Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
ing untrusting creatures into licking maniacs. Take it slowly, he cau­
tioned himself. No sudden moves.
The next day, she wasn’t there. He learned later that Moff had
wooed the pants off her by asking if he could drop her somewhere on
his refurbished Harley. She rode with him down the coast to Mon­
terey, shedding almost every stitch of clothing and flinging it into the
Pacific. After two rapturous months, Moff had to break things off
because of “serious differences in expectations.” She responded by
spray-painting his motorcycle pink. Harry was more upset than
Moff about this report. Blast it! Moff had turned her into a Cerberus
hellhound who wanted only to lunge and kill anyone with a penis.
He had utterly ruined her as far as future dating was concerned.
Adding insult to injury, Moff had also said to him, “Those hazel
irises you admired so much? Colored contact lenses, my friend.”
What the devil did women see in Moff? Harry tried to imagine
him from a female’s perspective....He was taller than average
(meaning, taller than Harry, who was five-feet-ten), had a passable
build, lanky and no flab. But he was a complete washout when it
came to proper clothes. His boyhood pal wore the same jungle-safari
shirts and baggy short pants no matter what the season or event.
And the shoes, well, they were more working-class boots, greased
with dirt and flecked with paint. His hands were callused, like an or­
dinary laborer’s. He wasn’t the sort to buy a woman flowers or speak
to her in endearments, not like Harry. And Moff’s hair was a mess,
long bushy locks gathered into a ponytail, and a receding hairline ac­
centuating a massive forehead. The latter made him appear super-
brainy, which he was, Harry acknowledged, though he also knew
that Moff had been kicked out of school for truancy and smoking
pot by the time he was sixteen, and thus was forced to become an
autodidact.
What knowledge Moff possessed had come from reading, roam­
ing the streets, and taking odd jobs in his youth, many of them in
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