Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  ‘I’m five thousand per cent done with this,’ she said, but she closed her eyes. She tilted her head to mine and began to kiss me.

  ‘I’m only going to the store,’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’ She drew her knees to her chest. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so on edge. I don’t know what’s happening. I’m crawling.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I kissed her forehead. I picked up my keys. I put on my coat. My heartbeat was like Kalashnikov fire.

  He’d arrived first. He was sitting with his lights off. I crossed the lot, slid into the suicide seat.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ I said.

  ‘I never asked you to.’

  The grey digits on his dash were blinking. I’d already been too long. I’d have to invent a shopping list, some reason I’d had to go to the next town. I started to unbutton my shirt, quickly; I reached over and fumbled with his belt, drew his dick out of his jeans, fit him into me. I wanted to be bored with it all but I wasn’t.

  At home Lux was out of the bath. She sat on the fold-out sofa watching TV while I put the groceries away, the ones we didn’t need. I tossed her a packet of Tylenol. She’d taken her hair out of the plait.

  ‘Are we getting like Jerry and Elaine?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I threw up my hands, stuck out my neck, squinted a little. ‘What’s the deal with airplane food?’

  She didn’t laugh. ‘You had to leave because you couldn’t be in the same room as me,’ she said.

  ‘You’re being ridiculous. I went to the store.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Ever since we moved here I feel like I’m annoying you. I feel like you’re outgrowing me.’

  ‘I’m not outgrowing you. But I can’t keep having this conversation over and over again. When have I not been on your side? When have we not done exactly what you needed?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re a goddamn saint, Joanna. There never was a woman as good as you.’ She dropped her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what more you want me to say.’

  ‘I wanted to move here because I thought it’d be easier to have it…just us. I wanted us to make a cocoon here. And it still feels like there’s so much space. And you wouldn’t understand that.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’

  I sat beside her. Her hands were in her lap, palms-up, as if she were ready to receive communion. There was a pretty bruise on her forearm.

  ‘I worship you,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you. You’re speaking like me.’

  ‘I want to swim in your blood.’ It felt good to say it out loud, since I’d been rolling the words around in my skull for months. She looked at me like I was crazy. Her hooded sweatshirt was unzipped and slipping from her shoulders. She was f lushed. I kissed her mouth. I kissed the hollows of her collarbone. ‘What’s the matter with you,’ she kept saying, but her face was turned up to the ceiling. I thought about how we fit together but sometimes things were hard work. I thought about how giving up was giving in. I slid my hands under her pyjama shorts. She was warm. I thought about how, when we fucked these days, it was like a stream of tiny confessions. The springs of the old fold-out sofa were begging us and still we were moving over each other in a fever dream, now me supine and her above me, her thighs framing my face, her taste in my mouth. I thought about Perry, the way we fucked in our machine-gun, 7/8 time signature.

  ‘I want it to always be like this,’ she said. We knew how to love each other the right way. I thought, Nothing is worth this.

  After class on Friday I asked a bunch of kids to stay behind. I kept Perry the longest. His flunking another quiz was of no interest to either of us. I said, ‘I want us to stop.’

  The light was grey. Someone had left behind a Grizzlies sweatshirt. It was puddled beneath a desk in the front row. I couldn’t remember who’d been sitting there.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve been feeling like you were going to say it for a long time.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t been comfortable with this for a long time. It was a bad idea for a lot of reasons. And I’m sorry I took it so far. I was the adult. I should have stopped it.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell anyone,’ he said, and laughed. ‘You don’t have to make me feel better.’ But there was something brittle in the way that he said it. I felt new about him, somehow maternal and sad.

  Still, though, I felt good when I drove home. Clean blood. I was certain of things. Lux told me about an article she’d read on memorial architecture. We cooked a complicated sort of a meal together, used the polenta we’d bought last time we were in Fresno. We had time for all that.

  The phone rang when we were eating. It was Perry.

  ‘I know I can’t come over,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to meet someplace else.’

  ‘You’re mistaken. You have the wrong number.’

  ‘I just thought I’d ask,’ he said, ‘if you wanted to meet someplace else.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said.

  There was a noise like a car starting up on his end. Boys’ voices. Perry was speaking close to the receiver. His consonants made a soft thud in my ear.

  In the other room, Lux was watching TV.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I know I’ve made this difficult for you. I’m sorry about it.’

  He said nothing. The noise on his end had died. I wondered if he’d gone someplace else. Then he said, ‘We always did exactly what you wanted, Joanna.’

  It was the first time he’d ever called me by my name.

  I cleared my throat. ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘This is a different number to the one you want.’

  I went back to the fold-out, where I’d left my plate on a cushion beside Lux. We were watching something about the wirewalkers who crossed Niagara Falls. It was on the Nature Channel but I couldn’t see why. There was nothing natural about it.

  The phone rang again. Lux looked at me. I set down my plate and went to the kitchen to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘You okay? Christ, that was like gunfire.’

  ‘Oh, Jeff,’ I said. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘Yes,’ my brother said in a strange voice. I thought he was going to tell me some bad news then, but he only started to laugh. All the blood rushed to my ankles.

  ‘You missed Maria,’ Lux said when I sat down again. I felt as if I were looking at things underwater. ‘Maria Spelterini,’ she said. ‘The first and only woman to cross the gorge on a tightrope.’

  V

  On Tuesday morning we had a staff briefing. A girl had been sexually assaulted, a sophomore. Kelly Murphy. I didn’t know her.

  Lynn, the social studies teacher, started to cry. ‘That shouldn’t have happened to any of our girls,’ she said. ‘One of our own.’ The rest of us looked at one another, a little embarrassed.

  Mike cleared his throat, picked up where he’d stopped talking. He was our assistant principal. He had a face like a losing politician’s. ‘Obviously, we need to be taking this very seriously. The assault took place on school grounds, and we need to make sure the students are supported and feeling safe. We also need to avoid, as far as possible, any sort of mass hysteria.’

  I raised my hand. ‘When will parents be informed?’

  ‘We’re still discussing that. We’ll work on a letter this morning.’ I stopped listening. I was thinking about the high school where I’d taught in Crenshaw. Shit happened all the time, but there’d never been anything like this on campus.

  I didn’t mention it to Lux because she wasn’t there when I got home. There was a note that said she’d gone out for coffee with one of the work girls before her shift started, and I thought that it was nice that she’d made a friend, since it didn’t always come easy to her. I changed into my jeans and boots. I put on my rain jacket. I decided I’d walk to the creek. I rolled a cigarette to have halfway there. Kelly Murphy was a sophomore. Kelly Murphy was in Spanish Club. Kelly Murphy’s yearbook picture said nothing. She
wore a denim jacket. Her hair was flat and straight, the way all the girls wore theirs. Her brother was the District 6 Rough Stock Director of the California High School Rodeo Association. I didn’t know her. I kept thinking about Lynn saying one of our own, as if there were an outfield of other children. Lux pronounced creek as crick. She said it was a northerneastern states thing, but I’d never known anyone to say it like that until I met her.

  Kelly Murphy was in Spanish Club. Kelly Murphy was one of our own.

  I didn’t know I was crying until I went to light my cigarette and realised there was noise coming from me. It was dusk. I had a flashlight in one hand. It kept bumping against my thigh. In the morning Lux would examine the salvo of grey bruises there and ask what happened. I’d say, I don’t know, maybe it’s from leaning against my desk when I’m teaching, and not know why I was lying, and she’d say, repeated-action bruises, and touch them with her lips and ask if it hurt.

  Back home I moved from room to room. I was useless. I didn’t know what to do. My head was full with something I couldn’t name, a dull metallic humming like the sound of the airplanes landing close by, so loud when we first moved to LA. I lay on the bed. I wanted to be unconscious, but the strongest thing we kept in the bathroom these days was melatonin, which, Lux liked to say, does shit-fuck except make you feel like you’re trying. Eventually I got up and called her.

  ‘Yosemite Gateway Inn, this is Lux. How may I help you?’

  ‘Hi there, I was wondering if you still had any rooms available for this evening,’ I said, trying for a thick Midwestern accent, a man’s voice. Somehow she fell for it.

  ‘Certainly, sir. Is it just yourself?’

  ‘It’s me and my girlfriend. You might know her—she’s petite, really hot, tattoo of a Shel Silverstein drawing on her arm.’

  She was laughing down the line. ‘You fucking idiot,’ she said. ‘That voice was full-on Fargo. Don’t ever use it again.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Slowly. I feel like I’ve been here a week.’

  ‘Can I come up?’

  I made a thermos of coffee to take. It was raining lightly. There was a restaurant attached to the lodge, but they closed early on weeknights, and Lux wasn’t supposed to leave the desk. The restaurant was where we’d eaten when we came to check out our house, way back in the summer. It was packed then. We kept whispering Oh my God at the carved wooden bear, the gaudy lampshades and carpet, the paintings of galloping horses, the laminated menus with looped cursive and pictures of mountains. This is it, Lux had said. This is the decider. We have to move here.

  I pulled into the lot and saw her waving at me from behind the desk. She was trapped in that golden-lit cubicle meant to welcome weary travellers. A rush of cold air followed me in. She stood and kissed me, went to find some mugs. The room keys with their heavy plastic keyrings hung from numbered hooks. I ran my finger along them and set them rippling. On the desk was a half-eaten sandwich, a glass of apple juice and a Leslie Marmon Silko novel I’d never read. Her internet browser was open to a page of documentaries on conspiracy theories.

  ‘There were deer earlier,’ she said, ‘up by the playground.’

  She’d grown up outside Syracuse, so I never really understood her enthusiasm for deer, but certain things were always remarkable to her.

  Headlights outside: a car pulled into the lot beside mine. A man in a puffy jacket climbed out. I saw a woman yawn in the passenger seat, two children asleep open-mouthed in the back. Lux stood to greet him. A bright voice came out of her. Absolutely, sir, the crib’s already set up. She chatted with him while she took his credit card, clicked around on the computer screen. And do you have mud and snow tyres? They’ll have the little letters on them? That’s okay, you can check tomorrow. Why don’t you just go on up and get some sleep now. They’ll want to know you’ve got chains at the gate, but you can worry about all that tomorrow. She reached for a key from the row of hooks, still trembling where I’d disturbed them. She pressed a map into his hand. They beamed at each other.

  We watched him fold himself back into the car, hand the room key to the woman.

  ‘M and S tyres,’ I said, and we were both laughing.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. My dad would be so impressed.’

  We fell quiet again.

  ‘You okay, babe?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I cried this afternoon.’

  She turned to me right away, put both hands on my knees. ‘What happened? What’s going on?’

  ‘My head just feels so full, I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Tell me. Tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I hated myself. It was such a bald lie that I started to cry again.

  We went back to LA for our friends’ engagement party. In the car we both said over and over again, This is good, we needed this. We camped in a tent in their backyard for the weekend. I got afternoon drunk and we escaped downtown. We walked all the way to Chinatown with nothing in mind. It was too cold for LA; it was all anyone talked about that weekend. The sky was white. We were both in our big coats. We held hands. We talked about everything and the world. We bought sticky coconut bread buns and ate them on the walk back. Lux stopped to hang her arms over the concrete railing above the Santa Ana freeway. She smiled at me, sleepily, where I stood. In one fist was the balled-up paper bag from the Chinese bakery. The wind was in the thin palms. It was in her yellow hair. Her arms were reaching for the overpass, as if she could pick up the I-5 and pour it down her throat.

  ‘I never thought I’d miss this. I miss it like my mom,’ Lux said. ‘And I never thought I’d miss my parents.’

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ I said. ‘Big city.’

  ‘Only for the weekend,’ she said.

  Walking back to the bus station she had her hand under my coat, in the back pocket of my jeans.

  At Nate and Marta’s all the cars were still parked out front, and we could hear them in the yard. We staggered down the drive, kissing and laughing. We kissed under the oleander. We told each other we tasted of coconut. The sky was almost dark. In the backyard Nate said, Where the fuck were you two, we missed you, and hugged us both at once. We made pizza. We borrowed hats and scarves from Marta. Someone went to the store to get more tomato juice, and came back with a cat. Marta and Nate made a funny, clumsy speech. We all went for a midnight walk to the lumber yards. It felt good to be small again. There were no stars in the city.

  All night Lux made cuba libres for other people, sliced limes the size of baseballs. She didn’t drink any more, but she was gracious about it. I’d never once heard her say she wished she could join; that she missed it. After everyone had gone home I vomited on the avocado tree. Lux said, Baby, you’re so fucked up, in a tone both gentle and disgusted. She hosed down the patch of soil where I’d been sick. She sang to me until I passed out.

  We got the news only just before the kids did. There was another meeting. Afternoon, this time, the end of the day. There weren’t enough seats. I stood at the back of the room, close to the door. There was a draught at my back. I didn’t hear much of what Mike said past the first few sentences. My whole body was electric. Some hot doom had invaded me. It was in my guts, the tops of my thighs. I slipped out of the faculty room. I was in the parking lot shivering, fumbling for my keys, before I realised it was snowing. I’d left my coat inside. I drove home blindly. Half a mile from our house, I pulled over to the shoulder. I slid my hands beneath my thighs and sat on them. After five minutes I held them up. They’d stopped shaking. I looked at my eyes in the rear-view mirror. I flicked on the headlights and drove home.

  Lux was cutting up vegetables in the kitchen. She was playing a Karen Dalton record, singing along. I dropped my bags on the floor, stood looking at her dumb.

  ‘Is it still snowing?’ she asked. She kissed me, her elbows either side of my face, holding her hands away from me. They smelled of onion.

  I s
hook my head. ‘I think it was just a dump. All at once, now nothing.’

  ‘Some Mariposa High kid’s been arrested for assault. Rape,’ Lux said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He’s in my English class,’ I said.

  She turned back to the chopping board. ‘Shit.’

  ‘How’d you find out?’

  ‘Annie. Her son’s on the wrestling team with him. Apparently it was in a classroom. How the fuck does something like that happen?’

  ‘Lux,’ I said. ‘I know you’ve just started dinner but do you—would you take me to the park?’

  She turned around, looked right at me. ‘The big one?’

  ‘I’ve just had a motherfucker of a day,’ I said, ‘and I feel like being outside. And I don’t want to drive. I wouldn’t ask if I really didn’t have to.’

  ‘Okay. Of course,’ she said. She was already washing her hands, already pulling on a sweater. She yelled, Are you okay, from the bedroom, and I said, Yeah, it’s just been a weird day, and she emerged in a woolly hat, looking at me closely but still moving, still prepared to take me where I wanted. We didn’t talk about it any more, just got into the car and drove the fifteen miles to the park entrance. Our annual pass dangled from the rear vision mirror. The guy at the gate asked us if we had chains. Pearly dusk skies. We drove down to the sequoia grove. We were the only ones in the parking lot. Lux pulled in by the shelter with its maps, its warnings about bears. The handbrake made a violent grating sound as she pulled it to. We sat in the half-dark, looking out at where the headlights threw their yellow glow. Lux cut the engine.

  ‘This place is full of devils,’ she said. I got out of the car. I started walking up the snowy slope. I tried to stick to the footprints that had already been made. I wasn’t wearing proper boots. I was slipping all over the place. Lux was way down there yelling, The fuck are you doing, what are you doing, but I didn’t answer, and she didn’t follow me. It made me want to go further. I stopped when it got absolutely too tough to walk, when I slid and landed on all fours. I got to my feet, one hand on a tree trunk, breathing hard. The snow was clean there where I stood. I looked down to where Lux stood in front of the car. Her arms were crossed.