Nicotine

by Nell Zink

  “She’s making me nervous,” Sorry says.

  “So where are we supposed to go?”

  “I’ll read some feeds,” Anka says, “and tell you if there’s some squat in Oakland that’s on your side.”

  A few exits later, Rob sees a Wal-Mart sign and pulls off the highway. He buys a cheap Coleman four-person tent, four summer-weight Coleman sleeping bags, a large air mattress, Sunny Delight, Wonder, and Jif.

  Jazz scans maps for an obscure park with a dull name. (To find a vacant campsite in summer in California, it helps to stay away from beckoning words like national and beach and tree.) She selects Anthony Chabot Regional Park and reserves a narrow space under pines with a concrete pad for the minivan. They camp.

  LATE THE NEXT MORNING, ROB drives alone back to the airport to pick up Penny. He walks to the arrivals gate and waits for her. She arrives weary.

  She throws her arms around him while he holds the handle of her carry-on. She has almost nothing to say. Several times in a row, she says “Rob.”

  After a while he pries her loose and starts her walking back to the minivan. “Talk to me,” he says. “I don’t understand what’s going on. They’re all like, ‘You’re with Penny now. Deal with it.’ Like it’s this fait accompli. So I thought you’d at least be happy. But you look about ready to cry.”

  “I’m worn-out. Let me pay for the parking. I got a job.”

  He feeds her money into the machine and tucks the card into his breast pocket. “This way,” he says.

  She stumbles along behind him toward the parking spot, dragging her little suitcase. “They’re not stupid. It’s a fact that you should be with me. It’s so obvious.”

  “That’s what I hear,” he says. He opens the side door of the minivan, puts her luggage inside, and places his arm around her waist.

  “Just stop it!”

  He squeezes her. She gasps, and he asks, “Does that hurt? Do you have a bruised rib or something?”

  “No,” she says weakly. “It’s just that when you touch me, I can’t breathe. Let me sit down. I feel dizzy.”

  She sits down in the open side door of the minivan, breathing slowly. When he touches her shoulder, she shudders. She takes his arm and draws it toward her until he sits down next to her. She buries her head in his armpit and starts to sob.

  “You’ve been under a lot of stress,” he says.

  To which she says, “Rob!”

  He kisses her gently, opening his mouth just a little, and she shakes like a patient in a fever ward.

  So this is bondage, he thinks. A woman hog-tied by the fear I might not want her. Quivering protoplasm before she even got off the plane! He regards her helpless body, sees her eyes overflow with damp, unabashed sorrow (a touching spectacle framed in perfect skin and thick, glossy hair), hears her shameless crying, and the whole thing begins to take on a very definite shape in his mind. It’s a shape he knows not from experience but from instinct: the shape of something that wants to get fucked, like, right now.

  It’s not Penny exactly. It’s her body. Penny was made for higher purposes. That’s why she fights it. She’s forced into the position of being the sufficient and necessary condition for the fuckable thing.

  “Listen up,” he says. “You know I want your body.”

  The announcement makes her inhale sharply and stiffen like a possum playing dead. Then she vibrates like a scared bat, as if her heart is beating three hundred times a minute. “Scooch over,” he says, compelled to take the initiative. He scoots backward on his butt, pushes the luggage aside, pulls her onto his lap, and leans forward to slide the door shut. After a glance around the cluttered floor of the vehicle, he wedges them both into the narrow space between the front seats and the bench seat. He sits back on the hard, uneven vinyl, wishing he had a mat or a sleeping bag. He pulls her toward him and kisses her mouth, which has never seemed so defenseless and soft. He yanks down her leggings with both hands, peels them off her with his toes, and realizes he has hit a wall.

  He whispers, “I think there might be condoms in the glove compartment.”

  She chirps, “Okay!”

  As he unbuttons his jeans, she turns and crawls into the passenger seat to extract a roll of brightly colored lubricated condoms—the kind AIDS activists give away—from among the parking tickets. Without a word, she unrolls one over him and proceeds to have sex with him as though he were a perfectly normal guy. Clearly she is neither perturbed by his size nor hankering to pronounce some awful verdict. Instead she moans with strange joy. She makes animal sounds.

  He whispers, “I wish Sorry could hear you.” Instead of laughing, she shakes her head so that her hair hides her face. She cries out. She comes. He can feel it distinctly, even through the condom, and as he takes a more active role (she gets clumsier and clumsier, ceding ever more control, so he has no choice) he feels a kind of pressure and resistance he has never felt before. With a moment’s effort he flips their configuration over. He attains physical incoherence and bangs his head against the interior paneling and the back of the driver’s seat. He puts his mouth on hers for orientation and to quiet them both down. He grabs her ass with both hands. He comes.

  “My God, what was that,” he says, panting wide-eyed.

  “I love you so much,” she says, hugging him with her arms and legs and kissing his face all over. “I’ve been so totally crazy about you for so long!”

  “I mean the sex. I figured Jazz was—I shouldn’t say this. It’s different with you.”

  “Didn’t you ever read the Kama Sutra? You’re a hare man, and the hare man is supposed to be with the deer woman. That’s all.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Matt’s my brother. I’ve seen him naked, and I did the math. Like, if Jazz can even sleep with him, then, you know. She’s above average.”

  “I see,” Rob says. He slips off the condom and ties a knot in it. “Should I save this as a souvenir? I’m thirty, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.” He puts on his pants, walks barefoot through the parking garage to the trash can next to the elevators, and throws it away.

  “What were you talking about just now?” Penny asks on his return.

  “I never had sex with a condom before.”

  “You what? With Jazz?!”

  “Hey, hey. Calm down! She’d never had sex without one, so it evens out. Trust me. I’m clean as a whistle.”

  “Right. Glad I got the HPV vaccine.”

  “Your virgin act is not cutting it. And Jazz would not lie to me about being disease-free. You slept with her yourself.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry.”

  “She’s going to say let’s have a threesome, so you better start thinking about your answer.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “My polymorphous perversity just hit an all-time low. But if you want her kissing you or whatever—I mean, if she stays out of the way—”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I don’t need anything or anybody but you,” he says. “Your body is all that and more.” He tucks a hand under her knee and kisses her inner thigh. “Maybe if your family was Latino, you’d know how beautiful you are? Maybe it warped you growing up with a bunch of white dudes calling you ‘koala-face’?”

  She points out that the alleged likeness involves her having inherited her father’s wide-bridged nose.

  THAT AFTERNOON THEY BED DOWN in the tent, leaving the minivan to Jazz and Sorry. But five acts of intercourse in four hours seem like enough, and around six Penny gives in to the urge to converse—as a way of keeping the intimacy going, not breaking the spell, not taking a nap. She starts by requesting immunity from prosecution. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure,” Rob says.

  She tells him how Norm died.

  She shares a few narrative highlights—cerebral stuff, bitter ironies, cruel contradictions—but mostly it’s images and feelings. Images of suffering, feelings of failure. She says, “Adolf Hitler didn’t deserve to die tha
t way. Dad was so good and smart. I was such a coward not to help him.”

  “There was nothing you could have done legally, and The People versus Penny Baker is not a fair fight. Nobody can ask you to lay down your life. Especially not your dad.”

  She sniffles.

  “Maybe it had a happy ending anyway,” he adds. “You know how when you’re really sick and get better, you get this ecstasy? People looking at you can’t see it. All they see is damage, and you’re in the eye of the hurricane.”

  She blinks. “Maybe,” she says. The image of death as a hurricane works a little too well with the image of the soul as a small bird.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I saw his soul.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t really see it. I just knew it was there. He died, and then—don’t laugh at me—his soul flew out the window.”

  “Souls are nomads. They see that hurricane coming, they hit the road.”

  “I know you’re kidding, but I watched his life leave the room. Life can’t die, so it must go somewhere. It all follows. It can’t squat a new body unless you believe in reincarnation, so where does it go? The great refugee camp in the sky, where they’ll let you in even though you have nothing left, not even a body. I don’t believe in it any more than you do.”

  “I wish you’d told me this stuff a long time ago.”

  “I didn’t want your understanding and sympathy. I wanted what we have now.”

  “Well, maybe we would have gotten closer faster, if I’d had any clue what was going on.”

  She shakes her head. “I think it’s an interesting coincidence that you fell in love with me while we were fucking.”

  “True,” he says. “I feel this incredible inner peace since that happened. And now we’re having this conversation. It’s so stupid. Not you. Me.”

  SORRY IS NOT SURPRISED WHEN Jazz declares her intention of going out that night. It must be difficult, Sorry feels, to see the love of your life usurped by a rival claimant—especially if you’re Jazz, used to getting exactly what you want from men (perhaps because you consistently want the thing they most want to give you), and your rival is Penny, who wants so much from men that it’s astounding they give her the time of day.

  Jazz calls a yellow cab from the entrance to the campground. It’s a long way into San Francisco, but Matt says he’ll wait in front of the restaurant to pay off the driver.

  And there he is. Standing at the curb, in close-fitting chinos and a white shirt, looking very well. He opens the door and Jazz steps out, in a sort of long T-shirt made of sheer turquoise rayon tricot over a crocheted bikini that’s the closest thing she owns to a bra and granny panties. “Skip dinner?” he suggests as the cab drives off. “I got a suite.”

  “I’m here for the food,” she says. “That’s why I wore this roomy dress. I want prime rib, like a twelve-ounce steak. We’ve been living on Grape-Nuts.”

  “You’ll need to earn that kind of treatment,” he says. They walk in, straight to the elevator, ignoring the reception desk and the restaurant.

  To Jazz, his voice alone has a certain momentum. She feels light as a meringue and slippery between her legs with that sweet-tasting transparent stuff, and when he goes to press against her in the elevator she says, “Careful of my dress.” He pulls the hemline up to her waist and caresses the bones of her hips. “Is that a camera?” she asks, looking up. He drops the dress. When the elevator door dings, he leads her down a long hallway to his corner suite. “I’m starting to realize we should have talked on the phone,” she says. “This is looking an awful lot like sex.”

  “What about?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”

  “About how much I want to fuck you, probably.”

  “Be a big boy,” she says. “There was something you wanted to say. Out with it.”

  “I think I told you I love you.”

  “Not that.”

  “You’ve put on weight.”

  “I’ve been eating with Rob and Sorry.”

  “No talking,” he says. He pulls her dress off over her head and lets it fall on the floor. He cradles her shoulders in his hands, fingertips pulling softly on the straps of her bathing suit. “I have missed you. I have missed you so much.”

  “I thought this was our good-bye dinner. So I brought my gun, but no condoms.”

  “I don’t have any either. I don’t care. I want you. It’s all I can think about. Being inside you. Just you and me. And maybe somebody new, somebody who’s both of us. You know what I mean.”

  “That’s it,” she says. She stoops to retrieve her dress from the floor. “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”

  “Come on,” he says, seizing her around the waist. “Let’s be happy.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” she says. “I love you. Of course I want your baby. I want to be happy like that. But I was not cut out to be happy like that. I will never be happy like that. I wanted to fuck you more than anything in the universe, after we talked and had dinner and whatever, and now I can’t.”

  “I’ll pull out and come in your ass—your mouth? Anywhere you want?”

  “Can I get your permission to enforce that with the gun?” She puts on the dress, pulling it all the way down to her knees. She shakes out her hair, combing it with her fingers. “Forget it. This is love. It’s the closest thing to love between a man and a woman the world has ever seen, and any baby who survived it would be a pretty fucking lucky baby.”

  “I swear, I’ll pull out.”

  “Listen. You’re my bête noire. My destiny. But I’m not ready to meet my fate, not yet. I don’t want to lose myself and live for you or anybody else. Not in this lifetime. Maybe when I’m so old I don’t mind. When I’m a wisp of a little old lady, all alone and poor, I’ll go there. That’s the deal I’ve made with myself. I will not give myself up. I fought too hard to get this far alone!”

  “What?” He squints as his head wobbles in bewilderment. “What are you saying? Do you need me to force you?”

  “No. No! If it were just me, sure, but a baby? I’d be mixing up somebody else in this sick thing. Somebody who has a right to be happy. I’m not a happy person, but I’m under no obligation to give a fuck. It’s just me!”

  Matt’s emotions are very exasperated—exasperated desire and exasperated fear, linked by exasperation into incoherent helplessness. “I don’t have to see either of you,” he insists. “I’ll pay for everything, and you can live by yourself, on top of your old house. You know I’m making a really nice apartment up there, on the roof where you used to live, but with fireplaces and climate control. You’ll be so happy, with all your friends. I would help you. It would be easy.” He pauses, then adds, “I’m so sorry about what I did to your friends. But you couldn’t really expect me to get along with Rob, under the circumstances. I’ll make it up to you.”

  “How would that help anything? I want to fuck you, but you don’t want to fuck me.” He makes a gesture of protest, but she goes on. “If you wanted that, you wouldn’t want me pregnant and a mom. Right now you don’t even know it. It’s hormones, because you’ve never been a father, and you’re getting old. It’s your biological clock. I’m twenty-four, Matt.”

  He goes motionless and quiet.

  “We can fuck,” she says firmly, “with birth control. We’ll get condoms from the concierge.”

  He sits down on the bed. All his strongest desires conflict with his desire to be liked by Jazz. He could grab her right now and fuck a baby into her, and if she didn’t abort it, she would love it very much whether she liked it or not, and it would love him the way he loved his parents, from a respectful distance. But she still would not be the love he wants, because (as he knows) it wasn’t him she was talking about. It was herself. They are too similar. He knows what he would say to a woman who offered him a baby to raise. He would say, “Tell it to your biological clock.”

  He feels the helpless, unpleasant sens
ation of being trapped in a conversation with an equal. Sex never makes him feel helpless. Love appears to consist of helplessness and nothing else.

  Maybe she’s right, he thinks. Maybe love is a bad idea. He tries to imagine casual sex with her, and can’t.

  Eyes shut, he hears the door close. She is gone.

  He jumps up to run after her. Then he sits down again.

  “I SAW MATT LAST NIGHT,” Jazz tells Rob as he stands at the campground deep sink to do some hand laundry. “We didn’t fuck.”

  “What do you mean, ‘saw’?”

  “Got together. You were busy.”

  “I wasn’t that busy. I would have found the time to throw your phone on the fire and tie you to a tree.” She is silent. “Let’s be friends. Talk to me.” He lathers up his socks for the second time, paying extra attention to the grubby heels.

  “He’s in love, and he thinks it’s forever. It’s like he’s seventeen. He wants my baby.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “Leave the country with no forwarding address.”

  “That’s a little harsh,” Rob says. “I mean on me.”

  “Nothing is forever, except babies.”

  “Let me see your phone a second.” She hands it over. He bangs it against the stucco wall of the restroom building, cracking the glass of the display. He drops it in the water. It lies forlornly at the bottom of the sink, emitting bubbles.

  “Breaking my phone won’t make my accounts go away,” Jazz says. “He can still get in touch with me.”

  “I miss modern life,” Rob says. “Remember when you could leave Dodge after high noon and the sheriff wasn’t in your fucking pocket? You’re going to be fielding booty calls from that fucker forever!”

  “Rob. Rob. I left him sitting crying in a hotel room. I didn’t fuck him. You’re the last man I ever fucked. I love you. I don’t want to be anybody’s baby-mama. Rob!” Down in the water, the phone lights up for a fraction of a second, then dies. They both glance at it, and Jazz says, “It’s still working?” She picks it up and shakes it, and water flies out. She taps the display a few times. “Oh well. I guess it’s really broken.”