THE GIRL
You don't waste much time,
do you?
She pulls hard on the cigarette and allows the smoke to float from her lips, sizes up the naked woman in the bath and the fully dressed man standing above her.
FADE TO BLACK
He liked the girl very much now, the way she walked into the scene, delivered her lines, took control of the whole thing, powerful in the spaces between the words, the calculated pauses, rhetorical silence.
“I'd like to stick around, you know, just to watch. Just to watch, you understand, but Mummy might get SUSPICIOUS, and then I would never learn to drive.”
It seemed to Giles that the phone rang before the girl could have possibly gotten downstairs to the Volkswagen. The woman with the brown-red hair who was wearing only a towel held the phone at arm's length, tears in her eyes, her face still swollen from crying.
“No, I didn't,” he replied into the receiver. “No, I didn't.”
Unlike early gray L.A. mornings, mornings that always promised rain and would have meant rain anywhere else but burned away instead—or L.A.'s cool evening breeze that in South Carolina could only have meant spring dawn, L.A. darkness was like darkness everywhere else.
“She was too drunk for ME to drive,” the girl said, charging across the room to the sofa.
“Was not.” The tall, blonde mother smiled, pushed back the cloud of fine hair from the girl's sulky eyes.
“I thought you might pass out and I would drive us up to Tehachapi. You're a born human sacrifice, you know.” She turned her eyes up to Giles now. “Some day she's gonna wake up with a knife in her heart.” She kissed her mother's cheek.
“She's such a very pretty girl. So beautiful I pity her,” the mother said.
“Pity is as pity does.”
“Just turned sixteen.” Together she and Giles watched the girl disappear into the room with only a mattress on the floor. “I was that beautiful.”
She poured vodkas into tall glasses. But he didn't drink.
The four of them sat on the L-shaped sofa inside a long empty silence. “Oh, gross,” the girl said. She looked at her mother and they both laughed. The Colorado woman in the towel had passed out with her legs apart. The girl went to her, looked at the man, lifted the towel, raised her eyebrows high like Groucho Marx.
“Let's shave her a valentine,” the girl said to him.
“That would be painful and cruel.”
“Yes, so what are you saying?”
His glass of clear, warm vodka sat on the floor.
“Time for little girls to be beddy-bye.”
The girl made a face that could only be made in the presence of the blind.
“But why, Mommie? You are much too drunk to fuck.”
“Bed. Now . . . . Young Lady?”
“Much too drunk to be fucked, I might add.”
Then the girl closed the door of the room with only a mattress. She didn't look back.
When they danced, he realized the mother was exactly his height, eyes and lips spaced the same. He led her back to the sofa to sleep. Giles backed away from her, toward the source of the music. Dim yellow light reflected off the narrow kitchen walls and fell like sulfurous smoke over the sleeping women.
Behind the curtain he found the radio. It was the only life left in the room. Leaning forward into the bay window, forearms on the sill, Giles experienced the sensation of standing at the stern of a giant ship, a deep cold current just beneath his feet. He didn't know how far it was back to the bar, distance being measured in space and time, with two of the three parts of the equation having been suspended indefinitely. But he figured he'd be sober by the time he got back to where he remembered things clearly.
When he knocked on the bedroom door there was no answer, but he could see the light from inside. He eased open the door. The girl looked up from her magazine.
“Can you tell me how to get back to the bar? Do you know which one?”
“It's The Booth. Tell the taxi man. They all know it.” She returned to her reading.
“I'll be walking.”
“It's too far,” she said without looking up.
She lifted the edge of the mattress. “Here. This will get you there.”
“No.”
“It's okay. I'll tell her she spent it on drink. Half true, huh? The way I see it, it's you who deserves it, even if you didn't earn it.”
“I really couldn't do that.”
“You are funny. Talk to me and I'll see to it that you get home safe.”
“I'm sorry?”
“Just talk to me. I like the way you talk. The accent I mean. That Southern talk.”
“It's very late.”
She sat up attentively, without mockery, waiting.
“I can't” Giles said. “It's like when people put a microphone in your face or tell you to look natural for the camera. I can't do it. I have to go now.”
“Wait. Please do wait.” She was standing. Translucent panties. Short sheer gown. She talked comfortably as she dressed, gliding into jeans, pulling a loose shirt over the gown, buttoning it over her arms, then removing the gown from underneath.
“I'll drive,” she said.
“No way.”
“I love that, 'No way.' I like the way you say that, 'Noo Waay.' You can shift. Don't worry.”
***
But he made her give him the keys, thinking he'd get money at his hotel, take her back to the apartment, then call a cab from there. He had time. He wouldn't be sleeping for a while. They drove a long time, the girl telling him when to turn here and there. They had left the oppressiveness of the apartment.
“I'm hungry,” she said. “Pull in here.”
“You've been taking me in circles, haven't you?”
“I've been watching you. I've been watching you going through the five speed. I can do it now.”
She ordered food for them. A waitress on roller-skates brought it to the car.
“They say you are what you eat.”
“They're wrong,” she said passing him a hamburger. “You become what eats you. Life in the food chain.”
“If your mother wakes, she'll wonder where you are. She'll be worried.” The girl held up one finger as she chewed and swallowed.
“She never knows where I am. She worries all the time. She’s a classic worrier. Someday they’ll build a statue to her, call it The Great Mother of Worriers. I'll simply remind her of the Mississippi man. Now give me the keys.”
He hesitated.
“Noo Waay,” she said laughing. “How will I ever learn? How will I ever get back to Kansas, Toto?”
“Don't take your eyes off the road,” he said. “Don't confuse changing gears with driving. Look away too long and you end in a ditch.” Her hair blew across her face, but Giles could see that she was smiling.
“There isn't a ditch in this whole bloody city. I love you. You know that? I love you.”
He held his hand on hers and performed the actual shifting until she had the feel of it.
“Only one last thing,” she said. “I have to learn to command the radio, too.”
“Save it,” he said.
“Well, you command the radio, I'll do the driving.”
The yellow haze of night was shifting to gray morning.
“What’s the name of this one?” she said, nodding toward the radio.
“Everybody Wants To Rule The World.”
“Who sings it?”
“Tears for Fears. It’s old.”
She turned and looked into his eyes, and he saw that she was just a little girl.
“And you remember it?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, turning his eyes from hers. He wanted to say something to her. She was waiting, but he couldn’t find the words.
“Last stop, Lincoln's destiny,” she said, steering the car to the curb outside the bar.
He didn't know what to say when they came to a stop. He didn't want to get out of the car, to just leave
her there. For a second they both looked down at the radio, listening as the song began winding down, fading.
“Pretty good,” he said, forcing a smile, “for an old song.” The music floated from their open windows, out into the gray morning somewhere. Hers was the mask of a smile. He closed the door softly with both hands. He waited. She looked up at him. Then she looked away, out at the city.
“Nobody wants to rule the world,” she said. “Nobody really wants to rule the world.”
He looked at her eyes, at the blue and white and red lights of the city reflecting in them.
“I can go anywhere now, can't I?” she said glancing around the interior of the small car, avoiding his eyes, holding back. “Anywhere at all.” She looked straight ahead, waiting for him to step away from the car.
For a time her eyes didn't move. Then she looked at him. “Can't I?” she said, gripping the steering wheel. “Anywhere.”
She reached down to the radio and switched it off.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“You know, the ride.”
“Think I can make it back home in one piece?”
“Absolutely.”
“Say that again,” she said, “that same way. That Southern way.”
“Absolutely.”
“Again,” she said.
“Absolutely.”
“You wanna bet?” she said.
***
Giles Carter tried hard to remember how long the walk had been from the hotel to the bar. He was walking in the right direction, but nothing looked familiar. He didn't know how far it was or how long it would take. Could be two blocks, two miles, two continents he thought. Then he knew it didn't matter. The earth could open up and swallow him at any moment. One day the earth would open up and swallow this city. It was only a matter of when.
Anything can happen, he thought. Anything can happen. Anything.
What You Really Mean Is
Rene Severance and Giles Carter
At some indecipherable moment in their conversation, she hung up on him. And after a dozen phone calls and as many messages on her machine, Giles Carter couldn’t take it. He drove from his Myrtle Beach hotel through the night to Florence seventy miles away, to Rene’s apartment.
Passing the somber, Gothic hospital complex that marked the city limits, he lit another cigarette and lowered his window. The humidity washed over him like a heavy tide, and the salty air trapped in the car's interior was absorbed by the night, gone. The wipers peeled away the foggy film that materialized on the windshield. At red lights, he paused, glanced both ways, then drove on. The dark voice of the tires' gripping the pavement whispered up from the damp streets. It was two-thirty in the morning.
He found her note tacked neatly at each corner, as perfectly centered as a painting on the new white door: Call the police. Please don't be the one.
He reached for the door. It was unlocked, and after easing it open he did take one step. Then called her name. He took another step, called again, and listened.
Giles heard the sound of the bath upstairs.
This is how it began: Rene and Giles were first-year teaching assistants at Duke University. Coincidentally, they had each required their students to see Carnal Knowledge, the first campus film of the year. When they ran into one another in the lobby, it seemed only collegial to have coffee and talk. It was, they would say by Christmas, their first date.
The truest scene, they agreed, is when Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen meet. In the scene, Nicholson and Bergen are driving to a small cafe and talking about how men and women communicate. Nicholson says that men and women speak in code, like spies. Everything means something else, he says. Bergen says, “Yes, and when you say that you mean something else.” Nicholson says, “But when you say that what you really mean is….”
Rene and Giles agreed that the scene supported current critical theory that questioned the validity of language in the rendering of human relations. Words, they agreed, were inadequate, unreliable. He quoted Stanley Fish and she quoted Jacques Derrida and then they motioned for more coffee.
Rene, who had come to Duke to study Milton, assigned the film to her class titled “Failed Feminine Models and the New Woman.” Giles, who had come because he admired Reynolds Price, said his students were reading from Robert Bly and would discuss Nicholson and Garfunkel as two incomplete sides of the male psyche.
“Just look at the women in the film,” Rene said. “Count them. You have The Girl Next Door, Bergen. Big Boobs, Ann-Margret. The Cold Ball Buster, the Woman-Child hippie, and The Prostitute. All of them, they are all stereotypes. There are no other choices represented.”
“Women in the audience are supposed to identify with Bergen,” Giles said, pouring more coffee, “because she has small breasts and gets to sleep with both guys, and yet remains a 'good girl'.”
“That's Mr. Hollywood selling tickets,” Rene said, reaching for her cup.
“But what you mean when you say that,” Giles said, smiling, “is that the idea that a good girl would want to sleep with a man, two men, is a male, not a female fantasy.”
“And what you mean when you say that—” Rene waited until he stopped smiling. “What you mean is you'd rather talk about sex than the movie.”
“Meaning, really, that you are grateful I brought up the subject of sex, because you are a good girl who has fantasies of sleeping with two men as different as Nicholson and Garfunkel—has in fact slept with men very much like them—but you could never be the one to initiate the conversation. Because you are a good girl.”
“Meaning, more to the point, that—by omission I might add—I have small breasts, but you wouldn't kick me out of bed.” They both laughed.
“And what you mean when you say that is that it is time for me to say whether I would kick you out of bed before you reveal more of yourself in this conversation.”
“But what you really mean is that you are not sure you can recapture the erection you had when Ann-Margret's tits filled the screen, and you'd rather I didn't sleep with you than experience failure again in bed.”
“Which is another way of saying that if you threaten me with sexual failure, you won't have to experience the guilt of making love with me while fantasizing that I am alternately Nicholson and Garfunkel. When I'm on top it's Nicholson; when you're on top it's Garfunkel.
“Face it, Giles. You're a boob man.”
They were both laughing now. “You're right. You got me.” They were both laughing hard now. “And yet what you really mean when you say that is that—he waited for her to catch her breath—if you did have enormous boobs, you'd take a picture and send it to Jack Nicholson.”
“God, yes,” she said.
The next morning in the shower, they talked deconstruction. Before they were done, Rene had named his penis Derri and her breasts the Dadas.
At parties, when the conversation turned to gender issues, Rene and Giles derailed theoretical controversy, one spinning off the other's verbal gymnastics until the whole room was laughing. They quickly became famous among graduate students for their myths about a seventy-year-old one-armed albino woman blues singer who'd finagled a humanities grant to support her post-punk radical feminist trio, Derri and the Dadas. They were a hit. Someone suggested they begin renting themselves out for parties. That was in the winter of 1990.
Classes ended in May. For three weeks at the beach, they ate strawberries and sharp cheese, cold shrimp, sliced apples and boiled eggs. They drank Chablis that was eye-achingly cold. They took meals on their bed.
The sky was blue-black with heat and energy. The surf, the color of cracked slate, churned into whiteness at the shore. With the bitter smell of salt brine blowing over her in a misty fog, Rene gripped her hat with both hands against the sand and wind. Giles tossed chunks of bread that raced like meteors and brought the black-throated gulls so close to his head that she begged him to stop it. Huddled under the eaves a few feet away, she shouted through
the hard wind and surf for him to stop it, running finally, pleading with him to kiss her.
During the late night, rain cascaded from the roof onto the porch outside their window, soothing them as they lay slick and breathless. Candle light from the other room defined lips, illuminated nipples.
An evolving conversation interrupted only by sleep and lovemaking consumed their days. They bared adolescent dreams, described in hushed voices their deepest unexpressed fantasies, then later laid open their most savage secrets like conspirators, assassins, knowing—even anticipating—the thrilling danger of their revelations, then purged their dark confessions always with wine and sex, followed by more talk. They turned each other inside out with talk.
Then in September, before the summer had quite folded upon itself, she stood in the black surf crying as he swam with all his strength toward the low, parched moon, hoping it would swallow him, pulling hard in the slanted current until it slammed him against the bits of shell that stretched like broken constellations at the frothy water's edge near the pier late in the night.
And neither of them could say how it had happened. They couldn't say how it had come to that.
They didn't speak for five years.
Giles applied all the charm and political energy he could muster and fake to selling his first novel. Still, when it was well received, he was so surprised by its moderate success that he couldn't mask feeling that he was an impostor. The book had been just good enough to make a brief splash, but when serious reviewers noted that Giles had studied under Reynolds Price they lamented that he'd not learned more from his teacher. At signings and other publisher-sponsored events, he sensed that every bookstore cashier, stock boy, and janitor was impatiently watching the clock and tapping his toe, waiting to switch off the lights, to pull up stakes before Giles could close his bag and button his jacket. When he couldn't write the second book, he gutted it, reformatted it and called it a screenplay. He made the rounds of writing conferences, vanity presses.
Someone To Crawl Back To Page 3