by Don Lee
Jeanette was tempted to follow her down the hallway. Perhaps Ms. Wicks would have a question or a request for her, and they’d ease into incidental conversation, get chatty, even friendly. Jeanette could learn what she was like in real life. She had a weakness for celebrities. She liked hearing gossip about them, reading about their lifestyles. But when she turned the corner and looked down the hallway, Ms. Wicks was not there.
She began cleaning No. 331, a standard room with a mountain view, facing the foothills instead of the ocean. Still nice, still very expensive, but not extraordinary, not a VINP room that merited any Charisma notations.
As she made the bed, Jeanette thought about Yadin, the way he had questioned her last Sunday, asking whether she truly loved him. She had been ruminating about it all week. What had prompted him to ask that night? Because she didn’t invite him to sleep over? Because she didn’t have an orgasm? None of this was new. She used to fake it once in a while, but stopped when Yadin began to suspect and reassured her that she shouldn’t.
She hadn’t always been so unresponsive. She used to love sex, and even had had a reputation in high school for being promiscuous. She and Étienne Lau—her boyfriend the summer before she was supposed to go to the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.—couldn’t fuck enough. He had been the love of her life. Yet no one ever understood how she could let herself be defined by a relationship, as tragically as it’d ended, that had lasted a mere two months when she was eighteen. That was why, when pressed, she sometimes lied, and said that they had been engaged, and that when she became pregnant, they had intended to keep the baby, and that she had suffered a miscarriage after learning that Étienne had been killed in a car crash. The truth was, she and Étienne were never engaged, and she didn’t miscarry. She had had an abortion.
Whatever the embellishments, she had been devastated by Étienne’s death—so much so, she’d suffered a breakdown, and her parents had her hospitalized for a week. She thought about enrolling at the Corcoran the following year, or maybe the year after that. But then her mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and Jeanette took care of her throughout the surgeries and chemo and radiation. Then she died, and Jeanette had to raise her little sister and hold things together for her father, who had been undone, and Jeanette felt compelled to stay in the house until her sister went to university, and then she was thirty years old.
She went out on a few dates—not many. In the seventeen years between Étienne and Yadin, she had sex twice, one-night stands with two different men. Both times, it was sort of date rape and sort of not. She didn’t say no, she didn’t say yes. She just lay there. She couldn’t imagine having to cope with another unintended pregnancy, and had her tubes tied.
Somehow, that part of her—erotic, desirous—had disappeared, lost amid the years packing lunches and cooking dinners and cleaning house, driving to hospitals and parceling out pain meds and changing colostomy bags. She felt as if everything sentient about her had been erased. Was any of it retrievable? Was it dormant but still there? She wanted it to be, especially for Yadin.
She finished cleaning No. 331. She wanted to work on No. 342, but it was a DND (Do Not Disturb), which she worried might throw her entire day off-schedule. In the hallway, Anna, uncharacteristically in a frenzy, scrambled up to Jeanette and asked, “Can you help me with something?”
The problem was in No. 363. There were black scuff marks all over the marble bathroom floor. “I’ve tried everything,” Anna said. “I can’t get them out. Do you have any ideas? I don’t know what kind of shoes this guy had, what he was doing in here. I mean, was he tap-dancing or what? This will really fuck up my QCs.”
“I know something that’ll get them out,” Jeanette said.
“Let me guess,” Anna said. “Alberto VO5.”
“No, even better.” Jeanette went back to her cart and got a tennis ball that had a hole poked in it. In No. 363’s bathroom, she inserted the end of Anna’s broom handle into the hole, flipped it upside down, and, pressing hard, rubbed the tennis ball against the scuff marks, magically erasing them.
“That is amazing,” Anna said. “Damn. What other tricks you got up your sleeve?”
She had a lot of tricks. She knew how to do things, take care of things, get things done. She prided herself on being someone people could depend on. She had been considered indispensable at city hall, and she was regarded that way now at the church, where she’d recently been elected president of the board of trustees, in spite of her continual astonishment that she had joined the church in the first place.
Thirteen years ago, a woman who worked as a coordinator in the city recreation department, Gabriela Flores, had invited her to a potluck at her house, not telling Jeanette that she was trying to start a UU fellowship in Rosarita Bay. Jeanette had never heard of Unitarian Universalism before. She wondered if it was associated with the Unity Church, or the Unification Church, and if Gabriela was trying to recruit her into a cult. Even after being told UU’s principles, she was not assuaged. Her mother, an atheist, had raised her children to be wary, if not contemptuous, of all religions. What drew Jeanette back for another potluck, however, was that she was lonely. She had no life outside of her job in the clerk’s office and her family. It was an excuse to get out of the house, a respite from caring for Joe and her siblings.
They started slowly, using a Church in a Box subscription from the Unitarian Universalist Association. In each box was a sermon written by a UU minister and program materials. Someone would read the sermon, they’d talk, and they’d sing songs—a simple exchange of fellowship that grew enlivening to Jeanette. Without knowing it, she had been seeking a purpose, and she found it within this fledgling congregation. UU’s commitment to social justice, in particular, aligned perfectly with her residual liberal ideals. She worked indefatigably with Gabriela and the other founding members to establish the church, and in time they signed a lease for their current building and became a chartered congregation of the UUA.
They’d had some setbacks along the way, such as when Gabriela—as well as several other members—got laid off and had to relocate, but Franklin Kuchenbecker had brought new life to the church. He had been their part-time pastor for a year and a half now, and conducted the worship service in Rosarita Bay on the first and third Sundays of every month.
For most of their history, their services had been lay-led, interspersed with the occasional guest speaker or visiting minister—circuit riders who traveled to various congregations. Before Franklin, they’d never had the means to hire a minister on a permanent basis. Without a Chalice Lighters grant from the UU Pacific Central District office, they wouldn’t have been able to afford even the paltry sum they were paying him: twenty-six thousand dollars a year as an independent contractor, with no benefits (albeit he was given much of the summer off). On alternate Sundays, he was the consulting minister of a UU fellowship in Aptos, just south of Santa Cruz, and he supplemented his income further by presiding over weddings and funerals.
Jeanette was grateful that circumstances—Caroline being offered the library manager job—had brought Franklin to town. He was a popular minister, smart, eloquent, and charismatic. Often, during his sermons, Jeanette found herself nodding her head in agreement and tearing up in recognition, as if he were speaking directly to her. “We can’t eliminate pain,” he would say, “but we can be there for each other.”
It gave her a lift whenever she saw him, on or off the pulpit, as it did this evening, after work. She was in the church office, printing out the order for service, feeling a little blue, when, without notice, Franklin dropped by, and his appearance immediately cheered her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “It’s your off-week.”
“Needed a book,” he said. He scanned the shelves and pulled out a paperback, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and tucked it into his messenger bag. “How’s Stephanie? Nervous?”
For the lay-led service this Sunday, one of the members, Stephanie Weiler, wou
ld be giving a talk—her first—entitled “How My Dog Taught Me to Be a Better UU.”
“A basket case,” Jeanette said. “She’s already made Siobhan listen to her rehearse three times.”
“I’m sure she’ll do great,” Franklin told Jeanette. He was wearing jeans, a suede jacket, and a pair of spiffy ankle boots—leather and walnut-brown, buffed to a high sheen.
Forty-one years old, he had dark brown hair, thick and wavy, which he kept mussed and somewhat long, wisping his earlobes. His eyes were his best feature—green and alert, above sharp cheekbones and a straight nose—accentuated by his habit of glancing at things askance, sideways peeps that made him appear boyish, mischievous. He seemed taller than he actually was, five-nine, because he was lean and athletic, the muscles on his forearms ropy and veined.
He had the beginnings of a potbelly, however, and his shoulders were too narrow for his body, his chest concave, topped by a sinewy, equine neck. His head, too, was small, as was his chin, and he was badly nearsighted, requiring chunky silver-rimmed eyeglasses. He could be comely from certain angles, yet stringy and queerly proportioned and hollowed-out from others. All the same, when they had been interviewing ministerial candidates, his looks were noted, sotto voce, by several women (and a few men) in the church, and Jeanette had been among his admirers.
He lingered in the office, leaning against the doorway and smiling awkwardly, as if he wanted to discuss something with her but didn’t know where to begin. “Listen,” he said finally, “you almost done here? Want to get a drink somewhere?”
She was surprised. They had gone out for lunch a few times on Saturdays if they both happened to be working in the office, but otherwise they never socialized together, just the two of them.
“Do Buddhists drink?” she asked.
“There are all sorts of Buddhists,” Franklin said.
In separate cars, they drove to the Memory Den—Jeanette’s suggestion—which was near the harbor, an outpost for fishermen, surfers, and ne’er-do-wells. Franklin had never been to the bar before, and, actually, neither had Jea nette, reminded of it only because Anna had proposed going there the other day. No one from the church would see them in the dive. She wasn’t certain why, but she thought it best for them to seek seclusion. It felt like they were doing something illicit, and the idea excited Jeanette.
The fact was, she had become a little infatuated with Franklin in the last few months, meeting with him regularly in her new role on the board—feelings she kept to herself, and which she considered fundamentally innocent. It was a commonplace, a cliché, for a woman in her position to have a tiny little crush on the minister, and she knew she would never, ever think to act on it.
They entered the Memory Den together. There were only a handful of people inside the dingy, windowless building, all older men, playing pool.
“You run in glamorous circles,” Franklin said.
There was no table service. They ordered at the bar—a beer for Franklin, a glass of Merlot for Jeanette—which he insisted on buying. When he got his change, he laid down a dollar bill, hesitated, then added another single. “I never know what to tip,” he said as they settled into a booth near the back. “Especially in hotels. Until I was in my early thirties, I didn’t even know I was supposed to tip the housekeeper.”
“A lot of people don’t.”
“But the guests at the Centurion, I imagine they’re pretty generous,” Franklin said. “Or is that indecorous to ask?”
“I’ll get a ten now and then, but two, three bucks is more typical.”
“I would’ve thought they’d be bigger tippers at a high-end resort like that.”
“At this motel where I used to work,” Jeanette said, “I was lucky to get spare change, if anything. Sometimes people would leave religious pamphlets for me on the nightstand. Once in a while, used tampons.”
“No.”
“And used condoms.” She had no compunctions discussing such matters with Franklin. He might have been her pastor, but he wasn’t the least bit puritanical. He seemed, in fact, a little titillated.
“Where was this?” he asked.
“The Holiday Breeze in Pacifica.”
For six months, she had cleaned twenty-five rooms a day at the Holiday Breeze. She’d find porn magazines underneath beds, the pages swollen and warped; straps hanging from headboards; forgotten dildos and vibrators in drawers. Couples would have period sex; blood would be everywhere; it’d look like a murder scene. Biohazards were a daily occurrence: syringes, razor blades, bent and blackened spoons, crumpled tinfoil, cans of whipped cream, menthol chest rubs, cotton balls, glassine bags. The sheets and furniture and carpet would be stained with bong water, burned with holes, littered with cigarette butts and roach ends. Someone once used a room as a mobile meth lab, and they had to call the fire department to remove the leftover chemicals. Regularly there’d be vomit, piss, and shit to clean up. Dog shit, cat shit, people shit. Turds deposited in coffeepots. Used toilet paper thrown on the floor instead of flushed. Teenagers would have parties, tear apart the rooms, spray beer and soda on the walls, fling pizzas against the ceiling, puke in the shower, take shits in the sink.
“Holy crap,” Franklin said. “Excuse the pun.”
Just as appalling had been the attitude of the motel maids. They’d pop the sheets, not changing them between guests. They’d pick trash up from the carpet but wouldn’t bother to vacuum. They’d run a washcloth over spots in the tub but wouldn’t scrub the whole thing. They’d clean glasses with Pledge and a toilet rag. They’d blot semen stains on the bedspreads with a wet sponge until they were marginally blended.
“No wonder you’d get tampons for tips,” he said.
“That was never me,” Jeanette said. “I always cleaned everything.”
“I know, I know,” Franklin said. “You’re one of the most conscientious people I’ve ever met, Jeanette. I would’ve left you a ten-spot for sure.”
Was he flirting with her? She thought he might be, and she was enjoying it. She had been curious why he’d asked her out—if this was just a casual drink, or something else—and she still wasn’t certain, but she felt safe. She knew that neither of them had any designs beyond banter.
Franklin bought them another round of drinks and, coaxed by Jeanette, told her stories about his Peace Corps days in Togo, West Africa. She hadn’t heard them in such detail before, and she was fascinated. She was having fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun.
A few more people trickled into the Memory Den. “You see those two guys over there?” Jeanette said. “Tank and Skunk B. They were pals with my brother in high school. You’d never know it, looking at them now, but they used to be hard-core surfers.”
“At Rummy Creek?” Franklin asked.
“Yeah.” Rummy Creek was a famous big-wave break just north of town.
“Your brother was a surfer, too?”
Jeanette glanced over to Tank and Skunk B again. When they’d come into the bar, they’d given her the once-over, but didn’t recognize her. “No. Tank and Skunk were major potheads, and so was Jeremy. It got him sent to prison.”
At once she regretted the gaffe. There was an unspoken agreement in their family to conceal Jeremy’s record. More so, she was sorry to have broken the mood. Franklin had been lounging against the backrest of the booth, relaxed, but now he sat up, solemn and alert, ready to dole out ministerial empathy.
“Substance abuse?” he asked.
“That’s the ironic thing—he’d pretty much stopped smoking weed, and he never got into anything more serious.”
At the time, Jeremy was beginning to make a name for himself as a chef in San Francisco. Yet in culinary school, he had worked as a bike messenger for a company that delivered pot door-to-door, and had kept a stake in it. When the company got busted, Jeremy was indicted on federal charges for conspiracy. He served ten months in Lompoc, which was no Club Fed. He was now making grilled cheese for a food truck in Portland.
“I didn’t even know you had a brother,” Franklin said. “You have an older sister, too, don’t you?”
“Younger. Julie. She lives in San Diego. She was an accident. My mother had her when she was thirty-nine.” The exact age Jeanette was now.
“I’m ashamed to say this, but it occurs to me I don’t know a lot about you, Jeanette.”
The frivolity between them had perforated. “I bet you want to know why I’ve never been married,” Jeanette said. That was what everyone always asked her. Why are you single? What’s wrong with you? How’d you end up an old maid?
“I wasn’t going to ask that,” Franklin said.
“No?” Jeanette said, because it was impossible to answer, to explain all the heartaches and disappointments that divided who she had once been and who she was now. She didn’t understand it herself, as often as she turned it over in her head. She had thought she was going to have a life, and then one day she had looked up and it was over, and she’d become a person who lived in the past, not in the present or future.
She had had a scholarship to study documentary photography at the Corcoran School. During high school, she had gone to the town of Watsonville—just inland from Monterey Bay—to volunteer after the Loma Prieta earthquake, and she had shot photos of the farm and cannery workers who were encamped in tents in Callaghan Park. One of the photographs was published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and it was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers. She had brimmed with ambition. Once she got to the Corcoran, she had planned to intern at National Geographic or the Washington Post, and then, after graduating, land a job with Time or Newsweek or Mother Jones and travel the globe.