How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,6

next door to us, me and Rose, my granddaughter, in January. She was hardly home that summer. She had gotten together with a new guy and was mostly at his place across town.

Richard had parties every Saturday. At first, it was just the housewarming, and then it was other things. His apartment door was always open, people coming in and out at all hours. Sometimes there were just kids over there, little ones, playing with Christmas lights, shaping them into small sculptures, leaving a mess of wire and bulbs on the floor. Other times it was middle-aged people crawling through some tent maze built out of cardboard boxes. He even had a party where people brought over their bikes, and we took a tour of the city. I did not have a bike, so he let me ride with him. I sat on the bar in front of the seat and he pedalled. He told us stories, personal ones, about his time living here. He’d been in the city for a few years. On the bike tour, he told us about a woman he’d loved once. He showed us where they ate and skipped out on a bill, the places they kissed. There was something about the way he told this story. The city became his. Later, when I walked by that building, that corner, his stories were there. His gloomy voice played in my head like an old record.

“THERE’S NO SUCH THING as love. It’s a construct,” Richard told me one day when I went over to his apartment. I had gotten a package of his in my mailbox. “You know anyone who is in love?”

I thought of Rose, who always said she was in love whenever she met a new guy and then would wait by the phone all day, crying. Then I thought of my friends and my own experience. We had all known love, but it happened a long time ago. It was not something we sat around wondering about. It happened, and when it’s happened, there is no need to think too hard about it.

I said, “Maybe you haven’t had enough time to know a range of people.”

He told me he knew a lot of people. Thousands was the number he gave me. I wanted to tell him we were talking about different things, but I wasn’t sure he’d understand. A few minutes passed between us, and then he said, “People say that they’re in love all the time, but they’re not. I don’t believe them. They think they should say it because it’s what you say. Doesn’t mean they really know what it is.”

I looked around his apartment. There wasn’t much in it. A couple of chairs, a couch he’d dragged back from someone’s front lawn, a table, and a little anatomy man. The anatomy man had plastic bits inside. I reached inside him and took out a small brown thing the size of a pencil eraser. I didn’t know what it was and put it back.

RICHARD LIKED TO TALK about the women he had slept with. There were two he brought up a lot. The first was his ex-roommate, the one he told us about on the bike tour. The second was a woman named Eve. She lived in New York now but came back once in a while to visit. He said he wasn’t in love with her, that they were just best friends. They had, for seven years, been a couple, but now they weren’t. The chemistry wasn’t there anymore. When she didn’t answer his emails or phone calls, he would google her.

I asked him, “Do you think maybe you’re still in love with her?” He said no—to be in love, you should want to have sex with that person, and he didn’t want that with her. He asked me if I’d had sex with anyone lately. I took my time to answer. I could tell he had no use for anyone who didn’t have sex. I tried to remember the last time. I hadn’t been with anyone but my husband. He died thirty years ago. A heart attack. Sudden. Thirty years is a lifetime for some people. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t had sex for such a long time that I could consider myself a virgin again. I couldn’t remember how it all happens.

Richard knew how. He was always talking about the sex he’d had. With hundreds of women, he told me.

“It’s easy. You just ask. And