“Hey,” I say whacking him on his upper arm, “what would your fiancée say!”
“That I’m engaged to her but not blind.”
I whack him again, this time on his forearm, another whack forward and I can grab those fingers in my short, chubby ones, the fingernails chewed to nubs, but he turns the key in the ignition and the grabbing moment is gone.
“My fiancée,” he says, adjusting the rearview mirror and backing out smoothly, “believes in dreams.” He glances at me. “I had a dream about the two of you last night.” He exits for the interstate. “You were both playing chess.”
“Who won?”
“No one. It was fucked up.”
He switches his tape on again. There’s this one Pakistani song that sounds like Black Sabbath but it’s not. It’s a warning to copycats, Sully says, and rather tongue in cheek since its music is hardly original itself. He begins to tell me tidbits about the band but I’m not interested and inquire instead, “Why do you like demure women?”
“I like women who know they’re women,” he rocks his head to the music, “like you.”
“I’m demure?”
“What do you think?”
“Define demure.”
Another song comes on, he sings a few lyrics—he’s got a terrible voice, but he’s so confident—and says, “the opposite of bold.”
The opposite of bold. Why not? Why couldn’t it be me? Hadn’t I not knocked on Sully’s door last night? I’d gotten up twice to go to his room, but hadn’t I ended up in my own bed? Damn right, I was demure.
“How demure is your fiancée?”
“So demure I’m going to ravish her behind and she won’t know why the hell she’s not getting pregnant.”
“Sully!”
“What?”
But he’s laughing and I laugh too, because of course he’s joking, joking about demure being so important, and behinds, and all the U.S. girls, two a week if possible, he’s going to have sunny side up. But between the laughter there’s a savageness that supposes his fiancée may as well be blind and deaf, because what she can’t see or isn’t told never happened.
We’re still laughing when we leave Wyoming and enter Utah. Still laughing when flatlands turn greener and greener and the bushes turn into trees. Laughing when we stop at a gas station where we use a unisex restroom, the seat piss-splattered and stinking. Laughing as we buy cheddar sandwiches, laughing coming out to the car surrounded by seagulls, five, ten, fifteen large creatures pecking the tarmac and others swooping so close they could land on my hair.
Not laughing I rush into the car, glad the windows are up and mouth to Sully, “The Birds,” and Sully says, “they just want to be fed.” He walks amidst them boldly. I think: How modest of me to retire to the car, how demure, is it feminine the fear I felt or just unique to me?
I open the car door, gingerly step out, again laughing. How simple explanations are—it’s not a horror movie, it’s hunger or greed if I go by the way the gulls are gulping our sandwiches as if they were meant for them all along.
We are still laughing when we get to Salt Lake City. Laughing as we drive on sprawling spider-leg flyovers and guessing which exit to take. Laughing when we take a wrong one and laughing when we take the right one and get to Holiday Inn.
We park, enter the lobby, there are rooms available, we get a room, go back to the parking lot, disengage the trailer, go back inside, decide to freshen up and then find a nice French restaurant because we want meat, meat, glorious meat—we are giddy over nothing in particular and everything in general—over demure and bold and everything in between, but when we get to the room the curtains are drawn and the bed beckons. For a second I feel bad for a fiancée baking chiffon cakes and then decide that she’s not my problem, she’s his, and that I can take her place and, because I won’t be busy baking, will make sure no one takes mine—and we find ourselves naked on the bed, in it, off it, back on, and now he’s on, I’m off, my knees pinned against the rough brown carpet and when I look up for a moment in the mirror adjacent to us, I see Sully’s head cradled in his hands, eyes shut, mouth pursed, and I finish it off, swallow, swallow, he says and I do and then come up and say, “My turn” and sit up, brusquely, when he says, “No, no, I can’t do that.”
And he doesn’t. He just won’t. I cajole at first. Then discuss. Then argue. Then yell. And finally say please, and when that doesn’t work I hobble into my clothes, grab my bag, and storm out.
Clad in a towel he follows me into the elevator, seizes my arm, the elevator door shuts.
“I know it’s not fair,” he says. “I know and I’m sorry.”
“Then why did you let me?” I press LOBBY.
He shrugs.
“What if your demure virgin of a wife expects you to?”
His shoulders are on the narrower side, there’s a fat, flat red mole on the left one. His legs, I see now, are thinner than mine.
“If it comes down to this or her leaving me.”
He lets go of my arm and bangs a fist in a palm and this strong reaction over my leaving pleases me enough to return to the room.
I decide to show patience in this matter and lean over to kiss him and he rears back.
“What!”
“Umm . . . can you wash your mouth first? Please.”
“It’s you in my mouth, you can’t kiss me, but I’m expected to swallow.”
When I leave this time he doesn’t follow.
Thursday. I don’t know what Sully did for breakfast but I ate the donuts and black coffee provided in the lobby where he was waiting for me.
“Hello,” he said.
“Drop dead,” I said and again when he tried to help me hitch the trailer to the car.
We drove out of Utah with the radio on at the first audible frequency. The DJ was announcing a contest to win free Bette Midler concert tickets.
I drove upon a straight highway with a lake on both sides that increasingly became whiter and whiter until finally they were nothing but immense, vast stretches of salt. If I didn’t know I’d swear it was snow.
“I’m sorry,” Sully said. His arms were crossed, his hands tucked into his armpits. He looked tired. As if he hadn’t slept.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “You’re an asshole and now I know.”
The radio station is coming on garbled. I turn it off. Sully turns on his tape. Today it’s not sounding so hot. Fucking band copying Black Sabbath—who the hell did they think they were, third-world wannabes. I switch it off.
Sully turns toward his window and stares out and is still staring when Nevada comes upon us in the guise of huge billboards with women wearing frilly dresses, advertising casinos voted, by people whose tastes we don’t know, for having the best food around.
I’m thinking dark thoughts about love and demureness and beginning to wonder if I’m an insensitive creature—the man finds genitals dirty, not just mine but, for God’s sake his own, he couldn’t even kiss me, all he did was ask me to rinse my mouth, and what had I done? acted like dirt was no issue at all. I want to apologize, but I can’t. I just can’t get over the hump of me on my knees and he not.
But when he finally speaks hours later, “I have to go to the restroom,” I’m ready to begin anew and so I stop.
The women’s restroom at Ernie’s Country Store in Oasis, Nevada, could do with a touch-up. When Sully emerges from the men’s I ask him if there was any toilet paper in there.
He looks at me and I think it’ll be him now who won’t answer. “Plenty,” he says.
It’s a relatively big store selling food and drinks and gifts like ponchos and glass dolphin wind chimes. There are a few video poker and Pilot Peak’s slot machines by the entrance, all occupied.
Sully grabs some beef jerky. I get a Dr. Pepper. There’s a long line at the checkout counter held up by a girl of four or five. She’s hugging an armload of candy and screaming at her mother who is trying to yank the goods away from her.
; The man emerges like a charging bull. I think he’s crippled, the way he’s bouncing up and down, his thin, blond braid wafting like a wisp of smoke, then he begins to grunt, “ooo ooo aaa aaa ooo ooo.” He’s scratching his armpits like a chimp and he is a chimp, a damn fine one too, because the little girl, enthralled by the monkeying of a grown man with a light brown full beard in Birkenstocks and khaki shorts, drops her candy to copy him and the mother swoops down, picks her up, nods a thanks, and hurries out, leaving everyone behind clapping as the man takes a bow.
When we leave the Oasis, minding the black beetles doddering through the sand, Sully shakes his head.
“What an idiot,” he says getting into the car. “How could he just do that without a care about looking like a complete fool?”
“Because he’s bold and demure all at once and not pretending to be one or the other. Something some people just can’t see or get. He’s just a stupid American, I guess.”
Sully’s breathing quickens but he doesn’t say a word. In the car he turns on his tape. I don’t switch it off. Pettiness brings no one closer. Nor does it create distance.
When we get to Reno I ask for separate rooms but it is Sully who shakes his head, says “Just wait,” and as soon as we enter the suite in La Quinta Inn, tumbles me onto the queen size bed.
“Are you sure?” I say, alarmed at the ferocity. “Are you sure?”
Without an answer he dives down; he’s clueless. Twice he gags, but before I can say anything he takes a deep breath and is back at it.
I’m getting a bit sore. I wonder if helping him out would indeed be the complete opposite of demure. His fingers uselessly clutch the beige bedspread on either side of me. If this is how he performs do I want to be his wife?
I brush aside doubts because of course he’ll get better. He’s a novice and there is no such thing as a natural. But for now I faked and did a great job because he came up beaming, gasping for air, and I leaned over to kiss him, to let him know I appreciated this done for me but he shoved me aside and hurtled into the bathroom and I could hear him gargling. He gargled for at least an hour, it seemed.
When he came out we shared a cigarette. I kept smiling and he kept saying, “What? What?” and not looking me in the eye. After the smoke I spread him out on the bed, longing to tell him that I loved him. I whispered, “I thought you were only going to do that with your wife.”
I’m sitting on top of him, stretching, triumphant, my fingers locked, arms thrown back, proud, arching my lower back, breasts and belly button—one smart, continuous treble clef.
“I was practicing,” he says.
It should not sting—practice—but it does. Cheap. Trashy. Whore. For. Someone. Who. Will. Marry. A. Virgin. And. Do. Her. Backside. Until. He. Decides. To. Flip. Her. Over.
I lower my arms, slide off him, grab a cigarette as nonchalantly as possible, trying to still my shaking fingers.
“Hey,” Sully says, sitting up on one elbow, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I light it, take a puff, decide no aggravation is worth damaging my heart any further, and offer it to him.
I watch him suck on the cigarette butt, run his tongue over where my lips were a moment ago, and wish I’d just put it out.
“I’m taking a shower.”
I melt into the scalding water, which doesn’t go deep enough into my ears to scour out hearing that I am a practice session—not the real thing—not that I want to be the real thing, of course not, but what if I did, so damn it don’t point it out. I feel indignation for the land of “America.”
“Can I join?” Sully’s turning the knob but I’ve locked the door—he must think I’m a silly, sweet American to be sharing a bed but showering in private.
I call out I’m done, turn off the water, and then realize that, in my hurry to get away, I’ve forgotten to bring any clothes.
“Can you hand me my clothes?”
“Are you kidding?”
He must think I’m mad, and to keep some sanity intact I emerge bundled up in towels, open my suitcase, turn my back, let the towels fall, remember he’s a butt man, turn around, and see him smoking again, looking at me, one brow raised.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t I any good?”
“It’s not that.”
When I’m fully clothed, it comes out. “I didn’t like being ‘practiced’ upon.”
“Thought that would get you.”
“I don’t like being played mind games with, either.”
“Why are you so upset?” He ashes on the tourist guide to Reno.
In the dim lamplight his fingers look like old, discolored wooden chopsticks.
“I don’t,” I say, “like calling a fuck a fuck.”
“It’s not just . . . a fuck . . . It’s . . . we’re friends.”
I roll my eyes.
“Michelle?”
I turn away.
“Again not talking?” He shrugs, takes a last long drag of the cigarette, swishes it under the tap in the sink built into the room, then tosses it into the garbage can. The room smells of wet smoke, a maggot-infested carcass slowly burning.
In Reno and not going to a casino. I feigned sleep while Sully got ready and left. I talked to Mom and then to God. I could have called Erin or Dad but they would have gotten worried, thought I’d been raped, but how: I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
I wanted to get a separate room but there was a Bette Midler concert and apparently we were darned lucky to get any room at all.
When Sully came back I was watching a Beverly Hills 90210 rerun. He crawled in next to me—to forgive is divine—but when his fingers crept up my knee I stiffened, pushed them off, and lay down with my back to him.
What does he know about me: that I like onion dip with ruffled potato chips, that I only drink Dr. Pepper, that my mother’s dead, that my father had an affair and remarried, and that I’ve had a heart attack that cranked open my legs.
What do I know about him: nothing I care to recall.
“Do you mind if I change the channel?”
I don’t answer, and after a second he flips through and finally settles on Leno. I hear Leno taking digs at Kevin Eubanks, mocking Donald Trump, and then making a fool out of a couple in the audience on account of them dressed in identical jeans, T-shirts, and hats.
Sully’s tickled. The bed’s shaking. He’s laughing like his life depends on it: He sounds like I imagine a donkey being castrated would.
He’s laughing and I wish we’d respect ourselves, us Americans—all of us and each other—and quit thinking that pointing out our mistakes is healthy and will endear us to the world, because here is this man come for an American education and planning to stay for an American job and making room in his plans to fuck an American girl or two per week, but first confuse her about demure or not demure, confuse this naïve American who thinks she’s bold and brave and going about the world on her own terms.
He’s in deep sleep, his eyelids jerking in the way that used to scare the life out of me when I was a kid. I pack my duffel bag. I leave.
I wonder what he’ll think in the morning. Me gone, my car gone, and I hope he knows that this is me screwing him up his butt.
I think about him often those first few months and it keeps coming down to “practice, practice, practice,” but over the years as I relate my experience with a Pakistani man, he goes from being that fuck to that arrogant prick to that asshole (no pun intended), to that jerk, to that stupid guy, and to finally rest as this guy who made me feel like a slut, worse, an unpaid slut.
I push this matter into a cabinet, right into the blackest corner at the back.
Monday night preparing to watch TV.
The kettle whistles. I pour the boiling water into my favorite mug, a pink one Josh gave me saying, “I Have a Dream . . . for All Mankind . . . PMS.” The instant vanilla cappuccino froths up. It smells, as
my daughters would say, yummy. I turn on the TV to watch Ally McBeal but I cannot. I just cannot.
Tuesday afternoon in the garden.
I am loosening up soil. My beefsteak tomatoes are doing very well, but I don’t think that my Russian roses will win anything this year. Leaves have fallen into the pool again. The soil is damp and smells of life and I may as well lay me down and die.
Last Sunday morning at the BookWorm, browsing.
There’s no trick of the light upon the eye. I am not going mad or having a heart attack. I recognize him—Sully.
It is Sully.
Dark brown Sully in a white shirt, a little heavier in the jowl area, his hair thinner and much shorter.
Sully on the cover of Writers Inc.
Is he still making fun of us and being rewarded with fame and fortune?
I am an animal going on my perfectly normal way only to be run over and left there.
Many summers ago Josh and I met and married. Josh did good, and I’m a full-time Mom who shops from a farmer’s market and buys only organic, cage-free eggs, and goes to lunches at the club, hosts a huge Christmas dinner annually, and sometimes doesn’t mind wearing the same color T-shirt Josh is wearing.
Wednesday evening.
I visit Dad, taking him a big basket of home-cooked goodies. He outlived his second wife, too. I turn the key to his front door and find him watching The Philadelphia Story, chuckling away as if he’d never seen it before.
It’s the first time that whole week, as I sit on the ottoman with Dad’s feet in my lap, cutting his toenails, that I don’t feel completely useless or totally empty and sad.
I am the proud founder of two successful book clubs. I read to the blind once a month. Josh and I vacation twice annually. Once with the kids and then without. Then there’s always sex on Saturday night so as to keep ignited the eternal flame, followed by lazy Sunday mornings and BBQs with friends. I enjoy gardening, swimming, and taking Bundt, our dalmation, for walks in the park.
So why did I leave the bookstore as if my life were one very big joke?
Saturday, twenty to midnight.
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