Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

“What do you want,” he asked, looking down at me. He stood at the top, a glass in his hand.

  “I want to explain.”

  “Get out—”

  “Jim, it’s not what you think.”

  He slammed the door. I heard him running toward the front of the house.

  I went out again to the end of the driveway and saw him in my car, a darkness in the dark behind the wheel.

  “Jim—.” I got in the passenger side.

  “I’m driving you home, Laura.”

  “This is my car. Will you let me explain?”

  “Explain what? You can have a fucking divorce. I don’t have time for this shit. I want a normal life.”

  “Jim. This friend came over,” I said. “We took a walk. He went swimming. I let him take a shower.”

  “Shut up, just shut up!” he shouted, pounding his fist on the dashboard. “Who are you kidding, Laura?” He went for the keys in the ignition but I was quicker and pulled them into my lap.

  “This can’t work can it?” I whispered.

  “No, it can’t.” He rested his forehead against the rim of the steering wheel. “You know why? You enjoy conflict. You need it. You love it.”

  A neighbor’s spotlight lit up the car like police. “Let’s not start again.”

  “I need to lie down,” he said, squinting. “They’re bright and I’m tired. I’m going in.”

  “Please. I’ll come in with you.”

  We followed the pied piper of habit, up the familiar front walk to the house and beyond, into the mountainside. On the way upstairs, he put his arm around me. By the top of the second floor landing he had my sweater off and was fumbling with my bra. I didn’t stop him. I switched off the guest bedroom light, the study light, and in our bedroom, the two night table lamps that had both been turned on as well. I leaned back on the bed so he could ease off my pants. Then I pulled him down.

  I pulled on his hips and listened to our bedroom shade flapping in the wind, sucking our past out with the breeze. We pushed and pulled but we never found the insides. He turned over into a dark hugging sleep. I rolled off the bed and slipped away for the very last time.

  For the remainder of that night, I stayed on the single bed kneeling at the cottage window, my nose pressed against the soft screen mesh gasping, holding my breath, the sky so endlessly black I could have drowned in it, except for the moon, tiny bright hole in the sky, and the memory of Raymond and Jim distantly shining, breaking through.

  For at that time in my life, I am sorry to say, I was too brittle and hollow for any man’s reach.

  A relic of my future.

  A shell.

  Bird of Grief

  I woke to the beating between my legs. No sleeping in that state. Every day, darkness seeped back into the light and, of course, my dreams suffered. Three months post-Richard I lay curled around the slow alarm song of my cell phone: a dark indentation on my pillow next to my ear.

  Finally, I got up and went to where this boy, who was not Richard, might be. I walked along University Avenue, the long stretch of sidewalk decreasing as I neared the college quadrangle. My fingers curled nervously in my coat pocket as he approached, returning from class. So many times we ran into each other like this. I told myself it was more than coincidence

  The first time I stopped him, I said, “Excuse me. What is your name?” This took him by surprise. He cleared his throat, his lips moist as the earth in that November drizzle. I wondered if they were as cold.

  “Seth, and yours?

  “I’m Jennie.” Then, rushing: “Where did you grow up? Where are you from?” I sipped my breath, warping an ant’s worth of pocket lint between my fingers.

  “A farm out West, but not a real farm,” he said. “We had land near the hills.”

  “I’m from the city. Much different than you, I imagine.”

  “I would think so.”

  I touched his arm and went away to my filmmaking class. I was late, though a few steps later I turned to watch him receding in the weather. Drops of what I didn’t know about him filled my brain. He wasn’t Richard but maybe he could be.

  Seth wore dark corduroy pants, wire-rimmed glasses, neatly cropped hair, a blazer. I guess I was impressed. I wore red pants, a green plaid scarf that mismatched. My savage blond curls rejected most types of barrettes. I didn’t think it mattered once you turned off the light.

  In my daydreams I found him alone in an empty schoolroom. He was expecting me. I slipped a hand under his chin; unzipped his pants. My hand searched beneath his cotton shirt, past daylight into the dark humming in his chest, until our bodies were pieces of cloth we had left behind, our invisible selves afloat someplace away from earth. It was all I could muster: to fly free across a current of clouds, until we drifted back into the light, that simple classroom.

  I dreamt this again and again but it still wasn’t enough to take me away from Richard, who blended in with those winter birch trees that first time we met skiing in Vermont two years ago. Even in ski gear he looked sinewy, beautifully self-contained. Paired up on the double lift by coincidence, we sat together talking. Richard told me he studied math.

  “Here’s a puzzle,” he said. “There’s a boat in the ocean at low tide. Hanging from the boat is a rope ladder with six rungs.” He pointed his skis down at the people shushing below, colorful pompoms dancing on their heads. “The water comes up to the first rung. Are you with me so far?”

  “Keep going.”

  “Where does the water come to at high tide?”

  I pictured a boat anchored at sea. Did the ladder go down? Did the rungs disappear?

  “I don’t know. Just tell me.”

  “First rung. Know why?” He eased into his professorial mode. “Because the boat floats.” He looked at me then with clarity in his face. Simple. “Math is universal. But people fear it. It’s all about looking at the same thing in many different ways. That’s the beauty of it.”

  The beauty of him, I thought.

  “Tell me another riddle.” By then, I was sitting up in his hotel bed, pulling off my thermal shirt. We wrapped ourselves in his goose down sleeping bag. Two years later on the phone, Richard said he felt claustrophobic. With five states separating us, a fourteen-hour bus ride, twelve hours in my car if I drove from Rhode Island to North Carolina on the highway late at night, the time apart didn’t add up, he said. He came to Providence five maybe six times during the middle period. Then he stopped.

  “What do you mean claustrophobic? What’s not adding up?”

  “People change,” he said over the phone.

  So I found Seth on the campus quadrangle. He was looking at me, too. Neither one of us said much except for the questions in our eyes, the fringe of his woolen scarf fingering the breeze, not me, just inches away. His voice resembled the dusk I would have preferred; soft and dim, it made me want to forget conversation, get in and drive to that place-between-his-legs, then rest in the quiet way he walked beside me as we headed to the convenience store.

  That morning was steeped in winter glare.

  “Weren’t you in my film class?” I was certain I saw him sitting near the door.

  “Sort of. I dropped it. Can you wait? This will only take a minute.” He squashed his dying cigarette with his snow boot. He didn’t apologize for smoking.

  Inside the store, I couldn’t see well in the pharmaceutical light except for the region in his eyes that said he wanted me too. Or maybe he wanted to wait. He bought two crisp new packs while I fumbled around the shelves of notebooks, touching the ones with covers burning red.

  Another week passed before I asked Seth to dinner. It had already snowed twice. I told him I needed to make a short clip for my final exam. Would he be my target subject? He accepted, offering to pick me up at the triple-decker where I rented a room on the top floor.

  First, the buzzer, m
y voice calling to him as I leaned over the railing. “Do you want to come up for a minute?” I looked down at him through the stairwell’s spiraling tunnel.

  “Can’t. Motor’s running. I’ll wait for you in the car.” He tilted his head up and looked as if he were in a hole.

  His red Volkswagen Bug bloomed like a flower in the cold. An impossible, beautiful sight. I got in, smiled hello. He shifted gears and drove. In another week it would be Christmas. Vacation time. He said he wasn’t going home. “Family misunderstandings,” he explained.

  “What kind of misunderstanding?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My parents are divorced. My father doesn’t talk. He spends his life in the garage fixing radios.”

  “No, that doesn’t sound good at all.”

  “Don’t tell me you have ideal parents,” he said.

  I tilted my head; half smiled. “They were toxic. My father died in a violent crash.”

  He looked at me differently after that. People usually do. A combination of compassion spliced with envy as if being close to tragedy gave me an edge on living.

  “My mother remarried when I was thirteen,” he told me after that. “My father is bitter.”

  I wore a purple sweater under my aqua down coat and nestled in the seat, the squashed up place where New Orleans jazz played gaily on his CD, louder than the heat blowers sirening through the vents. He shifted gears again. We were off to a restaurant downtown, in the Italian section of Providence.

  In this historic city we followed badly paved streets, buildings where people used to live. But he knew his way. He turned down an alley, rubbed one wheel against the curb to park. I got out and stretched my leg across an ice puddle, winging my arms out for balance.

  “Did your parents fight a lot?” I walked beside him now on the sidewalk. “Or did they stop talking?” When my wrist nicked him accidentally and electrified, I grabbed my other mitten to ground myself.

  “One way or another, it wasn’t love. There,” he said, pointing away from me toward the restaurant. “That’s it.”

  At dinner, I layered our table with yellow pads of paper and file cards.

  “Why pick me?” he asked. “You have friends.”

  “I wanted someone I didn’t know.”

  “You won’t discover much. You’ll have to make things up. Lie a lot.”

  “Tell the truth,” I said.

  We sat in a room with red paper tablecloths, green window shades. When the meal came, I wound spaghetti strands around my fork. The noodles fell apart and I tried again. He thought it was funny.

  “Don’t look at me while I eat then,” I said, squirming.

  “You’re looking at me. I’m looking at you. Why don’t you tell me why you really want to make this film?” He stabbed the fleshy curl of a shrimp and slipped it neatly between his lips.

  I dropped my fork, triggered to defend myself.

  “You figure it out.”

  “I think I have.” He eyed my plate.

  “Think of it as a game. Start anywhere,” I said tearing the cellophane wrap and pulling out a file card. I wrote: SCENE 1. Crummy Italian marching music ekes out of speaker in ceiling.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me.”

  Lights flickered in the underground room. The brick floor and walls seemed to make him crouch closer. He told me a story about his first days at the University, how he had left a suit jacket and pants in the train station locker, how they were stolen, and then, how he went there still thinking he could get them back.

  “It’s a lost cause,” I said, which I regretted because he frowned.

  He shrugged.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Tell me more about your parents. What happened between them?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Aren’t you upset about it?”

  “Not anymore. It’s old.”

  “Really? I don’t believe you. Life’s sad.” As soon as I said that, I fell inside the hole that Richard left, my skin burning like snowballs stuck to my palms.

  If a tree doubled in size every day for one hundred days, on what day would it become half its size? Richard asked me this a few days before the end. He was living with two math students off campus. His apartment was in a house. A dentist worked on the first floor. In the morning, at exactly nine o’clock, the drilling began. The odor of metal and toothpaste followed. Richard baked bread to erase the smell of it. In the refrigerator, he coddled mixtures of Russian black bread and sour rye dough in soda glasses.

  I considered the tree puzzle. I didn’t know the answer right away, as Richard would; then it came to me like Venetian blinds opening.

  “The day before,” I answered.

  “Correct. Time for quantum mechanics class.” He looked over my head at the kitchen clock. “You coming?” He stood at his front door.

  “People can be that way too,” I said, caught up in the possibilities of many meanings. “You know. Half of who they were the day before.”

  “That’s not the same as the tree. The tree got bigger,” he said, impatiently.

  The day after dinner with Seth, I took my camera and went to the train station, a cavernous building, to search for his missing clothes or so I thought. The light was bad inside but I shot things anyway, running the lens along a wall of metal lockers, stopping at one with a heart scratched into it—a marred heart etched into the shape of a triangle. Pen lines crossed at each curve. The metal door was rusted and wouldn’t budge like Richard. I capped the lens and went back to my apartment.

  The next day Seth caught me wearing yellow tinted ski goggles.

  “What are you doing? The sun’s not out.”

  I turned full circle. “They brighten everything,” I said. “Try them.” I dangled the pair in front of him.

  “You’re crazy.” He stood there for a moment, wondering.

  “It’s for my project.”

  I didn’t tell him about the red-tinted glasses or the blue ones both in my book bag. I didn’t tell him how the blue glasses didn’t change much except to darken the air. Yet, blue was so familiar: blue sky, blue sea. Yellow took its claim from the sun. But those red glasses made me feel I could breathe underwater. I felt different, part of something unearthly; like that first time on the ski slopes with Richard when he stayed with me, sliding his skis alongside mine as we waited for the chair lift to take us up the mountain again.

  Richard said he wanted to eat my thighs. That was in North Carolina. Middle period, first year. During that fall season down south he wore black jeans, hiking boots; his ski jacket heedlessly unzipped.

  At home I walked around my bedroom wearing red goggles, staring, then pausing to stand over the bed. Red made the quilt ripple below me in a watery atmosphere. I imagined Richard floating on his back waiting for me to perch. I lay down on the mattress.

  Once, to my surprise, I called out to Seth across the street: “Hey!” Another time, I called him “Sullen One” instead of saying hello. Sexy, I said to myself over and over and over to stay calm.

  Then it grew hectic the way it always did before long school vacations: everyone packing, arranging train schedules, air travel. Not me. I walked out of the film room, down the old wooden stairs to the sidewalk to meet him.

  Seth said, “Let me film you today.”

  “What? No. That’s not my plan.”

  “Let me shoot you. That will tell you something about me.”

  “Hell it will.” But I handed over my camera anyway, and tromped off to a large beech tree across the road. When I stopped and faced him again I stood blinking, twirling my eyes, covering my face.

  “Don’t do that,” he shouted. “Take your hands away.”

  I laughed. “I’ll do what I want!”


  We walked to the coffee shop on the hill. I went inside and ordered two large, cream-no-sugars to go. Later, in the editing room, I watched my face brighten and dim behind the neon-lit glass of the restaurant. I saw myself talking to a waitress with gray hair, my hands wrapped around Styrofoam white cups. Small hands that he kept shooting. Couldn’t keep his eyes away.

  “What are you pointing at?” I asked, coming out of the restaurant. I looked down at the steps to avoid tripping. The lens hid his face—his knees bent, poised to move in.

  “Random objects.”

  “I’m not random.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Let me have that back.” I reached for the camera. “No more filming me. The rest of today I shoot you. Get in your car.”

  He had a zealot’s affection for his Bug: rusted spots, tears in the back seat, magazine covers rain-washed on the floor. I made him sit with the windows open. The wind blew his hair, his hands whitened with cold. I shot his half-face in the rear-view mirror. I shot his thighs, his crotch, the steering wheel, back to his hands on the wheel near his crotch. He had such delicate fingers.

  “Close your eyes,” I said.

  “Why? What’s this about? Where do I fit in?”

  “I don’t know yet. Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open.”

  “So you can take me apart,” he said, biting his lip.

  “If you’ll let me.”

  He nodded, one hand resting on the steering wheel.

  “All right, you can get out now,” I said.

  I didn’t see him again until Monday, three days before the University would empty out. He was busy over the weekend. Something about a friend. I spent the weekend thinking I should have been with him, pacing the streets, walking past his apartment—two days, blackened windows. Where was he?

  I took my camera and roamed until Sunday night when, late, in my monstrous old sedan, I saw his shadow behind his window shade. Ten-thirty my fever waned. I tried to coast down the hill past where he lived and head home, but the traffic light turned red. My V-8 engine idled badly; loud enough I was certain an entire campus could hear. I swore at myself. Finally, the light turned green and I raced back to my room.