The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  I turned off the car and climbed out. The cold hit me like a solid force. The weather report had called for an Arctic depression, and during the night the temperature had fallen through the floor. It was twenty degrees below zero out and overcast. I hustled across the parking lot and pushed into the kitchen store. A little doorbell tinkled above me.

  “Cold, isn’t it?” asked a woman wearing a red apron.

  She had been arranging tea towels.

  “I can’t believe how cold it is,” I said. “It’s bitter.”

  “March is supposed to be warmer, but for me it’s always the worst winter month. It promises so much and always fails to deliver.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It can do that.”

  “Can I help you look for anything?”

  “No, just browsing, but thanks.”

  What I wanted to ask is: By the way, I met this guy and fell for him, and he used to own the land under these stores, his grandfather did, and now he’s gone and you’re here and can you tell me anything about him? That sounded crazy even to me.

  46

  The bad drunks, the ones that get you in trouble, are the ones that sneak up on you. If you set out to get drunk, then you go at things with a plan in mind, a pacing that a sneaky drunk slyly slips around. During a sneaky drunk, you start with a drink, maybe in the afternoon, and one thing leads to another, and maybe you haven’t eaten enough, at least not enough for the kind of drinking you are about to engage in, and before long you are drunker than you should be, sloshy, and because you haven’t planned for the drunkenness, it seems like a pleasing surprise, an unexpected guest, and you keep offering more drinks to this visitor, delighted to find yourself in a state of glow when you hadn’t even meant to have more than one.

  I found myself drunk in an après-ski bar with five young men from the University of Vermont’s ski team at four o’clock in the afternoon on the last day of our girls’ getaway week. Constance and Amy sat beside me, equally drunk, the merriment of feeling happy and loaded beside a fire with five attentive young men locked deep in the experience.

  We talked about eyebrows.

  We talked about eyebrows because one of the Vermont boys, Peter, posited the theory that the denseness and thickness of a woman’s eyebrows served as a reliable indicator about the denseness and thickness of a woman’s privates. What denseness and thickness meant in relation to a woman’s vagina was hard to pin down, but it was an afternoon discussion, a drunken debate about the impossibility of eyebrows having anything to do with our anatomy south of the equator. But Peter—who was tall and cute and hopelessly full of himself—insisted it was true.

  They all wore Carhartts. They all wore fleeces and silly wool hats. They were like a pack of puppies, and Amy, at her wicked best, liked to play with puppies.

  “So you’re saying,” Amy said, getting everyone to define terms for a moment, “is that what hands and feet are to men, indicating size and scope of the male organ, eyebrows are to women? That’s a fascinating theory.”

  She pulled out the waistband on her jeans an inch and looked down. Then she looked up at the boys, her eyes wide. The boys laughed hard.

  “By god, it’s true!” she declared.

  The boys laughed again.

  “I just read that there is no correlation between hand size and penis size,” Constance said, ever the scholar. “I read that is a myth.”

  “Thank goodness,” one of the puppies said, holding up his hand.

  I took his hand and examined it. It was a small hand.

  “One more round,” Peter, the ringleader, said to the bartender, Tomas.

  We drank beer. Vermont Long Trails. And twice we did shots of Jack Daniel’s. It felt like a couple of rivers joining in my belly.

  “What might make sense,” Amy said, “is to think the thickness of a woman’s eyebrows has something to do with her passion. That might make a little sense. Women with thick eyebrows are passionate, more than a woman with thin, delicate eyebrows. That only stands to reason.”

  “I have thin eyebrows!” Constance said.

  And that made the boys laugh once again.

  “The mound of Venus, the thick meaty part under your thumb,” I said, finding it surprisingly hard to speak clearly, “is supposed to indicate a lover’s passion. A thicker pad at the base of the thumb is a sign of a good lover.”

  All the boys felt their thumbs. Of course.

  It was afternoon drunk talk. That’s all it was until Peter asked us if we wanted to smoke a joint. And when he said smoke a joint, what he meant was: Let’s get out of here, let’s go somewhere, let’s see what else this afternoon can become.

  And maybe, probably, he meant his invitation chiefly for me.

  * * *

  “He’s way into you,” Amy said in the bathroom, inspecting herself in the mirror. “Peter, the cute one.”

  “They’re all cute,” Constance said from the bathroom stall.

  “They’re puppies,” I said, because they were.

  “Puppies or not,” Amy said, digging in her purse for lip gloss, “they’re adorable. And they have nice bodies. And they don’t judge. They’re just out for fun.”

  “So do we want to go smoke a joint?” I asked. “They said something about a hot tub.”

  “I am not going in a hot tub!” Constance said, and she flushed her toilet and came out. “No way. They’re a bunch of boner boys, believe me.”

  “Of course they’re boner boys,” Amy said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  Without meaning to, we found ourselves standing in front of three different sinks and mirrors. We all became aware of it at the same instant, and our eyes went from one to the other, back and forth, our smiles broadening as we realized what fun we were having, how much we cared for each other, how the boys, one way or the other, were just diversions along the way—friendly, cute diversions, but mere diversions.

  “I just want to hold one on my lap and pet him,” Amy said.

  “Which one?” Constance asked.

  “The little one. What do they call him?”

  “Munchie, I think,” I said. “It was hard to tell.”

  “I don’t remember boys being so innocent,” Constance said. “They have a lot to learn.”

  “They’re young,” I said. “As young as we were not long ago.”

  “We’re not much older now,” Amy said. “Don’t go freaking granny pants on me.”

  “But we’ve been through a lot,” Constance said. “I get Heather’s point.”

  Amy held out her hand, and we slid our hands on top of hers. We didn’t say our little ritual saying, but simply held our hands together. It was somewhere around five o’clock on a snowy day in Vermont.

  47

  I kissed Peter, and it was pretty good.

  It was pretty strange, actually, because it had been six months since my last Jack kiss. Six months since my body felt tangled up in another person’s tangle, and I felt a little on guard, a lot drunk, and happy to have broken the spell.

  “You’re like the prince who wakes Sleeping Beauty,” I said. “I’ve been asleep for a long, long time.”

  “You’re not asleep now, are you?”

  “No. I’m awake.”

  “I’m into your eyebrows,” he said.

  He kissed me again. It was a light, easy kiss, but underneath it a bunch of other impulses asked for consideration. Begged for it. And we sat in a hot tub, and I had smoked a joint, and Amy was due to arrive any second with another wave of ski puppies, but they hadn’t come into the pool area yet. Children played in the shallow end of the regular swimming pool. Their moms sat at a table and watched them, but the hot tub was far enough away, down at the other end entirely, to let Peter reach across, take the back of my neck gently, and pull me toward him for a kiss.

  For a kiss in a bathing suit, which had to count for something extra.

  He had a great body. He looked like a young British actor, one of those gallant lads who appear on the PB
S dramas, a thin, tall scion of the ruling class, nice hair, nice teeth, and a gaze that suggested long walks with Labrador retrievers circling his legs and later, in the evening, a gallop and a cup of tea. He was handsome, in other words, but knew it, and that was a bit of a fatal flaw for him.

  “This is a family pool,” I said after he had kissed me a second time.

  His hand had roamed a little under the water. Not inappropriately, just exploring.

  “We could go someplace where it isn’t so public.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is so.”

  “And what would we do in this not-so-public place?”

  He kissed me again.

  I didn’t stop it. But I didn’t encourage it exactly, either.

  Several thoughts: How much had I had to drink? How drunk was I? How much did I trust this Peter character? Where was Amy?

  And what about Jack?

  Well, what about Jack? I asked myself. Jack wasn’t precisely in my calculations at the moment. He wasn’t in my calculations when Peter leaned forward and kissed me again, and this time his hands grew bolder, and I felt myself caving in a little, drunk, warm, and he was cute. Definitely cute, but full of himself, full of that young guy conceit that says he can get pretty much what he likes, and plenty of it, and I told myself I would not reward such a jerk, but then his hands brushed over me and the water was warm and I asked myself, Why not, why not, why not? What am I waiting for?

  * * *

  Amy arrived just in time.

  “And what’s going on here, you little lovebirds?”

  She had two boys in tow. She dropped her towel without ceremony and climbed into the hot tub. The two other boys, Jeff and Munchie, climbed in after her. Munchie smiled a druggie smile. He was the chief pot smoker, apparently, because most of the jokes surrounding him had been about weed. His smile was wifty.

  Jeff, who was sharp featured and muscular, wiggled his eyebrows at us.

  “Orgy,” he said. “Who’s in?”

  “Definitely,” Munchie said. “Orgy for sure.”

  “Dream, you little twits,” Amy said.

  Munchie smiled at her. Jeff sank into the water up to his nostrils.

  Peter’s hand brushed my thigh underwater.

  “Heather and I were thinking about heading out,” Peter said. “Weren’t we, Heather?”

  I tried to clear my head. Had we said anything like that? I understood how he could come to that conclusion, but I wasn’t sure that we had confirmed anything between us, not in the least, and I shook my head softly.

  “Not sure we said that,” I said. “No promises made.”

  Peter’s hand brushed my back and the side of my ass.

  “You guys are going to go have sex,” Munchie said. “You lucky bastards.”

  “Shut up, Munchie,” Jeff said.

  “But they are. Look at them! They got that low eyelid thing going. Like they’re all smoky and ready and hot and bothered.”

  Peter smiled. It was a guy-to-guy smile, and I didn’t particularly like it.

  “Don’t count your eggs before your chickens,” I said.

  Which was not the correct phrase. I tried to edit the comment, but I couldn’t remember how it went.

  Peter smiled some more. Jeff popped higher in the water.

  “We need more to drink,” he said.

  “And more to smoke,” Munchie said.

  Peter stood and reached for my hand.

  He had an erection. He had folded it up under his waistband, but it was still obvious.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I didn’t feel ready.

  “Let’s just hang for a while,” I said.

  Peter smiled. He reached down for my hand again.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “I’m going to hang for a while,” I said. “Just sit down. We’re having a nice time.”

  He reached for my hand again.

  And that’s when Amy punched him.

  * * *

  She punched him so quickly, so unhesitatingly, that it stunned everyone.

  One second she had been half-submerged, watching, joking with the puppies, and the next she had crossed the diameter of the hot tub, had surged up in the water like a great white shark beheading a seal, and she punched Peter on the chest with a force that knocked him to a sitting position on the side of the hot tub.

  “Not now means not fucking now, douche bag!”

  She screamed it. Even after she stopped, her voice reverberated around the natatorium. Everything, every little thing, went silent.

  * * *

  “You saw us leave the bar,” Amy said. “Alfred and me. Or is it I? No, it’s me, right? But do you remember him? I picked him up, and he had those horrible, long fingers.”

  “Of course I remember him,” Constance said. “So does Heather.”

  I nodded. We sat at a butcher-block table in the small kitchen area of our condo. Constance had made us a salad with a side of mac ’n’ cheese. We were done drinking. Amy sipped tea. We all wore pajamas. I felt exhausted and hungover and foolish. I had a bottle of water in front of me. The mention of Peter, the afternoon hot tub punch, had started Amy talking about Alfred of Amsterdam. She knew more about what had happened with Alfred now. Therapy had brought things to light.

  “Anyhow,” she continued, “we went back toward his apartment, or something, and we stopped along the way and ate a brownie that he had with him. I mean, this brownie kicked my ass. I have never felt so high in my life. Added to that was all the pot and booze we had had that night, and I was stretched out.”

  “Do you think he extra doped the brownie?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Hard to say. He might have. Or maybe it’s just really strong stuff. I ate too much of it, because, well, that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done all my life. Amy can do it because she’s Amy! You know the deal. It’s my badass, self-imposed identity. That’s something, by the way, that Tabitha, my therapist, is helping me deal with. She says I don’t always have to lead the charge. That came as a news flash to me.”

  She sipped her tea. She looked radiant sitting in the stupid little kitchenette, her hair wild as always, her gray-green eyes slicing through everything around her.

  “So I don’t want to give all the gory details, but we started making out, and then he said, ‘Here’s a friend’s boat,’ or something, and we climbed down onto it, and I had more or less made up my mind not to be Alfred’s ho, when suddenly I couldn’t stand up straight. That’s about all I remember with any accuracy. You know the rest of the story almost as well as I do. My stuff was gone. He wanted to rip me off. That’s why he hung out with us. With me, anyway.”

  Her eyes did not tear. She sipped her tea thoughtfully, almost, it seemed, astonished that this thing had happened to her and that, at last, we all knew the final details.

  “It had to be the brownie, right?” Constance asked after a moment had passed.

  Constance, of course, would want real, demonstrable reasons. I wasn’t sure Amy believed in those kinds of answers. Not about this.

  “I think so. It tasted chemical, but who knows? Something knocked me out. I’ll say this for Alfred. He didn’t do anything to me. I’m pretty sure about that. My clothes were in place, no sign of rape. He was a gentleman about all that.”

  Constance reached across the table and held Amy’s hand. Amy nodded.

  “Well, come on, you both wondered. I’m solid that he didn’t molest me that way. It’s a thing. It happened. No real repercussions except the mental part. And maybe even that was good, because it made me start asking some serious questions. Like, what the fuck was I doing with a guy I had just met at some ridiculous hour walking around a city I didn’t begin to know?”

  “It was our fault,” Constance said. “We shouldn’t have let you go. I hate that we let you go.”

  “Do you really think you could have stopped me? Haven’t you both wanted to say I should cool down a little with t
he whole men thing? I know you have. I wasn’t able to listen at that point. Now, it’s different.”

  “And that’s why you punched Peter,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “And that’s why I punched Peter, stupid-ass little puppy. It’s all about ladies’ choice for me. If the woman isn’t into it, then nothing is going on. Not while I’m around. Sorry if I overreacted. He seemed like he was pushing it. You didn’t seem ready, Heather.”

  “I don’t know what I was, honestly. I can’t pretend I wasn’t thinking about it.”

  “Well, maybe I overreacted. I don’t know. But I’d rather err on the side of caution, right? You can always pick up with Peter. With any Peter.”

  She finished her tea and went to the sink and rinsed out the cup. Then she came back and sat down again.

  “That’s it. That’s the story,” she said.

  “There had to be something in the brownie,” Constance insisted. “I’ve seen you party, Amy, and nothing can bring you down.”

  “Well, something did. Something definitely did. The truth is, there had to be something in me to put myself in that position. You can’t imagine Ellie Pearson walking the streets of Amsterdam with a vampire like Alfred, can you?”

  Ellie Pearson was the most goody-goody girl at Amherst College. We always used her as a counterpoint to whatever mischief we had engaged in.

  “No, Ellie Pearson wouldn’t have been walking around the streets of Amsterdam late at night with Alfred,” I conceded.

  “So the fault was in me,” Amy concluded. “Nice to think otherwise, and I hate Alfred’s guts and would stab him in an instant if I could, but I take my share of the blame. You know what I think about a lot, though? I think about the fact that he didn’t cover me. That he didn’t have enough kindness toward me that he would at least put something over me. I hate thinking another human being could treat me like that. I don’t know what he would have had on the boat to cover me with, but it would have made it a little more bearable to think back to. It’s probably just an absurd quirk of mine. I wanted to have a blanket over me and stay home from school, I guess.”