“Pete,” he said, touching his chest. “You bandaged up my hand.”
Before she could reply, he palmed a bottle of red and asked her did she have a place they could drink it. She smiled at the ceiling as if to say not again, not again was this happening, was she going to take a man home. She put the bottle back on the shelf. He swayed in the air in front of her like a song was playing. She fetched a better bottle, and let out her arm for him.
She lived some blocks away in the Wilma Building. They went in through the door next to the theater lobby and to the elevator. A gray-skinned elevator operator in a vestigial red suit with epaulets requested her floor, though he must have known. Pete asked him what he was looking at, and the man took in Pete for a moment longer. He told Mary no overnight guests allowed.
“Who do you think is staying overnight?” she asked.
When they made her floor, Pete dug in his pocket and gave the operator a ten-dollar bill. The man folded it several times, put it inside his coat, and wished them a good night. The accordion gate rattled to. Pete watched the elevator operator’s silhouette descend with low-grade delight.
She leant on the wall, the bottle of wine dangling in her hand like a short club.
“So you’re the one who thinks he’s staying over.”
“There could be more gatekeepers. A jealous cat. I make no assumptions.”
“Shut up,” she said, striding toward him like she might brain him with the bottle.
They were at it when the elevator opened again and discharged one of her neighbors, who rushed past them, Mary’s dress opened to the navel. She clutched it closed, took up the wine bottle from the floor, and led him inside.
When Pete woke he had no notion of the layout of her place. The window was covered by an opaque blanket or quilt, and when he pulled it away from the window the light from the street wasn’t much to see by and the blanket fell back anyway. She breathed thick with contentment next to him. He touched her through the sheet and she arched toward him, the warmth of him, in the tropism of desire, and when he stilled, she ground against him in her sleep, moaned, and paid out a sweet winey sigh.
He got up and made his way blind as a mole. Glass things on the dresser tinkling as he bumped it. He stepped on what seemed like a paper sack, and found the door by chancing upon some hinges. A closet. Jesus. He moved along the wall, found the light switch, the door molding, the glass doorknob. The hinges screeched and he stopped and listened. She breathed on as before. He slipped out of the bedroom.
The neon light of the Wilma marquee illumined her tiny living room and kitchen, said too that it wasn’t even late, that movies showed yet. They had simply fallen asleep like old lovers. What a nice idea.
He padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. A dull ache, the onset of a hangover. He thought he’d handle it with the wine.
He popped the cork and there was a knock at the door. The elevator operator. Maybe the manager. There was another soft knock like the person was using a single knuckle, like the knocker was getting discouraged.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Crimson hued and nude.
He held up the bottle. Whoever was at the door tried the knob. He glanced in that direction, did she want him to check it out. She gestured vaguely, as though people were always knocking, and shucked on a silk robe and yawned.
“You hungry?”
“I could eat.”
“Pour me some of that.”
She kissed him and he put on his underwear and T-shirt and they drank wine out of little juice glasses as she cooked, and she batted her eyes at him in mock affection and he stood behind her and kissed her neck as she worked. Hot fumes drove him to an open window with the view of the marquee.
“Jesus, what are you making?”
She smiled, strained noodles. Her robe fell open more than once and he caught sight of the lattice of white scars on her belly and over her heart that he’d felt in the dark. She caught him looking and came over and sat him on the chair and filled his mouth with her heated tongue and moved over him until he was splendidly awash in an opiate stupor and didn’t move at all when she went back to finish cooking. The marquee winked out and in a bit she turned on a lamp, scented the bulb with something from a dropper, and came back with two steaming bowls.
“Come on,” she said, patting the floor.
They ate facing one another cross-legged. He was starving.
“It smells like hell, but I could eat this the rest of my life.”
She grinned and told him it was lo mein.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“Not sure.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
She started to laugh, covered her face with her fingers, and peeked through them at him.
“I can’t remember your name,” she whispered.
“It’s Pete.”
She mouthed the words I’m sorry.
“It’s fine. I like that you forgot. Mary.”
She blushed. He held up a glass and she clinked it with her own.
“You’re adorable, Pete.”
“Thank you.”
She pushed some of his hair behind his ear.
“You’re welcome. Another helping?”
He nodded and she took his bowl and filled it again and his small glass of wine too. She watched him eat approvingly, lustily. Like the witch fattening him up. And he would have let her eat him, feed him to whatever animals she kept, whatever. When he finished, she asked did he need another.
“I’m full.”
“You sure?”
“God yes.”
“You’re going to need your strength,” she said, taking his bowl and setting it on the coffee table. She got astraddle him. Hiked up his shirt and began to run her nails along his torso. He gasped and it embarrassed him, but she didn’t care or notice. She bent down, her robe was open already, and he swooned like a drunken woodland god. He started to pull her up, she fell back.
“It’s cold on the floor.”
“You’ll be warm in a minute.”
He was due some vacation days and he took them. A week of noons he woke and went downstairs to watch matinees in the Wilma or up the street to the Oxford for a late lunch and a little poker with tight-assed old cowboys. He had her key but he still paid the elevator man to let him up. Groceries and a bottle of something waiting for her when she got back from work. He liked having the place to himself. Waiting for her. Cracking the paper seal, ice in the glass, glug splash, ah.
He woke to her sitting on the bed, watching him sleep.
“Hey you.”
“Hey yourself.”
He sat up, the springs in the bed groaning and then tocking to stillness. How the contraption had clattered, bounding like a stagecoach. Fucking her you felt like you were really getting something accomplished, like you were a team, you two were good at it, that it was a thing that could be won.
“I feel like this bed is just gonna disintegrate,” he said, patting the mattress.
She smiled. He noticed just then that her eyetooth was gray and too that her smile was no less lovely.
“What time is it?”
“Almost five.”
He took a breath so deep it made his throat sore.
“I guess it’s supper what I’m buying you.”
They ate in a bleary cafe with weeping windows. Shared a tapioca dessert, spoons clinking in the pudding.
“So you’ve been at this awhile,” she said.
“What this?”
“The pudding.”
“What?”
“The job, dummy. I looked up some older cases in the records and saw you in there, in Missoula County. After you visited the office that day.”
“What did you do that for?”
“I wanted to see about you before I fucked you.”
He grabbed the check when the waitress set it down.
“You’re up in
Tenmile now.”
“Yep.”
She sat back in the vinyl booth and regarded him. It had become something of a pastime, this just looking at him.
“What?”
“What made you run up there?”
“I didn’t run.”
“Those rural gigs are tough. Hours on the road. Not a lot of support. I’m sure you were on track for supervisor down here. So why go up there?”
He was in his wallet and set a twenty on the table. The waitress came and got it and made for the register. He asked would she bring him another cup of coffee, and she waved over her shoulder that she would. He folded his hands together and leaned forward.
“Can we talk shop just this once, and not anymore?” he asked.
“I don’t want to talk shop.”
“Then what are we talking?”
She waited until the waitress dropped off his coffee and change. He noticed there were no holes in the coins.
“There’s a party tonight, and I want you to come.”
“All right,” he said.
“It’s a work party.”
“Ah.”
“Over at Tricia’s.”
She waited to see if he would say anything else, and when he didn’t, crossed her arms. He reached across the table and got her wrist. A pair of hairline scars there too. He rubbed the groove they made. He did not wonder at all about why she’d done that. It was past.
“What is it?”
“I feel stupid.”
“About what?”
“I like you,” she said.
“I like you too.”
“I want to go to the party with you.”
“I’d like to be gone with to the party.”
She looked off.
“Mary, what the hell is it?”
“I’m new.”
“And?”
“And I’m gonna feel stupid when all the girls you’ve been with from the office are talking about me.”
He grinned and took her cold hand and rubbed it and told her that he’d never been with anyone from the office.
“I haven’t so much as kissed one of them under the mistletoe.”
He took a hand away to sip his coffee and held hers with his other one.
“I’m not a jealous person,” she said. “But people talking, I hate it. I need things to be separated. Work. Life. Separated.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t even care if you have somebody else in your life—”
He’d let go of her hand.
“Do you have somebody up in Tenmile?”
“I left my wife a while ago.”
He sipped his coffee. Before he could set it down, she took it from him and had a drink too.
“A wife.”
“She went to Texas.”
“Texas.”
“You’re repeating me.”
“Sorry.”
“Now you’re apologizing.”
“Fuck you.”
“Now you’re swearing.”
She set his cup back down in front of him.
“Do we need to talk about her?” he asked.
She scratched behind her ear. Smiled when she looked at him.
“No.”
He sipped his coffee and she took it from him again.
“Let’s go to this party.”
“It’s not for a while.”
He slid out of the booth and stood.
“Let’s go to this party slowly.”
They are drunk when they arrive, an almost empty fifth of Montana Redeye. She climbs a wrought black spiral staircase ahead of him, he keeps trying to put his mouth onto her lovely ass as she ascends before him. The lively throng upstairs. So much cigarette smoke the house may be afire. A guitar boils out a crude blues through overworked speakers. She leads him to a card table sagging under bottles, faceted half-empty goblets of red wine, and a fondue pot with a burping neon orange skin. Someone has placed olive eyes in the thing. Pete pumps a spittle of froth from a keg floating in a garbage can of ice water and gives up. Faces spin out of the mass to recognize him and shake his hand and say things to him he cannot hear.
Now Mary is gone.
He wheels into the kitchen to find her. People he knows from work, guys from the Attention Home slap his back.
“Pete, my man. What’s that you’re drinking?”
Pete hands the bottle over. Accidentally knocks a playcastle of cans off the counter.
“Christ, Pete. Nobody actually drinks this.”
Pete shrugs dreamishly, coughs creamishly, hawks into the sink.
“Got a cold there?”
“I’m runnin’ a temperature, all right.”
“How’s the wife?”
“Texas.”
“What?”
“We’re splits.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No one quits a good thing,” Pete said.
A loud record now, something new from the plinky tinny keyboard sound of it. Mary dances in the living room. Alone. Swaying about in that dress, a satiny red and white thing that fits her all over.
“That Mary is just . . .”
“Yes. Yes she is.”
Someone hands Pete a can with a screwdriver stabbed into it.
“Did you hear about her?”
“Hear what?”
“Shotgun that thing already.”
Pete removes the screwdriver and puts the can to his face. A cold bubbling snake liable to choke him. A long foaming burp. He sets the empty by. Burps again.
“Hear what?”
“She has a file. Jake come across it. She was in and out of foster homes and state hospitals her whole life. And it wasn’t no good run neither. Fuckin bonkers. One placement, they kept her in a goddamn closet most of the time. This was two years. Two years of getting beat and raped. All before she was twelve years old. And the shit at the state hospital? With the guards fucking the girls? She was up there too. It’s still like a goddamn brothel up there. I never send a kid there, I can help it.”
She dances, and Pete is not the only one watching.
“Looks great on the outside, but under the hood. Another story.”
She touches her stomach with a palm and closes her eyes and sets her hips in a pendular swing as though her pelvis depended from a point somewhere near her heart.
The system knows this girl.
Which is to say that you know this girl.
All her homes are group homes and all her sisters and brothers are fosters in placements, her fathers and mothers are social workers, and when she ages out of care, she ages into the job. Your job. Only she gets inappropriate and benched, or no one trusts her with any real cases and she sits in the break room rearranging packets of Sweet ’n Low.
She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn’t need permission, that there is no novel evil it won’t embrace.
And so you’re in a mood now, watching Mary dance and taking shotguns of beer and then riding in a car with her and people from the party and you’re both too drunk to notice the other is too drunk and you’re kissing in the flicker of a dying neon sign, hiccupping, kissing hard and sloppily, teeth clacking together, inexpert, tyro.
Innocent, be untroubled a while longer.
He hurt all over, the sunlight frying him through Mary’s window.
He thought he should just quit. The job or drinking or both.
Her note said she had drawn a Saturday shift and so he quaked alone in his hangover among her spider plants and wicker, staring for some time at the phone or the number Beth had scribbled on a scrap of envelope. He’d memorized it by the time he folded the scrap into his shirt pocket and went to Al’s and Vic’s. He took the beer the bartender pulled for him and watched him clean glasses and left when his head quit pounding.
He went to the Army Navy store for a new pair of bootlaces, to the bookstore, and for lunch. Didn’t speak to a soul. It was two o’clock when he finally returned to the Wilma.
He lay down on Mary’s couch, couldn’t fall asleep.
It was five when he woke.
He pulled the phone onto the coffee table and regarded it, muttering. Then he dialed and it rang twice and he was about to hang up when she answered.
“Hey, Applesauce, it’s Daddy.”
“Why don’t you have a phone at your house?”
There was music in the background and people talking and Beth too, he thought. Her laughter.
“It’s Dad,” she said to her mother.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Mom says to tell you to send some money.”
“Okay. I will. How are you?”
“Sucky. I hate it here.”
“You’ll meet some kids your age. It’ll get better.”
“I don’t like kids my age.”
“What does that mean?”
Beth was talking to her.
“Mom wants to know if you’re going to send at least two hundred dollars.”
“Tell her I’ll talk to her in a minute.”
His daughter covered the mouthpiece, and then it flooded with sound again.
“Pete?”
“Damnit, Beth. Put her back on.”
“I need that money right away. At least a couple hundred.”
“Yes. Put Rachel back on.”
“Your daughter needs things. Shoes. School clothes. Notebooks and shit.”
“Beth. Put Rachel back on.”
“You don’t have any right to talk to her if you aren’t gonna support her.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
A hand cupped the receiver and it sounded full of ocean, full of Texas. Thirty seconds he watched the clock. A minute. He wanted to pitch the phone at the window, but it was Mary’s window, Mary’s phone.
“Mom says I only have a minute because of the long distance.”
“I’m the one who called, Rach. It’s my bill.”
“Daddy?”
“What?”
“Can I come live with you?” she whispered. “I won’t need a lot of room and I’ll be good, I promise. I hate it here. It’s hot. It’s fall and it’s still hot. Hot hot. Like a thousand degrees.”
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