I did as instructed.
“No, harder.”
So I pinched really, really hard, and she suddenly sprang off of me as if an electric current had just shot through her body. She actually rolled off the bed and onto the floor.
In an instant, she scrambled back onto the bed and had stuffed my cock inside of her again. Her lips moved for a split second and she said, “Hey, I’m mad at you.”
“But you said to pinch hard!”
She smiled slowly. “Do it again.”
We went on this way for a good thirty minutes or so, and she seemed to want to try me out in every position she could think of, and then, because I have always had good control, I waited until I sensed she was getting a little tired from her exertions and, as I’d promised, I came inside of her.
Did she know, as we lay there side by side, that I’d hardly felt anything, except in my cock, the entire time? How could she? And how could she understand why I hadn’t felt anything if even I couldn’t understand it?
8
We had a good weekend after that, exploring the Pike Place Market and drinking a lot, going to a Greek festival where we ate a great deal of spanakopita and gyros, and lying around her apartment and reminiscing about our teachers in grammar school. We had sex three other times that three-day weekend, and each time we went for at least a half an hour, and every time she moaned and she came and I felt like there had been a sheet of Saran Wrap between us the entire time, and whether this was because I feared she might become pregnant, or for some other reason entirely, I could not say.
On Sunday morning, we went out for an early brunch at a restaurant called Flipside and I ordered Eggs Benedict with something called peasant fries—really just rough-cut potatoes with the skin still on. But the chef had done something with them to make them really delicious, and that’s what started the whole thing.
I offered Willa some of my fries and said, “I don’t know if you remember this, but there was a Jewish smoked-fish place near our place. Remember?”
“Sure, I never went there, but I can remember those incredible smells. I always wanted to try one of those lox sandwiches they sold.”
“So anyway, my buddies and I used to play football like all year round, even in the dead of winter, and then sometimes when it was really cold, we’d stop by the fish place because they also had fish and chips, and the French fries were served in these big brown paper bags, but they were so incredibly hot and greasy that the bags would turn semitranslucent. I never had any money, but my buddies would buy me one of the bags, and they’d get their own bags, and we’d shake about a ton of salt on them and then stick the bags in our coat pockets. And then all the way home from football, cause I never had any gloves either, I’d stick my frozen hand in the hot bag and eat fries and heat up my one hand, and it was like the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.”
Willa smiled one of her slow smiles.
“So you never had their fries?”
“No, my sister and I did a lot of cooking. We hardly ever went out to eat.”
“Yeah, you guys were probably as poor as we were.”
Willa shrugged. “Yeah, probably worse, actually.”
Something suddenly occurred to me. “So how did your parents afford to send your older sister—what was her name again? Beatrice?”
“Yeah. Bea, we’d call her.”
“Bea. How could they afford to send her off to summer camp?”
“Well, it was just that one summer when she was twelve.”
“And you never went?”
Willa shook her head.
“So the one summer when we were eight, and Elizabeth dies”—this was the first time I’d mentioned this name the entire three-day weekend—“was also the one time your sister goes off to summer camp, meaning that she wasn’t around to watch Elizabeth when your mother was gone? Willa, don’t you find that a little bit odd?”
She looked at me with those unblinking round eyes. “Odd? I don’t know. I honestly, genuinely never gave it any thought. Why? What’re you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems strange, is all. To be honest, Willa, I’ve been feeling strange ever since, I don’t know, I was going to say ever since I came to Seattle, but it was before that, and maybe even before Hawaii. I’ve been having strange dreams, for one thing, and then I didn’t even tell you this, but I lost my job.”
Willa gasped at this, and I felt a surge of affection for her.
“Oh my God, Charlie, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. My boss was kind of an ass. A philosophical ass, but that’s an even worse kind. Anyway, I’m here on frequent flier points and I’ve got some money saved up.”
“But you paid for all our dinners! Can I please pay you back?”
“It’s really not necessary at all. I’ll be fine. And I’ve had a wonderful time with you here.” And at that moment, I felt as if I really had.
“I did, too.”
“So, your sister. Bea. What’s her last name again?”
“Baer. Beatrice Baer.”
“How do you spell that? B-A-E-R?”
Willa shrugged. “I suppose. It’s her married name, obviously. I went to her wedding and she said something like, ‘I’m not sure I like the whole B.B. thing. But sometimes she used to go by ‘Billie’—that’s B-I-L-L-I-E, I’m sure of that spelling.”
“Sort of like you went by Nilla. Or Bunny Wabbit, I should say.”
She laughed. “Actually, I barely remember Nilla at all. But anyway, like I said, we’ve really drifted apart, and I haven’t seen her husband since the wedding, and I’ve only seen her like once or twice. So at this stage, all I know is she lives in or around St. Louis, and her last name is Baer, however it’s spelled. I guess I could scrounge around for her wedding invitation or something, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
Well, how many ways could it be spelled? A lot, as it turned out. When I got back to Chicago, summer was fading into autumn, and I spent far too much time taking long walks along the leafy sidewalks, and watching Netflix and Hulu (which made me think, every time I saw the icon on my computer, of Honolulu) and talking now and again to Bowen, one of my few remaining friends. I hadn’t worked up the courage yet to contact Diane, in part because I didn’t know if she knew yet about Frank and Alisa. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have talked to Bowen, either, except he called me unexpectedly with the news that the sale of our old agency to Glennis had indeed been consummated. I didn’t know what to make of it; hadn’t Jason been planning to take the ClickEver account away? “Sure,” Bowen told me. “As soon as ClickEver’s contract with Gilbert is up, they’re history. But I heard through the mill that Gilbert told Glennis that ClickEver’s already renewed and he somehow got them to swallow this even with Glennis’s due diligence, don’t ask me how, maybe he drew up a phony contract. So basically, Glennis is getting a pig in a poke.” I could only laugh at Gilbert’s audacity, but neither Bowen nor I could imagine Glennis, a big agency, standing for it when Jason walked away with the only part of Gilbert’s business they’d wanted.
Once in a while I’d chat with Willa by text or Facebook, which was nice, though neither one of us alluded to the fact that we’d had sex, nor to the possibility of a future visit, nor to Elizabeth, nor to anything more consequential than whether it really added something to a homemade ground-chuck burger to top it with an organic fried egg with a nice runny yolk. “Yum,” one of us would say, and that was about the depth our conversations would reach.
I also spent a lot of time job hunting, because even with unemployment my funds were running really low, and I picked up some dollars here and there at Berto’s. There was a new waitress there named Kathleen, and she seemed really nice.
But I spent even more time at my kitchen table, staring out the
window at some ash trees in the backyard and Googling and Facebook-stalking Alisa and Frank (without learning anything too startling, other than managing to confirm that Frank and Diane were still married, and that Alisa was going to a lot of networking events, and that she didn’t seem to have a new boyfriend). I called my father twice, but he didn’t answer; I couldn’t decide whether I was relieved by this, or more worried than before.
And I also spent a lot of time on Google looking for various permutations of “Bea” and “Beatrice” and “Billie” and “Baer.” With a little online research, I determined that Willa’s sister’s married name could be spelled in the following ways, among, perhaps, others:
BAER
BEAR
BARE
BAIR
BAYR
BAIRE
BAYRE
BAYHRE
BAHRE
BAYER
BEHR
BEHER
BERE
BEARE
BAYIR
BAYHR
BAYHIR
BEIRE
BEAIR
BEHRE
Combined with “Beatrice” and “Bea,” I was forced to do many hundreds of Google searches. Still, even though the name wasn’t at all in vogue when we were growing up, I came up with a dozen or so possibilities in the St. Louis area, even after I’d eliminated some because they were outside of Willa’s sister’s age range. Adding “Billie” gave me even more possibilities. If I looked long enough, I could find addresses for most of the names, but very few of the results had e-mail addresses or phone numbers, and I didn’t like or trust the online snooping services that purported to supply this information in exchange for a hefty fee. After a week or so of playing around with this, I shrugged and moved on to another time-waster.
By October, I’d picked up some freelance work writing copy for a series of investor websites, and I’d settled back into a regular weekly gig at Berto’s. The new waitress, Kathleen, hadn’t lasted, and now there was still another waitress who was rude and brusque and whom I didn’t like at all. One of the cooks told me that Kathleen had been fired because she’d complained about seeing some mealy worms in the kitchen, and that bothered me a bit. I e-mailed Diane and asked her whether or not Kathleen might have grounds for a lawsuit, but Diane never responded, and, although I know that labor attorneys are busy all of the time, that bothered me even more. Reese Nakamura, the manager at Palmyra’s, also hadn’t responded to my e-mail, and that made me brood about just how bad my performance must have been.
Glennis, as Bowen and I both predicted, was not at all happy about discovering, shortly after they’d purchased Gilbert’s firm, that there was nothing much inside it except for a big, ClickEver-shaped hole. They filed a lawsuit, and both Bowen and I were asked to give depositions on what we knew. I wasn’t concerned about it; Jason hadn’t consulted with me about taking the account away from Gilbert, and neither had the people at ClickEver—when I was in New York or before or after that time. I had no culpability and very little to tell the lawyers other than my opinion, which is to say that I thought Gilbert perfectly capable of doing what he had done. Nonetheless, it was one more item to add to my list of worries.
On October 30, late in the evening in my silent house, I was fooling around on Facebook while I was supposed to be writing some web copy when for no apparent reason I clicked over to Travelocity and, as if something else other than my conscious mind was moving my right forefinger across the keys, made reservations for a flight to St. Louis. I had barely enough space on my credit card to purchase the ticket, so I made the reservation for December 3rd, when I’d have been paid for the second third of my web project and could afford a rental car and meals.
No apparent reason. And yet, of course, “no apparent reason” did not mean the same thing as “no reason,” no, not at all. Because now, if not perhaps then, I understand “what an involuntary act signifies.”
And so it was that on December 4th, after a good night’s sleep at the St. Louis Airport Sheraton, I picked up my car from Budget and went off to visit all of the Beatrice or Billie “Baers” that I’d managed to find.
9
St. Louis in December was a bleak place, though a good bit warmer than Chicago. The downtown area, where the first of my Beas lived, was especially barren and seemed to have the whole inadvertently back-to-nature, “weeds growing through the sidewalk” aesthetic fully perfected. The first woman, last name Bayer, lived above an old-fashioned hardware store called New Market, at the corner of Laclede and Sarah Streets, and it understandably took me a lot of time to convince her to let me upstairs to her room. She was a very tall, slightly stooped woman who resembled a bit one of those Depression-era farm wives from a Walker Evans photograph, complete with the minuscule vertical furrows in the area above her upper lip that women get from smoking too much (if Alisa had been there, she would have “reminded” me, though I already knew, that the area between the upper lip and nose was called the philtrum). It took me no more than a couple of minutes to determine that she had never lived in Chicago and had no sister named Willa. But she was nice enough to offer me a cup of instant hot chocolate and asked, not unreasonably, “So this woman you’re looking for, if you don’t know which Beatrice it is, why not just call them? I mean, call all of the ones on your list that still have home phones? Or send out a bunch of e-mails? It’d at least be a start.”
“I don’t really have a solid answer for that. I guess I thought it would be better if I took all of the women who could be the one by surprise so they didn’t have time to think about whether or not they wanted to talk to me. I just don’t know if I could bear sitting around in my apartment for months waiting for these women to return my phone calls or e-mails, which they probably wouldn’t, assuming I even could come up with them.”
“Well, I understand what you’re saying, I suppose, a little bit, if it’s a sensitive matter for you. But if it is, it’s a sensitive matter for her too, whoever she happens to be. I can see you’re a decent guy, but not every woman would have opened the door to you and I almost didn’t either. So do yourself a favor and call ahead next time, why don’t you?”
The second address on my list, which turned out to be a neat little English cottage–style house in a suburb called Valley Park, was owned by a woman named Beatrice “Billie” Beher, who had a sister named Wilhelmina. I had taken the first woman’s advice and called ahead, so this Beatrice, the right one, had a pot of coffee brewing by the time I showed up at her door. She offered me a cup, and I explained that I had irritable bowel syndrome, so she suggested hot chocolate instead, and after hanging my winter coat in the closet, I accepted it gratefully, pretending I hadn’t already had one at her namesake’s apartment above the hardware store. Beatrice was taller than Willa, and a little rounder, and a lot wearier looking. She had the same round eyes, but they were pouched, and her hair had stray touches of gray that drifted helplessly above the darker strands. Her lips were much thinner than Willa’s, and they looked like they’d gotten that way from a lifetime of being pinched in disapproval. But she wore bright carmine-colored lipstick, and, unlike the first Beatrice, there were none of those vertical furrows above her lip, though I could see those coming in a few years.
After Beatrice served me my hot chocolate, she went back into the kitchen for some coffee for herself and came back looking like she was ready to get down to business, whatever business it might be. I looked at the time on my cell. After picking up the rental car, wasting my time at the first Beatrice’s house, and eating a big lunch at a Chinese place, it was now nearly 3:00 in the afternoon. Knowing, now, that I had the right Beatrice, and standing in her living room under her minatory gaze, I suddenly felt extremely nervous. My gut suddenly cramped hard, no doubt the crappy Chinese food and all the tea I’d gulped conspiring with my irritable bowel, and then there
was a second vicious kick and I realized with horror that I would have to use Beatrice’s bathroom. She graciously pointed down the hallway, and I thanked her, but to me, it felt like she was my teacher handing me a hall pass.
I opened the toilet lid and saw that there was a single sheet of translucent toilet paper with a lipstick kiss mark floating on the surface of the water; Beatrice, apparently, had applied a fresh coat of lipstick in anticipation of my arrival. I left the paper where it was instead of flushing it and did my business as quickly and as quietly as I could. Then I flushed, and after washing my hands, quickly opened the medicine cabinet to see if there was any trace of a husband—aftershave, shaving cream, men’s deodorant, condoms, prostate pills, anything. There was none. Just Monistat 7 and Prozac and Tylenol and Midol and face cream and cotton balls and Chapstick and a couple of old tubes of lipstick, one of which might very well have been the color that’d stained the tissue in the toilet.
The bathroom was decorated with antique floral prints—sweet pea and nasturtium and phlox and the like—and there was a tissue box covered with an ugly pink-and-yellow knitted holder, as if tissues were a shameful thing to display. And though there was a full roll of daisy-embossed toilet paper on the cylinder, there also was a toilet-paper holder that was covered in the same ugly knit, and for some reason I lifted the top off of the toilet-paper holder, and inside, instead of toilet paper with embossed daisies, there was a bottle of Ron Rico Rum.
By the time I’d gotten out, a good five minutes had passed, and I felt dirty and humiliated for having snooped around her bathroom. I felt like the same shamefaced eight-year-old that I had come into this house with the express purpose of shedding once and for all, and I walked very slowly back into her living room through a hallway decorated with framed family photos—Beatrice (apparently) as a child herself and as a teen; her mother, Isabelle, looking bigger and heavier than Beatrice and as fearsome as I remembered her, though to be honest it was mostly only her voice that I remembered; her father, not familiar-looking at all; a young woman with a very strange, squinched-together face; and some old photos of what appeared to be grandparents.
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 16