He called her the next day. The band had suddenly gotten an out-of-town gig, which meant he would be leaving town for a few days, starting tomorrow. “I know we’re having a moratorium,” he said. “But I can’t go that long without seeing you, and also we have this big cool car that we rented for the trip. We could go for a fun drive in it.”
She told him she wanted to see him but that she didn’t want to have sex. “I just can’t do it now,” she said. “I feel too sensitive. Can you respect that?”
He paused, as if savoring an elaborate and slightly absurd delicacy. In a soft voice, he said yes.
“Are you sure? Because I don’t want to have some ridiculous scene.”
He swallowed voluptuously. “I’m sure.”
She noticed his condescension, but it felt to her like another version of his expression, caught between malice and unspeakable tenderness. It felt secret and sweet.
When he got to her house, they cuddled on the couch. They told each other about their lives. Valerie talked about leaving home when she was sixteen. She told him about panhandling and selling jewelry on the street. She described her shiftless older boyfriend, whom she had supported by working as a waitress.
“It sounds rough,” ventured Michael.
“Mostly not,” she said. “Mostly it was banal. And sometimes it was fun. I would do stuff like go to Las Vegas for a weekend with some guy I’d just met. Even ordinary stuff was fun. Like when I got a job painting and lettering signs at a circus in Montreal. I thought that was really cool.”
“That is cool,” he said admiringly.
“Some bad stuff happened, though. I was raped by this asshole once.”
Michael sat up and smiled. “Yeah? What happened? What did he make you do?”
Valerie felt startled, then she realized she wasn’t really startled at all. “Are you reacting that way because I had sort of a smiley look on my face when I told you I was raped?”
His smile snagged and lapsed.
“That smile was left over on my face because I’d just told you this other nice stuff. I wasn’t smiling about being raped.”
He looked down. “I don’t know why I did that. I know rape is horrible, but it’s the horribleness that gives it a charge. It’s like the fantasy thing. Like, right now, some guy is making some girl do something really gross. It’s weird.”
“Yeah, but I’m not some girl.” She spoke gently, not angrily; she felt very aware that she was older than he was. “It wasn’t a fantasy. I tried to fight him, and he punched me in the face. It was really bad.”
He put his hand on her forearm. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Sometimes I tell people really awful stuff like it’s a joke. I don’t know why. I’m trying not to do that anymore.”
He put his arms around her. “I’m sorry anything bad ever happened to you,” he said. His embrace was soft, but muscular underneath. She lay in it, feeling the immense relief she might feel on finally explaining herself to someone who for years had refused to hear her out. She felt upheld by his youth and strength. She felt this even though she knew Michael still didn’t quite grasp that she wasn’t talking about a fantasy. Even though, really, she hardly knew him at all.
He wished he could roll her up in a ball and hold her. When she’d said, “I’m trying not to do that anymore,” it had provoked a storm of monstrous pathos in him. It was the kind of pathos that felt so good he wanted to make it go on forever. It shocked him that someone had hit her, but following close upon the shock was an overwhelming tenderness that made the shock seem like an insignificant segue. He remembered fucking her while she was crying, her legs all the way open; it made him think of eating sweet vanilla pudding while he watched TV.
“Let’s go for our drive,” he said.
He drove them to the Marina and across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. The fog was heavy and wet.
“Right after I moved here, I had a dream,” said Valerie. “I dreamed me and my high school boyfriend were lying on a beach in California. The sun was so bright and the sand was like a giant, breathing body. In the dream it was like, finally, I was getting to do the stuff that everybody else did—I was lying on the beach with my boyfriend!”
Distractedly he patted her leg. He was staring helplessly at the inside of his head, at images of Valerie, openmouthed and victimized, her face tear-stained and humiliated and very dear. He thought of the sounds she sometimes made when he was way inside her, deep sounds that came out ragged, like they’d been torn off. On a whim, he took a Mill Valley exit. Without the light from the freeway traffic, it was suddenly very dark.
“Why’re you going to Mill Valley?” asked Valerie.
“No reason. Just driving.”
“Oh. Anyway, when I woke up I thought at first I’d dreamed about an actual memory, that me and my boyfriend had gone to a beach. Then I realized there weren’t any beaches where we grew up; it was just a dream. I felt somehow cheated.”
He didn’t say anything. He was driving up a warren of narrow streets wound around a steep hill. The glimpses of people puttering about behind their windows was soothing to her.
“It probably sounds strange that I felt cheated,” she said. “I think it’s because since I left home so early, I didn’t really have boyfriends my own age. They were always a lot older, and I didn’t go on normal dates or to proms or anything.”
“That’s kind of sad,” he said.
“I don’t know. I thought proms seemed pretty horrible, actually.”
Maybe, he thought, he could bend her over the seat back and pull her pants down. Maybe she would make a lot of those noises. Maybe she would cry again. If she did, he would hold her against his chest and stroke her hair until she breathed gently and evenly. He turned abruptly down a dirt road. She thought it was a very long driveway at first, but then she saw there was no house at the end of it. “Michael,” she said, “what are you doing?”
He pulled over and stopped the car. He turned sideways in his seat and leaned against the car door.
He didn’t answer her. She remembered the way he had held her and said he was sorry anything bad had ever happened to her. In the dark, she couldn’t see his face. “Michael?” she said.
He didn’t answer her.
“Michael?”
She was suddenly so scared she couldn’t think. She felt her weakness like a burst of nausea; if he wanted to hurt her, there was nothing she could do about it. Indignation rose up against her helplessness, but it was like the voice of a child crying, “But you said! But you said!” over and over again. Her fear took on the flat urgency of a trance. She put her hand in her purse so that she could find the heavy chain necklace she had been meaning to take to the jewelers. She found it and wrapped it around her fist, then carefully withdrew her fist from the bag. He leaned forward. She turned to face him and retracted her fist. Her voice came out in a hoarse growl. “Don’t come near me,” she said.
His retreat was like a sudden frown. “Valerie?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t come closer.”
“Valerie?” There was a short, vibrant silence. “Are you afraid of me?”
His puzzled voice cracked her trance. She relaxed her fist and put the chain back in her purse. “Start the car,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“Wait a minute—”
“Start the fucking car. I mean now.”
He muttered as he pulled out of the dirt road and negotiated the dainty lanes. It dawned on him that if he took his hands off the steering wheel they’d be shaking. “Valerie,” he said, “are you really mad at me?”
She didn’t answer. He glanced at her. Her profile had the bristling intensity of a trapped rodent. “Shit,” he said. “This is really bad.”
“You must be a moron,” she said flatly. “For three weeks I’ve been doing it with a moron.”
He smarted as though from a blow across the bridge of his nose. “How could you say that to me?�
� he said.
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to go home.”
The rest of the drive was an abstract of misery. When he pulled up in front of her apartment they sat in private misery for some moments. “I don’t think I can see you anymore,” said Valerie finally. “This was just too awful.”
“Too awful? What was too awful? Nothing happened! I was only playing, I wasn’t going to do anything if you didn’t want it.”
“You already did something I didn’t want.” She shoved open the car door and stepped out onto the pavement, then spun back on the first step. “What do you think? You spoiled, stupid, ignorant little shit! I tell you I don’t want to fuck, I tell you about being raped, and you set up a rape fantasy? What’s wrong with you!”
“I was just doing what we do all the time.”
“It’s not the same!” But his quiet, injured voice had interrupted her anger, and besides, what he said was true. She sat in the car and stared at the sidewalk. She abandoned her anger. “You were disrespecting me,” she said quietly. “For real.”
Her small voice and her words hinted at the wonderful pathos that had so gripped him. Again it made him want to roll her in a ball, to see her cry, to split her open, to comfort her. He tried to think of how he might explain this to her. He couldn’t. “It wasn’t disrespect,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
Her silence was like a tiny, pale feather falling a long distance. For a moment he thought she might put her head on his shoulder. If she did that, everything would be okay.
“The problem is, you’re a kid,” she said. “Everything’s like TV to you. You don’t really know anything.”
He looked out the window. His cheeks burned. “Valerie,” he said. “If you don’t say something nice to me, this is going to be really bad.”
“Something nice to you?”
“Please. Say something nice to me.”
His plaintive tone pierced her. Without the anger, her emotions were like blunt, blind, vying shapes, each blotting the others out before she could tell what they were. The fragmentation dazed her, almost hurt her.
“I love you,” she said.
He sat up and drew back. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t know.” Her bewilderment increased. “I think I do.”
“You love me?” His voice was astounded and fluting. “You love me!” He opened the car door, bounded out, and jumped up and down in the street, yelling.
It’s true, she thought, astounded herself. It’s true.
He flew around the car, into the shelter of her open door, and knelt, his arms about her waist. “I love you too,” he said. “And I’m going to respect you. I’ll sleep here all night and I won’t try to do anything.”
“Sleep here?” She took his face in her hands and rubbed her nose the length of his. “No way. You’ll be after me all night, and I’ll never get any sleep.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said. “If I leave, it’ll ruin everything. I’m going away for a week tomorrow, and I’ve got to stay with you.”
“See, you’re doing it again. You’re not respecting my wishes.” But her voice was full of shy delight.
“I’ll sleep on the floor!” he said. “In the living room!”
“That’s ridiculous. It would be much too uncomfortable.” She paused. “You can sleep on the bed, but you have to wear your clothes and stay outside the blankets.” She felt like a little girl with a rhinestone tiara on her head. She waved her plastic scepter. “You have to promise.”
All night, he shivered against her warm, blanketed body. In the light from the window, her sleeping face appeared concentrated and intent. Once she twitched, and the tiny, urgent movement seemed the result of a fierce, private effort she was making deep in her head. He turned away from her so that he could look out the window, his back firmly against hers. His thoughts went forward, then backward, then he fanned them out laterally: a phone call to his mother, a quarrel with the drummer, a newscast about a raped and murdered teenage baby-sitter, the kitchen of that dump in Seattle where he ate hot french fries out of the fryer basket and listened to the cook talk shit about some girl. He imagined scooping up sleeping Valerie and placing her in the middle of his thoughts. He imagined her waking in the thriving garden of his thoughts, confused and possibly frightened. Then he imagined her realizing what he’d done; she put her hands on her hips, she tapped her foot, she fixed him with a fussing eye.
He was cold to the bone by now, but he didn’t move even to shut the window. He was respecting her.
“Michael?” She turned and gently groped his back. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking so—oh, you’re cold! Come under the blanket!”
“It’s all right. I said I would stay outside the blanket, and I will.”
“Don’t be silly. Come under the covers.” She lifted the blankets, greeting him with her warmth and smell. “Come on. You’ll get sick or something.”
He hesitated, drawing out the moment.
“Don’t you . . .” She faltered. “Don’t you want to?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want to.” And he did.
Comfort
Daniel sat in his San Francisco apartment on a big, mushy pillow, with his black rubber drum pad on his lap. He stretched his legs and pushed the coffee table on which he and Jacquie had just eaten dinner into the middle of the room at a cockeyed angle. Jacquie sat on the bed, coiled in a blanket, holding an Edith Wharton novel in her small, stubby hands. As she read, her gold-brown eyes moved intently back and forth, giving off a spark of private frisson. Half hidden under her lowered lids, the movement of her eyes reminded him of an animal glimpsed as it slips quietly through the underbrush. With loose-wristed strokes, Daniel cheerfully swatted his pad. The phone rang.
“Probably somebody we don’t want to talk to,” said Jacquie.
Daniel rolled his eyes. It was his brother, Albert, calling from Iowa.
“Dan,” said Albert. “Something bad happened.”
“What?”
“Mom had a car crash. She’s alive, but she’s really hurt. She’s broken her neck and smashed her pelvis.” He paused, breathing heavily. “And she also broke some ribs.”
Daniel made an involuntary noise. Jacquie’s quick glance was almost sharp. The drumsticks fell to the floor and rolled.
The evening became a terrible melding of misery and sensual tenderness. Jacquie held his head against her breast and stroked him as pain moved through him in slow, even waves. At moments, the pain seemed to blur with the contours of Jacquie’s body, to align itself with her warmth and care, as if by soothing it, she actually made it greater. He stared at their dirty dinner plates, shocked by their brute ordinariness: tiny bones, hunks of torn-up lemon, mashed fish skin.
Late at night, they lay without sleeping on their narrow bed. Jacquie held him from behind, one strong arm firmly around his chest, her dry feet pressed against his. She spoke against his back, her voice muffled, her breath a warm puff against his skin. “Your family gets in a lot of car crashes, don’t they?”
He opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “So do a lot of people. There’s car crashes all over America all the time.”
“Well, there was the one with the whole family in it when you were a little kid, and then the one when your father drove into the fence, and then the one where your mother got hit in the parking lot, and now this. That seems like a lot for one family.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not trying to say anything. I just noticed it.”
“My mother’s lying in the hospital with half her bones broken, and you just noticed that.”
Jacquie took her arm from him and turned the other way.
There is something wrong with her, he thought. They had been together for two years; this was not the first time he had had this thought.
He flew to Iowa the following day.
He had not been in his brother’s suburban house before; he found it bland and characterless, and he was glad
of that. A more decoratively expressive home might’ve waked his sensibility and made him feel worse.
Albert was a pharmacist. Together, he and his wife, Rose, reminded Daniel of two colored building blocks made to illustrate solidity, squareness, and rectangularity for children, the kind of blocks that, when picked up, turn out to be practically weightless and not solid at all. Apart from Rose, Albert became heavier, more sullen. His problems expressed themselves in his heavy brows. His hands took on a morose, defensive character. The brothers were eight years apart. They had never been close, and they had become less close in adulthood.
On the night of Daniel’s arrival, they sat at the kitchen table, eating Mexican takeout and trying to comfort each other. Their words were difficult and, on the surface, not especially comforting. Their halting conversation would’ve been small talk but for the emotional current moving under it, sometimes rising to fill whole strings of words with mysterious feeling, then subsiding to a barely felt pulse. Rose sat forward attentively, as though she were silently monitoring the unspoken current. When they got up from the table, Albert hugged Daniel as though part of him wanted the embrace and part of him wanted to get it over with. When his face came away, Daniel saw Albert’s left eye staring over Daniel’s shoulder, wild, bright, and oddly furtive.
All night, he lay awake in his hard little guest bed, thinking about his mother. He remembered her serving dishes of yogurt and cut fruit for dessert. He remembered her sitting with her feet up on the couch, painting her false fingernails pink. She was wearing her night-gown, and he could see that her knees were rough and that veins had flowered on her legs. Her hair was a manic knot of curls. She looked at her watch often. He could see all these images, but he could not feel them. He turned them this way and that, trying to feel his mother. She used to sit across the table from their father, working her jaws stiffly and minutely. “Daniel,” she said. “I want you to ask your father where he was last night.” For five years preceding the divorce, his mother and father had addressed each other primarily through their children, although when things got truly ugly, his mother would drop the act and scream at her husband straight on. Daniel brought his hard guest pillow to his side and hugged it. “Mother,” he said.
Because They Wanted To: Stories Page 11