Places to Stay the Night

by Ann Hood

  “Of course you got it all,” Renata had told him.

  Now she spent her days getting a room ready for her. She painted the walls a bright yellow. She had a hospital bed delivered. She moved in toys and books from the other house, driving back and forth every day. Tom would come home during lunch and find Renata rearranging things again. Or cooking them all dinner. Now, when he opened the door and walked into his house, it smelled like fresh paint, like spices, like the flowers Renata placed in jars and bottles everywhere. It smelled, he thought, like a home.

  “I don’t get it,” Renata said, frowning. Sometimes when she frowned she looked like a completely different person. Someone with worries Tom could never even begin to understand.

  Tom cleared his throat and looked down at the map spread before them on the kitchen table. It was one of his favorites, a map of the eastern seaboard made before Route 95 had been built. The route from Maine to Florida was carefully traced in dark green ink, small Xs marking points of interest or places to stay the night. In a masculine penmanship, written in the sea near Savannah there was this notation: “Ma’s—grits, ham, biscuits, gravy, 99 cents.”

  “Well,” Tom said finally, feeling Renata waiting for him to respond, “I collect them. Maps,” he added, even though that was obvious.

  Renata’s long index finger traced the road to Florida. “So,” she said, “you took this trip?”

  Tom sighed. He tried not to remember the way Libby used to love to pore over maps with him. How her cheeks would flush with the idea of where they led. Think of the things she didn’t do, he reminded himself. Think of how good this house smells right now.

  “I know it’s crazy,” he said. Slowly, carefully, making sure all the creases matched up exactly, Tom began to fold the map. “Maybe I missed my calling,” he said. He forced a smile, feeling its phoniness all over his face. “Maybe I should have been a mapmaker.”

  Renata placed her hand over his, the old map dangling half folded between them. “Cartographer,” she said. “That’s what it’s called.”

  “Jesus, Renata,” he said, pulling his hand free, “I know that.”

  He turned away from her. The map was a neat rectangle in his hand now. Folded like that, no one would guess the secrets it held, the neat lines that led to Savannah and beyond, the small roads, the bridges, the Xs and 99 cent breakfast at Ma’s. Libby used to memorize routes, the names of cities and towns along the way.

  Tom figured that when she left Holly, she had not needed to consult a map. She had her route planned long ago, with alternates and scenic diversions. She knew, from all his old maps and triple A Triptiks customers had brought him, what was under construction, where there were fast-food restaurants and areas of interest, and where, at night, weary from the day’s driving, she could check in somewhere with a pool and color TV and sleep until the next morning when it was time to move on again.

  Behind him, Renata began to hum a song he could not identify, its melody foreign and unfamiliar.

  Roald had practically become Dana’s best friend. They talked on the phone constantly. They went to the movies every Friday and Saturday night. To foreign films with subtitles. To the big multiplex in Pittsfield. They argued about them afterward. He gave her lists of movies to watch at home on the VCR. You, Roald had told her, are a neophyte.

  They read books too, exchanging them back and forth. He gave her lists of those too, and Dana spent time after school in the library, reading. She even started reading the encyclopedia, beginning at A. She also wrote down odd facts that she thought would be good in conversations in New York. Did you know that the cow has seven stomachs? she would say to Roald. Did you know that James Madison was the shortest U.S. president? That Carl Sandburg called Chicago the hog butcher for the world? What are you doing? he asked her. Trying out for Jeopardy! or something?

  Now, on the telephone late Wednesday night, Dana told Roald, “My father is having an affair with Renata Handy. She is now our resident Amazon and weirdo.”

  “How do you know it’s an affair?” he asked her.

  “They are upstairs doing it right now. They do it constantly. That’s how I know.”

  “Ah,” Roald said. “It.”

  “Yes, it,” Dana said. Every night she heard the bedsprings creaking. Every morning her father walked into the kitchen grinning. Renata grinned a lot too.

  “When did this start?” Roald said.

  “It’s totally gross.”

  “I thought you claimed sex was amazing.”

  “If you saw Renata Handy you’d understand. She’s like six feet tall and fat.” Then she added softly, “My mother is beautiful. I don’t see how he could do this.”

  “Horniness,” Roald told her. “It makes for strange bedfellows.”

  “I guess,” she said. Above her, the bedsprings quickened. June, she reminded herself, was only ten weeks away.

  Tom picked up the telephone and called the operator.

  “I need the area code for California,” he said. He whispered when he spoke. Upstairs, Renata was sound asleep.

  The operator’s voice was kind. “Which city?” she said. “They have a lot of area codes.”

  “Right. Of course.” He swallowed hard. “Los Angeles.”

  “Two-one-three,” she said. “Have a good night now.”

  His fingers trembled slightly as he dialed the phone.

  This operator was not as patient.

  “There is no Libby Harper in L.A., sir.”

  “But there has to be.” What was it that women who lived alone did? he thought suddenly. “L. Harper,” he said. “Try just the initial L.”

  “There is no L. Harper either, sir,” she said.

  “There has to be,” he said again. But the operator had hung up.

  Tom did not put the receiver down. He heard the dial tone, and then a loud beeping. It was like she’d disappeared, he thought. He could try other cities. San Francisco. New York. Where else did actresses go? Burt Reynolds had some kind of theater in Florida somewhere, didn’t he? With computers couldn’t they somehow centralize all these operators so he wouldn’t have to keep calling for area codes of every city and then redialing each time?

  Then Tom realized something.

  He dialed information in Los Angeles again.

  “What city?” the operator said. It was a man this time.

  “Los Angeles,” Tom said. Despite the beer, his mouth suddenly felt very dry. “Libby Holliday.”

  “Hold for the number,” the man told him.

  A computerized voice came on and told him where he could reach his wife. He laughed. Wife. She was not even using her married name anymore. Libby Holliday, he whispered. And the smiling housewife waxing the floor disappeared. Instead he saw the young blond girl who sat in front of him in English class, who begged him to drive his car faster, faster, whose charm bracelet left small imprints on his naked arms—a ballet shoe, a sweet sixteen, a small silver car.

  He did not dial the number. He repeated it to himself all the way back upstairs to bed. Renata was awake. She tossed the covers off and opened her arms, as if she were waiting for him.

  It was funny how Libby thought a person shouldn’t just walk away from a relationship without an explanation. She knew, of course, that she had walked away from her entire family without telling them why. But she felt they understood, that in all the years of her unhappiness they had almost come to expect her to leave someday.

  She did not know why Jeremy had stopped calling her. And she thought she deserved an explanation. He did not return her calls. She wrote him a letter, made sure it was cheerful and upbeat, and signed it “Warmest regards” so as not to seem pushy. He still didn’t respond.

  Her friend Janice said, “Spring, and a man’s fancy turns to love.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Libby said.

  Janice only shrugged.

  It didn’t seem like spring to Libby. She was used to the changes that came in New England—the sud
den burst of warm air, the rainy nights, the bits of bright green appearing in unexpected places. Here, there was just more of the same. People were always bragging about the weather, but Libby found it dull and uninspired.

  All those years she’d imagined coming West, she had pictured vivid sunsets over the Pacific, limousines taking her everywhere, a sense of excitement that never went away. She had found none of that. In Holly, she had a place. People knew her. Sue rolled her eyes at Libby’s big schemes. Dana and Troy shied away from her altogether and Tom loved her, no matter what. Foreign films and thick books with small print didn’t take the place of any of those things.

  Sometimes she saw herself on television, mopping that floor, the spray of stars shooting from it. She had it on video, but catching it by accident between Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune was even better. There she was, spilling into people’s homes across the country. But even that moment was short-lived. Eventually she had to go back to Von’s or write a letter to movie theater owners protesting the price hike. Eventually she had to face herself.

  When Ashley got a regular role on a new sitcom and Heather got a replacement part on a soap, Libby quit acting class. Right away two new young girls with gobs of hair and tight black clothes replaced them. Libby had had enough. Now, without acting class and Jeremy, her nights stretched before her endlessly.

  She started to listen to late-night talk radio. She especially liked this woman, Doctor Bobbi. Her voice was like maple syrup, soothing and sweet. At the end of each phone call, Doctor Bobbi always said, “Hang in there, babe. Someone out here loves ya.” No matter how bad the situation, she said that. It made Libby think of Tom. Through all these years, that had always been his message to her. She had hardly appreciated it.

  One night, after calling Jeremy every hour and hanging up when his machine picked up, Libby called Doctor Bobbi. She was put on hold. On the radio, while she waited, a woman was talking about how her mother had left her and her sister when they were very small, and now they wanted to go and find her.

  “I heard Sally Jessy will do that for you,” the woman said. “Hire a detective. Everything.” She had a slight speech impediment, a lisp, that made her sound even more pathetic.

  “The point is,” Doctor Bobbi was saying, “do you really want to confront this woman who left you twenty-five years ago? Who did the most heinous thing a mother can? Desertion? Abandonment?”

  The caller was crying now. Libby started to cry too. She had done that to her children. And Doctor Bobbi was saying it was the worst possible thing. She tried to imagine this woman’s mother. Perhaps she had felt that she would die if she didn’t leave too. No one seemed to care about that. Here was the daughter now, grown up, seemingly all right except for this little lisp.

  A voice clicked onto the phone. “Your call is up next.”

  Libby hung up. Her hands were trembling. She tried to picture Troy, with all those awful tattoos and his red-rimmed eyes. There had been a time when they were close. He used to make her laugh when no one else could. The image she got, though, was of him as a newborn, all red-faced and wrinkled. Dana had come into the world kicking and screaming, but Troy had been calm. He had looked her right in the eye.

  For an instant, she thought about calling home. Just to see how everyone was doing. And just as she thought that, the phone rang, startling her. She half expected it to be Troy on the other end, as if they had communicated by mental telepathy.

  Libby was surprised to hear Sue’s voice instead. She glanced at the clock. It was after midnight in Massachusetts. Something must be terribly wrong. The face of the teenage Troy came to her then, loomed right in front of her. Didn’t mothers have omens like this? As she had sat remembering him as a baby, something bad was happening to him. She knew he drank too much, took who knew what kind of drugs. He was always getting into trouble, a bad boy, the kind she avoided when she was a teenager.

  But Sue was talking about something else and it took Libby a few minutes to understand.

  “Wait,” she said, calming down. “Are you talking about that big old weirdo Renata Handy? The one from school?”

  “Yes!” Sue said, frustrated. “Renata Handy has moved into your house. She’s living with Harp.”

  Libby couldn’t catch her breath. “But he loves me,” she managed to say.

  “They’re having an affair,” Sue said. “He shows up all over town with her and her daughter.”

  “Renata Handy and her daughter are living in my house?” Libby said.

  “And there’s something wrong with the kid. Leukemia or something.” Sue took a drag on a cigarette, exhaled long and slow. “Renata is still as big as a house too. With those gypsy clothes. She told Dee-Dee that her husband died in the gulf war but I doubt it. I mean, really.”

  “How could he do this to me?” Libby said, more to herself than to Sue.

  “Libby, don’t get mad or anything, but you did leave him. The guy’s been a mess. You should see how he looked, unkempt, all unshaven and drawn. Like a zombie. Like a guy with a broken heart.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Libby said. She didn’t know why, but suddenly she was angry at Sue. “As if I didn’t know he was upset.” She wondered if Sue would betray her too, start hanging around with Renata, double date with them.

  “I’m sorry,” Sue was saying. “I thought you should know. If you ever thought about coming back, you know, maybe this would be a good time.”

  “I’m not coming back,” Libby said. “I have a life here, you know.”

  “Yeah, well. Good night, then.”

  Libby hung up the phone. Once, back in school, Renata had drawn her a picture, like a Peter Max one, all psychedelic swirls, of a boy and girl growing out of a flower. “It’s you and Tom,” she’d said, in that stoned way she used to talk. Libby had not known what to do with it—two naked people popping out of a lily, their hair all orange and purple. She had laughed, shown it to everyone so they would laugh too. Then she’d thrown it away.

  Doctor Bobbi was saying, “Good night, Los Angeles. Hang in there and remember, someone out here loves ya.”

  All Libby could think about was Harp making love to Renata Handy. It disgusted her. Once she even got up the courage to call home, but when a little girl answered the phone she hung up. Janice didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. “Renata Handy is ugly,” Libby told her. “And weird.” But Janice still didn’t get it.

  She tried to make Libby feel better anyway. She set her up on a few blind dates and came over to watch L.A. Law. But nothing helped. Just when she’d start to relax, the sight of the two of them together would slap Libby in the face again. She called Sue two or three times a week. “Are they still together?” she demanded. “Yes,” Sue told her. “Yes.”

  Janice got tickets to the ballet. “It’ll make you feel better,” she said. “It’s Giselle, where all abandoned women get their revenge.”

  “I was not abandoned,” Libby told her. But she went along anyway.

  The ballet only made her more depressed—all those lovely young ballerinas, leaping high into the air. She used to hope that Dana would become a ballerina. But Dana always did the exact opposite of what Libby wanted. The way she dressed and cut her hair, it was almost as if she wanted Libby to dislike her.

  At intermission Libby said she wanted to go home.

  “But you’ll miss their revenge,” Janice said.

  Janice, with her hair dyed a strange flat black and her dark red lipstick, looked like a creepy stranger to Libby. Glancing around the crowded lobby, everyone suddenly seemed like a creepy stranger, and Libby yearned for something familiar—her back yard, the road leading to her house, the sound of Tom’s voice.

  Her eyes settled then on a familiar face, Fu Manchu mustache, shaggy brown hair. Jeremy. His arm held firmly to the waist of a woman with ripples of long red hair. She wore black evening gloves and Libby knew it was his wife, Kathleen.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Libby said. She thought if s
he didn’t leave this minute, she would get sick, throw up right here during the intermission of Giselle.

  Janice was saying something Libby could not understand, as if she was speaking a foreign language. Libby pushed past the crowd of people, and out the door, where she stood gobbling the dirty air for a very long time.

  Jeremy was not hard to find. All she had to do was call the production company he sometimes worked for to find out that he was building a fake cantina in the desert for a Mexican restaurant commercial. Libby drove the two hours to the site, then sat in the car and watched as the crew finished building the cantina—fake adobe walls all cracked and stained brown, tiled floors and terra cotta tables. Actresses in off-the-shoulder peasant blouses and brightly colored ruffled skirts pretended to serve margaritas to other actors pretending to eat dinner and have fun. All an illusion.

  Libby saw Jeremy standing off to the side, drinking a soda and watching. He looked like everyone else, a workman in a T-shirt and jeans, not at all like a brilliant screenwriter, which Libby doubted he even was. She got out of the car and made her way toward him, the sun hot on her neck and shoulders.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see her there, in the middle of the desert at a fake cantina.

  “So this is what you do,” Libby said, motioning toward the set.

  A muscle in his jaw twitched at that.

  “You could have told me you’d gone back to Kathleen,” she said. “A gentleman would have told me.”

  He finally looked at her full in the face. “I didn’t really have anything to say. After a while you just bored me.”

  He’d said that to hurt her, she knew. And it worked.

  Jeremy pointed to the fake cantina. “All make-believe. Tricks. Out here, there are tricks for everything. To make turkey look moist and brown and the cherries in pie shine.” He turned back to her. “You don’t belong out here, Miss Libby Holliday. You belong at home baking cakes and watching I Dream of Jeannie with your mechanic husband.”