Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  But after an hour I woke up with a start, that kind of waking that must come from our monkey ancestors when they were about to fall out of a tree. I jumped awake. It was dawn. I had no idea where I was or how I got there. Then I remembered. I was hungry. I realized in the past twenty-four hours I had eaten a total of two hamburgers, not my usual bill of fare. I got up and went into the sitting room to look for a banana. I was going to deconstruct the gazebo fruit basket if the job did not require a backhoe. The bellman had stacked all of Sabine’s luggage next to it. On the coffee table made out of what seemed to be an actual humongous seashell, she had placed her purse. I picked one banana from the stalk of the hundred or so (with leaves) and sat down.

  I think it was the Pocahontas guy who sent the fruit basket that was waiting for Sabine and me in the honeymoon suite. It was as big as a gazebo. The card said, “Fruit you can eat! PS Don’t drink the water!” There was an enormous sort of flan cake from a writer who hadn’t worked for Doris since he novelized Die Hard II. There were matching sombreros filled with cookies. What in the world did people think? That newlyweds would spend their honeymoon gorging themselves to death? That they’d sit in the Jacuzzi stuffing their faces? I was tired enough from the drive that things felt a little surreal anyway (things were a little surreal anyway). So far Sabine and I had spent less time in conversation than having sex. She barely woke up long enough to check into the hotel (as Doris, which entertained her) and have sex with me again (not as Doris, which also entertained her). I had never met anyone who talked less about herself. But after Doris it was, as I said, a relief, and, as I also said, I thought we had plenty of time. I fell asleep like a toddler who just had his first whole day at the zoo.

  Before I tell what I did next, I want to say that I am not a snoop. I know this is like Nixon saying I am not a crook, but snooping has never been one of my problems. I’ve never read a diary or a letter addressed to someone else or listened in on a phone call. I believe I can understand how people feel about me by the way they act toward me. This may be wrong but it is simple. If anything, I’m the opposite of paranoid. It doesn’t occur to me that people are hostile to me even when they are hostile to me. It doesn’t occur to me that anyone has a hidden agenda. Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, I unzipped Sabine’s purse. I was curious about her. I thought I might find out something.

  I sure did: it was filled with money. Lots of money. Cash. Hundred-dollar bills in packs of one hundred. Brand-new bills, unused, crisp. I couldn’t tell how many of them there were, but there was nothing else in the bag but some tissue paper to round it out. Twenty packs at least. At least $200,000.

  My response was perhaps a bit aberrant: I found it erotic. I had never seen that much cash much less touched it. Something about Sabine’s purse, the color of the money and the texture of the surprisingly soft black leather, and the way she had run out of the bank in the rain clutching it against her chest. It brought back our sex, the way she felt and kissed and smelled, and the fact that we were soon going to have more sex, a lot more sex, a whole weekend of sex.

  Then I thought, Psycho. Janet Leigh, the bank teller, the money she had just stolen sticking out of her purse as she drives out of town.

  Both of these reactions passed through me in about a nanosecond. Then I got scared. Holy shit, I thought. What is going on here? What have I gotten myself into? What should I do?

  I started with some deep breathing. I used to have a yoga teacher, an Indian named Miss Gayatri, who would say, “Innhale and do nahthing.” That’s what I did. There were just a whole universe of questions I couldn’t get answers to, and there was only one person in the universe who could answer them: Sabine. My options were to call the Mexican police (never an option) or ask her directly what the hell was going on. Or walk out of there right then and drive back to LA. But the room was in my name, and I could be letting myself in for trouble. I might be an accessory to a crime. I might have driven the getaway car. Okay, I’d ask her what the hell was going on. Shall I wake her up and ask her while I am in this state of panic or shall I ask her after we have slept awhile when I may be a bit calmer? What difference would a few hours make?

  Pretty fuzzy thinking, I guess, but it had been an overstimulating twenty-four hours. It’s not that I believed she’d provide me with a reasonable explanation for why there was 200 grand in her purse. And I have to admit that, crazy as it was, I wanted to have sex with her again, in fact more than ever. So I left the purse as I found it, trying to make sure it was zipped as it had been zipped, at the exact angle it had been lying on the table. Then I crawled back into bed. Sabine made a sleepy noise as I fit my body against hers from behind. I kissed her neck. She moved against me and reached down and before I could think about it I was inside her again. I put my hand over her mouth as if I were mugging her, and she started sucking my fingers, all of them, like she was trying to get my whole hand into her mouth. Then she started screaming in a way that startled me, almost a scream of pain, as if the pain were going out of her as she went into orgasm. Pretty intense. It took me over completely. I just didn’t care about anything else, who she was or even who I was. When we were finished, I was the one who fell asleep as if I were hit with a hammer.

  When I woke up, it was dark. Sabine wasn’t there and, of course, neither was her purse. Or her luggage. The only thing on the coffee table was my banana peel, underneath which was a note on hotel stationery:

  No I am not some avenging angel sent to do you like you did Doris. I just had to leave. Some day I hope to tell you why in person. Believe it or not, I don’t go to bed with strangers. I have never done before what I did with you. I used you, but I didn’t know you would be you, and it has spun me around good. You may find out some things about me when you go back to LA that may confuse you or maybe you’ll just not bother and forget me. I will never forget you. I am sorrier than you will be able to believe right now that I cannot stay here with you and go back with you. When we meet again I will make it up to you. Thank you for your kindness to me. You are a lovely, gentle, sexy man.

  Sexy was underlined three times. At the bottom was a PS:

  If you care at all for my safety, please burn this letter.

  Burn was also underlined three times.

  Well then. What now? I read the letter again. And again. I read it five times, with a different response each time, ranging from, My God, what a woman to I bumped into a rip-off artist, that’s all. I just got taken for a ride. The truth is I had no idea what to think, it was all so bizarre, but I settled on the last response because it was most obvious and comfortable. Fat chance anyway I’d burn her letter. I might have to show it to the police. Anyway, it was my only honeymoon souvenir.

  My mouth tasted like I had been sucking dirty pennies. Here I was in the honeymoon suite, surrounded by food. I could take a Jacuzzi with the flan cake or perhaps one of the larger papayas. I could be by myself for a while, which was what I wanted to do less than anything. But I felt too rotten to be with anyone else. I could just see the looks: got what you deserved. It was hard enough to feel sorry for myself (at which, however, I was a life master). No way would anyone else feel sorry for me.

  I called the front desk and found out it was nine p.m. I had slept twelve or thirteen hours. I put on my rain gear to go down to the restaurant and have some dinner.

  The hotel was huge. The honeymoon suite was about a half mile from the main lobby. I guess they figured the newlyweds would be screwing so much they wouldn’t have time for the restaurant; they’d eat massive fruit baskets and sombreros-ful of cookies in their room between gambols in the Jacuzzi. In contrast to my usual state of antiparanoia, even the hotel layout seemed conspiratorial. When I asked the desk clerk where the restaurant was, he said, “My condolences about your wife’s mother, señor.”

  I said, “Thank you very much.”

  “What a misfortunate thing to happen on your honeymoon.”

  “Did my wife get off all right?” I asked.

&n
bsp; “Oh yes, no problem,” he said cheerily. “The hotel shuttle took her right to the airport.”

  “At about what time was that?” I said.

  “The plane leaves at nine a.m. so no later than eight.”

  “And that flight was going to . . .”

  “Mexico City, señor. It is only a small plane. From Mexico City one may fly anywhere in the world.”

  “Yes, well, thank you,” I said. I handed him a tip. He smiled and bowed elegantly. He was short and had a neat mustache, nothing like Tony Perkins at the Bates Motel. I bet he had never dressed up in his dead mother’s clothes in his whole life. I turned to walk toward the restaurant, but he stopped me.

  “A question, señor, if I am not intruding.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

  “How did your wife find out about her mother?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were no telephone calls to your room.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “She has a cellular phone. It works anywhere. I guess it beams to a satellite or something.”

  “That was about seven A.M. then.”

  “It could have been.” I looked at his nameplate. “Octavio. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m so sorry, señor. I do not mean to invade your privacy in your time of grief. The security guard in that wing heard a terrible screaming coming from the honeymoon suite.” Octavio smiled with embarrassment. “We never intrude upon our guests, especially in the honeymoon suite. But such a scream, well, we did not know what to do.”

  I smiled incongruously. “It was a terrible shock for my wife.”

  “Yes, I am sure. Again our condolences.”

  “Right, well, thank you, Octavio.”

  “My pleasure, señor.”

  I didn’t think about his question until after I was seated in the restaurant, and then it seemed conspiratorial too. How would he know there were no phone calls to the room or why would he pay attention to such a thing? Maybe it was nothing. The hotel staff must talk among themselves when a guest has an emergency. Maybe the hotel operator told him there were no calls. Maybe I was completely whacked-out paranoid at this point. I needed to get a purchase on reality here.

  Mexico is not the best place to do that for me, which is why I’ve always liked it. Doris wanted to take the Concorde to Paris for the weekend (she could only take the weekend off), but she indulged me my lower-middle-class preference to drive to Baja. It barely qualified as Mexico anyway. There were more Americans than Mexicans here. Tonight they all seemed to be celebrating birthdays or anniversaries. I was the only one by himself: the dining room was filled with couples drinking margaritas and toasting each other and looking deeply into each other’s eyes. There was a buffet at a long table with a number of men in chef’s hats slicing hefty beef roasts and hams and women in poofy off-the-shoulder dresses dishing up all varieties of Mexican specialties from silver trays warmed by flaming cans of Sterno. I had to tip the mariachi band ten dollars not to play at my table. They sang “Happy Birthday” as a cha-cha to one of my fellow diners named Earl. I sang along to myself with the words, “How could you be such a chump, Chump? Chump, chump, chump.” I had a good time feeling wronged. It kept me from having to think about everything I was going to have to deal with when I got back to LA.

  4.

  I checked out after dinner.

  “No luggage, señor?” asked Octavio.

  “Just my anorak,” I said, hoisting it onto the counter with one hand while I signed the credit card slip with the other. If I had worn it on the trek from the honeymoon suite to the front desk, I would have been happily dead from heat stroke.

  “Anorak,” Octavio repeated carefully. “This is a disease that infects cattle. It is a disease of the nerves.”

  “Yes, nerves. My problem, exactly,” I said.

  “Oh no, señor. Now you are joking with me. Surely you do not have this disease, because it is fatal.”

  “Right, just joking, Octavio. You’re thinking of anthrax. Thank you very much.” I reached over the counter and handed him another tip. I asked him to take home the fruit basket, the flan cake, and the his-’n’-her sombreros filled with cookies. I could tell by his expression that this was not allowed, but he thanked me warmly and assured me that his entire family would think of me as they enjoyed these delicious treats.

  There was hardly another car on the road until I crossed the border at three a.m., and then it was the rare pleasure of the I-5 north from San Diego and the 405 into LA at seventy-five mph without one car ten feet in front and another car ten feet behind and cars on each side passing and being passed, with motorcycles splitting the gap and making my stomach leap to the ceiling. I’ve seen at least twenty-five accidents on the freeway in the fifteen years I’ve lived in LA. The most recent was a Mercedes a hundred yards in front of me that shot across three lanes to its left, hit the guardrail, and flipped onto its roof into the oncoming traffic. The driver must have either passed out or done it on purpose. I’d never know which. It became a “fatal injury accident blocking the 405 northbound at La Cienega” on the radio traffic updates for a couple of hours, then nobody thought about it again. What does it do to your brain to live like this? It was just something that happened to somebody else. To most people it was nothing. To the people who had to drive the 405 at that time it was an irritating inconvenience. To me it was something I saw that became a story I told for a couple of days to friends who responded with blank looks that said, “So what?” If anything, they were concerned about me getting all excited about the obvious. Because what was there to say about it? It was just another horrible possibility, like the next big earthquake. The fact that it happened to other people every day was a fact nobody could do anything about, another unfortunate incident on the news. What are we going to do? Make bike paths out of the freeways? Stop driving cars? Shut up and live your life, their patient smiles said.

  When I pulled into my driveway, it was just dawn. I had worked myself into the certainty that it would be blocked by yellow police tape, and a SWAT team would descend on me as soon as I pulled up. Nothing. Not even two plainclothesmen napping in an unmarked car. I got out of the Z, stretched my arms in the air, and breathed. The air is actually breathable here this close to the ocean. My place is in the Santa Monica Canyon, at the highest point on a switchback up from PCH, a garage converted into a one-bedroom apartment with a little deck on the back from which I can see the ocean over the trees below and used to be able to see Charles Laughton’s old house perched on a cliff in the distance until it slid down onto the highway during a mudslide.

  My landlady is named Renate Steiner. She is a big-boned blonde in her late forties with a soft face that shows her suffering. She lives with her daughter Krista in the house on the double lot, an old white wood-frame house built in the late thirties and owned ever since by German immigrants. Krista is a schizophrenic. She has two older sisters: Hannah, who graduated from Harvard Medical School and runs the hospital in a refugee camp in Cambodia; and Greta, who is first cellist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Twenty years ago, after Renate’s husband died suddenly, she converted the garage into the apartment and lived in it with all three girls so she could rent the big house and put them through school. Krista is the youngest, twenty-two. She has been home for four years. At eighteen, she went off to Wellesley on a full scholarship and within two months she was back home. If something awful happened to her during that time, she won’t tell anybody what it was. Now when one of her sisters has a great accomplishment or good fortune, Krista cuts herself. I’ve been living in Renate’s place for four years; Krista had just moved back home when I moved in. She’s a pretty girl, large-boned like her mother, with frizzy hair and a round flat face like a clock. She hates the way she looks. She ducks when she sees a mirror. She smiled brightly when I first met her, then I noticed she had rotated her body a quarter turn and was looking at me sideways out of the corners of her eyes. Her head was oscillating slightly and her smi
le had become frozen, tense, a rictus. It may have been in response to my putting out my hand to shake hers when Renate introduced us. Renate said, “Krista, shake hands with Mr. Wilder.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Krista said.

  But in the four years since, she has decided she likes me. More than likes me. Renate says she talks about our future together, that she knows that “we each have to work through our personal issues” but then we will be married. When I travel, I sometimes find her in my apartment when I come home. She waits until Renate is asleep then uses the spare key to let herself in. Sometimes she sleeps in my bed, or eats something from the refrigerator; usually, she just sits in my chair and listens to her Discman, which she does most of her waking hours. Otherwise she doesn’t disturb anything. It’s still a little creepy, and the first time it happened I of course talked to Renate about it who talked to Krista about it whose response was to slash her breasts with a razor blade. When we hid the key, she broke a window and climbed in. When I asked her myself not to do it, she said, “I don’t ever bother you when you’re here. Why can’t I at least stay with you when you’re gone?”