“Do you want to?”
“I didn’t say that.” Marlon hadn’t driven a car in years. The reason involved something legal, or maybe illegal. She knew she shouldn’t be driving. Traffic lights and street lights and car lights careened around them. The shapes of people and cars and buildings were both flat and menacing, like driving through a stage set for a horror movie. Marlon wasn’t sure of his directions and they got lost in an evil near-west-side neighborhood, a district of dark underpasses and blind-eyed buildings and lurking figures in hooded sweatshirts. Figuring that crazy speed was her best option, Olivia floored it and the car fishtailed for the length of a block. She was crying by now, crying and hunching over the steering wheel as if the car was a horse that needed urging on. She hadn’t thought she was a lousy mother but she guessed she was. The kind whose children appeared in lurid news stories and you thought what degenerate scum the parents must be. She had done everything wrong, not just with Roberta but everything her whole stupid life, and she was sick with shame, knowing she could never make it all right. Yet even her guilt, she knew, was suspect, that same old extravagance of feeling and weepy self-regard. She was disgusting, really.
“Try her phone again,” she ordered Marlon.
“I can never figure out how these things work.”
“It’s a phone, how hard can it be? Do you really know where this place is?” Nothing looked familiar to her: gas stations and car lots lit with galaxy-bright floodlights behind chain-link fences. Brake shops, welding shops, exhaust repair shops, all the spoor and fodder of the automobile.
“Just keep going. Or no, go around the block.”
This was a neighborhood of tilting, two-story frame houses, each with some kind of appendage—porch, awning, outside stair—haphazardly built and almost visibly separating from the main structure. The yards were narrow lumps of dirt in which the occasional small tree stood, bare as a hat rack. She couldn’t stand thinking that her daughter might be inside one of these ugly houses, drunk or drugged or worse. How many lives were carried on in such places, how vast was the world and all its wretchedness and meanness and clamoring greed, and how could she find the one human soul dear to her in so much darkness, ah help her, help her, she was losing her mind, it was peeling away in great sodden chunks, like wet cardboard.
Club Veejay was a building of yellow brick, not much bigger than a garage, with high slits for windows and a solid metal door. “What do we do if she’s not here?” Olivia asked, shivering in the chilly night air. It had been spring earlier, but they’d taken it away again.
“Have a drink, I guess.”
“You were always one of the smart kids in class, weren’t you?”
“Don’t talk a lot,” advised Marlon. “And act like we just dropped in, we were just in the neighborhood.”
Olivia dialed Roberta’s phone over and over, getting her languid voice message: Hi. Roberta. Talk to me. I’ll get you back. What if she never saw her daughter again? It could happen. Things like that happened to people. At the entrance of Club Veejay, they paused, listening, but no sound came to them. Marlon shrugged and pulled the door open.
Roberta wasn’t there. It only took a moment for Olivia to scan the dim precincts of the little bar, and another to want to back right out again. But Marlon was behind her, an obstacle to retreat, and besides, maybe they were supposed to stay there, she couldn’t remember.
They stood at one end of the bar, which was a block of stained and scarred pine, and Marlon ordered two brandies. He gave her a nudge, a cautionary reminder, and Olivia gave him one back, harder. She kept her gaze down, not meeting anyone’s eye. The bartender had hands like lobsters, red and scuttling. Bits of murmured conversation reached her, full of sinister consonants.
When she raised her head for a look around, she saw eight or ten men at the bar and the two small tables, all of them drinking in a steady, businesslike fashion. It was not possible to tell, from observing them, if the alcohol was cheering them up or sinking them further into some expatriate melancholy. The walls were paneled with cheap wood veneer. The furniture, what there was of it, had the same look of dismal thrift. Where was her daughter? Weren’t they supposed to be doing something about her? She drank her brandy. It crawled down her throat like something alive. “Let’s go,” she said to Marlon, but he was asking the man next to them if he had a light.
“You can smoke in the car. Come on.”
Marlon said, “Yeah, I’ve been here a time or two,” and Olivia realized he must have been talking for a while, having a whole conversation without her noticing. “I came with a friend, and my friend had this other friend, what was his name, honey?”
“Bruno,” said Olivia. She was sweating beneath her clothes. She felt poisoned.
“That’s it. Bruno.”
“Bruno,” said the other man. Olivia tried to get a good look at him. She had to tilt her head back because her eyes wouldn’t open all the way. He was plaid. “Big Bruno or Little Bruno?”
“He kidnapped my daughter.”
“Oh, that would be Little Bruno.” The plaid man laughed, which made her indignant. But then she realized she hadn’t really spoken. Something else had been said that she’d missed. Sweat was rolling off her.
“Ladies’ room,” she said, very carefully, and the plaid man conferred with the bartender, and the bartender’s lobster claw pointed to the corner.
“You all right?” Marlon asked, and she would have liked to say something witty and caustic back to him, but instead concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until she was behind the door of the little toilet room, where she vomited and urinated and vomited again in such quick succession that she had to keep hopping up and down.
She splashed her face with cool water, avoiding the mirror as much as possible. She made a promise to the universe: Give me my daughter and I will…What could she promise? Who was in charge of these things anyway?
Olivia loosened the hook that provided the bathroom’s minimal privacy. The door didn’t close all the way and an inch or so of space allowed a view of someone’s stolid backside, shifting his weight from one haunch to another. A thin, indirect current of cigarette smoke filtered through. The bar had grown noisier, more crowded, and she had to push past a layer of thick-bodied men who made amused, possibly obscene comments. Screw you. She was going to learn enough Serbo-Croatian to say that, she was going to make a point of learning it and coming back here to tell them.
“Mom? Hey, Mom!”
Roberta was waving to her from one of the little tables, where she sat with Marlon and the plaid man and a creature who must be Bruno. Olivia fell on her. “Ow, you’re smooshing me,” Roberta complained.
“I should only kill you.” Olivia had been blubbering, but now that was over and she was ready to be furious. “What the hell kind of stunt was this? And what are you wearing?” Roberta had on an unfamiliar blouse, emerald green, made of some shiny, stretchy, cheaply glamorous fabric. “What did you do to your face?”
“It’s professional makeup. It’s for my photographs.”
“You look like a clown.” Or like the girl in the Korean shop’s calendar, rouged to the eyebrows. “Since when did you do pink? What photographs?”
“This is Bruno, Mom. I told you about him.”
Bruno was draped across the chair in the corner. He was younger than Olivia had expected, twenty-five, maybe, with blond curls slicked down with hair goo, and pale blue eyes set a little too close together. His face was long, horsey, with sunken cheeks, but still a face girls might persuade themselves was rakish and desirable, oh yes, she knew a thing or two about girls. “Mamma,” said Bruno, nodding and grinning.
“Creep,” Olivia said, sitting down across from him. There was some new problem or danger here that she would have to deal with, but she was still too sick and liquor-dazed to see the shape of it and navigate it successfully. “What photographs?” she repeated.
“For my portfolio. Heeheehahahah.” Roberta squealed a
nd squirmed. Bruno had made some under-the-table contact.
Olivia said to Marlon, “If I hit him, do you think anyone in here would care?”
“This is Drakko,” said Marlon, indicating the man in the plaid shirt. “He’s from Bosnia too. He’s a doctor. Of philosophy.”
“That’s not a real doctor, what does that mean? Anybody can call themselves that.”
“It is an honorary title,” said Drakko.
“What’s that you’re drinking?” she said to Roberta. “How did you get in here anyway when you’re underaged?”
Drakko, said, “It is a family place. Family atmosphere.” His English was better than Bruno’s but still heavy going. He was Marlon’s age or older, a big, sagging man with ill-fitting dentures.
Roberta said, “I’m almost eighteen. When I’m eighteen, you can’t tell me what to do anymore.”
“If you live that long. Let’s go home now.”
“This is all because I said I wasn’t going to college, right? So anything I want to do instead, you won’t let me.”
Marlon said, “You used to hear a lot of bad things about Bosnia. But I believe that’s changed.”
“My country is my broken heart,” said Drakko, with genuine, if drunken, sadness.
Marlon said, “I think it would be an interesting place to visit sometime. For the experience.”
“See? Even Marlon thinks you’re overreacting.”
“Marlon’s just making noise. He’s improvising. Tell Bruno it’s been nice knowing him.”
“I’ll come back and see him,” threatened Roberta. “You know I will. How come you’re the only one who ever gets to have any fun?” She was sitting on Bruno’s lap now. This had happened while Olivia had not been paying attention. The despicable Bruno was jiggling and rearranging her for his own gratification. The bar had become impossibly loud.
“Fun?” Olivia tried to get out of her chair, but the crowd hemmed her in. “Show me where I’m having so much fun, what is this place anyway, Little Transylvania?”
“There you go again. Being this character.”
Drakko said, “In America, everything is always so funny.”
“We’ll go home and talk,” said Olivia. “We’ll work it all out. What about Larry, shouldn’t you be thinking about him?”
“You don’t even like Larry. See? You say whatever you think I want to hear, then you take it all back because you’re always drunk.”
“Am not. Besides, so are you.”
Bruno spoke up then. His mouth was nibbling at Roberta’s armpit and his voice came out muffled. “For money, Mamma give permission?”
“For free, Mamma break your face.”
Marlon had gotten up from the table to go to the bathroom, and now he was back. “They have a condom machine with international brands,” he reported. “Isn’t that something?”
“What? Who cares? Roberta! How does anyone even get to Bosnia, I bet nobody you ever heard of flies there.” She was aware that she was exhausting all her good arguments.
“Bosna i Hercegovina,” Drakko said, “is the correct name.” His dentures made a sound like a stick rubbed across a picket fence.
Roberta said, “I bet I could take classes there. It would be like study abroad.”
“Aren’t they all Muslims?” asked Olivia, vaguely. She was trying to stay awake, stay conscious until the bar closed, when one or another thing would surely happen without her needing to struggle further, assert herself again and again. She was so tired.
“Muslim, Orthodox, Roman Catholic,” Drakko explained. “Lots of God.”
“Here’s a deal for you,” said Roberta. “I won’t go if you stop drinking. And I’ll stop too. Can you even think about doing that? Huh, Mom?”
“This isn’t about drinking.”
“Sure it is.”
Drakko said, “My country is where they is try to kill God. Knife and club. Gun and bomb. But here he is back again.”
Were everybody’s stories just the same old story all along?
About sacrifice, and giving things up? She said, “That’s what it’s gonna take, huh.” There was a sensation in her head of birds flapping. Battering against her skull, trying to get out.
“Right here right now. Promise. And keep promising.”
“You know you’d miss the way we are,” she told Roberta. “You know we wouldn’t be able to be the same. Hang out the same.”
“Some,” said Roberta. “Sure. But it’s no good anymore, Mom.” She was crying, and something in the makeup turned her face shiny, as if it was coated in sheets of cellophane. “Look where we ended up.”
“Almost in Bosnia,” Olivia agreed. It was the universe again, smacking her around, claiming its due. Killing her off and bringing her back again, changed and unrecognizable, no more high old bad old times or raging fun. And she didn’t want to do it. That was the sacrifice part. “I promise,” she said, not meaning it yet. She guessed that would be one more thing that came later.
A
Normal
Life
She wanted them to have a normal life, she told him, and he said he wanted that too. They deserved it. After all the bad business of sneaking around and trysting in motel parking lots and telling the necessary lies. It had gone on for a long, rotten time and had filled them with loathing admiration for their own slick, dishonest skills. After the expensive wreckage of his marriage and the decertification of hers. It had been hell, their tricky love. Now they were finally together. The awful legalities had been played out. The angry children had said hateful things and transferred their allegiances. That was a sore point but you had to expect some sore points, you had to believe the children would eventually come around. For now they were happy, and free to revel in all the boring, normal things they’d been denied: grocery shopping together, and falling asleep in front of the television, and padding around the house in their sock feet.
Money would be tight for a while with the legal bills and child support, but they agreed that it was brave and freeing to live simply. Melanie had a small import business specializing in Asian gifts and gimcracks, carved elephants, bamboo trays, kites, fans, lanterns, beadwork, lacquerware. Mass-produced exotica for American living rooms. She thought she could squeeze a little more out of the business, now that she was no longer preoccupied with all the apparatus of an affair, the lingerie, the secret phone calls, the cover stories. Chad worked selling advertising for a radio station with a classic rock format. The ringtone on his cell phone played “Layla.” It could be a melancholy job, since the station’s demographic skewed to middle age and so many of the advertisements were for active retirement communities, investment funds, prostate screening tests and the like, reminders of the march of time, of bodily failure and mortality. Chad was forty-five and Melanie forty-three. They told themselves that they were still a long way from old. With any luck at all they’d have a considerable span of healthy years together. And after all, they had leapt and grasped at happiness, made purposeful, invigorating choices. Surely that was good for a few bonus points in the actuarial tables.
They regarded the grubby corners of their new, undersized home with a certain fondness. Each of them had come away from the marriages with a few pieces of family furniture, a rocking chair or dresser or hutch. Melanie rummaged her business inventory for decorative lamps and shell-encrusted mirrors and embroidered pillows, giving the rooms the look of a struggling carnival. It was like being kids all over again, back when they were just starting out. For each of them had once lived in similar small, lumpen houses at the beginning of their previous married lives. Each of them had arranged (with Diana, with Greg) similar sparse belongings in vacant spaces. They had not known each other then and they were jealous of all the time they’d missed.
“I bet you were nervous about cooking,” Chad teased, and Melanie said that she guessed she was, she couldn’t remember. Then, realizing she should make more of an effort to get into the spirit of things, she said, gaily, that she had be
en a terrible cook at first. She’d burned everything. And when she had managed to put meals together, she’d served roasts and steaks and slabs of ribs, large, shuddering cuts of meat, dripping with blood and cholesterol, the kind of thing she wouldn’t even touch nowadays. There had been the notion that men liked meat, great caveman portions of it, and in fact Greg had always gobbled it down. Of course, Melanie added, that was before anybody knew better, and long before Greg’s bypass surgery. These days it was all about steamed kale and bran.
“Ha ha,” Chad said, and rested one hand casually on his chest so that he could feel his own heart, its reassuring dump dump dump sound. He already took medications for high blood pressure and for anxiety. He had a bad knee and a worse shoulder. He was rusting out. Sex would probably be the next thing to go. He struggled with gloomy thoughts. He was beginning to feel he might have launched himself under a false flag, misrepresented himself as bold and resolute, or at least talked himself into thinking he was. There were times he half wished he was still undivorced, back home in his garage, changing his car’s oil. He hadn’t been happy with Diana but he’d gotten good at ignoring her. He missed the old habits, old routines, being able to find his toothbrush or coffee mug or keys without thinking. Now everything required premeditation. He wondered if his brain was too old to learn new pathways, new responses, if it was already folded into indelible creases like the lines in his palms. There were still times when he woke up in this strange bed in this strange house and did not remember where he was. Then he’d become aware of Melanie’s industrious sleeping—she sighed and twitched and burrowed—and reach out for the nearest friendly body part breast, crotch, thigh—and fall back to sleep with his hand still there, warm and nested.
Melanie wished there was more than one bathroom in the new house. She was used to privacy for certain bodily functions, though Chad seemed to have no such problem. Well, that was all right, it was all part of the normal life thing. She could and would adapt. She was determined to make this new marriage work. Somehow it was always the woman’s job. Fine. She was going to nail the sucker. She stepped lightly around Chad when he sank into one of his moods or broods, gave him back rubs when he came home from work bent into peculiar shapes from driving while talking on his cell phone. She rehearsed sprightly topics of conversation. She pushed sex about as far as it could go, which turned out to be pretty far indeed. Thank God for the reliability of male lust, that handy switch that was so easy to flip on. Who would have thought it, after all those years of good old married sex, or of doing without (often the same thing), that you could still make love with your whole heart and soul, not to mention skin?
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