Black Ambrosia

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  I shook myself and walked around for a bit, trying to push this strange intimate knowledge of him from my head, trying to remember the abuse he had done me the night before. I stood over his blanketed body and I wanted to kick him, cry for him, pray for him . . . do something, but there was nothing to be done, so I emptied my mind of Earl Foster and concentrated instead on my freedom. I sat on the picnic table, my back to him, and read for a short time while the sun dried my clothes. Then I packed up and headed down the road, only vaguely remember­ing it from the night before. It looked very different in the rational light of day.

  I had walked probably five miles down the main highway before a freshly waxed, late-­model car stopped. I was pleased to find that the driver was in his early twenties, solidly built, with dark curly hair and delightful sparkling blue eyes. He looked like pleasant company. In the backseat were a small cooler full of ice and soft drinks and two small, clean, well-­worn army-­type packs, filled to a smooth, round plumpness. His name was Lewis, and he was a treas­ure.

  In the first few minutes of our companionship, he convinced me that the West was the place to winter, and Nevada was not a bad place year ’round. He was tidy and pleasant; I felt comfortable and safe; and this one ride would take me all the way to my wintering ground. I was reluctant to give all this up to talk to the police and make statements about Earl Foster, who was such an objectionable person, and now quite beyond help. I decided somebody else could deal with Earl Foster—and I could wait to eat; I wasn’t very hungry after all.

  We took turns driving all day, then stopped at a run-­down roadside motel for the night. Lewis ar­ranged our accommodations, and I was so tired I said nothing. We slept in separate twin beds in the same room without incident.

  I awoke at dawn to the sound of a huge truck pulling off the road, and then I smelled the cafe that shared the same parking lot with the motel. I arose silently—Lewis still slept—dressed, and went out. I spent my final dollar on two Styrofoam cups of coffee and brought them back.

  Lewis woke when I returned, and he propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me, his dark hair tousled over his head, his eyes puffy from sleep. He rubbed his darkened chin and smiled boyishly at me.

  “ ’Morning.”

  “Good morning,” I said, and handed him a cup. He plumped his pillows up next to the wall and sat up, bringing his sheet with him. His smooth skin contrasted pleasantly with the white of the bed linen.

  “Sleep well?”

  He nodded, then put his cup down in the center of a black stain on the wooden nightstand. He held his arms out to me and wiggled his finger.

  “C’mere.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed shyly, knowing that he was about to seduce me, knowing too that I was ready. It wasn’t Lewis, exactly—it was just time.

  He sat forward, the sheet falling away, and kissed the side of my neck. I closed my eyes, and soon he turned me and began to unbutton my blouse. My heart was beating so fast that I could hardly breathe, not from excitement, but from fear, I think; I didn’t know if this would hurt or be pleasant; I didn’t know if I would like it or hate it. Sexual matters were a completely blank area and I was suddenly very anx­ious to learn. But I was used to being in charge of my life. And in this instance, in this sleazy motel room, Lewis was in charge, and I was about to let him be in control of my body.

  My blouse off, he unbuttoned my pants and I stood and slipped them off. He stood up then, next to me, and I tried very hard to divert my eyes—for the time being at least. He rubbed himself against me, then took me in his arms and lay me on the bed, where we completed the act. I was unimpressed, although I’m sure that was no fault of Lewis’s. I believe he did the absolute best he could.

  I enjoyed examining his anatomy when he was finished. I asked him many questions, and he lay back with his hands behind his head while I knelt on the bed beside him and he answered me with small smiles and an occasional blush. After a while he took me again, and I tried very hard to find something enjoy­able about it.

  I found one thing. It was a moment of realization so intense it almost hurt; it felt like Lewis’s orgasm looked. Though I’ve been celibate for most of my life, I can still call up that morning. I looked up into Lewis’s contorted, enraptured face just at the moment of his orgasm, and I realized that while I thought I was relinquishing control to Lewis, in fact, the reverse was true. His sexual nature rendered him totally power­less. During his orgasm, I was in control. Total control. I could do anything to him in the space of that release. I almost laughed aloud.

  So therein lies the pleasure of sex.

  LEWIS GREGORY: “I loved her from the first minute I set eyes on her. She was so tiny, and a ball of fire. I think she was a virgin, although she never told me. She had wild eyes. They were always, like . . . scared, or something. They were never like other people’s eyes; they were either, like, scared, or else they seemed to . . . I don’t know. They seemed to understand every­thing about everything. I can’t explain it. She was just the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I just loved her. I wanted to take her home and put her down in the bedroom and just take care of her for ever and ever.

  “I guess I’m always wanting to tame the wild thing. When I was a kid, I always wanted to save the little birds that the cats got. I always wanted to hold them, but they always died. I was never sure if they died from fright—from the cat—or from being held by me. I wanted just one to live long enough to be a pet.

  “Anyway, that’s how I felt about Angelina. I was naive, I guess. I wanted to tame her but I didn’t dare.

  “Why’d she leave? Secrets. Wild things always have secrets, things they can’t share because they don’t know how. Angelina had lots of secrets, and they drew her on.”

  6

  Lewis’s house was a modern nothing, a block and wood tract-­style home in Westwater, Nevada, with dreadful orange carpeting and plastic woodgrain ac­cessories. The living room was furnished with a television on a wheeled stand, a pile of mismatched pillows, and a torn Naugahyde couch. A Formica table, covered by a green plastic tablecloth with Nevada dust ground into its quasi-­seersucker peb­bling and set with a plastic napkin holder and wilted napkins, stood in the corner of the kitchen. Every­thing in the kitchen was either harvest gold or avoca­do green. Everything in the house looked as if it had been bought at a grocery store—including the bed­room furniture.

  Lewis showed me his backyard, his barbecue, his toolshed. He smiled at me as we toured the house, bare walls shining down on us, like he was introducing his old mistress to his new one with expectations that they would coexist in harmony, adding pleasure upon value to his days. I had an odd feeling that I had already become one of Lewis’s possessions, and that feeling was frighteningly pleasurable.

  I showered while Lewis called to have our dinner delivered, then he showered while I changed the bed linen and explored the house. The refrigerator held four cans of beer, an almost-­empty bottle of Tabasco sauce, a bite of fuzzy cheese in the corner of a milky plastic bag, and two sprouting potatoes. I began to make a list.

  That night, we unpacked, ate, and went to bed early. Lewis stretched out next to me on his bed, then reached for me. I snuggled into a comfortable posi­tion, and we lay together while he talked of how good it was to be home, how nice it was to have a nest, unfeathered though it might currently be. Before drifting off to sleep, he talked of plans to improve it, styles of furniture, colors of paint, equity and a next-­step-­up neighborhood when this house had ap­preciated enough.

  As he talked, I realized I had been wrong in thinking I wanted to find a home and settle down.

  The next morning was Sunday. We read the paper in bed, then went grocery shopping at the corner market.

  The trip to the grocery store stands out in my mind because for the first time I can remember, another person and I engaged in childlike play that was so much fun
and so funny that I giggled uncon­trollably, tears running down my cheeks. We threw groceries to each other, raced the carts, took turns pushing each other, mocked the other shoppers, read ingredients to each other with much drama, and were intentionally silly, incredibly silly, for the better part of an hour.

  Then, just as I thought I would burst with joy, pleasure, and warmth toward this man, this clever, clever man, he picked me up and twirled me around, and all the gaiety disappeared. The fun was over. This close physical contact in a public place was just too distressful. I liked being in control of my own body, especially in public. The fun was over. We finished the shopping and went home.

  Lewis returned to work the next day, and I was left to entertain myself, which wasn’t difficult under usual circumstances, but in the barrenness of Lewis’s home, I had to stretch my imagination to discover anything which had any entertainment value at all. I ended up washing all his dishes and all his clothes, and then I tackled the house.

  By the time he came home from work, filled with excited chatter about his job and his friends, I was sullenly resentful. I carried in bags of sensible grocer­ies and helped put them away, listening to his banter, then sat, chin in hand, as he fixed dinner, and day­dreamed about the adventures I would have the next day. I was not cut out to lie around the house and wait for a man to come home from work. One day of that was sufficient.

  The next day, as soon as Lewis had gone to work, I began to explore Westwater.

  There were half a dozen chain supermarkets in town, and Lewis was the general manager of the biggest and most prosperous of these, on the north end of town. The north end was the affluent area, the goal of Lewis’s real estate strategies. I stayed far from there.

  This was my first experience of this area of the West; I had spent the previous winter in California, but California was nothing at all like Nevada. Westwater was truly desert—desert in the very literal meaning of the word—complete with sand, sage­brush, and cactus.

  I walked from Lewis’s house through his subdivi­sion, across the highway, and into town. From the quantity of run-­down motels, I gathered that Westwater was the place where Las Vegas losers came, looking to earn a decent wage in order to recoup and return. I walked through the small but respectable business district, which was filled with men in light suits and women in dresses with jackets. I kept walking, knowing that this town, as all towns, must have a seedier side, and my patience was rewarded a couple of blocks later.

  I thought there was an overabundance of bars, cocktail lounges, girlie-­show theaters, and adult book­stores for a town this size, until I noticed all the military haircuts parading the streets. A military installation must be nearby. I began to fantasize about this sleazy area, and soon I hungered to hear its music at night, when it would be alive, in full bloom.

  But the first day I just wandered the streets, becoming familiar with Westwater.

  I picked at a tuna-­salad sandwich in a truck stop right next to the freeway and watched the trucks come and go, and the buses, and then I realized the building next door was a bus station, and my curiosity was piqued. I finished my meal, noticed the time, and left for Lewis’s. I wanted to be home when he arrived, but the bus station drew me. I looked in through the dusty windows at the figures sitting on wooden benches, and I heard vague strains of a melody that had once been quite familiar. I agreed with myself that I would return the next day.

  Initially, I explored Westwater every morning after Lewis left for work, then sat in the cool of the bus station during the heat of the afternoon, ostensi­bly reading a book I’d brought with me. I could never concentrate on the pages of the book; instead I watched bus-­station patrons and made up my own stories about their lives.

  Eventually, I all-­too-­anxiously saw Lewis off for work in the morning and left for the bus station immediately after his car turned the corner.

  The bus station, the fascinating bus station. It was a continual, entertaining show. My emotions roamed freely while sitting on the worn wooden bench. Some people I wanted to be with, some I wanted to travel with, some I wanted to get to know. There were others who were too obvious, some with too many children, some who angered me by their ostentatious and very assuming appearance, some who seemed, by their dress and manner, to be out of place in the seedy surroundings.

  Within a week of my discovering the bus station, I was there every day, watching, watching. And the only feeling that was stronger than that which com­pelled me to sit there every day was this: I wanted to be there at night. I wanted to see the differences in the people; I ached to experience the atmosphere, to be with the night people in their element.

  Something about the night escalates the darker side of mankind. Worries and fears weigh heavy when sensory input is slight; one can lay abed and fret over a faint sound from another room until the heart fairly bursts with the tension of it. Those terrors that overwhelm in the dark can become insignificant, even silly, in the day.

  There is an excitement to being outside after dark. Even going to the corner market is different. Colors are altered, perceptions change, and the distortion of reality heightens as the darkness deepens. Things sound different in the dark.

  Some thrive on it. Others hasten home and lock their doors. Most people stay home at night, not daring to venture out. I believe they are afraid of that influence that, like the tides, like two glasses of champagne, affects our baser animal natures, and pulls our minds just slightly out of kilter.

  Twilight has always been the magical hour, the bewitching time that we dance around, taunting, as we wait for the dark to bend our heads, just a little—please, God, just a little—hoping against all chance of hope that the light will shine one last ray of rationality into our minds and tell us to go home and turn on the lights. But we don’t. We choose the bending of our sensibilities, and soon the bend is permanent and must be fed like any habit. The night people are lovers, loners, readers, romantics. Night people are addicted.

  I became obsessed with the notion of coming to this particular bus station and watching the night people in the midst of their environment during the drunkenness of the moon, the madness of the dark.

  Every day for weeks I sat in the bus station. Every day I changed my seat and therefore my point of view. And every afternoon, just after the three-­twenty bus disgorged its passengers from Salt Lake City, I would—so reluctantly!—leave my seat and go home, arriv­ing just before Lewis.

  I would sit at his table, chin in hand, while he made dinner and chatted on about his day, and I would fantasize about the bus station. What did it look like with the lights on? Who went there, who came in and who left, and how could I possibly arrange to be there to see them?

  I never felt indebted to Lewis, nor did I feel entrapped by him. He was as pleasant a person as I have ever known, and because of that, I set careful parameters about how far to stretch his affection for me. I fancy myself to be a relatively loyal person, and Lewis was a gem of a man. He knew I was gone all day, but after the first question—when it was evident I was not interested in divulging my whereabouts, and was less excited about his pushing the issue—he respected my privacy. I believe he only wanted to be reassured that I was not seeing other men, which I found to be quite amusing and quaint. For me to go out on my own at night instead of being with him would stretch the limits not only of his affection, but of his hospitality. He would hurt and that would not please me.

  So I sat with him, present in body, if not in mind, and we played cards and watched television and sometimes went out for long walks and talked about how the neighbors had valiantly and vainly tried to make their homes unique via the extravagant use of greenery.

  The days went along, one after another after another. I cooked a small turkey for us at Thanksgiving, Christmas approached, and as it did, the nights became terribly cold. Space heaters were dusted off and brought out, so were the quilts and blankets. I began to get used
to Lewis’s sexual rhythm, and tolerated his advances with less distaste. We bought matching red sweat shirts and began to talk of Christ­mas presents and New Year’s activities.

  There was a contentment in my body; it was relaxed and well fed and exercised—but there was a hollow place in my mind and a yearning in my soul. I had to get out. I had to break away from this little-­wife role, if even for a little while. I had to do something else, something more, something different—some­thing young.

  Just when I thought I could stand it no more, just when I began to seriously think about leaving Lewis, just when I thought I would burst from the frustration of forcing my true feelings to the back of my priorities—Lewis’s mother died.

  The call came while we were having breakfast. The telephone rarely rang; Lewis was not a gregarious person. It surprised us both when it rang, so uncharac­teristically, at seven o’clock in the morning. Lewis went to the living room to answer it. I heard him gasp, then continue to listen, so I went and hugged his back while he talked, and I saw the silly Christmas tree in the corner looking out on baked desert ground, and I knew someone had died, died just in time for Christ­mas, died just in time for me.

  He turned around and hugged me, and tears dripped onto my shoulder. It was his mother, he said. Stroke. He had to leave immediately for California and would probably be gone three or four days.

  I was sorry for Lewis. My arms went around him and I held him, and while his sobs shook my whole body and he sniffled and his tears wet my hair and my clothes, I tried to understand his grief. My cheek against his chest, I watched the little plastic icicles on the Christmas tree flutter in the breath of movement in the room. It matched the flutter of excitement in my belly as I thought that tonight I could go to the bus station, to let the tide of darkness once again wash over my mind.