Exposure

by James Lockhart Perry

  "What, are you hard of hearing? I said I'm gay!"

  Lydia gaped up at him. He stood there, impassive, waiting, she was sure, for her to flood him with knee-jerk heterosexual revulsion. She didn't know what to flood him with. This was so expected, unexpected, and everything in between. Finally, she swallowed and managed, "Then what the hell have you been doing the last six days?"

  "Making you feel better."

  "Making me feel better!" Lydia exploded. "Are you out of your mind? I'd trade my husband's bed for yours any day!"

  "And fuck you, lady! So would I!"

  Lydia blinked. Both of them burst out into hysterics of nervous laughter. Lydia shook her head to clear it. She still hadn't completely grasped the idea. She emptied the contents of her puzzled mind with, "I didn't even know you could do that."

  "You mean in the gay sex manual? You must have missed page twenty-six—exceptions for women friends who rip off your clothes to make themselves feel wanted."

  Lydia laughed sheepishly. Mac was so right—that was exactly what she had done. For the first time now, they gazed at each other through a prism of something like honesty. "Thanks a lot, jerk. You took off your own damn clothes. And while we're at it, your cooking stinks."

  "You think so, do you? Well look out!"

  Mac fished a banger off the messy tray and came after her. He leapt onto the bed, laughing and grabbing her hair in one hand, the banger in the other.

  "What are you— Sonofabitch! Let me go!" Lydia shouted.

  "You think you can tell me to fuck myself? Go down on this, bitch!"

  Lydia screamed with laughter and kicked and punched at him. She grabbed the sausage out of his hand and shoved it at his face. "No wonder you crave this horrible crap! Penis envy!"

  Mac let her propel him onto his back and leap on top of him, but held her off. Finally, she gave up and sat back, gasping for breath. "God, I want my husband," she blurted out of nowhere. "I miss him so much I could scream."

  "He's such an asshole."

  Lydia nodded. "Yeah, but that's not the husband I mean." She eased off Mac and lay back on the bed. The ache inside her had nothing to do with alcohol. It actually felt good to her in a perverse way—more than that, it felt human.

  Mac tossed the remains of the food fight onto the tray and lay back next to her. Lydia couldn't begin to imagine life in a closet so tight, Mac couldn't even trust his best friends. He took her hand and played absent-mindedly with her fingers. He had something on his mind. This had to be the part where he begged her not to take his news to the national wire services.

  "What?" Lydia asked.

  Mac sighed. "You'll have to go find him, if you want him."

  "Sam? Why? What do you know?"

  "He's gone. I went by the apartment yesterday and asked your neighbor. She said he's been gone three days."

  "To Louisville?"

  "I doubt it, but she didn't know. Apparently they're not the best of buddies."

  "I suppose."

  Lydia sighed and let the thought of Sam in Louisville wander off somewhere. Mac was right, she needed help. She just couldn't see where or what kind. It was one thing to lie around in Mac's immaculate existence, under no pressure whatsoever, and another to stand erect in the violent maelstrom of her husband's life. She was no child. She knew exactly what she was getting into the day she walked through Sam's studio door. But now he had driven her over the edge, and she knew he would do it again. Repeatedly.

  It was enough to drown a good woman like her in loneliness.

  Chapter 8

  Sam sat in the back seat of the limousine and stared out through the cast iron fence at the ugly, yellow-brick elementary school. Raggedy Ann children played on the monkey bars, swung on the swings, and chased each other across the playground. Their shrill cries should have lifted his spirits, but instead they only sank him deeper into his funk. This was his last stop in Louisville. He had run out of excuses for avoiding Lydia's home and family.

  The limousine driver hadn't taken his eyes off Sam since they pulled up and coasted to a stop. Sam could feel his suspicion through the rear view mirror. What was a seventy-two-year-old man doing sitting outside an elementary school and staring at playing children? The driver knew Sam was from California, because he had been driving him around for three days. What did he think? That Sam flew twenty-five hundred miles and rented a limousine in search of a child to abuse? They had sat like this outside a high school, the Louisville Slugger factory where Lydia once worked, and an industrial lot where, according to city records, a dilapidated shotgun house once housed the Burgoyne family of South Louisville. How the driver fit all of that into his suspicions of creepy Californians escaped Sam, but he didn't much care.

  Evidently, someone in the school thought along similar lines, because when Sam turned at the sound of a car pulling up behind them, he saw a cruiser's flashing red lights. He opened the door and climbed out with a muffled groan. His knee hadn't let up since he got here. The driver followed.

  "Afternoon, sir," the patrolman started off affably enough. "Something you need here?"

  "I was looking for my wife."

  Patrolman and driver both looked askance, so Sam sighed and added, "My wife is from Louisville. She was born and grew up here. Lydia Burgoyne. She went to school here."

  This managed to puzzle as much as it enlightened. "Your wife is in there?" the patrolman asked warily, pointing at the school and the children.

  "No, I just never knew anything about her. Where she came from. I wanted to see."

  At least it didn't sound threatening. The patrolman adjusted his sunglasses and weapons belt. "It's not every day we get a stranger renting a limousine to cruise the neighborhood—"

  "I'm not exactly cruising."

  "Someone reported you yesterday outside the high school, but by the time we got there, you were gone."

  So that was it. No great surprise that the limousine had marked him. "The rental car company refused to rent me a car. They said I was too old." And it was true. The policy had come as a shock to Sam, as if nothing he did in his life mattered anymore. Just another worthless old geezer tossed out onto the scrap heap by a superficial young sales clerk in a bright green uniform, with no empathy and no clue about the juggernaut headed her own way in another thirty years.

  At least a part of Sam felt like this was what Lydia did by walking out on him—dumped the old fart into the uncollected trash bin of her life. He couldn't blame her for thinking him self-absorbed. Until he landed here, he realized, he had almost no idea who she was or where she came from. He had never showed the slightest curiosity about her past. On this trip, he hoped to figure it out before stumbling onto her mother's porch, but it was slow going.

  Records in a county registrar were no more instructive than bricks, mortar, and a crowd of strangers too many years removed from his wife's current life. Sam had expected to absorb something—anything—but if he did, the subtlety of it escaped him. People in these parts were polite to a fault, but Sam already knew that side of his wife. His photographer's eye had served him unerringly through his career as a chisel for levering off the manhole covers strangers capped over their lives, but this time around, he might as well have been blind.

  "Excuse me, what was that?" Sam had missed what the patrolman was saying.

  The patrolman held onto his patience. No doubt, his own senile parents were lovingly installed in a nursing home as far away from his life as possible. "I'm sorry your wife passed, sir, but I don't think you're going to find her here."

  Passed? Sam declined to object to the assumption. "No, I suppose not. Thanks for your help." The patrolman nodded politely and left Sam to limp back into the limousine.

  The driver followed, his entire demeanor transformed. "Where now, sir?" he asked with the solicitous tone of a funeral home director.

  Sam took a moment to reply. The big surprise of the trip had been that Lydia's mother was dead, and all of five years ago. Did Lydia know this? Did she t
hink her husband too apathetic to even bothering mentioning it? Or had her idiot brother Joe kept it from her? Either road led down a sorry cul de sac. Now that he mulled them over, both notions left Sam pretty sure Lydia wasn't in Louisville. She never would have come back for a brother she had despised since childhood. Mac must have had his own agenda that morning back in South Redondo.

  But Sam wasn't finished. When he figured out that the Burgoynes—or more specifically Joe—sold the family home to an industrial developer, he guessed they must have retreated to their rural roots south of the city. No real reason, except Joe always struck him as that kind of guy. The kind who could talk himself into cheating his sister out of a chickenshit inheritance and then dig in back in the hills to await the Lord's retribution. Like it or not, Sam needed to make another stop—he just wasn't sure why.

  "Take the I-sixty-five south to Park City. It's a couple of hours."

  "I know it well, sir," the driver said, then added skeptically, "But do you?"

  "I haven't a clue. Why?"

  "It's tobacco country, sir. People tend to keep to themselves. Strangers—"

  "No shit. My wife's people came from there. Tobacco farmers four generations back."

  The driver shrugged and took off slowly. A few blocks of progressively deteriorating urban blight, then they climbed the ramp onto the no man's land of the Interstate. Within minutes, they were deep in the gorgeous Kentucky countryside, thick green vegetation masking some of the poorest red-clay farmland in America.

  Sam closed his eyes and recalled the one time years earlier when he brought Lydia to Louisville. On a whim and out of work, he had talked The Times into accrediting him for the Kentucky Derby. But as soon as they arrived and checked into the ancient Brown Hotel, he lost interest. He was no sports photographer, and if Lydia hadn't suggested the trip in the first place, he would have turned around and gone home. The editor was already covered and didn't care, so Sam pretended to work every one of the three days. Better than wading through the Derby crowds snapping visual clichés, or trailing after Lydia to nod politely at a family of silent, displaced, backwoods tobacco farmers.

  On the third afternoon, Sam was sitting in a coffee shop on West Main, screaming with boredom, when he spotted Lydia across the street. Alone. He called her over, and they sat together—dancing around the fact that they were sitting here alone and family-free—until a whiff of guilt propelled him into asking why she hadn't taken him to meet the folks.

  "Why would I want you to meet a bunch of white trash?" she answered, irritated.

  The anger and hostility of the phrase surprised him. It was so uncharacteristic of her. "If you feel that way, then why have you just spent two days with them?"

  "I haven't."

  "You haven’t?" Sam gaped.

  Lydia bit her lip an embarrassed moment, then confessed all. "I've been hanging around downtown every day, waiting for you to come back from the Derby." Sam choked until she slapped him on the shoulder. "What the hell are you laughing at?"

  "Nothing! Nothing! I'm sorry!"

  "Can we go home? This place is killing me. I never should have come."

  Sam paid the check and led Lydia out of the coffee shop. Part of him felt sorry for his wife, so disconnected from her past, but another part shrugged it off. Sam knew all about life on a desert island, a thousand miles from the nearest trace of empathy. His own family...

  Instinctively, he took Lydia's hand and refused to let go all of the way back to the hotel. Whatever he intended—and he really had no idea—she stopped him outside the lobby and smiled gratefully into his eyes. She started to kiss him, but stopped herself with a suddenly distracted glance around them.

  "What?" Sam prompted.

  "Where's your camera bag?"

  Years later in the back seat of the limousine, Sam gazed out at the Kentucky hills rolling past and found himself smiling at the ancient joke. What the hell. This archeological dig wasn't going to turn up his wife. For centuries, refugees like Lydia had fled to California to escape the chains of their past. So much of what passed for a lack of depth in the Golden State was really a concrete barrier built to wall out ancient regrets and resentments that no longer served any useful purpose. Lydia, like most Californians, was born the minute she stepped off the train in Union Station. Sam would have to do better than a trip to Louisville, if he wanted to find his wife.

  And that thought surprised him too. When had he ever made an effort to find anyone? When had he last gone out of his way to want anything at all? As if on cue, the sickness in his stomach and bowels welled up and reminded him that he was still breathing. Technically anyway.

  "Sir?" the driver asked. He must have heard a question in the air. His wrinkled brow stared back at Sam through the rear view mirror.

  "Forget about Park City," Sam said. "Take me to the airport."

  Chapter 9

  Not that anyone was asking, but Sheri's deep, dark secret was that she was born in 1969 at Woodstock, the rock music festival in upstate New York that shook American culture to its roots. According to Sheri's mother Marta, Richie Havens broke her water, Jefferson Airplane dilated her, and Jimi Hendrix's guitar brought an infant howling out of her womb. But the precise sequence might have been apocryphal—Sheri's mother was never much for detail, and the story tended to turn on a dime, depending on the music playing on the radio.

  The real story was that the cute little Dutch girl Marta had arrived in the United States on a short-term visa to work illegally as an au pair for a family in Princeton, New Jersey. When the husband knocked her up, and the wife threatened to report her to immigration, Marta fled. New York City was too complicated for a naïve little Dutch girl from Utrecht. Before she knew it, Marta found herself in the back of a VW bus, singing along on the New York Thruway north to a concert at some dude's pig farm. It was that simple. The American counter-culture of the period was the perfect place for an illegal to hide. First Marta, and later Marta and Sheri, drifted for years through a kaleidoscope of festivals, communes, and love-ins.

  Marta was sharp enough to refuse the emergency helicopter that descended onto a flat near the stage where Hendrix woozed and smoked and ground out the Star-Spangled Banner, so Sheri's birth never joined the other two babies in the official record. But that was apparently the limit of Marta's cunning—it wasn't until Sheri had missed her second year of school, that someone explained how a New York birth certificate for Marta's daughter could have solved all of their immigration woes.

  And Sheri's secret wasn't always so deep and dark. If anything, it made her a celebrity among the ninety-nine percent of American hippies and yippies who hailed from embarrassingly respectable middle-class families. Sheri had inherited Marta's most striking physical feature, her cute little Dutch girl looks. By the time she was eighteen, she looked twelve. By the time she hit thirty, she looked eighteen. By the time she finally met a man she could love, she still looked younger than his twenty-eight years. But she knew better than to test Rudy Spavik's tolerance for falling head over heels for a woman twelve years too old for him. And Rudy might have been a dope when it came to the business of running a photography studio, but Sheri was pretty sure he could subtract 1969 from 2009.

  But what a dope he was, Sheri decided, as she loaded the memory card into the computer. She sat in the old photographer's former darkroom, a claustrophobic womb that still oozed an odor of developing chemicals and old guy sweat. She had lost her patience the day before and shoved Rudy out the studio door.

  "You want me to take pictures?" he asked, desperate. "Pictures of what?"

  "How should I know? You're the photographer! All I know is, you don't get out of here and stop bugging me, I'm never gonna get the business end together."

  And it was true. He had been driving her crazy since the afternoon she agreed to play along with this pathetic charade. Neither of them had a clue what they were doing here. The only business Sheri had ever run was her mother's cookie bake, and that lasted until the first flou
red hodgepodge collided with its first taste bud. Since then, her working life had involved nothing more complicated than cash registers and nervous old ladies in the cosmetics section. And Rudy might be Mister Pulitzer Junior for all they knew, but...

  The computer caught up with the memory card, auto-loaded a photo-finishing program, and flashed the first of Rudy's shots onto the screen. Jesus! Sheri's jaw dropped.

  In the photograph, an outraged Muslim man stalked toward the camera, his son and head-scarved wife on either side. The man hung his open hands in the air, beseeching his God for patience in dealing with such fools. The little boy stalked along, hunched over, his fists in tight balls of fury at his father's stupidity. But the wife—oh the wife! The camera caught her just as her open hand was about to collide with her husband's head! This was light years from anything Sheri understood of the Muslim world. She was pretty sure the insight would blow anybody's mind.

  "I knew you were a genius!" Sheri squealed. "I knew you had it in you the day I met you!"

  She clicked through a handful of the images on the strip at the bottom of the screen. Half were out of focus. In most of the rest, the camera tilted oddly, or the subject fell out of the frame. Apparently, Rudy had walked the length of the Venice Beach madness in search of subjects that spoke to him. Body builders, basketball players, an aging hippie with a feather in his hair, a ballsy young girl smoking a cigarette underneath a mural of Jim Morrison, a pair of stoners with a cardboard sign offering to work for marijuana. Apparently, large female breasts shouted at Rudy, but Sheri let that pass. Her boyfriend had it! For the first time, Sheri spotted a glimmer of hope in the random catastrophe of their lives.

  She thought she heard the studio door open and close, but she was too busy to bother with it. Let Rudy scare away his first customer. He probably would too. Sheri might have heard a woman's voice—she couldn't tell, until the woman shouted, "What the hell are you doing here?"