by Dana Spiotta
“That’s the subject,” I say.
We have taken to asking questions with no inflections in our tone, a form of road disease that has come upon us simultaneously, and we adjust without speaking of it. It is an intimacy, the beginnings of a secret language, the way a journey makes you alien to everything but the journey itself.
“You have a better subject,” she says.
“You mean the first time I had sex with someone. Loss of virginity. How I became a woman. We are that bored. No, don’t answer that. But these are guaranteed dull stories.”
“No, never dull. Guaranteed not dull.”
“Look at Louisiana. Lorene, look — Louisiana. Bayou country.-Below sea level. Slant-roofed shacks and mushy turnip gardens,” I say.
Even from the leveling uniformity of the interstate a difference has settled in. Everything looks fetid and damp, sagging in the middle and abandoned. Things seem to be growing in the wrong places, more bacterial than lush, a huge petri dish where people could live only if they grew up here and had the proper biology.
“I don’t like looking at landscape. I like people talking. I want some secret and intimate memory. Some human experience to make all this window-watching palatable,” she says. Lorene has revealed her bar owner soul. She wants to hear the intimacies of others’ lives as fill and distraction. She is not, as I had thought, a great listener, but instead an interrogator, an extractor of confession and disclosure. A verbal voyeur, I guess.
“You tell, then. What your first time was like,” I say absently.
I see a man up ahead, sitting by the road. The road runs so flat and uncurved that I notice him as a dot and watch him grow larger and more in focus as we travel toward him. He, I suppose, watches us grow larger, and now we are nearly upon him as he sits, doing, I think, absolutely nothing, not hitchhiking or trying to cross or walk, but just sitting there, in a duster shirt untucked and loose jeans, his face caved in and sunbeat, his mouth working as if chewing or speaking. He is in a crouch, not sitting but squatting, and I realize that he is defecating, or trying to, but I can’t be sure because of the shirttails and the speed at which we pass. As I glance at the rearview mirror, though, I think the posture unmistakable, and he continues, unaffected by our passing.
“I asked you first. I want to know, just tell me,” she says, lighting a cigarette with the car lighter, the toasted cigarette paper clinging to the hot gray-red glow. It smells almost good— mittens, maybe, if you put them in the toaster.
“Your nail polish looks like hell,” I say, gesturing with my chin at her lovely hands. The nail tips are showing white where the ever-shiny Perpetually Wet and Angry Anise purple-black has worn and chipped away. Her fingertips are bitten into Good & Plentys.
“Sorry,” she says, clenching her hands and actually sounding-sorry.
“You’re not traveling well,” I say.
“Shut up,” she says.
“It’s awful,” I say, “it’s depressing me.” She actually looks quite beautiful, but I enjoy upsetting her, hectoring her a bit like some bully boyfriend. I find it sexy. She turns her head away from me at a sulky angle and stares out the window. We sit that way until I take the cigarette out of her hand and take a drag.
“All right, I’ll tell you. Are you listening,” I say.
Lorene is wearing a white T-shirt, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in a T-shirt before. Her perfect C-cup breasts appear to be having an exceptional day. She is, of course, braless, the tightness of the T-shirt holding everything in place. Her nipples are smooth and darkly visible. I don’t mind looking at them.
“I was fourteen. His name was Mal Ortensky. He was sixteen,” I say.
“Mal,” she says.
“We were on the same baseball team. He used to meet me after games and help me with my swing, with my arm, with my catch.”
“You played catch,” Lorene says.
“Yes, Mal. He took an interest in me. So one day he was standing behind me, helping me with my swing. You know, his hands were on my hands. His arms on my arms. He was standing behind me, talking in my ear. You get the picture,” I say.
“Fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“Catch,” she says, “his arms on your arms.”
“Yes.”
“Then what,” she says.
“Well, these stories are pretty standard from there, aren’t they.”
“No, you could say where, and what was said and how it felt,” Lorene says, “what you thought, what happened after.”
“OK. Under the bleachers, after dark. He said nothing. It felt like nothing. A little pulling at first.”
“Then. Seven seconds over Tokyo.”
“No, he made me come eight times.”
“Eight times in seven seconds.”
“Pretty good for sixteen, huh,” I say. She smiles through a weary giggle, examining her hands. She uses her thumbnail to peel bits of polish off her other nails. It has become her road project.
“I think I should have said more about breasts or thighs or something. Thrown in a detail about blood or how he kept his baseball cap on and it kept hitting my forehead.”
“That’s all right, though,” she says. “The baseball stuff is kinda sexy, actually.”
“Your turn.”
Lorene does not stop picking her nails.
“You shouldn’t have said under the bleachers.”
“Your turn.”
“You may as well have said in the backseat of his car, Mina.”
“Your turn.”
“OK, my turn.”
Lorene doesn’t say anything, but tilts her head in the way certain women do when they are making room for their thoughts. The way men tend to stand back to make room for their speech. She untilted. I see a shiny look come over her. She removes her sunglasses. The gesture exudes a wistful earnestness.
“It’s difficult to explain,” she begins.
“Lorene.”
“I was eighteen.”
“Lorene.”
“What.”
“Sorry about the bleachers.”
She made it to the bar just as Scott was ready to leave.
It had never felt real to her. Not even a real betrayal of her husband, none of it real until this moment when she had to extract herself from his life.
The first time with Max, however, had felt absolutely a betrayal. Not even that, but the first real thought of it, and then the weeks when the thought wound its course to the first time and then a series of times. She had thought of Max, imagined them together, right in the kitchen while she washed dishes with David. While they rewound a video, in those whirring seconds of unoccupied time, or when they shopped, or, oh, yes, when they spoke of ordinary, Sunday things. She thought of Max. Especially then. David touched her, or put an armaround her, and she allowed herself to think what if it were Max’s arm, and it made the act pleasurable for her. When they watched a good movie, and she noticed something she hadn’t before — what was it? That movie where Joseph Cotton is the evil uncle — she didn’t want to share her thoughts with David but wanted to tell Max. She made a mental note to tell Max. That was betrayal.
The actual doing was all fear of being caught and consequences — not any real line being crossed that hadn’t already been crossed in her imagination. And when she felt her longing for Max while David smiled at her, at first she wanted to confess, to beg him to understand, to wear ashes, to burn her hair, anything. But instead she drove the feelings from her mind, did a sort of mental hygiene — this is one man, that is another — imagined she could will a compartmentalized life. And to her amazement, for a while, it worked. She could drive it out, nearly live in separate parts of herself. She felt her own power, and astonishment. She realized, coldly, ambivalently— she could do anything. She could do anything.
But now things had changed. Some feeling of vague agitation, anxiety. A worry she couldn’t contain it and would make a blunder. Some horrible exposure. She would trip herself up,
and in fact she sort of vaguely wished for it — some trip-up so she could at last be relieved of it. The external pressure, the nagging fatigue. Something in the notes from her brother was making those segues between one interaction and another longer and more difficult. Or the not driving, which made it impossible to move fast enough to not feel everything confused and out of her control and sure to collide. Or maybe it was the way Max’s movies had quickly moved from the embellishment of their erotic life to becoming the thing itself. Or the way hertriple life made her think everyone wasn’t as they seemed, made her suspicious of David, of everyone. She knew she couldn’t contain it any longer, hold it together.
Scott’s face looked so shocked, so deeply unprepared. She spoke and as she spoke, she watched the words register on his face. She sounded dumb and mean. Not like a movie, not witty. But she had been so careful, so scrupulous. She had, hadn’t she?
The compartments were breaking down.
Lisa scrubbed potatoes and carrots. She ran water over them as she scrubbed until they revealed tender bright colors, which would turn dull and gray after a long boiling. She soaked lettuce in bowls of water — raw vegetables made her nervous. She peeled and scrubbed and soaked and rinsed. It took hours. Mark hated how overboiled the vegetables came out. He was wrong, though, it had to be done. He didn’t realize how delicate they were, how tiny children’s bodies are, how vulnerable they all were. She made a meat sauce because Mark wanted meat. But the ground beef — she pressed it in the frying pan at a high temperature. The fat sizzled and popped at her wrists as she pressed down on the meat, separated the clumps. Pink was dangerous, she cooked it on high heat until it was nearly black and stunk of frying pan and burnt fat. She made sure every hidden thing in it was dead.Stracc-something, staph infection.E. Coli,with a number — so many strains of things they required numbers — triple digits. No, more—E. Coli0157:H7. That was the superbad virulent supertoxic one. Six digits and with colons and letters, too. Then in with the cooked-out tomatoes, until everything tasted the same — safe. She felt like a cave woman, killing her food in the microbe hunting ground for the good of her family.
Mark hated her cooking.
But what could she do?ListeriaandTrichinellaand antibiotic-resistant superbacteria. Alex and Alisa set the table. They reached up to place plates. She had made the meat sauce for Mark, but Mark wouldn’t be home. Mark hadn’t been home in two days. They began to eat quietly, in his absence, drinking distilled water as Mark’s beer sat in the refrigerator. The food was not tasteless; it tasted like Teflon and burnt toast. It tasted like a textural lumpy mess. The kids didn’t want it. Lisa yelled at them to eat. They had to eat their vegetables. She made them cry. Mark would not be back, she knew. She could make him, force him back with guilt and pleading, but how long would it last? And how much more living could they do with someone who didn’t want to be there, someone feeling trapped. One had to choose; there wasn’t enough in her for Mark and for Alex and Alisa. Alex was screaming at her, he hated this dinner. She felt in her son’s voice the fear of change, and heard how much she was to blame. Alisa sobbed, making girlish audible gulps for air. Lisa started crying and got out the peanut butter and saltines. I’m sorry, she said. I’m sorry, here. And the three of them ate the crackers and the peanut butter.
“We’ll have ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert,” Lisa said. “OK?” The children nodded and ate, red-faced. Lisa forced in the horrible food, putting pats of butter and fingerfuls of salt on it. She also ate the peanut butter and the crackers. She ate the ice cream with the chocolate sauce too, already seeing the end of it as she ate, already wondering what consolation was offered after ice cream. Her stomach felt uncomfortably large. It was so constantly full these days that she couldn’t hold it in at all. Her muscles a distant memory under her fat, and it made her sad and hungry and tired. It felt permanent.It surrounded her, her body, weighed her down, but still she ate. Mark had to leave, and what could she do now? She would have to go to her mother’s, be at the door with nothing but her children and her hunger. She could stay here only with Mark’s support — there was no way she could make it without his money. They cleaned up the kitchen together, the children trying to dry the dishes with quiet, obedient faces. She had let them down, she was frightened. She let herself become unlovable, fat and ugly and messy, and because of this they had no father. They watched TV, and while the children couldn’t see, she cried to herself. They ate the expensive store-bought cookies, and she wept. She was not crying about losing the apartment. She was crying now because she would not have Mark’s arms around her in her bed, that she had lost that, too.
David wanted to take Gwen to the Getty Museum. He wanted to show her something marble and anciently solid. He wanted to look at her as she moved through the world. But Gwen wanted to confine their explorations to her bed. She grew strict with him without saying anything. Her containment was apparent to David in the smallest unspoken moments, a code he read and contemplated in his solitude at home, staring at his computer screen. He picked up a photograph on her mantel. Gwen’s daughter, fat like Gwen, but sad and apologetic.
“What’s your daughter’s name?” he asked. She smiled halfway. A long pause.
“Come here,” she said, as if giving up something valuable. He knew he should shut up and he did. He trusted her completely. She could undo him, not from across a room, but within body-heat distance. Or on the telephone. When he first spoke to her, she called him after reading one of his scripts. Itwas her job, not an extraordinary gesture in itself, but the minute he heard her voice, he felt she would help him somehow. When he first saw her, she seemed unappealing to him. He thought she looked uncomfortable in clothing, pulling at her sweater, burdened by largeness. But he liked her. She was both kind and commanding in her critiques of his work. She had confidence in her opinions. David felt relieved of things when he was near her. They often met at her West Los Angeles home. They would sit under a sun umbrella by a large and elaborate sycamore tree. One particular afternoon, no different-seeming from any of the others they had spent together, she moved out of the shade and into the sun. She undressed to complete nakedness and stepped into the shallow end of the pool. She was soft, fleshy, white. He watched as she waded in, moving slowly, graceful in the weighted way that some large women are. She waded out, approached him glistening with water. Her breasts seemed enormous to him, pendulous, but the skin perfect, perfectly white, the nipples pink and wet. She kissed him, that first time, and she was sweet-tasting, liquid, light.
She did not want to talk about the daughter or the husband. She was content in her life. But she wanted David, and it was not something he questioned, he wanted her back. She made him forget about movies. She made him think about women in paintings — a glossy book from college of elaborate, solid women. Or of carved, still women that didn’t change when shadows overtook light and then back again. Women who inhabited one place in the world as you moved around them. He explored her curves, her Bernini twists and endless thighs. He kissed her dimpled spine, felt her muscular and soft flesh that gave when pressed, that didn’t resist. He moved on top of her, his front toher back. He liked the way her neck smelled. This he was unused to, she was more than him, anchored and fecund on the bed. Things became elaborate in the way things that excluded everything else usually do. They became overly elaborated, from baroque to rococo. She had silky scarves, blindfolds. He was on the bed — she tied his hands to the bedposts. She covered his eyes. He felt liberated by trust. Things touched him. Intricate salty flesh on his mouth. He felt with his tongue — layers and depths, textures and tastes, folds of woman skin. He lay there and licked lightly with his tongue, not pursuing anything but what came next. He explored what she gave him, and wouldn’t mind if the scarves were tighter, if he were held fast. He swallowed and felt her licking him and stopping. She would continue, he knew, absolutely, and he longed for more. The world became silent and solid flesh, a trustworthy place.
Scott had just kept t
alking, until he was in tears and not even angry. She tried to touch him. He shook his head, looking down like a child. This was what you got.
“I don’t get you people,” he said. “I don’t understand women like you.” And she put a hand to his smooth blond cheek.
“You understand, you must try to understand,” she said. “I told you it wasn’t possible. You know that’s true.” She didn’t know what to say, she had to touch him, now worse than ever. She had to make things worse.
“Please, don’t. I can’t anymore. I’m so ashamed, so humiliated.”
“No, now, no.”
“I am foolish. I am a fool.”
She could not help but find his tears erotic, looked at hisarms where the sleeves of his T-shirt ended, the little concavity between his pectoral muscles. She wanted to touch him one last time, ease his loneliness, ease hers. She had to make things worse. She put a hand on each shoulder, tried to lean him back against something — the couch. He tensed and resisted the push.
“No, please, Mina, it’s bad for me, we can’t. I won’t. Give me some air.”
She thought of it, that certainly this was mean. But she couldn’t help it. She stopped pressing for a second. He didn’t move, his head hung low. She inhaled, her breasts soft and just inches from his head. He just needed to lean forward.
“It’s OK, Scott, it’s OK.” He shook his head. “Come here.”
Afterward she left him, alone in his hotel room, stricken and spent from loving the wrong person. She thought that when she had finally ended it she would feel relief and liberation. She thought it would simplify her life. Why, then, did she feel so much worse, so much more confused and trapped as she walked home from the hotel, not noticing the sun setting, the splattered orange light — the garish, Mexican postcard sunset.