The Bewildered

by Peter Rock

  Natalie walked away from him, her back turned, the door still open. After a pause, he stepped inside, closed the door, and followed. The floor in the entryway was torn yellow linoleum, showing the black and white checks beneath; the trailer seemed to shift with his every step, an unsteadiness that might be solved by a two-by-four or a folded-over piece of cardboard between the cinderblocks outside. Inside, it smelled musty, mildewed. Cold fluorescent lights hummed, illuminating everything. He looked down at the piece of magazine in his hand and saw that the page was the color of skin, with black lace along one edge. He jammed it in his pocket before Natalie noticed.

  She now stood in the kitchen, in the space between a counter and the refrigerator, facing him, waiting. On the other side of the counter was a rickety table, three chrome and vinyl chairs, a ragged brown couch. Every surface reflected color, shining from the stacks of magazines that covered every surface, from the faded covers, the title atop each one the same, PLAYBOY, just in different colors. Natalie watched him looking over the magazines. She swung open the refrigerator; inside, it was almost entirely empty. A jar wrapped in tinfoil, a row of batteries, half a bottle of green Gatorade.

  “I’d like to give you something to drink,” she said. “Gatorade? I could mix you up some Tang, if that’s more to your liking.”

  “Gatorade’s fine,” he said. As she poured a glass, he looked around again, wondering what had become of all her modern furniture, all the things she’d collected for her place in San Francisco.

  “Now, why are you here?” she said.

  “To visit,” he said. “To catch up, you know. If tonight’s not good—”

  “It’s perfect,” she said, waving at him. “Sit down, sit down.”

  There was no place to sit, the chairs stacked high with magazines; he picked up a pile, moved them to the floor, and sat at the table, which was covered by six inches of PLAYBOYS; the issue in front of him was from July 1976. A brunette held a huge flag, her nude body faintly visible through a thin white dress. Happy Birthday, America! the cover said. Was the woman supposed to be Betsy Ross?

  Natalie handed him the Gatorade, and he took a drink, watery and achingly cold, sweet and salty at once. She returned to the sink and began to mix herself a glass of Tang. The spoon rang against the insides of the glass; that was the only sound, and then silence rose up. She seemed so calm, so at ease, as if none of this would be unexpected, as if it all followed from how she had been when he knew her before.

  “Did you sell your place in Frisco?” he said.

  Natalie just smiled, blowing on the Tang as if it were hot. Behind her, he noticed that the faceplates had been taken off all the light switches and electrical outlets, the insulation stripped to expose bare wire. He heard crickets outside, in the silence, the chirping coming and going in waves.

  “You got out of San Francisco at a good time,” he said. “The whole industry, I mean. The stock options were probably amazing. Did you cash out?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It must have taken some work to just disappear like that.”

  Natalie tossed the spoon into the sink and it rattled, startling him. She leaned forward with her elbows on the counter. Her hair fell down over her eyes and she blew it away, her lower lip jutting out.

  “That’s none of my business, really,” he said. “Sorry. That’s just what I heard.”

  “This one’s my bedroom,” she said, pointing to one of the two closed doors down a hallway. “That one’s my workroom, but I can’t let you in there.”

  Steven began to set his glass on the magazine in front of him, then hesitated. He looked down at the woman and the flag and blushed.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” Natalie said.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “Yes, you are. Go ahead, look all you want. I do.” Natalie came around the counter and reached across the table; she flipped open the magazine in front of him and paged through it. There were ads for cigarettes and eight-track players, then the centerfold—a naked woman in feathered hair and arched eyebrows, holding a thick rope and wearing high, striped socks.

  “Deborah Borkman doesn’t like the meat market singles scene of L.A.” Natalie said, “since sex, to her, is a private matter; but if she relates to someone on a mental level, then the physical part just follows naturally.”

  “What?”

  Natalie kept turning the pages. There were more pages of writing, and more pictures. A pictorial of a woman and man—it was a young, bearded Kris Kristofferson, Steven realized—in a brass bed, on blue sheets, unclothed.

  Natalie was standing up straight on the other side of the table, the orange glass of Tang in her hand. With her free hand, she brushed her long hair from her face.

  “Listen,” Steven said, “I just have to say something, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Something’s weird,” he said. “All I’m saying is I don’t know if you’re putting me on somehow or what. All your directions are based on strip clubs—the Corral, the Acropolis—”

  “That’s a steak place, too,” she said.

  “It’s different than how you were,” he said, “and then all this porn lying around.”

  “How I was is how I was,” she said. “I just can’t hardly remember it. There was a transition. And I wouldn’t call this pornography—pornography is more like simulated penetration, all that.”

  Steven looked down at Kris Kristofferson’s bare ass, the woman’s thin legs wrapped around his waist. Glancing away, trying to think, Steven looked at the other magazines and realized that many were duplicates, and that all of them seemed dated. The covers mentioned celebrities like Joe Namath, Billy Carter, O.J. Simpson, Lily Tomlin. Many were torn and weathered, scalloped as if left out in the rain and then dried.

  “You don’t think it objectifies women?” he said, finally, falling back on something he’d heard.

  Natalie hardly seemed to be listening. “All the girls look like weight lifters, now,” she said, “I can’t even stand to look at them. They have personal trainers, and airbrushing. I like to see pores, veins, razor stubble, you know.” She stretched her arms over her head, her hands almost reaching the water-stained ceiling. “And I just think back to when I was a girl, and I found these magazines, the first time—”

  “In Denver?” he said. “Isn’t that where you grew up?”

  “One of my clearest memories is finding them, when I was a girl, in the Bicentennial. I looked at them and I felt like my body would arrive and just force the clothes right off, like it couldn’t be contained. And then I’d be a person, truly at liberty—as free as they were.”

  “As who were?” Steven said, and then realized she meant the women in the photographs and couldn’t figure out what to say next. He decided to play along, to show her he could. Glancing at the open magazine again, he gestured toward the image.

  “I used to be a Kris Kristofferson fan,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. He felt a line of sweat run down his back, under his shirt. “‘Me and Bobby McGee,’ all that.”

  “What?” Natalie said. “Who’s that?”

  “I just liked his singing, his songwriting. And he was an actor. A Rhodes scholar, even. Once, in an interview I read, he said that you shouldn’t sleep with anyone who’s crazier than you.”

  Natalie smiled. “So whoever you sleep with, then, is breaking that rule?”

  “That’s the problem, I guess.”

  “Did we ever sleep together?” she said.

  “Why would you ask that?” he said, startled. “We were friends; I thought we were going to maybe be good friends, at least—”

  “So we didn’t,” she said.

  “Right.”

  She smiled and walked back around the counter. She leaned against the sink, facing him, and rolled up the sleeve of her work shirt, revealing her wiry forearm.

  “So,” she said. “What else do you like?”

  Suddenly Steve
n became aware of the blackness of the windows, only reflecting the trailer’s inside, and he remembered how clearly he had seen her, from outside. There were no blinds to close, no curtains to draw.

  “Did you hear something?” he said.

  “I was waiting to hear what you were going to say next.”

  “What?”

  “About what you like.”

  “Oh,” he said. “What do I like?” His neck was sore from keeping his head rigid, his vision above the open magazine in front of him. He wanted to close the pages, but he couldn’t. Natalie sat down across from him, gently kicking his legs under the table, settling, her face all anticipation.

  “I like the fall,” he said. “The autumn. When people pile up the leaves in the streets.”

  “So you’re saying you’re a man of simple pleasures, then? Or that’s how you’d like me to see you?”

  “You can see me however you want.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “I wonder about you. You want to know all about me, but what are you doing, I wonder.”

  “Nothing really,” he said. “Taking a couple months off, like I said, living on a houseboat, doing a little volunteer work—”

  “And we knew each other before,” she said. “In San Jose. Did you follow me here?”

  “No. You’ve asked me that already—I mean, I’m glad that you turned out to be here, it’s a nice coincidence, but I didn’t know.”

  “Are you really glad? Why?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me about your work,” she said. “Your ‘volunteer work.’”

  “It’s for a nonprofit,” he said. “An organization that helps the blind.”

  “And that’s interesting?”

  “I like it,” he said. “I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile, and it is interesting—I was just reading an essay by Borges all about his friendship with the color yellow. It was very touching—”

  “I’m sure it was,” she said.

  “Portland’s a good city for blind people,” he said. “The rain, it makes the world more audible, reflective; it reveals the edges of things. Snow, you know, that’s like the blind person’s fog—it dampens all the vibrations—”

  “Yes,” Natalie said. “It is a good city; I think so.”

  “How did you end up here?” he said. “After you disappeared, after you left California, I kept thinking I’d hear from you, but I never did.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “What did happen? I heard lots of things.”

  “Really?” she said, and laughed. “To be honest, I’m more interested in what you heard. Why don’t you tell me some these stories that you keep mentioning?” She tilted back her head, her eyelids half-closed, as if daring him.

  “I heard you bugged out,” he said, “that you’d had it, that you just didn’t come back from lunch one day, cashed in your stock, didn’t even warn your secretary.”

  “Mysterious,” she said. “I like it.”

  “And then I also heard that what it was was that you were down in the control rooms, where the tunnels and cables intersected, where you had no reason to be, and there was some kind of short, an outage. A technician found you there. The company hushed it up, and a lot of people thought you’d be back, eventually, were expecting you to be—and some even said you were still working for the company, but on something so secret or illegal that you pretended to leave, but really didn’t, or that you had to disappear.”

  “A likely story,” Natalie said. “And what else?”

  “That’s about it,” he said. “All I heard. Which one is closest? The first?”

  Natalie looked behind her, then all around the room before fixing her gaze on him again. “I’m here now,” she said. “I’m happy. It doesn’t seem like there’s any point in looking backward.”

  “But here you are,” he said, slightly exasperated, “collecting old magazines, surrounded by all this exposed wiring, in Gary Gilmore’s neighborhood. Something happened.”

  Natalie saw where he was looking. “That,” she said. “That’s just a hobby. I’ve figured out how to rewire things, and how to turn back the meters. Kilowatt hours are a whole different kind of time—”

  “Be serious,” he said. “I was worried. Are you serious? What are you even talking about?”

  “Take it easy,” she said. “Let’s just talk.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “Not so serious, though. We can talk without ‘having a talk.’”

  Steven looked away from her, his eyes skittering along the shiny surfaces of the magazines, the light reflecting. He wondered if it was unusually bright in the room, or if he were especially sensitive. He felt exposed.

  “That’s more like it,” Natalie said.

  He realized that he was absentmindedly turning the pages in front of him, and this time he refused to let her embarrass him. If this was what she wanted to talk about, then he would talk about it.

  “That was a good time for cars,” he said, turning pages. “I was like nine or ten, back then, dreaming of owning a Scirocco.”

  “Don’t pretend like you’re reading the articles! Just try—”

  Standing again, Natalie began stretching her arms all over the table, snapping back the covers of different issues, unfolding centerfolds. “Look at that string bikini tan line,” she said. “And here’s Karen Hafter—look at her hips, amazing; no one’s curvy like that anymore—and Patti McGuire; she was Playmate of the Year, you know. You can see why. She says she admires people who don’t admire anybody. Look here at Daina House, Steven. She’s not shy!”

  Steven glimpsed white lace, a grass hut, gold sandals, a straw hat on a barn floor, military dog tags, a pinball machine, tall lizard-skin boots. He focused on the women’s clothes, the things around them; looking at their bodies made him anxious.

  “These women probably have daughters this old, now,” he said. “I wonder where they are.”

  “I just want them to be how they were,” she said, “the way they are, how I first saw them.”

  Steven paged past the centerfold, through an article about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, past a racy cartoon about George Washington and Betsy Ross. He was in the Kris Kristofferson pictorial again; he could not hurry through. Natalie was watching him.

  “I see what this is now,” he said. “It’s from a movie.”

  “A pornographic movie?” she said. He could hear her smile.

  “No,” he said. “It’s based on a book I read. Mishima. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I wonder if the movie’s any good—I see they moved it from Japan to England.”

  “That guy doesn’t look very Japanese,” Natalie said. “He looks more like he’s in pain.”

  The woman in the picture was astride Kristofferson, leaning back, pulling on his hair. He grimaced, his eyes closed.

  “And what happens?” Natalie said.

  “You’ll have to read the book,” he said, “or see the movie.”

  “Look at how dark her nipples are; they might have rouged them.”

  “It’s a short novel,” Steven said. “It’s about this group of school kids who live by their own code and have all kinds of sadistic adventures. The sailor gets involved with one of these boys’ mother, a widow. That’s what we’re seeing here.” He turned the page; the woman was standing on the bed, her crotch in Kristofferson’s face.

  “‘Involved,’” Natalie said. “I’ll say. And then what happens?”

  “In the end, they trick the sailor, the kids do. They poison him.”

  “They kill him?”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I bet the movie’s not that good. I’ve never heard of it. I don’t even know if Kris Kristofferson is still alive.”

  Natalie abruptly stood up from the table, knocking it with her thighs; a few magazines slid off, onto the floor.

  “Natalie?” he said, but her back was turned, unreadable. She opened one of the doors in the hallway, disappeared throug
h it, closed it behind her.

  Left in her wake, Steven tried to think back through what he’d been saying. He closed the magazine in front of him; the back cover was an ad for Carlton cigarettes. From where he sat, he could see down the hallway. He couldn’t remember which door was which.

  And then one of the doors opened and Natalie stepped out long enough to open the other door and disappear again, into the other room. After a moment, she appeared again and then began going back and forth between the rooms, carrying things: a standing mirror in a wooden frame, it looked like; a lamp with cut glass beads hanging from the shade, a high-backed wicker chair.

  “Do you want a hand?” he said.

  “Stay,” she said, not looking in his direction.

  He couldn’t tell if she meant for him not to bother her or not to leave. Perhaps he should leave, though she hadn’t exactly asked him to. He wanted to help her, if she would just let him. He checked his bare wrist. There was no clock in the room, the whole trailer trapped in 1976.

  When he checked the hallway again, both doors were closed; she was in one of the rooms, but he could not tell which one. This was too strange. It had to be late. He would leave; that’s what he would do, what she wanted. Standing, he found his leg muscles tight. He stretched his arms over his head, twisted his neck, and then heard the door open.

  Natalie stood in the hallway, the fluorescent lights on her. Her skin shone, as if she were dusted with something, lightly oiled. Her thighs, her stomach, the straight line of her clavicle—he could see all of her skin. She wore only a short, white denim jacket; that was it, except for the tall snakeskin boots. Her hair was now shocking blond, almost platinum, parted straight in the middle, feathered back. One necklace, a single gold strand. She stood there, taller than him, and then stepped toward him, thinner than he would have thought. He tried to look away.

  “This is too strange,” he said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Natalie.”

  “Call me Patricia,” she said. “Patricia McClain. As a triple Taurus, I’m very rebellious.”

  Up close, he saw that her eyelashes were false, impossibly long. She blinked rapidly, but she did not smile. Had her fingernails been so curved, so red, ten minutes before? She leaned against him and he felt the heat of her body, her whole length pressed against him, against his slacks, his polo shirt. He was sweating, her perfume thick around him.