Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  “Yeah, threw it in my face.” She leaned on him as if he was a fifties boyfriend — a man’s chest felt fantastic when it was a place you could look up and out from, the whole world at a distance from the weight of your head. He put his hand in her hair.

  “What’s wrong? Are you just sleepy, or do you want to talk about it?”

  “What? Oh, no. My psyche feels like it shrank in the wash and now the edges don’t quite reach anymore. It’s a coverage problem.”

  He stroked her hair and the side of her face. His fingers felt soft and light-touched. An incredible gentleness. He pulled her down the stairs and abandoned her at the cocktail table. She moved to the edge of the bar, her mouth smiling and slightly open. She poured some vodka in a highball glass, some cream, then some Kahlúa. She drank it down fast. Like ice cream. She poured another, feeling something classic and teenage take hold of her, an archetype setting in. Drunk. Party. She watchedvinyl and satin and leather go by, spikes and skin, and she felt almost sexy and slightly removed. She stared down, looking at her feet in low-heeled leather boots. She groaned. Got to stop dressing like such a dyke, swear it. Jeans and boots and these goddamned baggy shirts, oversized and softly worn through. No makeup and long, straight blond hair. A fucking yogurt commercial, a Pepsi commercial, a goddamned milk ad. She shuddered.

  “You seem to be having an interesting conversation with yourself.”

  Mina jumped at this, caught, smiled at the speaker.

  “You’re reading yourself the riot act?”

  Mina had never seen this woman before. She had certainly not noticed her all night. She was a bit older than most of the people at the party. She wore a long fur coat, leopard skin, ankle length. It had not-too-stylized shoulder pads and was tapered to the waist. Mina would date it about the late thirties. Her hair was black and combed sleek and shiny at shoulder length. It was parted at the side rather dramatically. Cyd Charisse meets young Joan Crawford. Vixen hair. And she had the delicate small features that people would call “doll-like and porcelain,” but hers actually were porcelain and doll-like.

  “Is that a real leopard-skin coat?” Mina asked.

  “Of course. Feel it,” she said. Mina looked at the glossy soft sleeve, the deep black and warm orange-gold colors. It made her hair look ebony, blue-black, Superman-comic-book black. This in turn made her skin whiter. She examined her hands, white and manicured and red-nail painted. She looked at her feet. Pumps with sheer black stockings. She wondered about seams. She wondered what her dress was like under the coat. The coat, my God, the coat.

  “No, thank you. It looks real, I’ve just never seen one before.”

  “If you’ve never seen one before, how do you know it looks real?” She smiled and looked in Mina’s eyes.

  “It’s like too beautiful not to be real,” she said. The doll woman laughed and laughed. She had one of those condescending, amused laughs, knowing but genuine. Mina liked it. Mina liked her condescension. She was sure this woman did know more than she. More about everything in the whole world. All she could think was, Good, I made her laugh.

  “If you think it looks beautiful, you ought to feel it,” she said quietly. She held out a fur-covered arm.

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that. I’m sure it’s great, it’s best if I don’t touch it. I’ll just look from afar.”

  “That’s wise. If you touched it, you might be overcome with a desire to get your own, and coats like this one are very rare. Very, very rare.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I think you actually get crucified in some parts of the city for wearing a coat like that. Don’t they like force you to register with the police when you move into a new area, with the sex offenders? Are you restricted to after-curfew hours so no small children see you? Aren’t you like barred from whole arenas of employment possibilities? Do housewives burst into tears at the sight of you?”

  The doll woman smiled and pulled out a long European cigarette. She held it near her mouth and stopped smiling. She looked down at Mina’s feet, then back at her face. Perhaps she was trying to find something to comment on in her clothes. In any case, she kept it to herself, because she just looked at Mina with that near-smile. Mina supposed it was a vague sexual come-on, but couldn’t be sure. She began giggling, and Minawas hopeless when she got nervous and got the giggles. The woman pursed her lips, about to say something. Mina continued to giggle.

  “I’m sorry, I’m hopeless,” Mina said, now breathless. The woman again seemed about to speak, and Mina suddenly came forth with another muffled guffaw, which she tried to extinguish in her mouth and instead created an actual snort. She had to admit, as embarrassing as the giggles were, as conscious as she was that her nervousness was causing the laughter, she did enjoy it. She couldn’t stop because the laughter itself became funny, the way it sounded and felt in her body, it was hilarious. So she was trying to stop, but then she wasn’t really. The woman finally smiled benignly, and then looked away, no longer about to speak. Michael approached and lit her cigarette. She smiled at him and he turned to Mina.

  “Are you OK, Mina?” he asked.

  “Me?” she said, and then it was gone, the laughing fit. She was exhausted and serious. “I’m OK.”

  “You met Lorene, I see,” he said.

  “Yes, sort of,” Mina said.

  “Lorene, this is my fantastically wonderful and much missed little sister.”

  Lorene smiled. She looked at Michael and then got very sad-looking. She touched his collar and smoothed it a little.

  “Are you leaving?” he said. She nodded. Then walked away.

  “Just don’t ask, all right?” he said before she could even open her mouth. He was in a bad mood the rest of the night. It was years later, after Michael got sick, that Lorene called her and asked her to help her open her first restaurant. She knew it was Lorene’s way of staying close to Michael, but she didn’t mind. She wanted to be Lorene’s close friend. She still wantedto be her close friend. And they hardly ever talked about Michael anymore.

  It had to be the last meeting with Scott. She was supposed to meet him at the usual time, the usual place. Only this was the last time, she swore it. After all, she had done everything she could to contain it, made strict limitations. No phone calls. The Gentleman’s Club’s number in an emergency, because she “lived there, practically,” and no discussion of her life. Her life was simply “complicated” and “private.” And Scott had accepted these terms.

  They would meet, have a drink. Just like yesterday, when she couldn’t get the drink in her fast enough.

  The month before she had almost ended it. It had started in the usual way with them. London, he would say. Bahrain. Taiwan. Singapore. Hotels. Dinners with clients. The lonely timezone boy. Bonus and banks and Bedouins. Finance deals. Conference calls. She liked to hear the details of his banker’s life. She found catalogs of his business details erotic. Then she would press him. How lonely were you? Did you get a massage? Did you have a Thai girl sent to your room? Scott would blush and deny it. She found it exciting to press him for sexy details. To untie his Southern gentility.

  “Well, there was one time.”

  “When?”

  “I was feeling awful, drunk, far from home. I ordered a massage.”

  “Charged to the bank, I hope.” He put his index finger in his drink and stirred the ice a little, then put his finger in his mouth. Mina found the gesture an oddly feminine one. It was too overtly sensual for Scott, too contrived. She preferred himwound tight, audience to her own sexy gestures. But she had pressed him for details too many times, and now he was a little self-conscious in his revelations. It made her weary.

  “She came to my room. Tiny, shy.”

  “Eyes averted,” Mina said.

  “Eyes averted.” Scott smiled. Mina tried to picture it, but Scott’s smile ruined it.

  “Have you ever told anyone this before?”

  “No, no, I haven’t,” he said. He took a sip of scotch. His usually very short hair had grown
out a bit. He looked boyish, his eyes were sad. Mina suddenly felt it then, in that second, his sadness, and she wanted him again. She picked up his hand. He had large hands, the palms wide and the fingers in proportion, but elegantly formed, and the skin was soft and smooth.

  “She had me undress and lie on the bed. She draped a towel over my hips and rubbed oil on me. She gave a slow, deep massage with tiny, strong hands.”

  Mina turned Scott’s hand over and gave the lightest possible kiss to his inner wrist. She let her lips relax and catch a little as she moved them slowly on the pale veined skin. She moved over his palm to his fingers. She could taste a bit of salt, a bit of scotch. The tang of nicotine that tasted a bit like a woman to her. She thought of how after sex his fingers did smell like her. She imagined, even after a few hours and a shower, he might get a hint of sex on the airplane home when he rested his fingertips on his upper lip during a lull in conversation with the old lady from Greenville sitting next to him. Azaleas and spring, her unmarried niece. He blushes as the old woman talks, remembers how long a month is. When Mina thought of Scott like that, polite to the world, holding open doors and carrying coats but secretly overwhelmed, still kind of blushing — she’d think she couldmarry Scott, take care of him, be wrapped in some perfect suburban dream of bourgeois sex and storybook Christmases. Her secret desire to be Doris Day and normal came over her. It even felt sexy to imagine him coming home from the office late, smelling of another woman’s perfume, guilt-ridden and skittish. They would fight and have aggressive sex. But no, not likely. She was confusing Scott and Max. Scott would just weep, probably, confess everything and feel too guilty to touch her. She would watch TV and eat fat-free cookies.

  “She had massaged every part of me, and I’m nearly asleep but nevertheless aroused,” Scott said.

  “Yes, are you on your back at this point or your front?”

  “My back, towel draped over my cock.”

  “Are your eyes open or closed?”

  “Open, definitely,” he said.

  “Men’s eyes are always open, aren’t they?”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” he said, watching Mina rub his fingers almost absently across her lips.

  “Is it sexier if the woman’s eyes are open or closed?”

  “You ask the strangest questions. It depends, I guess.”

  Mina looked up at him with a closed-mouth grin. “Do you think these questions are sexy?”

  “Umm. Yeah.”

  “You’re on your back, towel draped across you, aroused.”

  “Yes,” he said, shifting in his chair, looking sadder still and down.

  “What next?”

  “She said, without looking at me, ‘Massage?’ and she pointed at my toweled midsection. I nodded and she put her hand under the towel and very quickly and expertly brought me off,” Scott said, pursing and grimacing his lips a little. “Shewas quite efficient and matter-of-fact about it. It was, I admit, very pleasurable, a clinically precise and passive relief. There was, I think, a fifty-dollar charge on my hotel bill for the addendum hand job.”

  Mina thought it wasn’t a sexy story at all, but it was undoubtedly true, and so ordinary and dull a little tale that she almost convinced herself she was in love with Scott, that she needed to wrap him in warm flesh for the rest of his days. But this was just because she had to end things with him, because she knew it would be one of the last times.

  At dinner that night he had calculated the number of times. He had a financier’s belief in interest and dividend, as though accumulated days guaranteed a return of some kind. He ordered a second bottle of wine. She let him. He spoke about his newly purchased house in Brooklyn Heights. Its authentic Federalist details. She didn’t quite listen, but thought of the first time they ate together. How he took her coat for her. He pulled out the table for her when she stood and when she sat. She knew these gestures meant nothing, that politeness was just learned habit. Yet when he held open doors and pulled back chairs, she felt an undeniable comfort. It was a protocol that hinted at an intact fabric, an order, a world in which she would be safe. When he pulled the table back to ensure she sat more easily, when he concerned himself with ensuring her comfortable and frictionless glide through the world, it had an embarrassingly intoxicating and erotic effect on her. Mina realized, suddenly, that this was a date, that these were the gestures of an old-fashioned date. That he was not winking at gestures, not imitating a fifties movie or displaying anything but complete earnestness. She knew then she should tell him, warn him, but she didn’t want to. Mina had never been on a date before.

  That time he had spoken of a domestic life, a new life. He wanted to care for her and have her care for him. She smiled and touched his hand and said what she always said when he tried to escalate and accrue.

  “But this is nice, isn’t it? The way things are right now between us?” And Scott nodded and stopped talking and they went to his room and had undistinguished, comfortable sex. When he touched her these days, she had to think of Max, of a whispered word, of a forceful kiss. No way would Mina manage to be what Scott hoped she would be, even if she decided she really wanted it. No way.

  No letters, she had said. She had tried in good faith to contain it, hadn’t she? No gifts. No phone calls. But containment didn’t really work, and there was a deepening asymmetry between them. It made their relations stagnant and lonely.

  She was getting close to being late for today’s assignation. (Lorene came up with names: assignation, rendezvous, tryst, bankers’ meeting, ATM time, MI — monthly indiscretion. It was amazing how the more names Lorene came up with, the less Mina was able to give it serious regard. She felt guilty about that, guilty toward Scott, then guilty for her guilt, for pitying him.) She lingered at the restaurant.

  Scott would be at the hotel bar, by himself. Ordering a second drink, maybe. Watching the door, glancing at his watch, certainly.

  Mina left the restaurant. She walked past her favorite boutique on Beverly Boulevard. She wandered absently inside. She was really late now. She needed some new shoes. She needed black kid-leather sling-backs. Maybe open toed. She usually didn’t go open toed. But sling-backs, or maybe mules. Black silk mules. Something Betty Grable-ish, somethinglook-back-and-over-the-shoulder-ish. Something to sit in her closet for a lifetime, unworn except for three minutes in a boutique on Beverly Boulevard. Shopping is a form of daydreaming, a way to recast your life instantly, a desperate optimism about the meaning of style and detail. Such a fleeting feeling, but impossible to resist. She knew she was the kind of woman who couldn’t walk past a post office without wanting to buy stamps.

  Scott finished his second drink.

  He’d have called the restaurant by now. On that awful little streamlined and lightweight cellular phone. To be interrupted at all times in all places is a contemporary privilege, privacy and exclusivity oddly inverted. Do you think people might figure that out, that all the underlings of the world might be forced to carry mobile phones, and the big bosses the only ones entitled to be unreachable?

  No, definitely not sling-backs, but mules. She looked at her foot. Her instep. Even the word oozed sex: instep. When you walk in mules, your eyes go to the curve of the instep, the sudden nakedness of the secret underside of the foot, the way it promised things about your life.

  She didn’t make it to the bar. She went to the Gentleman’s Club with her new purchase. Lorene sat at the bar with one of the night managers, Sam (real name Kenny).

  “Mina, my love, what a surprise,” Lorene said, patting the barstool next to her with a freshly manicured hand. Moroccan Mauve Lacquer in Cool Matte. One of Mina’s least favorites. She sat, dazed, imagining she might just have a drink and a cigarette or two. She drew her packages on her lap. She liked the sound heavy paper boutique shopping bags made when they rubbed up against slick-coated cardboard such as an expensiveshoe box. It sounded clean to her, and she liked it almost as much as the sound the boxes made when they were at last opened, the pulling up, the lif
ting of the whole of it until the bottom half slid apart with a moany, pregnant sound. Then the whispers of tissue, everything encased in matching colored tissue paper.

  “Let’s see what you got,” Lorene said. Lorene placed the box on the bar top. She pulled out the perfectly formed mules, the raw black silk spotless and pristine. It was curvy and dangerous, a personality-altering shoe. One must feel a certain way in it. One must.

  “A shoe like this could change your life, doll.”

  Mina put a finger on the vamp, the open-toe cap. Lorene looked at the shoe and then back at Mina’s absent fondling. She frowned. Lorene knew how to read the gestures of women. Mina put the shoes away.

  “I’ll have a drink, Ray,” Lorene said. “A Ward number six, please. Cuban style. Mina?”

  “A club soda.” She smirked at Lorene.

  “You’re no fun,” Lorene said.

  “I stood up Scott,” Mina said.

  “Yo, no kidding. I could tell from the shoes. Heart-trampling shoes.”

  “Did he call?”

  “Just three times.”

  “Oh, God. I’ll go over there. I should.” Mina got up and pulled her hair back into a thirty-second ponytail, then dropped it.

  “Hey, you forgot the shoes.”

  “You keep them,” she said, nearly through the door, not looking back.

  On Route: Lubbock to New Orleans

  “The first time you did it,” she says.

  We are escaping whole states on Route 10.

  She has made me drive the long haul from Santa Fe to Houston, one unbreaking line, speeding through the flat brown Texas landscape, the air saturated with manure and dust. We had stopped miserably in Lubbock, found an offbrand ersatz Howard Johnson’s where Lorene had eaten a butter-drenched gray twice-microed potato and I kept eyeing her cell phone on the table between us. We are going miles out of our way, on Route 10, to get to New Orleans. Lorene wants one girls’ night out in the French Quarter, a forced idea that only grows less attractive the closer we come to it. I can’t wait to get to the East Coast, my mother, some safe, sane place where I can consider myself. I couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough, only finally relaxing into a driver’s highway trance after we crossed the Sabine River.