Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  “I recognized his knuckle tattoos,” Mona said. “Should I go wash his feet, or what?”

  “Odysseus puts his hand around Eurycleia’s throat and threatens to kill her if she tells anyone,” Nigel said.

  “So that’s a no?” Mona asked.

  “Yes,” Nigel said.

  “Don’t wash his feet?” Mona asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Nigel said. “Do nothing of the kind.”

  “What do you think, Shiori?” Mona said.

  “Do you feel him in your body?” Shiori asked.

  “He’s in my spine,” Mona said.

  “Near your tailbone?” Shiori asked.

  “The whole thing,” Mona said.

  “Don’t do anything silly,” Nigel said. “You can’t afford the karma.”

  “Or the heartache,” Shiori said softly.

  Yoko and Yoko had a hard-on for Kurt. They’d only met him once, when Kurt helped her move from Taos, and they’d all spent an evening together. Kurt made an elaborate vegan meal. During dinner, Kurt claimed to have manifested the earthquake that brought him and Mona together, so that they could help each other “confront the wreckage of their pasts.” Yoko and Yoko swooned and practically creamed their pajamas.

  * * *

  KURT WAS BACK, TINKERING UNDER Maxine’s hood, so she felt safe to leave Room 3. She checked for birds overhead and trotted toward him. She put her arms around him, consciously turning her back toward Room 8. He let her squeeze him. She hoped Dark was watching.

  “You haven’t hugged me like this in a long time,” he said.

  “I was attacked by a bird earlier,” she said.

  He turned around to face her. “Where?”

  “My scalp,” she said. “I have a feeling it was personal.”

  “You and your bird trauma,” he said, and kissed the part in her hair.

  In their apartment upstairs, Kurt took off his shirt, opened a bottle of red, and warmed leftover lasagna. They ate at the kitchen table. He rattled on, for a solid twenty-three minutes, about the Bakersfield earthquake of 1952, how it had twisted cotton fields into U shapes and slid a shoulder of the Tehachapi Mountains across four lanes of highway, and then he blathered on about pH balances, fertilizers, the current drought, how much water almond trees require, and also the honeybee problem. She focused on the beautiful white cloud in his eye, which still aroused her now and then, or, at a minimum, kept her awake. Was she aroused by the cloud itself, or the hunting knife that had made it? She longed for sharpness, a honed edge with which to cut herself. She often avoided his eye that could see, especially when he was on top of her, because she couldn’t bear all the love in it. Too much mush.

  She supposed Dark had looked at her that way, too, but she had been disarmed by his earthy smell and the tattoo on his chest, A Steady Diet of Nothing. Kurt’s tattoo would have said A Heaping Helping of Hugs. Two years together and she couldn’t clearly describe Kurt’s smell. He showered twice a day and slathered on deodorant. He’d have douched his balls, if possible. Dark’s balls, on the other hand—

  “Dark’s balls?” Terry asked. “Really? What about faithful Kurt, the man living with you, the man right in front of you, who wants to marry you, the man who carried you out of Los Angeles, away from the vampires—how about that?”

  “Kurt’s knuckle tattoos would read, ‘MORE FOOD,’ ” Mona told Terry.

  “He’s not obese,” Terry said. “He’s slightly chubby. When did you become so shallow?”

  “If you’re so in love with him, Terr,” Mona said, “why don’t you marry him?”

  It seemed everyone had a hard-on for Kurt. Everyone except Mona. Was she a shithead?

  “I never called you a shithead,” Terry said.

  “Mona?” Kurt put down his fork. “Where are you?”

  “Sorry,” Mona said, startled.

  The motel line rang, forwarded from the office downstairs. Kurt got up.

  “Front desk,” she heard him say.

  She finished her wine. As she stared absently at the portrait of Rose she’d stolen years ago, the letter R suddenly appeared, floating on its back like Rose. She stood for a closer look. An upside-down G floated near Rose’s feet, and an E with one too many teeth. She found the A, also inverse and wearing a halo. Where was the C? Not in the water. Not in the trees. There it was, near Rose’s crotch. She laughed out loud, delighted.

  “What’s funny?” Kurt said after hanging up.

  “I finally found the Grace stain,” she said. “Only took me two and a half years.” She pointed out each letter. “See? Now that I see it, I can’t seem to unsee it.”

  He smiled. “Maybe it’s a sign.”

  They both sat again and she watched him finish her lasagna.

  “This morning I remembered being a bee in a past life. I was pretty happy. It felt good to have such a clear purpose.”

  Kurt looked at her adoringly. “I like the way your brain works.”

  “Who called—Mr. Terrible News?”

  “No, the guy in Room Eight,” Kurt said. “He wanted to know if we had room service.”

  Mona snorted and poured herself more wine.

  “His car’s in the shop so he’s stranded in Bako,” Kurt said.

  Bako. Barf.

  “The guy seems lost,” Kurt said. “He checked in late, after you’d gone to bed.”

  “Did he say where he was coming from?” she asked.

  “Alaska,” he said. “Or Nebraska? One of those. The guy smells like a goat. It’s enough to knock you over.”

  * * *

  AFTER DINNER, SHE CARRIED A plate of lasagna downstairs for Room 8. Kurt’s idea, of course. He fed anyone who looked vaguely hungry: travelers, migrant workers, hookers, even smelly goat men. Kurt was in the shower now, so she figured she had fifteen minutes with Dark. As she descended the stairs she blindly applied lipstick.

  “Too red,” Terry said. “Too obvious.”

  She blotted her lips and tightened the belt on her thrift store dress, a checkered tangerine-and-cream thing with black piping.

  His door was ajar. She pushed it open with her foot.

  “Room service,” she announced.

  He was sitting on the bed, shirtless, with the phone in his lap, a look of mild surprise on his face. She placed the food on the little table next to the window. Lasagna, she said, still warm.

  “It has hard-boiled eggs in it,” she warned him. “And you’ll have to eat with your hands because I forgot a fork.”

  “I was just trying to think of an excuse to call the front desk again,” he said. “But I was worried your husband would answer.”

  “We’re not married,” she said. “We met during an earthquake.”

  He put the phone back and patted the space next to him, inviting her to sit. If she sat anywhere near his armpit, she was a goner. She sat in the nearest chair.

  “How’s Rose?”

  “We split up,” he said. “I went back to school and then moved to Anchorage.”

  “You drove here from Alaska?”

  “Nebraska,” he said. “I just finished my last year with the Lakota.”

  Right. Sun Dance. The tree, the hooks, the incredible thirst.

  “I was hallucinating pretty hard near the end and you were in my visions. You were here in this exact place, except you had a dog.”

  She looked at his chest. She remembered the wounds being closer to his nipples. His brown nipples on his brown, muscular chest. Her fingers vibrated with the urge to touch him. She sat on her hands, hoping it would pass.

  “Still writing?” he asked. “And taking pictures?”

  “No,” she said. “I put a portfolio together but I buried it back in Taos.”

  “Let’s go dig it up,” he said.

  She laughed. “Why?”

  “You don’t belong here,” he said.

  They stared at each other quietly for a minute. His eyes slipped down the front of her dress and landed on her legs.

  “I�
�m comfortable,” she said.

  “You’re comfortable sitting on your hands?” he asked.

  She brought her hands to her lap. “What did you do in Alaska?”

  “I drove a cab,” he said. “Then I worked in a halfway house for newly released prisoners. Long-timers. I lived there, helping them readjust, but mostly I drove them around in a van. I slept with a knife under my pillow.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “You changed your hair,” he said.

  Kurt had convinced her to grow out her bangs so that he could see her “beautiful face.”

  “If I were your boyfriend,” he said, “I’d be torturing your box right now and you’d be coming all over the place.”

  Jesus, that was sudden. Kurt would never in a million years call it a box. Even if he did, he would only cuddle and kiss it tenderly. She missed how dirty Dark was, how rough and raunchy and out there, how willingly he turned his insides out for her to see.

  “Have you learned any Spanish?” he asked.

  “Caras vemos, corazones no sabemos,” she said. “ ‘Faces we see, hearts we do not know.’ ”

  A phrase from a postcard left by a fruit picker.

  “You know my heart,” he said.

  “I should get going,” she said, and stood up. “He’s waiting for me.”

  * * *

  WALKING BACK, SHE DECIDED NOT to shower. Kurt wouldn’t touch her unless she was squeaky clean. She found him playing video games. Off the hook, apparently. She kissed his retreating hairline and disappeared into the bedroom. She felt numb. She painted through a cheerless hour. Then she smoked and fell asleep.

  In the morning, Kurt asked if she could clean Rooms 17 and 21, and also change the sheets in Room 8. Dark’s room.

  “But not until one o’clock,” Kurt said. “He’ll be out running errands after one. He spilled booze on the bed, or something.”

  Bullshit. His sheets were clean—he just wanted to see her twisted up in them. He would be waiting for her. She showered and retrieved his favorite underwear from a box in her closet, where she hid his love notes. They still fit.

  She cleaned all morning. Kurt left for the hardware store. Now it was 1:08. Time to change Dark’s sheets. She knocked and imagined shutting the curtains, falling face-first onto the bed. He pulled up her skirt, placed his hands on her ass, and then licked the backs of her knees—

  No answer. She let herself in, hoping he was in the bathroom. He wasn’t anywhere. She even checked under the bed, but all she found was a limp ten-dollar bill and a grocery bag containing a box of black hair dye and a pair of stockings. And he had in fact spilled booze on the sheets—a whole glass of bourbon, it looked like, near the headboard. She felt as though she were being watched. She looked out the window and then opened the closet—no one there, of course.

  She rifled through his open suitcase. Dirty clothes and crusty socks, but no papers or rubbers or anything interesting. Then she saw a brown leather satchel stuffed in the lining. She felt the old excitement as she opened it.

  The photographs were zipped into a pocket. A loose handful, some with torn edges. Her hands shook as she shuffled through them. The first four featured a highly unattractive peroxide blonde in her early forties, fully clothed in a skirt and with a run in her stocking, obviously wasted, passed out on a bed with a tacky mirrored headboard. Long shots from every angle, then close-ups of her semi-hairy legs. In the next few, another woman, passed out and fully dressed, this time clutching a handbag. It looked as though she’d been ready to go somewhere but never made it out the door. A man’s hand held up her skirt. In the next set, a woman out cold in an empty bathtub, razor burn on her foreshortened legs, what looked like a painful bunion on her left toe. The fourth batch featured a buxom woman around Mona’s age. In the first shot she was wide awake and topless and giving two thumbs up; in the rest, she was passed out on a twin bed with only her legs exposed.

  Clearly, Dark was a little darker than she’d realized. As she shuffled through, she found herself coveting the photos. They had a certain snapshot aesthetic she admired. They looked like Nan Goldin prints, except not quite as artistic or hip. They were the sort of fucked-up photographs you’d find in the trash.

  “You know, Terry,” Mona said, “most women would run for the hills right now, or run back to the comforts of Kurtfoundland, but these photos don’t creep me out in the slightest. It feels utterly familiar. I feel like I’ve known this guy all my life.”

  “Well, that’s because you have,” Terry said slowly. “He’s your father. He’s your grandfather. He’s every man you’ve ever been close to.”

  Except Kurt.

  “But don’t the photographs remind you of something else?” Terry asked.

  “Vaguely,” Mona said. “I guess they look like pictures my dad would’ve taken.”

  “They look like pictures you would’ve taken,” Terry said. “Of yourself. Pretending to be dead. In your clients’ houses. Remember?”

  “Huh,” Mona said.

  “Steal them,” Terry said. “Figure out a way to use them in your own work—”

  “Shhh,” Mona said.

  Outside, a car door slammed. She rushed to the window. It was only Mr. Terrible News pulling a bag of kitty litter out of his hatchback. She hid the photographs in her cleaning cart.

  Dark’s note she found in his dirty sheets.

  Mona,

  I feel you in my guts, an aching column down the center of my body. You are a want that stretches from my first hope as a child to my first full want as a man. I’ve been in love with you since we met. I believe we belong together. Like you, I have had a death wish forever, and yet you make me want to live twice.

  I’m leaving tonight. Will you take a ride with me to L.A.? Palm trees. Wild parrots. A warm breeze. A vivid swim in the sea. Could you get away for a night or two? I’m picking up my car at the shop right now. It’s an old black sedan, which I’ll park out back. I’ll be leaving around four o’clock. If this is too crazy and you can’t come with me, I hope you’ll at least say goodbye.

  * * *

  KURT WAS ON TOP OF her an hour later. He’d stopped at Guthrie’s on his way back from the hardware store, had a few “road sodas,” and now he was taking too long to come. She turned her head to avoid his beery breath and looked at the clock—2:53. She wished she’d done laundry. Flies triangulated the room lazily. Kurt pressed her legs to his shoulders. She gazed at her knees briefly and then closed her eyes. She was the unconscious blonde with a run in her stocking, and Dark was beside the bed, holding a camera and touching himself—

  Kurt finished before she got any further.

  “You’re miles away,” he huffed, catching his breath. “Again.”

  “Am I?”

  It was 3:13. She studied her painting—the composition lacked interest and a focal point. Some grape pickers in the field, maybe, or a farmer on a tractor, or Kurt fixing the roof.

  “I went ahead and got a ‘For Sale’ sign at the hardware store,” Kurt said.

  “You’re selling the motel?”

  He laughed. “No,” he said. “It’s for Maxine. I think we should sell her and get a truck.”

  “Well, think again.”

  “She’s got rust on her belly,” he said.

  “And?”

  “It’s like cancer. She’ll be rusted out in six months. We should sell her now while we can.”

  “Nope,” she said.

  She turned back to the canvas. The painting didn’t need people in it. People were stupid.

  Kurt sat up and looked at her. “I’m sick of making love to a corpse,” he said suddenly.

  “You mean me,” she said.

  “Who else.”

  She cupped both of her hands over her ears. “I’m sick of living with you in this hellhole,” she said. Her voice sounded steadier and more sonorous with her ears blocked.

  He blinked at her.

  “You bore the fuck out of me,” she said, too loudly.


  His lips were moving. She loosened her hands and heard him say, “—so if that’s what you’re saying—,” then clamped down again, firmer this time. He stopped and sat there, frowning. She lowered her hands. He got up to open a window, forgetting they were painted shut. He slammed the heel of his hand up against the frame a couple of times, swung around in frustration, and knocked the canvas to the floor. She watched him set it back on the easel.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Damage is done,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called you a corpse.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called you boring.”

  He gave her a patient smile. “I still think we should sell Maxine.”

  “I think you need a nap,” she said.

  * * *

  HE WAS SNORING FIFTEEN MINUTES later. She recalled her morning: sweaty tits by ten A.M., wheeling her cleaning cart across the parking lot, folding laundry, the blackbirds eyeing her from the rain gutter. She pictured her future here.

  She grabbed a brush. Inspired, she worked quickly, covering the canvas with ugly vertical strokes. Prison bars.

  She packed a duffel bag. In the kitchen, she left Kurt a note saying she was taking the bus to visit her mother in L.A. and would be back in two nights. He seemed to like her trips away. It gave him the opportunity for a bender—booze, porn, video games—and to miss her. They were always sweet to each other when she got back.

  She made sure the motel calls forwarded upstairs before stepping out. The sky, stiff and pale all morning, was now a wide, cheerful blue. She found Dark around back, idling in a black, late-eighties Crown Vic. She leaned into the open passenger-side window. He’d trimmed his beard and was wearing a clean white shirt.

  “You found my note,” he said. “Are you saying goodbye or coming with me?”

  “I’m coming.”

  He smiled. “Mind riding in the back? The front seat’s broken.”

  Yellow foam poked through the leather, along with a metal spring. It looked like it had been clawed by a bear or a mad slasher.