unless maybe the opposite.
Maybe my refusal to accept her loan could cause her to think I was in love with her, to think I was afraid that she’d question my feelings if I accepted the loan; to think I was afraid she’d wonder whether I truly loved her or just needed money. I.e. she might think that I refused the loan for fear of letting money defile our love’s purity. Because that would have been romantic, I thought. Of me. To refuse a loan on those grounds. And then romantic of her to think it romantic. It would have been romantic of the both of us, I thought.
I knew a stalemate of hypotheticals when I saw one. So, much as I wanted to stop by White Hen, buy a couple cartons, and let Pang know that at least one person—a veritable stranger, no less—believed me creditworthy, I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not yet at least. Not without an unclear conscience. Plus what was my rush? Why keep pressing? There wasn’t any rush. It was better not to press. I had 147 Quills and, even if I wanted to, couldn’t return the money til morning (morning at earliest—for all I knew, Lotta had the next day off). I’d head back home, watch the eyebrow-flexing compilation with Blank, do a little reading, have a bite to eat, and maybe get some writing done. By these means, I would cease to press, and then I would sleep on it. It was always best to sleep on it.
* * *
I did cease to press, but didn’t need to sleep on anything. Having slipped the eyebrow-flexing compilation into the living room player, I was just sitting down to unsleeve Kablankey when my father, bruised greenly below the right eye, appeared in the doorway. He had come back home an hour earlier, he said. He’d been sitting out on the dock that morning, reminiscing, he said, with his old friend Rick, and Rick’s son, Jim, about the time we’d all gone fishing with some other father-son pairs on a rented pontoon boat thirtyish years ago, the time when Jim, who was mildly mentally retarded, had reeled in a crappie too small to keep, and Rick had told Jim that he had to throw it back, but Jim didn’t want to take the hook from its mouth, and Rick had said he had to or the fish would die, and Jim began keening and said he couldn’t touch it, he was too scared to touch it, and Rick told Jim that he had to man up (“Man up, son,” he’d said. “Remove that hook and throw that fucking fish back, or I’ll do it myself, and throw you in after it!”), and Jim, still wailing, and gushing snot and tears, had planted a foot on the flopping fish’s back and, before anyone could understand what was happening, wrapped the line around a fist and pulled with all his strength, ripping out the hook along with half the fish’s face, then punted what remained on the deck into the lake. My father said he’d been out on the dock in Michiana, reminiscing about that time with Rick and Jim, and that Rick had remarked on how gravely the Jim-manning-up ruckus must have upset me, given that I hadn’t gone fishing since, and went on to suggest that I’d overreacted (I had, in fact, vomited), saying that, sure, it had been bad, but it hadn’t been that bad, and my dad said, well, yes, it had been pretty bad, that fish got no mercy, was allowed no dignity, he’d nearly puked too, and Rick said no way, no way my father’d nearly puked, Clyde Magnet wasn’t a puker, Rick said, which my father took to imply that I, his son, was a puker, and he expressed his resentment of the implication, which, Rick, rather than apologizing for, tried to make light of by insisting repeatedly that I was, yes, a puker, a master puker, a hall-of-fame world championship puker. “ ‘The Duke of Puke,’ they call your boy,” Rick said to my father, and my father, in his turn, though he knew Rick was trying to mend fences via ribbing him, nonetheless took “Duke of Puke” pretty badly, he just didn’t like it, and who was Rick to talk about someone else’s son anyway, he wondered aloud, and Rick asked what he meant, and my father, who’d meant, “Your son is retarded,” or “I’m not the one with the retarded son,” already felt, if not bad, at least a little conflicted about having meant that, and he tried to make up for it by saying to Rick, “I just mean that Jim’s the one who lost control of himself and stomped a perfectly viable, inedible fish to death while tearing off its face, and then kicked it in the lake,” but Rick, no dummy, knew that wasn’t what he’d meant and, cutting closer to the chase, he told my father that Jim, despite having been born with many challenges, had overcome a lot, had only gotten stronger and, for that, Rick was proud, which my father, no doubt unmistakenly, understood to imply that Rick held the opinion that I, the author of No Please Don’t, had not done anything to make a father proud, which meaning incited him to once again express resentment, and before Rick had a chance to say anything to repair the offense he’d caused my father, Jim piped up. “I’m not the pussy son!” he said. “It’s your son who is! He is the puker! He puked on the deck! He puked and puked!” to which my father responded by slapping Rick with the back of his hand, to which Rick responded by punching my father just under the eye, which my father countered by socking Rick in the belly and then in the mouth and again in the belly, left-right-left, and he was just hauling back to strike a blow to Rick’s nose when Jim—“Strong as an ox, that doofus!”—stood up (they’d been, all three of them, sitting side by side on the edge of the dock while the fathers provoked and punched each other) and lifted my father above his head, and bodyslammed him into the lake.