Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  “It’s a retired cop car,” he said, as if that explained it.

  She climbed into the backseat. The car smelled strongly of motel soap. He turned toward her, put his arm over the seat, and touched her knee with his MORE hand. His LOVE hand rested on the steering wheel.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” she said.

  He started driving. Once on the highway he sat bolt upright and kept his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. She realized she hadn’t driven around with him much in Taos.

  “I looked through your things,” she said.

  “What’d you find?” he asked.

  “Pictures,” she said.

  He was silent for a while, but it didn’t bother her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “You seem tired.”

  “I clean motel rooms.” She stretched her legs out on the seat. “If I pass out, are you going to take pictures of my legs?”

  “Would you like that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said truthfully.

  “They’re not my pictures,” he said. “They belonged to an ex-con at the halfway house. His name was Clifford. He had a fetish for unconscious women.”

  “Did he have sex with them?”

  “He told me he only touched their legs.”

  “With his penis,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, with his hands. But he touched his own penis. He asked me to throw them away. For some reason, I never did.”

  “Thinking of you photographing me passed out turns me on.” She watched his neck redden. “Are you blushing?” she asked.

  He smiled and rubbed his neck with his MORE hand.

  “Anyway, I stole the pictures,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Terry Gross made me do it,” she said.

  He laughed. “You’re still in touch with her?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Who else am I going to talk to?”

  “Me,” Dark said. “I’m here now.”

  * * *

  THEY STOPPED FOR GAS. DARK let her out of the backseat—there were no door handles inside the back—to use the restroom. Dark disappeared for smokes and water. Back at the car, she opened the door and a dog jumped in. A small black-and-white terrier wearing a scruffy goatee and a dusty coat looked from her face to the windshield. His expression said, “What’re you waiting for? Drive, bitch! Get me out of here!”

  She laughed. “Let’s go,” she said, motioning for him to climb out. “This way.”

  He ignored her. He had no collar.

  “You,” she said. “Come here.”

  He shifted his weight between his front paws and scratched behind his ear with a hind leg. She heard a sharp whistle and watched his body go rigid midscratch. He jumped out and trotted behind the convenience store building. She followed him to an empty lot beside a moldy stucco house. An elderly Spanish man sat in a camp chair next to a card table, reading a paperback. Despite the heat, he was wearing a hat, a flannel shirt, jeans, and boots. The dog lay down under the table and closed his eyes.

  The man looked up at her. “Do you need help?”

  “Your dog,” she said. “He, uh, jumped in my car.”

  He smiled. “He does that.”

  “He was acting like we’d just robbed a bank together.”

  The man nodded. “He likes to ride in cars.”

  On the table, clear baggies filled with what looked like yellowed baby teeth.

  “What are you selling?” she asked.

  “Piñons,” he said. “Pine nuts. Here, help yourself.”

  She plucked a bag off the table and put it in her pocket. “Thank you. What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Piñon,” he said. “He’s a nut, too.”

  She smiled at the dog.

  “His owner died,” he said. “I’m on my way out. You want him? He has all his shots. No fleas. Still has his balls, though.”

  She shuffled her feet. Was there a way to get a look at the dog’s butthole? It couldn’t be too big or too visible or the wrong color. She craned her neck to look under the table.

  “Piñon,” the man said, and snapped his fingers. “Let this lady have a look at you.”

  She scratched his lower back. His butthole looked classy and distinguished. He sat on Mona’s left foot and gazed at the horizon. Check out my profile, he seemed to say. Notice my eyebrows. She tapped her foot and he stood up. He did a little dance, looking up at her. A box step. She realized his feet were burning on the pavement.

  “Mind if I pick him up?” she asked.

  “Sure,” the man said. “He loves to be carried. He also loves water of any kind, even bathwater.”

  He weighed about twenty pounds, she guessed. Grateful to be off the ground, he licked her cheek and earlobe. His tongue was pleasantly dry. He seemed like an intense little dude. She decided she couldn’t leave without him.

  The man patted the dog and said goodbye, and Mona carried him to the car. Dark was nervously drumming the roof with his fingers next to the open back door.

  “Jesus, Mona,” he said. “You scared me. I thought you took off.”

  “I have a dog now,” she said. “His name is Piñon.”

  Dark peered at Piñon’s face. “I know this dog,” he said. “He’s the dog you were with in my vision.”

  Piñon’s stomach growled. “He might be hungry,” she said.

  Dark ducked back into the store for dog food. Mona hosed down Piñon in the service area. As soon as the water hit him, his nose wrinkled and he moaned with pleasure. She’d never heard a dog make that noise before. He was shaking himself dry when Dark came back.

  “Here,” Dark said. “He was wearing this in my vision.”

  An orange bandana. She tied it around his neck and they hit the road. Piñon hung his head out the window and then curled up next to her and dozed off. She couldn’t stop staring at his paws and the tufts of hair between his toes. His feet smelled like Fritos.

  She wondered if Kurt had found her note. In the storytelling phase of their relationship, he’d told her he’d followed his dog for miles when he was only five. His dog had dug a hole under the fence and Kurt followed. They went missing all day. It made the local paper. Kurt said he would have followed that dog to the end of the earth. Would he follow her?

  “Are you hungry?” Dark asked.

  “Famished,” she said.

  They stopped at a crowded steakhouse and ordered sirloins. She made sure to get a seat near the window so that they could keep an eye on Piñon. Dark drank coffee; Mona drank something fruity with vodka. She grilled him about his cab-driving days in Anchorage. He told her that most of his fares had been strippers, and she asked if he’d gotten any lap dances. He said no, but one of the strippers had offered blow jobs as payment.

  “Did you accept?” she asked.

  “A few times,” he said. “It sounds terrible, but when you drive a cab from dusk to dawn, a blow job begins to feel like a blessing, like someone’s watching over you.”

  “Speaking of strippers,” Mona said, and cleared her throat. “I modeled nude dressed as a stripper for an artist in Taos—an old Hungarian guy. It was a weird scene. Flash forward two years, I find a Penthouse in a room at the motel. Flipping through, I see a feature on erotic art by living artists. And then there’s a nude painting of me. Full page. I’m bent over, touching my toes, legs and ass spread to the viewer. The motherfucker painted a smile on my face.”

  Dark laughed. “Which issue?”

  “I’ll never tell you,” she said. “You wouldn’t know it was me, anyway.”

  “I know your pussy like the inside of my eyelid,” he said.

  His LOVE hand moved across the table. It knocked over the salt and pepper. It touched her wrist, grabbed on to her fingers. It seemed hungry.

  “I don’t usually do this,” he said.

  “Abscond with the cleaning lady?”

  “Hold hands acros
s the table in a steakhouse.”

  Under the table, his MORE hand touched her knee. She uncrossed her legs.

  “I bought you something today,” he said suddenly.

  His hand disappeared into his jacket pocket. Out came a small wooden box. He slid it toward her across the table. Jewelry, she figured, but it was too heavy. She opened the box to find . . . what was it? A metal cube?

  Rare earth magnets, he explained. Two of them stuck together. Impossible to pull apart without hurting yourself.

  “Like you and me,” he said.

  She closed the box and placed it in her purse. “I have to go back, you know,” she said. “I can’t run away with you—not now.”

  “Of course you can,” he said confidently. “You don’t know this yet, but we’re going to be together for a long time.”

  She checked his face to see if he was fucking with her. He wasn’t. She chugged her drink and ordered another. Their food arrived. She ate a bit of the meat, finished her drink, and then excused herself to go to the ladies’. While she was peeing, she waited for Terry to say something.

  “Are you there, Terry? It’s me, Mona.”

  No answer. She washed her hands at the sink.

  “My face looks fucked up,” she told Terry. “Right?”

  “You don’t need me anymore,” Terry said, and patted Mona’s thigh. “You have Piñon now. In fact, go check on him. And be careful—your vision is blurring at the edges.”

  Back at the table, Dark was gone, and so was her purse. He’d paid their tab. She went out to the parking lot and found Dark leaning into the backseat. From behind him, she caught a glimpse of Piñon. The inside of his left ear, the white of his left eye. Dark had him pinned to the seat with both hands and was talking to him in a low voice.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He released Piñon and closed the door. “He was barking at me and then he bit me,” Dark said. “So, I let him know he can’t do that.”

  “Bit you where?” she asked.

  He held out his arm, but she didn’t see anything. Piñon stood and made confident eye contact with her through the window. It’s cool, he seemed to say. Whatever. A few cars down, someone was blasting Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” one of the saddest songs ever recorded, in her opinion. She and Dark lingered outside his car. He asked her to dance. She stood on the steel toes of his boots and clung to him. They swayed for a few minutes.

  “Are you having visions?” she whispered.

  “I’m right here,” he said.

  “Do you want to make a flesh offering?”

  He leaned her against the car and kissed her. She kept her eyes closed and the world seemed to fall away. Everything was sliding, sliding, and he kept pausing to lift her up, to keep her stationary against the car. When he reached under her skirt, she told him she felt Spanish again.

  * * *

  SHE’D BEEN SOUND ASLEEP FOR what felt like hours when he pulled to the side of the road. Her face was sweaty and she’d been slumped against the door. Piñon stood next to her, staring at her face and wagging his tail. In the failing light, she saw a small oil field dotted with three nodding donkeys. Or thirsty birds, in this case, as they were painted to look like toucans pecking the scrubby earth. The sun was orange and low in the sky and the wind buffeted the car. Dark killed the engine and looked straight ahead.

  “Where are we? Why are we stopped?”

  “Cops,” he said.

  She turned and saw a policeman approaching the passenger side. Dark reached over, rolled down the window, and the cop asked for his license and registration. He was young, on the beefy side, and wore a green felt hat with a wide brim. Piñon didn’t make a sound. While Dark rooted around in the glove compartment, the cop removed his Ray-Bans and made eye contact with Mona in the backseat. His eyes were blue and watery.

  “Was I speeding?” Dark asked.

  “No,” the cop said.

  Dark handed him his license. He studied it briefly and then asked Mona to step out of the car.

  “Me?” she asked.

  “Why her?” Dark asked.

  “Step out of the car, please,” he said impatiently.

  She looked for the door handle and remembered there wasn’t one. “I can’t,” she said. “There’s no handle.”

  The cop seemed nervous suddenly and touched his gun.

  “You have to open it from the outside,” Dark explained. “It was a police interceptor.”

  “Keep your hands on the steering wheel,” he warned Dark. Then, to Mona, “Climb over the front seat.”

  It was awkward with Piñon in her arms. The cop told Dark to remain in the vehicle and then directed Mona to stand behind their car. Putting one foot in front of the other was difficult. Piñon squirmed, so she put him down. He lifted his leg and seemed to smile at her as he pissed on Dark’s back tire.

  “Are you all right?” the cop asked. He touched her lightly on the elbow.

  Her mouth tasted like rotten vegetables. “I have a bad taste in my mouth,” she said.

  He nodded quickly, as if she were speaking metaphorically. “Someone called in this license plate, suspecting you were being kidnapped.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you being kidnapped?”

  “No,” she said, and picked up Piñon. “But I think I need to lie down.”

  “Are you intoxicated?”

  “I was, earlier,” she said. “How close to L.A. are we?”

  “Are you on your way to Los Angeles? You’re on the wrong side of the highway. You’re headed east, toward the Mojave.”

  That’s what was wrong, she realized now: no traffic.

  The cop studied Dark’s license. “Where are you and Mr. Booth coming from?”

  “Can I see that?” she asked, pointing to the license.

  He flashed it at her like a badge, as if afraid she was going to steal it. She squinted at it. There was Dark in the photograph, with a little extra weight in his face.

  “What’s your relation to Mr. Booth?”

  “None,” she said. She felt dizzy.

  “He looks a little off,” the cop said.

  She looked back at the car. Dark was staring at her through the back window. The sadness in his eyes reminded her of a drawing she’d been asked to interpret by a shrink. The drawing featured a little girl lying in bed with her eyes closed while an older man stood over her with a pained expression on his face. She’d been instructed to say the very first thing that came to mind. She thought the little girl was pretending to be asleep to avoid getting molested by her father, who was drunk, and that’s why he was upset. But she’d told the shrink that the girl was dead or dying, and the man, her father, was grieving. It had seemed like the appropriate answer. She’d lied about every one of the drawings, but it hadn’t mattered. She was still committed to the loony bin.

  “I need to go home,” she said.

  “Where’s home?”

  Home was buried in a trash bag in her backyard in Taos. Home was parked in the motel parking lot. Home was licking her cheek with its dry tongue. She could take Piñon to Taos. They could dig up her portfolio. But first she needed to fetch her car. She tried to explain this to the cop.

  “You want to go to Sweden?” he asked. “The country?”

  “Little Sweden,” she said. “It’s a motel. It’s nothing like Sweden.”

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Like Mona, I tend to be more productive in other people’s houses. I wouldn’t have finished this book without the hospitality of Rebecca Goldman, Kym Scott, Alan Grostephan and Maria Korol, Vickie and Bill Reuell, and Shane and Krista Beagin.

  Thank you, Sissy Onet, for letting me live in your weird, beautiful house and for introducing me to proper bed linens, fifty thousand bees, two donkeys, and a bunch of other stuff.

  Thanks to Michelle Latiolais, forever. To Binky Urban for the opening of that first email: “Who are you? Where are you?” and for taking a chance on me. To
the Whiting Foundation for picking me. To Daniel Loedel for editing out the earnestness, among other things, and to Kate Lloyd and the rest of the excellent staff at Scribner.

  Thanks to my mother and stepfather for all the incredible material and to Lori and Traci for being there.

  Thanks to Franny Shaw for the encouragement and gifted copyedits. To Kate Barrett and our thirty-five-year friendship and correspondence. To my friends Marylynne Drexler, Nicole and John Mullen, Kat Dunn, Laeticia Hussain, Andi State, Michelle McLaughlin, Linnea Rickard, Angela G. Sullivan, and my family at Sophia’s Grotto.

  To Laura Dombrowski, who I should’ve thanked the first time. To my old friend and first love, Glen Green.

  For more love (and pain), thank you, Mark Lacoy.

  Thank you, Leah Ryan.

  To David Netto, who essentially designed and decorated the house in Barbarians.

  And of course many, many thanks to Terry Gross, for the inspiration and imaginary companionship.

  More from the Author

  Pretend I'm Dead

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  Vacuum in the Dark

  Jen Beagin

  This reading group guide for Vacuum in the Dark includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Mona is twenty-six and cleans houses for a living in Taos, New Mexico. She moved there mostly because of a bad boyfriend—a junkie named Mr. Disgusting, long story—and her efforts to restart her life since haven’t exactly gone as planned. For one thing, she’s got another bad boyfriend. This one she calls Dark, and he happens to be married to one of Mona’s clients. He also might be a little unstable.

  Dark and his wife aren’t the only complicated clients on Mona’s roster, either. There’s also the Hungarian artist couple who—with her addiction to painkillers and his lingering stares—reminds Mona of troubling aspects of her childhood, and some of the underlying reasons her life had to be restarted in the first place. As she tries to get over the heartache of her affair and the older pains of her youth, Mona winds up on an eccentric, moving journey of self-discovery that takes her back to her beginnings where she attempts to unlock the key to having a sense of home in the future.