Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  “You’re wheezing,” Dark said. “You should quit smoking, babe.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said.

  He looked startled. “Touchy subject?”

  “Waitress,” she blurted. “Crown symbol.”

  “Are you having a stroke?” he asked seriously. “Or an anxiety attack?”

  She got to her feet and took a couple of deep breaths. Her teeth were clattering, but she wasn’t cold.

  “Your poor wife thinks she seduced her own father,” she said, rubbing her wrists.

  “What? She doesn’t think that,” he said irritably.

  “He turned her on, and then put it all on her,” she said.

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re married,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done this with you.”

  “You’re being a dumb twat,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  “I can’t be your mistress and your maid,” she said quietly. “Ever heard of the women’s movement?”

  What was she saying? She hated the word “maid,” had no interest in being his mistress, and had been setting the women’s movement back for years.

  Dark looked confused. “I adore you,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise I’ll never hurt you.”

  “You told me you and Rose were like siblings,” she said. “And I didn’t realize you did this sort of thing in other towns. With . . . waitresses.”

  “There’s only you and Rose,” he said. “And it was Rose who wanted to open our marriage—”

  “But Rose is fucked up,” Mona said. “And two is still too many. And you could have said no—how about that?”

  When she saw his eyes well up, she looked at Dinner, who seemed unable to leave the room even though the door was wide open. He sat looking up at her and whining.

  “I’d rather be dinner,” Mona said.

  He blinked at her. “The dog?”

  “The main course,” she said.

  He nodded soberly. “If I wasn’t married you wouldn’t feel such passion for me, I promise. Passion feeds on this kind of shit.”

  “Which shit?” she said.

  “Obstacles,” he said. “Restrictions.”

  “You’re full of it,” she said.

  He took a step toward her. “I can talk to Rose about spending more time with you. Chloe’s away at school—”

  “Oh God,” she said, and shook her head. “Don’t do that. Just be good. Be better to Rose. She’s your wife, not your sister. Don’t compare yourself to siblings. You guys have sex, and Rose has incest trauma, and so it’s just not accurate. Or helpful. And you know what? Don’t be here when I’m here. I don’t want to see you for a while. Or . . . ever again.”

  “Which is it?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. She left the house without finishing—a first—and spent the evening shaking. The following day her head turned into a cement mixer, which seemed to give her the shits, and she got her period. Then the longing started. She kept seeing him on the edge of her bed, naked, reading aloud to her and rubbing her shins, his hands inching toward her [rose symbol], over and over. The pain of parting was red and loud, indeed.

  By Sunday she was dead eyed and despondent. To distract herself, she watched a little porn. It seemed women were collecting semen in goblets these days. It was a trend. Revolted, she went back to staring at the ceiling and produced hundreds of tears, which she imagined collecting in her own goblet. When it was full, she would march over to the Hurt Ranch and force him to drink her tears. Every drop, motherfucker, she would say, slapping his face. Every drop!

  Rose called that night asking to meet over coffee the following morning. Mona said she didn’t want coffee. She only wanted to be their cleaning lady for now, and nothing else.

  “Philip is a mess,” Rose said.

  “Whatever,” Mona said. “It’s not like I fell out of a tree and died.”

  “He’s in love with you,” Rose said.

  “You know, most of my clients aren’t home when I’m there?” Mona said. “They make it a point to stay out of the house?”

  Why did she tack question marks to the ends of sentences when she was falling apart? Was she unraveling? Maybe? Would she tear at the seams? Would she wind up in the loony bin? Again?

  “I don’t hate you, okay?” Mona said. “I’m just not cut out for this?”

  “Okay,” Rose said after a pause. “I understand.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT WEEK NO ONE was home when she arrived. And then she’d found shit in the soap dish. She figured it was a fluke, but then found shits two, three, and four the very next week, followed by the phony rum ball.

  And now, nearly a month later, the final straw: a loaf on the flokati. Bigger, softer, and more pungent than the others, it would have been a twenty-wiper. It took some effort to remove, leaving a buttery stain in the wool. She fussed over the stain for forty minutes.

  “Fuck this,” she said.

  “When oh when are you going to confront these people? Or, better yet, walk out of this place forever?” Terry asked. “Honestly, what will it take?”

  “I have a confession, Terry,” Mona said, and cleared her throat. “Remember when I told you I was going through a breakup? It was with the blind lady’s husband. We Indian wrestled. And regular wrestled. And had sex multiple times. And said I love you—twice.”

  “Oh,” Terry said sadly. “Oh dear.”

  “But like I said, I ended it,” Mona said, “even though I’m pretty sure I’m in love with him. As to our mystery, the pooper is not the daughter. I think it might be Dark. He’s now our primary suspect. I suppose he’s acting out his emotions, or he might be trying to make it into the story he thinks I’m writing, or he might be trying to get me to—”

  A shadow passed by the window. She heard shoes crunching gravel, which was unusual, and then the kitchen door creaked open and clicked shut. Dinner ran into the kitchen but didn’t bark. Mona heard footsteps.

  “Hello?” Mona called out.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Mona poked her head into the dining room. A tall, skinny woman with a pretty face and splotchy skin stood next to the table. She wore a pale yellow cashmere sweater with lots of holes in it, dingy gray sweatpants, and blue surgical gloves. Was she a patient? Rose’s office is that way, Mona almost said. She stopped when she saw the pink plastic bag of poop.

  “Can I help you?” Mona asked.

  “This isn’t for you,” the woman said blithely, as if she were talking about a bag of homemade cookies. “It’s for her. Rose.”

  Mona coughed. Judging from the bleach stains on the woman’s sweatpants, it was the former cleaning lady. Evidently, she still had keys.

  “These people are assholes.” The bag swung in her hand as she spoke. “Lunatics. I worked for them for years. Years!”

  “Okay,” Mona said carefully, as if the woman were holding explosives.

  Mona had seen Hispanic women carrying cleaning buckets in and out of houses, but she’d never met another white cleaning lady in Taos. Or anywhere, really. Part of her wanted to talk shop.

  “Did you notice Grace written all over this house?” Mona asked, by way of distraction.

  The woman winced. “Rose really fucked up my kid . . . and now she’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Overdose.” She tossed the bag onto the table and covered her eyes briefly with the heels of her hands. “I wrote her name all over the place.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mona said.

  “Rose once told me I was haunted. She told me I smelled like incest. Who says that?”

  “An incest survivor,” Mona answered. “A blind incest survivor.”

  The woman grimaced. “Here’s how I look at Rose: you made me wear your shit, and now I’m making you wear mine.”

  “Mona, might this be your future?” Terry said in a loud whisper. “Might this be you in fifteen years?”

  “So, it’s
yours?” Mona asked, nodding at the bag.

  “Yep,” the woman said.

  “You know the expression ‘Don’t shit where you eat’?” Mona asked, and smiled.

  The woman laughed. “Don’t give me any more ideas,” she said.

  Mona thought of Dark’s tattoo, A Steady Diet of Nothing. It had not been a steady diet, sadly, and yielded nothing. Sooner or later, she would need to stop cleaning his house.

  “Where were you going to put it?” Mona asked.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “On the crow sculpture?”

  “The thing is, I’m the one wearing it,” Mona said. “I’ve been cleaning up after you.”

  “Oh God,” the woman said, and frowned. “Sorry about that. I’m surprised we didn’t run into each other sooner.”

  “I thought it was for me,” Mona said. “I thought I was the target.”

  The woman tilted her head. “Why?”

  “I had a thing with Dark.” She shook her head. “I mean . . . Philip.”

  The cleaning lady snorted. “That weirdo?”

  Was he that bad? Mona shrugged and fidgeted with the rag hanging out of her back pocket. She felt cemented to the floor, unable to move her feet. The woman hadn’t moved, either. It occurred to her that they were locked in a kind of standoff. She knew she would not continue cleaning up the poop. One of them would have to leave.

  Mona removed the rag from her back pocket and dropped it on the floor. “I surrender,” she said. “I guess I’ll go home. And regroup.”

  The woman smiled. “We should get a drink sometime,” she said. “Also, feel free to take something on your way out. I won’t look.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A token,” the woman said. “I always either take or leave something when I clean a house for the last time. Don’t you?”

  “I take photographs,” Mona said.

  The woman’s eyes lit up. “Tell me your name.”

  “Mona,” Mona said. “You?”

  “Maria,” the woman said.

  “What’s your middle name, Maria?” Mona asked slowly.

  “Funny you ask,” the woman said. “My middle name is also Maria. My parents met in Argentina and named me after some Spanish song.”

  Mona laughed. Then she felt like crying. Not only had Rose stolen Maria Maria’s name, she’d stolen the punch line behind it. What else had she stolen? If she was comfortable lying about something as basic as her own name, imagine what other lies she could tell.

  Mona took the portrait of Rose hanging over the sofa. She tucked it under her arm and carried it the thirty-seven steps to her truck. As she laid the canvas down in the bed of her truck, she searched for a sign of Grace. She knew it was carved in somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

  BARBARIANS

  MARIA MARIA LIVED ON THE south side of town with all the Spanish people, Mona on the north side with the fake bohemians, and so they met for drinks in the middle, at a bar attached to a hotel, and ordered cocktails with rye in them.

  “Just a couple cleaning ladies out on the town,” Mona said as they clinked glasses.

  It was cool to bullshit with someone about mops. Mona was all about string mops. Maria Maria preferred the flat, microfiber variety. They weighed the pros and cons of each, and then moved on to vacuums. The best vacuum on the market, hands down, was the Miele Titan canister. Best book-dusting tool? A shoe-polishing brush. To clean grout, Maria Maria liked to flood the tiles with bleach and go at the grout with an electric toothbrush.

  “Your obsession with bleach is legendary, by the way,” Mona said.

  “The white people around here are wimps,” Maria Maria said. “I’m sorry, but do you really expect me to clean your bathroom with vinegar and water? It’s like, go fuck yourselves.”

  At one point, as Maria Maria demonstrated her cobweb removal technique, which was indeed advanced, Mona noticed “Grace” tattooed on the inside of her left wrist.

  “You know, you should get a poop tattoo,” Mona said, “because that shit was genius. You’re definitely an artist. In fact, you might be the most important artist in this town.”

  Maria Maria rolled her eyes.

  “I’m just glad I took photographs,” Mona went on. “When the chips are down in 2033 or whatever, I’ll sell them on QVC and make eighty grand.”

  “How’s business?” Maria Maria asked. “Do you have a waiting list?”

  Mona laughed. “I wish.”

  “How many employees do you have?” Maria Maria asked.

  “Zero,” Mona said.

  “How do you make money?”

  “I don’t,” Mona said.

  “Come work for me,” Maria Maria said. “I’ll only take thirty percent.”

  “No pimps,” Mona said. “No offense.”

  They ordered another round. Mona was slightly tipsy and told Maria Maria a secret: whenever she saw a cleaning lady or janitor, she crossed herself as if she’d seen a saint. Or a ghost.

  “It’s like this superstitious tic,” Mona said. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found in a house?”

  “A stainless steel G-spot and prostate stimulator,” Maria Maria said. “Which isn’t that strange, I know, but it belonged to a woman in her early seventies. Her husband, also in his seventies, had cock rings in his nightstand drawer.”

  “Wow,” Mona said.

  “Listen, if you need a new client, I have someone for you,” Maria Maria said. “I bid the job already but I don’t want them. Too high-maintenance. They’re artists from Europe—Hungary, I think. They’ve got a bunch of cats, which is weird, because they’re straight and very wealthy.”

  “How much?” Mona asked.

  “One twenty-five per visit,” Maria Maria said. “Once a week. I overbid because I didn’t really want them, but they went for it.”

  “Well, shit,” Mona said. “I’ll take ’em.”

  * * *

  THE KOSAS WERE IN FACT Hungarian and owned not three, not four, but five cats. The cats were Turkish, apparently, and mostly white, with apricot-ringed tails and blue or amber eyes. As far as cats went, they were beautiful, yes, but they were just takers. Barbarians. They beat up the Swiss cheese plants and puked on the sheepskin rugs. That morning she’d found a headless wood rat in the foyer. The missing head, it turned out, was under the couch. More carnage near the windows: two small, half-eaten lizards, plus some blood on the floor. Also lizard guts.

  She swept the dead bodies into a dustpan, as usual, and flung them off the patio. The bloodstains she wetted with sodium peroxide and scrubbed with a stiff brush. One of the barbarians sidled up to her and made a pass at her thigh. You can pet my face now, the cat seemed to say. Mona ignored it and kept scrubbing. Bitch, rub my face.

  “Beat it,” she said.

  She nudged the cat away with her foot. The only thing she wanted to pet in this house was the furniture. And the Larry Rivers painting. And the walls. And perhaps the wife.

  Although, she wasn’t sure what to make of her last interaction with Lena. They’d chatted briefly on Mona’s first visit to the house a couple of months ago, and then again a few weeks later, when Lena had come home early to find Mona on her knees, molesting the leg of one of the dining room chairs.

  “What’s wrong?” Lena had asked. “Is it broken?”

  “No,” Mona had said, getting to her feet. “It’s not broken, it’s . . . beautiful. I was just—well, I have a weird habit of, uh, fondling your chairs.”

  Fondling! Fuck.

  Lena was taller than Mona—over six feet—and all angles. She seemed constructed to appeal to the emotions, like a cathedral made of human bones. Her green eyes reminded Mona of old wavy glass.

  “So why are you staring at her tits?” Terry whispered loudly.

  “Anyway,” Mona said, “I don’t know what it is about the chairs in this house, but they’ve cast some sort of spell over me. I usually don’t even notice chairs.” She cleared her throat. “I mean, I don’t exactly
have, you know, chair awareness.”

  Stop talking, she ordered herself.

  Lena laughed. “Well, it’s a very rare chair, actually, which is why I have only one.”

  They’d stood there, admiring the chair for several seconds.

  “ ‘An Awareness of Rare Chairs,’ a new essay by Mona Boyle,” Mona inexplicably said.

  Lena blinked at her—she was a slow-blinker like her cats—and then nodded. “You’re a writer,” she said. “That makes sense.”

  “Not of essays,” Mona said quickly.

  “What, then?”

  “Poems.”

  What did she hate more than poetry? Nothing, except maybe poetry readings.

  “Well, Mona, you have excellent taste,” Lena sighed. “This chair was designed by Jean Prouvé in 1944. The other chairs in this room are also Prouvé, but this one is special. I bought it off an actress in Los Angeles.” She touched the back of the chair with her long fingers. “It was outrageously expensive, but I had to have it.”

  Mona tried to think of something poetic to say about the chair, seeing as she was now a poet, but then she noticed lint and cat hair sticking to each of the chair’s feet. She couldn’t stop herself from bending down and plucking it off, and then stuffing the hairy lint balls into the pocket of her jeans—a nasty, lifelong habit of hers. She searched Lena’s face for signs of dismay or disgust.

  “You know, you have beautiful skin,” Lena said instead.

  “I do?” Mona said. “Oh. Well.”

  “Tell me what other chairs you like to . . . what did you say? Fondle.”

  “Oh, the brown ones in the living room,” Mona said. “Although, it seems like those chairs fondle me, actually.”

  “Frits Henningsen,” Lena said. “He was a Danish designer. They’re beautifully made, very well-structured chairs from the 1930s. I’ve been collecting them for years.”

  “I had a feeling they were Danish,” Mona said, and nodded. “They’re so . . . masculine and gorgeous. Like, uh, Viggo Mortensen. Or Mads Mikkelsen.”