This Vacant Paradise

by Victoria Patterson

  “Here,” he said, helping, his hand over her hand.

  And then they were in the hallway, the lights off, front door closed; she turned to him and he put one hand at her hip, the other at the small of her back, and moved her closer.

  Her face came to him, and his hand tucked under her jersey, up, up, fingers crawling beneath the underwire of her bra, on her breast, at the hardened sweet tip of a nipple. Her mouth was open and yielding when it reached his, and she made a groaning noise. He plunged into the kiss, but it felt like a black hole, his mind falling into space.

  He brought himself back, feeling for her teeth with his tongue; her cheek pressed against his, sweaty. Her breast was warm, cupped in his hand like a kitten, but with the firmness and ripple of silicon, and then the underwire of her bra pressed into the skin of his knuckle.

  They were moving in one stumbling jumble toward a couch, when his thigh hit the corner of a side table, stabbing him. His mouth pulled away. “God,” he said, but she seemed to think he was expressing his exultation, and her mouth came violently back at his, a gleaming flash of teeth.

  And it was all wrong suddenly, all wrong. He didn’t know how to tell her, so he tried to kiss her softly, gently, slow down, slow down, and then get to the end, hand releasing from her breast, pulling outside her jersey.

  They were sitting on a leather couch where she’d led him, and she was leaning in a prone direction, but he kept her at a sit. His head rolled back and forth a little, trying to pull away. He tried to get a look around him, but all he saw was a corner of her eye, flashing in something like alarm. A chill rose inside him; she had a hold of his bottom lip, like a hungry bird.

  “Thtop,” he said.

  She pulled away, and even in the dark she looked like a little girl who had gotten her feelings hurt; guilt crept at the back of his neck.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry; it’s me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a beautiful girl.” He set a hand on her forearm. “I’m not the one for you.”

  She stared at him, and in the darkness her eyes appeared wide and blameless. “I know that; we’re just having fun.”

  He should’ve been glad, but he felt a nick at his pride. Guilt and disappointment and embarrassment took him by the throat. Why wasn’t he the one? Why was she so sure?

  7

  NORA GIVENS WAS happiest when she abandoned herself to fantasies about Charlie. Besides jogging six laps around the high school track each Sunday, they spoke by phone nearly every other day about everyday things. The general nature of their conversations furthered her illusion of an unconditional love, a connection that did not rely on profound and consequential discussions, or on the physical facets that other intimate relationships needed to exist (although she wouldn’t mind crossing that road, and often deliberated over it). Theirs was a sacred and unconventional connection, full of respect, existing beyond boundaries, a spiritual telepathy.

  Most people wouldn’t understand. Like when her friends had warned her about Jake, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, telling Nora that he was using her. Late one night, her second week in Honduras, he’d come to her room, smacking his palm against her window. He’d passed out on her mattress, smelling of pot and booze, and rather than trying to wake him or sleep on the floor, or wake and upset her Catholic host family, she’d taken off his old Adidas sneakers (size 14) and slept with him. The warmth of his body, the bulky extent of him, his steady breathing, calmed her. At some point during the night, they both woke, one thing led to another, and he performed cunnilingus on her. Although she received the traditional orgasm reward, when his face appeared from between her legs—mouth and chin glistening—she felt like she’d been doing him the favor.

  When they woke in the morning, she was pressed against him, her legs cupped behind his. He began coming over most nights. She gave him a key. As soon as the mattress dipped with his weight, she felt herself release. And it wasn’t the sex. He called her his “sleeping buddy” and she called him her “sleeping twin.” He curled next to her, fitting his knees behind hers, his lips in her hair, his breath at her neck. Their positions changed with a nudge or a sigh, turning as a unit: her knees hooked behind his; later, turn again, his leg scissored between hers. She was tall and gawky, and he was a lumbering man, limbs like leaden blankets; rather than making her feel trapped, he made her feel safe. They forgave each other the unavoidable embarrassments—a slipped fart, or the times when he was so drunk and stoned, he peed on the mattress. And he was privy to her menstrual cycle because instead of sleeping naked, she wore her gray sweatpants.

  Her dream life, whether remembered or not, became entwined with his. And never before (or after) had she had an absence of nightmares. Last she’d heard, Jake was married, three kids, a mortgage broker living somewhere in Oregon. When she thought of him, it was with tenderness, an inner knowledge of his fallibilities, his innate sensitivity. But she’d never thought that Jake might be The One.

  Charlie had sexual relationships with other women—Brenda Caldwell, for instance—but those entanglements weren’t a real threat. Charlie had even said, “Don’t ever confuse sex with love or love with sex.” If she was honest: Yes, she wanted to marry Charlie, to bear his children, to grow old with him. And she was sure that it was a signal that he signed her birthday cards and Christmas cards: “Love, Charlie.”

  But when Charlie had called her at 10:42 PM, distressed over a “date gone bad,” she’d been disappointed. She was there for him, always had been, always would be, but these sporadic occasions were tiresome. It wasn’t so much what he’d told her as it was the tone of his voice. She knew that when he arrived, her job would be to listen, mentally preparing for pauses where she would reassure him. Her active role would be to placate him. She looked at her alarm clock. It would probably take fifteen minutes for him to arrive.

  These late-night discussions promised for intimate revelations and left Charlie feeling “a whole lot better,” but left her with lingering bad feelings, sometimes for weeks, because she did not have the kind of relationship with Charlie that she wanted (she wasn’t completely stupid) and, unlike Jake, Charlie was using her. Worst of all, she was letting herself be used.

  But this time would be different, this time she would be prepared. He needed to know how she felt and make a decision. There needed to be reciprocity. She should have spoken up long ago, and this time she would not falter.

  As she waited to hear Charlie’s Honda pull up at the curb, she squinted at herself in her bathroom mirror. A pimple at the rim of her nostril—nose too wide. She underwent the usual turmoil: If she picked, it would only get worse—reddened and irritated and spreading—but it was a habit that soothed her.

  She settled for lip balm, a little blush.

  She was no beauty, had known since kindergarten. She didn’t want to fight a losing battle (average women pretending to be beautiful). Her acceptance was as familiar and comfortable as her gray sweatpants, providing a suspension of vanity, a freedom to focus on her inner life. She was different from the competitive females vying for attention. If only men (Charlie) could get over their (his) preoccupation with the visible aesthetics of women (her), the way she had.

  Her eyes passed over the Martin Luther King Jr. quote taped to the corner of her mirror: “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” Each month, she changed the quote, hoping to be inspired and/or changed.

  November was Mohandas K. Gandhi, and she still had it memorized, despite its length:

  I do dimly perceive that while everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates. That informing power of spirit is God, and since nothing else that I see, merely through the senses, can or will persist, He alone is.

  She moved through her living room, bedroom, and kitchen, tidying for Charlie’s arrival, se
tting loose clothes in the laundry basket and throwing away an old banana peel in the trash can outside so it wouldn’t stink. She filled her teakettle with water and turned the stove knob with a hiss of gas.

  Looking in her refrigerator, she didn’t find much for him to eat. Cottage cheese, carrots, two tomatoes (on the rotting side), a package of corn tortillas, a package of orange and yellow shredded cheese, three cartons of leftovers from restaurants (all needing to be thrown away), and a carton of eggs.

  She took a Coors with her to her small balcony. Looking over the twinkling lights of the other houses and apartments, the telephone wires, the wind in the palm trees, she opened the can and drank. It was dark and cold, and the wind shuddered through the hairlike glittering ribbon wrapped around the palm trunks.

  The long increasing scream of the teakettle brought her back inside. She turned the knob of the stove and listened to the kettle’s dying wail.

  She lived in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom upper unit of a bungalow duplex in Costa Mesa, owned by Mrs. Elizabeth McFadden, former president of the Junior League and current benefactress and president of the board of directors for Clothing for Change. Nora’s title was executive director, which meant that she did the grunt work while Mrs. McFadden simultaneously kept her manicured hands clean and received all the credit and awards and write-ups.

  Nora and her indigent female clients (parolees, drug addicts, the homeless) were expected to express their eternal gratitude to the board of directors. Nora filmed clients’ “testimonials” for fundraisers, and they’d become so rote (“In these clothes, I feel like I can accomplish anything! I have a newfound confidence!”) that she fantasized about allowing her clients to speak openly, allowing herself to speak openly, a type of reverse scrutiny.

  But she kept her disillusionment with the nonprofit world private: Mrs. McFadden was her landlady, and her rent, along with her salary, was contingent on Mrs. McFadden’s goodwill.

  When Nora had returned from the Peace Corps, in order to make good on the principle of promoting her community’s understanding of people in developing countries, she’d set up slide shows at churches, high schools, and the homes of accommodating philanthropists.

  She’d been having trouble readjusting (for instance, when she’d stood in the produce-packed aisle of a Pavilions grocery store, weeping), and her slide shows weren’t helping to lift her morale because of their low attendance.

  Charlie had been one of the only people to express a genuine interest. Twenty-six of his students had also come, and it had been her most crowded, successful slide show—hands raised in the crowd, full of questions. (Later, he’d admitted to offering extra credit, even more so if his students asked questions.)

  She’d noticed him right away, a fluttering in her stomach. Tall and handsome, he had an aura of gloomy meditation. He wore faded jeans and a suit jacket, and his dark hair was long for a man—thick, with a touch of gray—but not too long. With a hand, he brushed it from his eyes and it surprised her, reminding her of something a teenage girl might do. When he looked over at her, perhaps sensing her interest, his eyes had a flicker of amusement, as if they’d known each other for a long time.

  After her presentation, he came over, waited while a woman she didn’t know—plastic-surgery face, midfifties—held her hand and said, “You look so skinny, Nora! Maybe that’s what I need to do to lose weight: go to a Third World country!”

  And then Charlie approached, and even before he was sure that the plastic-surgery woman was safely out of earshot, he leaned forward and said, “What’s wrong with these people?”

  Charlie often commented on her altruistic choices, first the Peace Corps and then Clothing for Change, saying that he held such respect. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “You grew up here. How’d you turn out so different?”

  She didn’t tell him her theory, preferring his baffled awe. And besides, her attempt at an explanation would be long and convoluted and humiliating and probably wouldn’t make much sense. She might say something like:

  Her father, a chiropractor, had been a religious man of the David Koresh variety; Armageddon had been his constant preoccupation, and instead of bedtime stories, he had told her of the second coming. She hadn’t seen him in over twenty years: he’d left for a communal-style farm in Montana with a “bunker,” remarried, and had three sons: Luke, Jonah, and Peter.

  Her mother, a secretary for a wealthy capitalist, had remarried her employer, thus providing Nora, six years old at the time, with a stable home life and a superior education in Newport Beach, but the fatalistic die had already been cast.

  Despite her privileged upbringing, her costly Stanford education, her two years in Honduras, her pragmatic rationality, and her three years of intensive psychiatric therapy and “self-betterment,” her father’s religious mania had bled into her, proving that childhood was—as the experts agreed—a formative experience.

  Although she told no one apart from the psychologists and psychiatrists, she had a deep inner certainty that the world was ending, and that before that happened, things were going to get very, very, very ugly. Her thinking, she believed, was probably genetic, embedded in her DNA.

  She wasn’t so much concerned for the state of her soul (“Blessed is the one who stays awake and is clothed, not going about naked and exposed to shame”), but the fleetingness, randomness, and meaninglessness damaged her.

  Nearly all were doomed, including the people she loved most, and her inability to stomach an exclusive country club–type heaven had soiled her vision of an afterlife, whether she was a member or not.

  Her decision to join the Peace Corps and to birth and develop Clothing for Change came partially from a desire to remedy the flagrant injustice: If most people were going to hell, she wanted to make life better for the ones who already lived there. No one deserved a double hell.

  She dreamt apocalyptic nightmares with black smoke and fire demons and “foul spirits like frogs coming from the mouths of dragons,” and her waking hours were streaked with a substantial morbidity.

  She stayed current with world affairs and local affairs, prolific and biblical in proportion: Iraq and Kuwait; Israel and Palestine; the passing of Proposition 187; the Whitewater scandal; Newt Gingrich; O. J. Simpson—not to mention the earthquakes, hurricanes, and famines.

  The main thing that continued to console her, year after year, was the continued survival of Earth and its populace.

  WHEN NORA OPENED her front door, a visible sadness in Charlie proved irresistible, and despite how she’d been preparing, her heart softened at once. His movements had a thoughtfulness, as if he balanced everything in his mind before taking action, before speaking. It gave him a pensive, slow quality—but it seemed to Nora that it was always worth the wait. Only when nervous did he chatter, but she’d become proficient in deciphering what he really needed to say.

  He sat on her couch, his top leg held out at an angle, foot resting on his thigh. He had an enviable manner of making himself instantly at home.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  Nora was not at ease with the topic of Esther, and she knew that “her” equaled Esther. Charlie had had infatuations with beautiful women, but this was different. Call it female intuition, call it ESP. Her best chance would be if Esther died—a car crash, choking, suicide. Then she would have to console Charlie.

  “I went on a date,” he said, “to forget her, but it didn’t work.”

  She’d already made Tension Tamer tea, and she went to the kitchen, pressed out the tea bag with a spoon, and added a tablespoon of milk and sugar, the way he liked. Within minutes of being with him, she’d lost her presence of mind, and she now wished she could get him to leave so that she might recover it—or not slip further down the rabbit hole of love-stupidity.

  She set the mug on a cork coaster at her coffee table and sat next to him.

  “Even if I want to be with her,” he said, pausing to take
a sip. His lips tightened as if he’d burned his mouth, and he set the mug back on its coaster.

  “What were you going to say?”

  He looked at her blankly. It annoyed her when he began to tell her something and then stopped midway, midsentence—as if what he had to say was so delicate, so profound, so intimate, that he was reconsidering, deciding whether or not to share. Usually, after a long buildup of anticipation, he’d tell her anyway.

  “I want to hear the rest,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come on,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t afford her anyway,” he finished.

  He stretched out his long legs underneath the coffee table, and at the same time, he supported his head at the back of the couch, tilting it so that he appeared to be contemplating the ceiling.

  Nora’s hands were clasped in her lap, and she ran her thumb against a hangnail. She was aware of the blood in her veins. She watched Charlie take a sip of his tea; he had a sputtering, coughing reaction. He shook his head, his face pinkening. He coughed violently, hand fisted at his mouth.

  They were quiet, and he appeared to be staring at a spot on the carpet. Her heart drumming, she decided to take a risk.

  “You need someone with similar goals,” she said. Someone like me, she thought. Me. You need me.

  She willed him to understand their relationship through the prism of her emotions. He was staring at his spot on the carpet, but she hoped that he was absorbing the information. She imagined his epiphany, her longing acknowledged.

  His head lifted to look at her. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. She waited. And then waited some more.

  “I can’t stop thinking about her,” he said, his face soft with amazement.

  Her embarrassment and shame were surpassed by a sudden wave of hatred. If the man she wanted to marry, the man she loved, was this inept an interpreter of her feelings, then her loneliness would not change.