“Me, too,” I said, looking down at my hands. Keep your hands where I can see them.
“So that’s where your résumé ends,” Marc said. “What have you been doing since then?”
I looked at the sea, at Marc, at the sea. “Not much,” I admitted. “I’ve been sort of—driving.”
“What, pizza delivery or something? That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” His voice said: Of course it is.
“No, just driving. You know, um.” I looked at the sea again and decided to go for the adventurer approach. “Just exploring. I wanted to see a little bit of this country of ours. The good old U.S. of A.”
“A little bit?” His eyebrows raised. “For five months?”
“I was sort of adrift.”
“And where’s your family?”
“Smothered.”
“I’m sorry. Where’s your mother?”
I blinked, shifted in my chair. I started to say elsewhere. I looked at Marc and the sea again. I didn’t say anything. This wasn’t going well.
“I’m sorry,” Marc said, insincerely. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I have to tell you, Joe, this five-month gap is not going to look good to prospective employers. If you had a diploma, maybe, but this Jack what’s-his-face, Kerouac thing is not going to fly.”
“I know it doesn’t look good, but I was hoping,” I said humbly. “I was hoping that you could help me make up for all that time.” The seventh step: I had humbly asked a Hire Power to remove my shortcomings.
“I don’t think we can help you,” he said briskly. “Quite frankly, Joe, we’re looking for people who are ready to face the challenges put in front of them. Not people who are looking for escape. You seem to me, if you don’t mind me saying so, stuck in ‘the past.’” He put two pairs of bunny ears around all my suffering. “We want people who are heading toward ‘the future.’ I don’t think we can help you.”
Marc stood up. His head floated in the lens-captured sea. I tried to think of something I could say that could stop him in his tracks, like a spell. “I don’t think,” he said again—
I put my faith in words I didn’t understand. “We think,” I said, “much less than what we know.”
Marc blinked. “We know,” he said carefully, “much less than what we love.”
“We love much less than what there is.”
I had him. “And to this precise extent,” he said, pausing to sit back down. We said the rest together: “We are much less than what we are.”
Marc reached over his desk with both hands, knocking over the little sign which said MARC. He took my hands in his. “No wonder you’re at sixes and sevens,” he said. “You should have told me you were a New Man. Don’t be ashamed of that. Ben Glass’s death has hit a lot of us very hard, Joe. No wonder you’re lost. Well, for a brother in courage and suffering I think we can find something.”
He opened a file cabinet which as far I was concerned was stuffed with faith and love, and pulled out a full-color brochure.
“How would you feel about leaving the country?”
“Saved,” I said.
He chuckled. “The pay’s not much, and I don’t think you can call the work challenging, but for someone a little at odds it might suit you. Have you heard of The Vast Resort?”
“No.”
“Terrific place,” he said, opening the brochure. Inside the folds some very tiny women were swimming. “The biggest self-contained luxury resort region in the Western Hemisphere. They’re looking for some temporary assistance in the service department. Folding up lounge chairs or something. Maybe a towel boy. I could make a phone call. What do you say?”
I looked at all the bright, bright blue they were selling: sky and swimming pools and beach umbrellas with the V in Vast scrawled across them in white. “I say yes. Where is this place?”
“Some island somewhere,” he said, gesturing like it might be in the potted plant in the corner. “Check in with me in a couple hours and I’ll give you the verdict.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thanks for reminding me what I should be doing for my fellow man, especially now that Ben’s gone.”
“Yes,” I said, uprighting the MARC sign.
“Thanks,” he said, noticing. We stood up together. “Because a lot of people think that men are always perpetrators.”
“And never victims,” I said, nodding.
“Right,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder. We were walking back out to the waiting room where I stopped and read the posters lining the walls: “Speak, hands for me!”—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, over a field of flowers. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”—Robert Frost, Ode on a Grecian Urn, as a sun set over a forest. “There is no benefit in the gifts of a bad man.”—Euripides, Medea, below a kitten napping in a basket, and this last one invigorated me most. I remembered what the rabbi, poor man, had said: “At the end, they ask her, Medea, what is left? Everything is destroyed, everything is gone. And you know what Medea says? She says, ‘What is left? There is me.’ There’s a woman for you.” I strode out of Hire Power knowing that I needn’t be at sixes and sevens, now that I had reached and passed them and was heading toward Step 8. “‘What do you mean what’s left? Everything is left. I am left.’” I turned left out of the parking lot and put the radio on, peering out the grimy windows hoping to spot a mall. I’d spend the last of my money on clothes for hot weather. A Vast Resort was ahead of me and I wanted to be ready.
Step 8
The morning sun was shining like the best cellophane money could buy. You could see every wrinkle in the sheets of the bed, captured like a topographical map. I looked out the shiny, shiny window and saw for the first time a sun that looked just like a child’s drawing of a sun, each bright ray careening like a market-researched exclamation point in a brochure. It was fantastic! I loved it! I’d never seen sunshine like that, never been able to clean something as thoroughly as the pool’s faux-marble steps. They were cleaned so often that when they were my assignment there was scarcely any dirt to be found, just a slight lace of beige I could just pluck from the stairs with a Vast Resort rag bleached to toothpaste-white. I’d never seen a pool that circulated with a carefully-constructed tide, controlled by a machine locked inside a shack hidden behind palm trees. This universe—I’m not lying here—was perfect!
“How does that work, anyway?” I asked Allyson. She was curled around the mattress like a bracket, looking for something under the bed. If we were children it would have been monsters, but we were all grown up and it was a book.
“How does what work?”
“The tide machine in the pool.”
She blinked at me absently for a moment, placing the tide machine, the pool, probably me. “They built a mechnical moon,” she said slowly, “which they control via satellite, to orbit around The Vast Resort for the convenience of our guests. I don’t know, Joe! Who am I, Einstein?”
Allyson wasn’t Einstein, but that was her last name so it was a joke. The moon thing, too; Allyson was pretty funny. And, funny-pretty: long, long arms and fingernails! Fireworks of blond hair! Freckles! Breasts so sharp they were like pieces of paper folded in half, two of them! She was some gorgeous joke book I got to read in bed. She was very tall but when you looked at her, in the shorts and sweatshirt they made you wear, you couldn’t tell where; I tried to find out by kissing my way down her body but she didn’t like oral sex. She’d never had an orgasm, or sushi. She liked things cooked. She’d pulled my head away, and up, until I was facing her face and we’d made love with me on top, the way she preferred, taking the condom off herself when we were done, tying it into a knot and tossing it behind her, without looking, into the shiny white basket I would later empty into a shiny white dumpster.
Love, that book with the drippy soundtrack says, is never having to say you’re sorry, and we never did. We never were. They kept us pretty busy at the Vast, as the staff called it in casual conversations over the ab
surdly colorful fruit salad they’d serve us each morning at the Breakfast Meeting. Allyson had worked there for three years, an Entertainment Coordinator, so she stood up front with sheafs of schedules bulging under the clip-grip of her clipboard. She spilled my coffee when she gave me my copy. She didn’t apologize, but smiled and said something about the table being shaky. After the meeting we huddled beneath it and looked at the legs. We kissed there and elsewhere. Our lunch hours were our own. She’d make cheap Entertainment Coordinator jokes, and, when I was promoted past the faux-marble to become her assistant, cheap debriefing jokes.
“Aren’t you supposed to be briefing me?” I asked.
“De-briefing,” she said, looking up from her book to slap my thigh. “And I did already.” See?
“Really,” I said. “I’m supposed to know what’s going on, Al. If Mike finds out that all we’re doing is fucking—”
“Joe,” she said. Despite the jokes she hated language like that. Allyson had the cleanest mouth I’d ever encountered. No oral sex will do that, I guess. “Watch your—”
“I was going to say fucking around.”
“—language! Joe!”
“I’m—” I would have said sorry if we said such things. “I just—I just want to do a good job.”
“You are,” she said, puzzled. “You’re doing a great job. Why do you think you got to be my assistant after just a few weeks?”
“I thought,” I said, gesturing to the bed.
“No,” she said. “Don’t think. You’re doing an excellent job, Joseph. That’s why Mike and I wanted you to work with people more, instead of, I don’t know, the garbage cans and the buffet table and everything. I think you can be a real asset at Vast.”
I felt myself blush. Mike was the boss, the real boss. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Can I mention the briefing, then?”
“Let me just finish this chapter,” she said, glancing at the Vast clock that perched on the wall in everyone’s room like a wide, white eye. “We still have a few.”
Minutes, she meant. I stared out at the tide. Allyson was reading the latest by an author she loved, a woman who had written about vampires and sold millions, written about other things and sold hundreds and then returned to vampires with a vengeance, a series about vampires, vampires everywhere, everybody sucking everybody else dry. Bindings had a cardboard figure of the author, dressed as a vampire. I wasn’t reading anything. I was spending my time trying to make a list. Living on an island somewhere didn’t mean I was leaving behind the twelve steps, which were now as obvious and squeaky-clean as faux-marble.
To hit Eight I had to make a list of people I believed I had harmed. The trouble was, I knew that Step Nine was making amends to them, and so far everyone on my list was dead. The faux-marble steps weren’t just decorative; they went somewhere, leading from the pool to the bar which was decorated with palm trees, half real, half fake. All day long, I watched my guests use those steps to get what they wanted. Even now, the early risers were dangling their feet in the shallow end, sipping fresh juice poured by Marco, who tended a bar at the top of the steps like a faux-marble prize. As Allyson finished her chapter they trickled in: the couple enjoying the first honeymoon of their second marriage, the fat man with the girl everyone hoped was his daughter, the three single women who knew each other from work, the old guy who looked like my family doctor and his silent sunglassed wife propping her book against her bent knees, the mom and her three daughters spending alimony like water, the retired couple who heaped extra entrees onto plates and brought them back to their room because of some Holocaust thing they had. I’d watched them all over the past few days, at a distance. These people were doing things on those faux-marble steps: getting tipsy when sober, refreshed when parched, rinsed when hot, always wetter and wetter. Those steps accomplished something; my own steps, I vowed, wouldn’t dead-end, either. But what to put on the list?
“O.K.,” Allyson said, tossing the book under the bed.
“How’re the vampires?”
“Hungry,” she said, baring her teeth and looking at where they’d do the most damage, before changing her mind and getting out her clipboard. “Tonight’s the costume party and everybody is going to ask you for costume help at the last minute. To cut down on the costume rush, Mike suggests that we see if anybody looks bored today. Then we can suggest getting to work on their outfits. So keep an eye out. The Pearsons bring theirs, of course—they always wear these fancy cowboy things—but most people are going to need all the crepe paper we can spare.”
“Who are the Pearsons?”
“The, you know, older couple. You don’t know everyone’s names yet? It’s already Day Five.”
“I don’t know anyone’s names,” I said. “How could I?”
“The list,” she said, pinching open the clipboard. “Here’s a spare copy. I gave you the list at the first Breakfast Meeting.” She put a piece of paper into my hands and sighed. Outside the palm trees rustled, even the fake ones, like her sigh had travelled all the way to the tourists.
It was a windy day.
“I guess I never got it. Maybe”—here I lowered the sheet a little bit—“you spilled coffee on it.”
She tried to look cross and finally smiled. “Maybe I did. In any case, you’d better go over this. You’re supposed to call the guests by name, you know. Here, it’s alphabetical. The Andersons are that couple, you know, with the fat guy.”
“She’s his daughter?”
“Oh. I never thought of that. I assumed she was his wife.”
“She looks thirteen.”
“Mrs. Bitburg has three daughters: Jenny, Elizabeth and Wendy, oldest to youngest. You can remember who’s who by Jew. Jenny, Elizabeth, Wendy. Got it?”
“Jew. Got it.”
“Are you Jewish, Joe?”
“I used to be.”
She smiled. “Jesus used to be Jewish. Margot and Lou Giltmore, they’re honeymooning. Remember we brought them free champagne the first night?”
“Yes, and I know who Sarah Hackett is, because she made a pass at me.”
“Really? The redhead, the one who’s—?”
“Fat.”
“Joe!”
“Yes.”
“What did she do?”
“She asked me up to her room.”
“You know that’s not allowed.”
“What am I supposed to do? Report her?”
“No, for you to—you know, for you to—”
“Fraternize?”
“You’re smart. Yeah. It’s even supposed to be against the rules for, you know, this, so watch your—self. Who else have we got? The honeymooning Kleins. Susan Runnon, with the, you know—”
“Breasts.”
“Yeah, Joe. Thanks. The other woman is Kristin Timball, and then there’s this last couple with a name you will not believe, it’s like the book, this is funny—”
And it was funny, the wind rising like that and opening the door on an illicit couple like it had done so many times before, curling up the staircase like smoke and hovering over the worn carpet in the staff quarters building until it found the right room. That would only happen, you might think, in a perfect universe, but here on the shiny island it could happen all the time, even when the door was latched, even when the boss was walking by. Allyson togaed the sheet around herself and went to close the door, but Mike was already in the doorway like an armed guard. A guy with a gun. A guy who didn’t get the joke. “Al?”
“Mike,” she said, calmly.
He took another step in. “Joe? What are you—the two of you—?”
“Mike,” Allyson said, “Excuse us, please. Could you close the door?”
He stepped further into the room and closed the door so there were three of us. Two illegal lovers and the whistleblower.
“This is—Al, I’m surprised at you! Shocked! This is—”
“Mike—”
“—against the rules! Against re
gulation! You’re not supposed to, you’re not—it’s against the rules to—”
“Mike—”
“You’re not supposed to be doing this,” he said, quieter. Allyson gathered the sheet around herself with one hand and put the other one on his shoulder. He shrugged it away. “I mean it, Al. It’s in the rules, for chrissakes.” Allyson didn’t say anything. “Your primary responsibility—your sole responsibility—is to our guests. You guys are on duty twenty-four hours a week. I mean it. A day. You know what I mean. Deep down you know, I know you do, and then—this? This is disgraceful. Al—Joe—you have wronged not our staff, but our guests! Every last guest depends on you, and this is what you do! Joe, you are no longer Al’s assistant. Al, you are no longer—Joe’s boss. You have wronged them, really. I want you to think about that. And get out of here, Joe. These aren’t even your quarters. This isn’t even”—the wind blew the door open again, and Mike slammed it shut, then looked at it and opened it so he could leave—“this isn’t even your room.” Slam, but then the door stuck on something. Slam again.
“Joe?” Allyson asked me. Only when she put her hand on my shoulder did I see how badly I was shaking. “Joe? It’s O.K., Joe. We—he’ll cool down. You’ll see. He’s just upset because—”
“He’s right. We’ve done those people wrong.”
“Don’t be silly. He and I used to—”
“He’s right. He’s right.”
“He and I used to go out, Joe. He’s just jealous. Can’t you tell? He wasn’t upset at what he saw, at all. He’s just jealous. Jealousy will do that to you. Why is this upsetting you so much, Joe?”
I didn’t know. My spine, inside, was twitching all wrong, bending backwards like a wire hanger. I was shivering, and my head was ringing with a full-orchestra blare, some operatic soundtrack shaking me cold. The flashes of skin from Allyson’s bare shoulders, and my own, were sticking in my eyes but all blurry and underwater. The slide show in my brain was switching from the Glasses to the cops, to the men in the tent and everyone at the bookstore, quick costume changes and curtain calls. The history of doors opening was drowning me. I guess jealousy will do that to you. But even at the bottom of the pool you can see the faux-marble steps, shiny and clean and rising towards the prize. “I was abused. I’m—the door opening like that made me remember, upset me. I’m sorry.”
Watch Your Mouth Page 18