“You’re blocking the TV,” he said.
Irene didn’t move. “She threw up in the bathroom.”
He finally looked at her.
“This morning,” she said. “And last night.” Mom had tried to keep it quiet, but the sounds were unmistakable.
“Huh,” her father said. His hand came up and scratched his jaw, four fingers held together. His hands had become shovels since the accident.
“Do you think she has the flu?” Irene asked.
“I’ll ask her about it.”
“She shouldn’t be working if she’s sick,” Irene said. “You should tell her to stay home.”
He almost smiled. If he’d let the smile come on, she would have screamed at him. “You don’t like Agent Smalls, do you?”
This was a month after Smalls had failed to lie to Irene. He was in love with her mother. The fact that she kept getting in the car with him every morning, kept working with him, was inexplicable to her. That her father let her mother do it infuriated her.
“What are you going to do about Mom?” Irene asked.
“I told you, I’ll ask her.” Irene thought, He believes that he’s really going to do this.
“But she’s okay?” Irene asked again.
“Madlock’s up to bat,” he said wearily.
Later, Irene started supper, with Buddy prompting her with the right ingredients from their mother’s recipe. It was chop suey, an ultra-bland dish as Chinese as meat loaf. When Mom came home, she didn’t try to take over as she usually did. She sat in the chair with Buddy on her lap, and told Irene that she was doing fine.
“How was work?” Irene asked. This seemed like an adult thing to say.
“Busy. And what did you do today, Mr. Buddy? Did you draw any pictures?”
They went on like that, talking about nothing as ground beef simmered in the skillet, until Irene called Frankie and her father to the dining room. Irene wasn’t about to ask her mother what was wrong. She was terrified that Mom would tell the truth.
Once they sat down, Frankie was there to distract them. At ten years old he was a motormouth, before teenagerdom turned him sullen, and aging desperation made him a yammerer again. This was the summer he found the Encyclopedia of Greek Gods and Heroes at the Bookmobile and kept asking Dad which ones the Telemachus family should worship. He was the only one who could get Dad to laugh since the accident.
“No paganism,” Dad said. “Your mom won’t stand for it.”
Mom had been moving the chopped celery and ground beef on her plate without eating any of it. When she thought no one was looking, her face went cold, as if all her energy had to be redirected elsewhere. But Irene was watching.
“Please stick to Christ and the Blessed Virgin,” Mom said. She touched her napkin to her lips, and pushed her chair back. “Excuse me a moment.” She was pale, and sweating in the heat. Buddy put his face in his hands.
Mom stood, and placed her hand on the chair back. But she put too much of her weight on it, and the chair tipped. She fell sideways, and the side of her head struck the linoleum with a sharp sound.
Everyone leaped up. Everyone except Buddy, who kept his face covered. Mom was embarrassed. “I’m all right, I’m all right, please everybody sit down, I just lost my balance.” Dad helped her out of the room, and up the stairs, to the bathroom.
He returned to the table a long time later. “Mom’s going to rest.” He looked at Irene. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Liar, she thought.
Six in the morning and Matty was blearily awake, volunteering to carry Irene’s bag down to the car and see her off to Phoenix. She knew he’d be asleep again before she left the driveway, but the effort touched her.
“I feel like I’m abandoning you to the wolves,” she said to him.
“But it’s my wolf pack,” he said. “Awhoo.”
The joking didn’t fool her. For the past two weeks, ever since he quit on Frankie, Matty had been moody and tense.
From downstairs, Dad said, “We’re twenty minutes late! Are we leaving or not?”
“Leaving!” Matty said.
“Give me a second,” Irene said.
She didn’t want to leave him. She’d already raised one set of feral children, her brothers, and knew the dangers. Was it any wonder she was so eager to find a man who’d take care of her for a change?
“So this Joshua guy,” Matty said. “You’re not moving to Arizona, right?”
“Did you pick up your room like I asked?” She’d learned to dodge questions by watching how others dodged hers. “That’s what I thought. Do it this morning, okay? And c’mere.” Before he could stop her she pulled him into a hug. “I love you, Matty. Don’t forget to—”
She pulled back, frowning.
“What?” Matty asked.
She bent, and smelled his shirt again. He tried to step back and she grabbed his collar. Sniffed hard.
“Holy shit,” she said. Matty’s eyes went wide.
“Let’s go already!” Dad called.
“Are you smoking pot?” she asked.
Matty opened his mouth. The lie died before it could break the surface.
“Currently?” he asked.
“Oh God. You’re smoking pot. You’re smoking pot. You’re doing this to me right as I’m leaving town?”
“Doing what now?” her father asked. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, ready for duty: hat on, suit jacket buttoned, cuff links shining. He would have made an excellent limo driver, if not for his petulant attitude. “He’s not to leave this room,” Irene said. “All weekend.”
“The room?” Matty exclaimed.
Dad looked at her, then at Matty, then back to her. “I’m supposed to ensure this incarceration how?”
“It’s real simple,” Irene said. “You watch him. Night and day. If he leaves the room, you beat his ass until he goes back inside.”
“That sounds an awful lot like you’re grounding me,” Dad said.
“Jesus Christ!” Irene said. “Be an authority figure for once.”
“Not really my strong suit,” Dad said. “Now come on, don’t do that.” She’d burst into tears. “We’re late already.”
“Promise me,” she said.
“All right, all right,” Dad said. “I promise. Also, Matty promises. He will not leave his room except for necessary bodily functions. Can we go now? I’m meeting someone for breakfast.”
“I promise, too,” Matty said. He knew she’d want to hear it directly from him.
“You shut up,” she said to him. She marched past him, heading for his room. He came after, emitting panicky squawks.
“Where is it?” Irene asked. “Where’d you hide it?” She kicked open his room. There were clothes littering the floor. To her newly drug-sensitized nose, the room reeked of marijuana. “Get it. Now.”
Any teenager with a normal mother would play dumb at this point. Wait her out. But Matty knew better than to lie or delay. She’d trained him from birth to accept the infallibility of her instincts. He walked to his dresser, opened the third drawer, and reached in. He handed the baggie to her without speaking. Two joints, one half smoked.
“If you miss your flight,” Dad said from the door, “don’t blame me.”
“Where’d you get this?” Irene asked.
Matty flushed. Beet red, she thought, was the color of being beaten.
“Train’s leaving the station,” Dad said. “Off we go. Toodle-oo.”
In the delay created by his grandfather, Matty found some words. “I bought it from an older kid.”
“Which older kid?” Irene said. “Where? I want names!”
“I’ll find out while you’re gone,” Dad said. “Irene. Look at me. I’ll interrogate the boy to your satisfaction.”
She looked at her watch. If she didn’t leave now, she’d miss her plane.
She howled.
—
Eight hours later, she howled again, in a different key.
“Mmhm
m,” Joshua said, from somewhere south of her navel.
Both of them wordless. That was what she needed, and what he gave her. Skin, and sweat, and the urgent action of bodies, free from the interruptions of a frontal lobe frantically turning experiences into nouns and verbs and adjectives. Labeling. She needed the pure thing, fire and not “fire,” heat and not “hot.” His body was enough for her. She loved the smell of him, the tang of his skin. She adored the damp at the back of his neck. His hard, bitable nipples. She even liked the friendly pooch of his belly. They’d spent three hours in this hotel room without exchanging more than a handful of sentences, and all she wanted now was to live the rest of her life in this primitive, nonverbal state.
But of course that was impossible. As they lay side by side in the gigantic bed, feet touching, holding hands, breathing, Irene let slip an appreciative, exhausted, “Fuck.”
“Past tense, honey,” Joshua said. “We shall fuck. We are fucking. We have fucked.”
That was the rub. She wanted him as well as his body: now, in person, not behind a screen, separated by satellites. But the only way to his mind was through a buzzing swarm of words. A more talented psychic could have reached straight in and grabbed the honey of his thoughts, but Irene had never been able to do that. Words, stupid words, were still required.
“Fucking is not an adequate name for what we just did there,” Irene said. “We need a better word. Something more festive.”
“Fucktivities?” he offered.
“Celebratio,” she said.
“Funnilingus!”
Even though they were in Tempe, only miles from his house, he’d agreed to meet in a hotel, just as they’d done every time he’d come through O’Hare. (The word “layover” never stopped amusing them.) In Chicago she hadn’t wanted to show him her house or introduce him to the family. And now that she’d traveled across the country to see him, she didn’t want to see his home, either. Not the furniture that was no doubt better than hers, nor the clothes in his closet, or the dishes in the sink. Not his daughter’s bedroom. If Irene saw how he lived, if she met his daughter, Jun, then there were only two possibilities: she would be repulsed and love him a little less, or she’d see herself in that house and want to move there. She couldn’t risk either of those outcomes, not yet. Their relationship had blossomed in the greenhouse of Hotel Land. Why complicate it?
Yet this trip was all about complications.
“Do you need to go shopping?” he asked her. “For, like, shoes. Or an outfit?”
“You think I need an outfit?”
“If you were interviewing me, you wouldn’t need any clothes at all.”
“Answer the question.”
He thought for a moment. “You did complain about your interview clothes being out of date.”
Good dodge, she thought. “I went to Talbots before I came here. In fact, I need to hang everything before it gets wrinkled.”
But still she didn’t leave the bed. She didn’t want to think about the interview. He’d set it up for her at his company, given her résumé to HR, and even made sure the interview could happen on Friday so they’d have the entire weekend after. This annoyed her, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was only trying to help. And why mention it, when it might turn out, after the hiring process had run its course, that these people wanted her on her own terms, and she wanted them? What trumped all intervening annoyances was her desperation to get out of her current life. Her father was toying with gangsters, her son was smoking pot, and she was flat broke and working a cash register for near–minimum wage.
She needed a game changer. She needed a home run. She needed the grand slam of all sports metaphors.
“I got something for you,” Joshua said. He hopped up from the bed, and she admired his muscular buttocks in motion. The man loved to be naked. He became as free as a toddler as soon as they unlocked the hotel room door, and that allowed her to shed her own self-consciousness. The natives of Hotel Land knew no shame.
He retrieved something from his roller bag, hiding it behind his back, and then held it out to her: a gift-wrapped box, a little bigger than a shirt box, tied in green ribbon. When she didn’t immediately take it, he swung his hips to waggle his penis at her, and she laughed.
It was this DNA-deep silliness that drew her to him, pushed her away, and drew her back again. She was a serious woman who’d grown up surrounded by frivolous men; by all rights she’d have no more truck with goofs, even gallant ones. Online he constantly poked at her, punned at her, and issued all-caps rants on her behalf that were directed at whoever had dared offend her that day. In person, where she had discouraged him from using words, he turned on the physical shtick.
“Nice bow,” she said. “You wrap this yourself?”
“Mr. Johnson held down the ribbon for me.”
She pulled off the shiny paper, opened the box. Inside was a portfolio, the brown leather glowing and buttery. Her initials were stitched into the front.
“You put your résumés in it,” he said. “And look: Yellow notepad! Pen loop!”
“All this, and rich, Corinthian leather,” she said. She pulled his face to hers, and was surprised to feel tears on her eyelashes. Tears, Irene? Really?
“I know you’re nervous,” he said. “But you’re going to knock ’em dead. You know that, right?”
She loved him when he thought he was telling the truth. But did she love him enough, all the other times? They’d known each other for only two months and already he wanted her to cross the continent to be with him, his Internet-order bride. He talked as if this was No Big Thing. A grand adventure. A lark. He had no idea how hard this was for her. Mostly because she hadn’t told him.
He grabbed her arm. “Come on. Up.”
“What are you doing?”
She held on to the portfolio as he pulled her to the big wall mirror. “Stand in front of me.” He placed his hand on her shoulders, put his cheek beside hers, and together they looked into the mirror.
“Repeat after me,” he said. “I, Irene Telemachus, will get this job.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“I, Irene…” he said.
“I will get this job,” she said.
“Not to me. Say it so you know it’s the truth.”
Irene looked at the naked woman in the mirror, clutching the portfolio as if it could protect her. “They’d be lucky to have me,” she said.
It was impossible to tell if Mirror Irene was lying. She gave nothing away.
Joshua slipped a hand under the portfolio and tweaked a nipple. “Damn straight.”
—
The interview started out well enough. Amber the HR rep, a twentysomething nymph constructed entirely of freckles and positive attitude, led her on a tour of the building, highlighting the open-plan office where Irene would sit if she took the job. Her desk would be surrounded by more windows than anyplace she’d ever worked except for a Burger King drive-thru. Everyone was smiling and pleasant, and Amber enthused about how friendly the working environment was and how laid-back and cool everyone was. The girl believed every word she spoke. And it was certainly true that the dress code was relaxed. Everyone wore southwestern casual: polos and khakis, sundresses, even shorts and sandals. Only upper management seemed to wear anything with buttons, and Irene felt like an eastern stiff, dour as a missionary.
The interview proper began in a large, glassed-in conference room with a surfboard-shaped table. Amber introduced her to Bob, her potential boss, and Laurie and Jon, her potential colleagues. Those two had the same job title, though Laurie said she’d been there four more years.
Bob described the consulting business, the kinds of clients they worked with, the array of experts they had on staff, the kind of person they were looking for to fit into their “family.” Jon and Laurie chimed in with details. Each of them took time to mention how they loved Joshua, Joshua was great, sharp as a tack that Joshua.
Finally it was time for the interrogation. The other
s opened their folders, pretended to study Irene’s résumé, and fell silent.
Irene resisted the urge to open the portfolio. The monogram now struck her as pompous and ridiculous.
“So, Irene,” Bob the boss said. “I’m not seeing a degree on here.” As if he’d just noticed this.
“No,” she said, “but I have experience in bookkeeping, accounting, and, well, money management.”
“Right…” Jon said. Then he winced apologetically. “But you know the job requires at least an undergraduate degree? In business, accounting, or some related field?”
“I saw that,” Irene said. “But we—I wasn’t sure if that was a hard requirement.” Joshua had encouraged her to apply anyway.
“Hmm,” Bob said.
Another long moment of silence, as if they were mourning the death of her prospects.
“How about postsecondary schooling?” Bob asked. “Perhaps courses at a business school?”
Did he think she would have left that off the résumé if she’d taken any? “I plan on continuing my education as soon as possible,” she said.
“That could be tough,” Jon said, putting on a concerned expression. “I mean, while working here full-time, and taking care of a son.”
Irene had not mentioned her son, and he wasn’t on her résumé.
“Any experience with accounting software?” Laurie asked.
“I know how to use spreadsheets,” Irene said. “The firm where I worked last used a homegrown system that was mostly paper-based.”
“Aldi’s uses a paper system?” Jon asked in mock surprise.
Fucker, Irene thought. He knew she wasn’t talking about Aldi’s.
“We have something a bit more complex,” Bob said. Jon laughed an ass-kisser’s laugh. Even Laurie chuckled.
The interview continued to spiral downward. She realized that they’d agreed to this interview only as a favor to Joshua, and now they wanted to make it abundantly clear that she didn’t belong here, would never belong here. Amber the HR rep never asked a question, but scribbled and scribbled and scribbled on her notepad like a five-year-old in a church pew.
Irene’s skin grew hot. She kept a smile nailed to her face. Held her voice steady.
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