To his sweetheart, he’d lied, told her his birthday was in December instead of July. His sweetheart: he’d not been able to guess her mood at the bakery. For all the months they’d openly flirted before they began sleeping together, each now acted in public as if the other were not present. His secret phone was in the glove compartment; there, his need for it to buzz might make it happen. This was the magical thinking of illicit love. Of love, period.
He decided he would test his theory about the newspaper by gauging Leslie’s response: he would know whether or not to be distressed by how she behaved. If she was proud of him, he would be proud. Or, if she were horrified on his behalf, horrified he would be. There wasn’t a paranoid bone in Leslie’s body. And what if she seemed pitying? How dispiriting and revolting to be pitied, and for even milquetoast Leslie to be savvy enough to see it. With her, he also could not simply brush off the honor as a joke. Leslie wasn’t versed in joke, although he’d mistaken her quick smile for teasing, once upon a time—her pointed upper incisors suggested impishness, a complete misrepresentation. But that was before he’d discovered that she was just like the beverages she ordered at bars, virgin versions of the ones that carried the poison and punch of alcohol. Leslie: her innocence had eventually elicited in him a viciousness he’d not known he was capable of, a bullying creature who’d finally, mercifully, been rescued by finding a new love. And he’d been able to divorce poor Leslie, divorce her before killing her with his cruel sarcasm, with his cutting scorn toward everything she fervently believed holy.
Like this perfectly fine business she’d managed to make a success. Oliver parked in its full lot and was pleased. It was he who’d kept it from contemporary flaky kitsch, he who’d recruited and trained her fleet of professional help, yet Leslie who’d bestowed the place with absolute unwavering goodwill.
She wouldn’t hurt his feelings, and that was a relief. “Hello, my friend,” she said when he came through the door, putting her dewy cheek next to his. He had the same brief realization he always did at her customary greeting: it was exactly the way his current wife addressed their dogs, Hello, my friends, and he could never be certain that Catherine wasn’t having a little joke at Leslie’s expense.
But now she didn’t mention the award at all. Quite possibly she’d neglected to look at the paper; she was persistently untutored on local or national or international news; she’d often forgotten to vote, come fall. She was fifty-seven but could pass for forty, her body tiny, her hair clipped like a French waif’s, her skin unmarred by sun or stress, her black linen outfit so utterly neutral, so thoroughly practical, as to be outside the realm of fashion, invisible like a mime’s, liberating like a martial artist’s, timeless as the sci-fi character clothed from some purely utilitarian future. Kansa Karma smelled always of flowers, not the sickly thick concentration of perfume or incense but the scent of fresh flowers, held just a few inches from the nose, and with a gentle breeze ready to further attenuate their presence, leaving you following their odor rather than turning away. It was she who’d given his current mother-in-law wind chimes to hang over the heat vent at the nursing home, a sweet tinkling sound, soothing; once upon a time, Leslie had taken classes with Dr. Harding, lugged around for a few semesters the massive anthology with its composite of stern suffragette faces on the cover. Further cross-pollination had occurred between this wife and the present one when Miriam had needed teenage counseling, and Catherine was recruited to provide it. More recently, Catherine had spent a few months here at Leslie’s spa, placid behind the desk, making appointments, filling water jugs, answering the silently ringing phone, welcoming clients with a murmur and a smile. She still came in occasionally, working when someone was ill, trading her services for the services of the spa, pedicure, massage, facial. Oliver wondered why it did not bother him to think of his ex-wife’s hands on his current wife’s body, his daughter working at Catherine’s face. Had he grown inured to the coincidences and ironic overlap of living in a town the size of Wichita? After all, Catherine’s mother had been Leslie’s favorite professor, a mentor; might he not be more bothered that Dr. Harding had had some early meddling influence during Leslie’s formative years? Wasn’t that, in fact, a far more insidious intimacy?
Maybe Dr. Harding hadn’t had enough of an influence.
When Leslie forgot to tell him to take off his shoes, Oliver caught the first hint of something awry. “What’s wrong?”
“Miriam,” she said, leaning close and speaking lower than usual. “She brought somebody here last night.”
He sighed. Miriam was thirty-two years old; her adolescent hijinks should have ended more than a decade earlier. “And?”
“He’s still here.” Motioning with her hand, she indicated that he should follow. What was supposed to be an obligatory gift-receiving session under hot stones (Leslie’s promised Christmas present, a gift Oliver had not particularly wanted, yet did not have the energy to decline) was now turning into an all-too-familiar episode in the continuing saga of Miriam’s arrested development.
Leslie padded along duck-footed, looking from the back like a Ninja, leading him through several whispering panels that all glided smoothly on their oiled tracks. They tiptoed past toweled women on benches, cubbies full of boots, wooden pegs holding a row of hooded white bathrobes like a soldierly line of ghosts. Always so quiet here in the spa, the dripping water, the flowering air, light filtering through the endless rooms of rice-paper doors, walls that slid away to reveal other rooms, fountains, clear beverages in which floated lemons and cucumbers, here a bowl of raw almonds, there a pump bottle of sandalwood oil. The light was autumnal, all year; clocks were disallowed.
Leslie pulled open the final rice-paper door separating one small lounge area from the pedicure room. In the leather massage seat with his eyes shut and his feet in a tub of water rested a naked man.
“Jesus Christ,” Oliver said. “He’s breathing?”
Leslie nodded.
“Where’s Miriam?”
“Doing an exfoliation. As you might have noticed, that Mom’s Day of Beauty idea was really popular.” This had been Oliver’s most recent brainstorm, a Christmas stocking-stuffer coupon for clueless husbands and their exhausted wives.
“What did she say about him?”
“She met him at an NA meeting.”
“And?”
“Then they got drunk?” Leslie shrugged helplessly. She’d done everything she could for Miriam: helped her through school (Miriam’s business card named her Esthetician), put her on the payroll, invited her back into her old bedroom at the house. But she’d never understood her daughter’s naughty habits. She’d not been that kind of girl, herself; Oliver supposed Miriam had inherited her taste for danger from him.
At least his secret life was secret.
“If it weren’t for the tattoo, he’d look like a frat boy,” he said. The man was carelessly handsome, beautiful by virtue of youth, his blond hair messy, his slackness more like something sculpted than something abandoned, his mouth open and his youthful white teeth showing. But the vivid colorful narrative covering his upper arms and continuing down along his wrists bespoke some other life. His hands hung slack—squared knuckles, a large silver skull ring big as a drawer pull on his pinkie—and framed his flaccid penis as if to present it. His knees splayed open and his feet rested in the electronic bucket used to clean and soothe toes. Its motor was running, a filmy gray surface of scum burbling away.
“I wonder how many times this kind of thing has happened, and we didn’t find out about it?” Oliver said. He already knew about ones that Leslie, innocent Leslie, had not discovered.
“He can’t stay here,” she said. “I have clients. And he smells terrible.” He did, some sour combination of alcohol, smoke, sweat, and general male carelessness. Leslie’s nose was tiny and very sensitive. She wished to dispose of this creature the way she would any dirty object fouling her sanctuary.
Oliver looked around the room. “No clothes?”
Or was sent from above, Adonis. Or from below, some devilish counterpart.
“And Miriam has nothing to say?” Oliver shook his head. Miriam. Was it his fault she did things like this? Was he to blame for her bad instincts with men? Early on she’d made wrong assumptions about her own father. She was sure he would prefer being called by his name rather than something as potentially sentimental or enfeebling as Dad. She liked to think of him and her in collusion, sometimes against Leslie, Miriam having also inherited some of his skepticism, his sharp tongue. His large head and skeletal thinness.
Leslie said, “I’m sorry, Oliver, but can you do something?”
“Of course.” In fact, it was sort of a pleasure to have something other than the newspaper to think about. “Okay. Grab a robe and some slippers. I’m going to pull the car around back.”
The man breathed peacefully through the awkward and unsavory process of dressing and moving him. Leslie had provided sterile gloves for Oliver, knowing very well his squeamishness concerning touching other people. In a terry-cloth robe and scuffs, his tattoos hidden, the sleeping man looked more like a model, someone on the edge of a swimming pool at the Playboy mansion.
“What was she thinking?” Leslie asked her ex-husband in the back alley by the garbage cans, genuinely perplexed. “What was she thinking bringing a stranger here, letting him …” She couldn’t say. It would pain her to have to learn the terrifying possibilities. This had always been her problem, behavior she herself would never perform being unimaginable to her, her own daughter welcoming into her life and body the unseemly and careless, the strangely dangerous.
Now that the man was in Oliver’s car, she breathed a sigh of relief, clasping her hands before her, beaming at him, so pleased and relieved to have removed this ripe disaster from her heavenly spa. The blue vein in her forehead was visible as it always was when she felt something incontrovertibly positive. She stood like a former ballerina, feet pointed out, spine erect. She probably weighed ninety-nine pounds. Catherine said that she always felt like a cow around Leslie, bovine, thick.
“Healthy,” Oliver had corrected Catherine, savoring, then, those large breasts, remembering Leslie’s nearly nonexistent ones.
“That’s what all the well-intentioned say about girls like me,” his wife had replied.
But now it was the Sweetheart’s body Oliver compared with Leslie’s, her swiftness and efficiency of movement, her practical thinking clear in her actions, her long dark hair that she was incessantly shoving out of her way. A brunette swatch of which had lain on his arm, in the newspaper photo, for all the world to see. The spill of it, on the pillow; the bound length of it grasped in his hand
“I’ll take him to the ER. I’ll tell anybody who asks that we found him out here in the alley, that we worried about an overdose, hypothermia, something like that. Don’t worry.”
“You’re a genius!”
Leslie’s praise was always excessive, saccharine; there’d been years when Miriam wouldn’t speak to her, so outraged was she by her mother’s unbridled, oblivious effusiveness. Maybe the spa clients liked it, Oliver thought, when Leslie thanked them for letting her spend an hour or more tending to their minor aches and pains and vanities, massaging their buttocks and skulls, breathing heavily over their knotted shoulders and crepey necks while they lay supine, inert, blissfully salved. “Thank you,” she would say, like a martyr, bending in a respectful bow.
Now she said, “I’m so blessed to have you to call upon.”
“Well,” he said, and then instructed himself to stop there, to bite his tongue before it did something awful.
But maybe that was why he’d really come here in the first place, to be thanked by a martyr instead of feeling paranoid, to put his prank theory on brief hold. “You packed up the paintings yet?” Leslie asked now, smiling benignly as if the comatose stranger weren’t still right there before them, head lolling on a headrest.
He gave her a half smile as he opened his door. “You never forget anything.” On a good day, it might look like selflessness; on a bad day, it seemed like somebody hoping so passionately to give the impression of selflessness that she manically displayed her ability to recite everything, absolutely everything, that was going on with those who surrounded her, as if she were being tested. It wasn’t nosiness, Oliver thought, and it wasn’t actually concern. It was the habit of a person who had nothing better with which to occupy her thoughts. Leslie did not read books, did not enjoy films or politics or shopping or gossip or competition or collecting or researching or imbibing or ingesting or any other of the myriad ways her fellow human beings filled their time and conversation and obsessive self-doubting. She occupied herself with other people, recalling their birthdays, learning how to address their superficial rather than existential troubles, anticipating their need for a glass of water or a bite of protein just moments before they noticed the need themselves. She settled them in rooms that resembled nothing more closely than the womb, a comforting, mindless space.
“Already started wrapping them up,” Oliver said, of the paintings.
“I always liked the even-numbered years best,” Leslie said.
“You like landscapes. You like seasons and trees and clouds. You prefer flowers.” He stopped himself from one further remark, because she would interpret it as criticism, which, to be honest, was criticism: You would rather die than deal with conflict.
“Much better than those monsters.” She shuddered her shoulders, blinked as a kind of mental exorcism of the very thought of the odd-year paintings. She meant the abstracts, in which she—and she alone—had seen devils and dark alleys and menace, modern art as Rorschach. It was true that Oliver and YaYa had an eclectic collection, somewhat manic-depressive, young nude figure demure in a bucolic hilly vista one minute, then suddenly obscured in a moody black-streaked murkiness the next. In their annual exchanges, the atmosphere in either house was abruptly switched.
“Better go,” Oliver said, nudging his head toward his passenger.
“Come back later for the hot stones?” she asked. “Please? Just thirty minutes? It would make me so happy to do that for you.” She was ready to pretend that Miriam’s latest mistake not only hadn’t happened but wouldn’t be repeated. Rinse out the foot bath, sponge off the chair. Switch on the ceiling fan, spritz some kind of floral spray, kill the man’s odor.
Oliver waved noncommittally, slamming the Saab door and studying his passenger. He wasn’t going to deliver him to the ER. As he pulled out into the street, he opened the passenger window to let cold air do its work. He took Adonis onto the overpass, just to get up some speed, exited onto the belt loop, then circled for a few miles. He could drop the guy at the recently shuttered amusement park, Joyland, that bizarre place with the rickety wooden roller coaster, the maniacal larger-than-life clown who pounded on the Wurlitzer organ, the general queasy atmosphere of things that too closely resembled menace, cotton candy like fiberglass insulation, rides designed to mimic the heart-stopping physical fears of falling or crashing.
Here you go, Mr. Tattooed Man. Joyland.
Oliver took the Kellogg exit too swiftly, which brought a flicker of consciousness from his passenger, his head wobbling forward, then knocking back against the headrest. By the time they’d gotten up to speed heading west, the guy had roused himself fully, blinking and popping his lips. He woke without surprise.
“You related to that cunt?” he asked at last.
Oliver turned sharply, the word making his knuckles whiten against the steering wheel.
“Muriel?” the man guessed, his eyes narrowing to recall. “Marian?”
“Is there somebody you want to call?” Oliver asked, locking the passenger window open just as the guy was reaching to close it. “I’ll dial any number you want.” The man looked down at his bright white bathrobe, lifted his half-covered feet, gazed at the car’s interior and then
at the billboards rushing by outside. Oliver motioned toward the strip malls, the airport when it went by. “Anywhere you want me to stop?”
The guy sighed angrily. Oliver would never ask Miriam whether it was NA where she’d found him, or why she’d brought him to the spa, nor what she’d done with him there. It was behavior that bespoke a sick appetite, an insatiability, a public disregard; it made Oliver nauseated to consider it. He might have had to vomit if the window were closed, if there weren’t frozen air cleansing the atmosphere. They drove in that windy silence for a few more miles, away from the city.
“There,” the man finally said, motioning toward a motel sign across from the cemetery. It was a place Oliver himself had noticed before, a place he’d thought about as a possible rendezvous spot, once the grandparents returned to town and he and the Sweetheart had to find somewhere else to play out their passion. He was attracted to the old-fashioned sign, the black and white tipped top hat, the unrenovated sleazy aspect that said the motel proprietor would rent by the hour, would take cash, would understand the idea of parking in the back. Like Joyland, the motel was a fading piece of the former city. For Oliver, this imagined seedy locale was part and parcel of his second life, that simultaneous existence that was a lurid undercurrent beneath the one on top, the nocturnal answer to the broad and reputable daylight.
This tattooed creature was the kind of lodger who’d be in the room next door while he and the Sweetheart made love.
“She won’t always get off so easy,” he said when they’d stopped outside the motel office. “Someday somebody’s gonna be sick enough of her shit.” With this he slammed the door, taking with him the two twenties Oliver had offered, and shuffled off in his scuffs to the main office. The clerk, there behind bulletproof glass, looked up without surprise. Eleven a.m. on New Year’s Day. A handsome youth in a bathrobe. Yes, there was a vacancy.
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