by Rachel Cline
“Darling, you can’t tell that from the way someone looks on the surface. It’s a very serious diagnosis.”
“But he’s always insinuating and making double meanings, he’s always implying . . .”
“Implying is human nature. There’s nothing to be done about that.”
But why is she arguing with me?
Certainly, she knew her share of arrogant, domineering men. My grandfather was the king of them. What she couldn’t imagine was that someone with Rasmussen’s warp would be so unhidden, so obvious. But in 1971 there was no real need for him to hide: the sexual revolution had been a Time cover story, “Young Girl” was a top-40 hit, and the Canadian prime minister’s marriage to a woman twenty-eight years his junior was celebrated as a triumph of flower power. I doubt that Adeline even saw the circumstances I was describing as something I might need to be protected from—she wanted me to be “free.”
But I was born free, like Elsa the lioness. My troubles with men come from some other place—maybe just the place of bad luck. My last love affair, the one that threw me off the horse for good, was with a guy named John. It was unlike any other affair I’ve had as an adult because it lasted for almost three years and because I thought it would last forever. I thought I had found, in John, a mate who was my intellectual equal, who was honorable, and whose idiosyncrasies were unlikely to result in either of us getting badly hurt. And I’m not sure I was wrong about any of that. I haven’t spent a lot of time deconstructing it. Our relationship ended before Adeline died and, for a long time after that, picking up the pieces of anything felt like a waste of time. My mother used to say I was incapable of intimacy, but I was intimate with John. I don’t just mean that I had sex with him, or looked into his eyes (which he disliked), or even that I let him see me at my worst. I mean that I came to like the way his sweat smelled, that I didn’t mind touching his dirty socks, that his humanness became part of my humanness.
It’s now dark out and my feet are falling asleep from sitting cross-legged on the library floor. I carefully unfold each leg and wonder what to do with myself. It’s not even seven o’clock. I hate this part of my day. I used to have friends, dinner plans, theater tickets, but now I’m too broke for any of that and I was never much for keeping up friendships on the phone. I lie down on my back and look at the ceiling: the star mural is much-faded now, but still there. ALbemarle 5-4176, I think. Beth’s old number. She won’t be there, of course, but maybe I can still catch her at work. I pick up the Tis Bottle and carry it back up the hall with me to the telephone nook and pick up the olive-green receiver, which feels impossibly cold and heavy. I dial 411 to get the number of Rachman Weeks from information. Thankfully, a human being picks up the phone there and transfers me over to Beth, who’s still at her desk. When she answers I say, “I’ve been reading the Tis Bottle.”
“Omigod, Nora! You still have it?”
“I do. It’s quite a relic. I just read a poem you wrote, ‘My Son, the Doctor.’ It’s pretty funny, do you want to hear it?”
There is a protracted pause and I’m not sure what’s happening. I start to feel as though I’ve said something wrong. “Beth? Are you there?”
“Sorry, yeah. I . . . Where are you?”
“Home.”
“Which is?”
“I figured you saw the number come up on your phone . . .”
She takes this in. “Really?” She is incredulous.
“Yeah. I inherited it. And I can’t sell so I’m stuck.”
“Adeline’s gone?”
“About eighteen months ago.”
“Can’t sell because of the economy or some other reason? ’Cause if it’s a legal thing, maybe I can help. It must be worth, what, seven million?”
I can’t believe she just appraised my grandfather’s apartment. I flash back to my meeting with the lawyers. “Don’t even think about what it’s worth,” the lady had said, fingering her fancy gold pen. “It will just make you bitter.” And she looked like she knew what bitter meant. I don’t want to explain to Beth how my grandfather had this fantasy that his apartment was some kind of museum of himself so there’s another weird silence until I say, “I shouldn’t have called, should I? I mean, because of the case.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I’m just thinking, my husband’s out of town and it would be so great to see you and really catch up. It’s practically on my way home.”
“Uh, don’t come here. I mean, there’s like no furniture. Or food. But I could meet you somewhere.”
“Is Armando’s still there?”
“Barely, but yeah. I think they’re closing at the end of the month.”
“Then we have to go there! Seven thirty?”
“Sure, see you then.”
21
Bob
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date sent: Feb 19 2009 5:28PM MST
Subject: On the Road
So yesterday I picked up a hitchhiker. She told me a story I know you’ll get a kick out of. I won’t deny that when I saw her standing alone on the highway I thought she might be a runaway, but I wasn’t going to do anything, you know that. Anyway, once she’s in my car I see that she’s a grownup, nineteen or twenty, at least. Running away from a man is my guess. She has no real destination. “I’ll let you know when we get there,” she says. She shuts the door and puts her hands in her lap so I can see the pale streak on her left ring finger. Rasmussen, right as usual!
“Do you mind if I smoke?” the hitchhiker asks me.
“Yeah, I do, and so do your lungs,” I say, looking at her again, because she’s given me an excuse to. “I used to smoke,” I add, not wanting to be too much of a daddy. “It makes me crazy to smell it. Especially when I’m driving or . . . you know, other times.” She nods, noncommittal, and we roll on into Monument Valley. The afternoon light on the mesas makes their surfaces look like those microscope pictures of internal organs or some special kind of velvet—but really it’s like nothing else because what it does is make my brain shut the fuck up.
“If I’m not gonna smoke, we better talk,” she says.
“Okay, you first.”
“Shit,” she says under her breath, caught in her own trap. Then finally, “Where are you from?” So she’s smart, too.
“Nice maneuver,” I say, “but it’s not that easy. I said you start, so start. Why don’t you answer my first question. Where are you going?”
“Someplace far enough my ex can’t find me and country enough they won’t call any references.”
It’s a tough speech but it comes out shy. She’s forcing herself to keep going just because I said to. “So you’ve been through here a million times, I guess.” She nods. “It’s my first time through in twenty years,” I tell her.
Ten miles later, we come up to my favorite stretch. “I was planning to stop up here by the white mesa, hike in, and take some pictures. I can understand if that’s not what you had in mind.”
“I’m not going to have sex with you,” she says.
“That’s okay, I’m married,” I tell her. It turns out to be the right thing to have said, because she agrees to come with me. Well, the wrong right thing in your eyes, I bet. But you know she wasn’t my type.
Her name turns out to be Rose. She tells me she was named for a character in a book she hasn’t read. When I pull over, we’re at a place where a small, climbable-looking mesa is near enough the road to approach on foot, and the light is turning yellow on its western face. “There.” I point. “Are you game?”
“There may be snakes,” she says.
“Bring your gun,” I say, and she smiles. Her teeth are terrible, not just crooked but stained, badly repaired with a metal-framed veneer over one incisor. It makes her look a little like a machine. She’s been hiding them up till now but the smile about her gun is genuine and large. She’s definitely carrying.
She goes ahead of me and at one point loses her balance but just brushes the dust
off her ass like some kind of dance she learned as a girl. And that makes me remember that time in 1971 when Daisy fell and almost went over the cliff at Ban-delier. She wouldn’t stop crying. Her face was torqued like an infant’s and she was covered in that same powdery dirt. Naomi raided my cache of cold beer for a compress and kissed Daisy on the part in her hair like she used to kiss Doria. Then she calmed down.
Once we’re out of sight of the road, I ask Rose to strip—I know what I’m doing, it’s not a slip-up—and she pulls her button-down shirt over her head like it’s a turtleneck. I see her whole body before she can see me seeing it. She has hard little tits and a bony ass, which I knew before she took off her clothes. But the whiteness of her skin where her clothes end surprises me. Somehow, instinctively, she knows how to pose without instructions, snuggling her whole body into a ridge where she says the sun’s heat is still in the rock. Her skin is pebbled with goosebumps and the contrast between the softness of the stone and the stippled skin is perfect. I’ll show you the shots when I get back.
On our hike back to the car, she’s monosyllabic. Doesn’t even ask if she can smoke again, though I can tell she’s dying to—fidgeting and sighing. When we get to the road, I tell her, “Have a cigarette, you’re killing me.” And she lights up, and turns her back to me, leaning on the side of the car like it’s a horse or something. Then I sit in the driver’s seat and watch her in the side mirror, the tiny orange light traveling back and forth from her hip to her mouth.
It’s dark when we get to Colorado. I’m heading for Cortez— like getting there this time is going to overwrite the time I never made it. I’m getting all kinds of 1971 flashbacks: waiting for my father to bail me out in that pissy jail cell, wondering what would happen to me if he didn’t, deciding I deserved it all, imagining how I would beg for forgiveness if he ever did show up. But he wouldn’t even look me in the eye, and I was so low and so rank by then, I was past believing I could ever get right again—with him or anyone else. I was an asshole before that, but I wasn’t the guy he thought I was then. Not yet. Anyway, you’re not going to believe this story.
Rose says they knocked down the Big Indian motel ten years ago because—well, it was going broke, but she says one reason it was going broke was because of this local legend about the child molesters in the hippie van. In the version she tells, I’m six foot six, red-bearded to the waist, and have a harem of twelve girls in one tent, each of them stolen from a different town in the Navajo Nation. It’s fucking biblical. I asked her where the motel fit in and she said the last anyone saw of any of the girls, an old white man with a bow tie was making them all get into a hippie van in the parking lot. She said all the girls in the Four Corners knew to look out for the orange van: I’m the boogeyman of the Navajo nation, and my old dead Pop’s the Grim Reaper!
We never talk about that time, Peanut. I’d be interested in your version, what you remember. It’s been a long time since you told me a story. Send me an email—I’ve decided to go see Archer at the state hospital. Yeah, you read that right. His sister got to me.
This morning, Rose was gone. I knocked on her door to tell her it was wheels up but the maid was in there already. I could tell she was ashamed of what she’d shown me on the mesa, her need to be seen. Funny because it’s all I want half the time: just to look. And so often what girls want, too: to be seen. But when that transaction actually takes place, instead of everyone walking away satisfied, there’s shame and name-calling.
The girl who first explained that to me, about girls, was your friend Nora. She had gray eyes that made the skin around them look purple in contrast and she could narrow them into one of the meanest looks I’ve ever seen on a girl that age. We were making prints in the darkroom. Her pictures weren’t very interesting but at the time I was interested in her, in unlocking her. I put my hands under her T-shirt while she was adjusting the enlarger and she said, “What makes you think it’s a good idea to do that right now?” She sounded forty-five years old, that kid. “Because you’re beautiful,” I said, which was usually all I needed to say. “You’re a moron,” she told me. “When you tell a girl she’s beautiful, she knows you’re trying to get something from her. If you just look at her like she’s beautiful, she might actually believe you.” Naomi was so afraid of her for a while—when she punked out of the trip at the last minute it seemed like she was going to blow the whistle. And then we got caught anyway. Still, she really could have fucked things up if she wanted.
22
Naomi
That night on the reservation campground was the longest night of my life. I stayed with the girls, put them back to bed, and sat up in the camper van trying to figure out what I’d do in the morning. For a while I played the radio down low. There was a country station like the one in Wheeling I used to listen to and I tried to soothe myself with “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden.” I waited until four— six back home—before I got everyone back in the camper van and set out for the pay phone in Kayenta to call Percy, who’d only ever hated me and vice versa. I could barely drive but the road was dead straight and the tar macadam fresh enough and I just pretended. The girls were too upset with everything else to realize they had a flat-out fool behind the wheel. When I got back in the camper van after the call, they were all sleeping like tops.
Pat picked up the phone in Connecticut. When she heard my voice at that hour she was afraid, of course, that her son was dead. I didn’t call often. I told her he was fine, just in some trouble. Percy didn’t need me to fill in the details—there’d been a girl before me, when Bob was seventeen and she was thirteen: Lee Ann. Percy had to sort that one out and he knew, like I did, that there was always another shoe to drop. Still, I don’t think he expected the whole harem. He said he’d meet us in Cortez by nightfall and he did. And he gave me his American Express card.
My job was to keep the kids in line at the motel, and to figure out food and what to tell their parents. I sat in a chair by the pool and carefully printed out the words I would say on the phone, big and clear like I did for the class mimeos. I printed them as though I could present those parents with a lovely scroll: We hereby declare your daughters safe and clean and fed right. They got a bit shook up but weren’t ever, ever in danger. Of course Percy wound up calling the families, finally, but sitting there scribing kept me from putting my kids in a taxi and finding us a new life in Colorado—like that girl he picked up the other day. I never wore a marriage band so I wouldn’t even have had that giveaway streak of missing tan. We would have made it.
My great fear at that time was Nora. She’d paid her deposit to come along with us that summer and her mother had signed the permission form. That was in maybe February or March. Then in May, she changed her mind. I was sure he’d gotten to her. And because she wasn’t like the others, and I’d warned him as much, she’d not fallen in love but instead gone to brood. It seemed to me it was only a matter of time before she cried rape. I sat by the pool and worried about Nora, back in Brooklyn, the unexploded land mine. Even though he’d already got caught white-assed and red-handed, pantsless among the lilies of the field, I thought Percy and his checkbook could silence anyone. I bet there’s a school or a community center out on that rez today that has the name Rasmussen on it.
It was two days we stayed at that motel. Other tourists came and went, but without my shaggy husband, there was nothing that noticeable about me and the kids and the girls. The girls had a fantastic time just laying out by the pool, reading the magazines other people left behind, watching TV in the room, buying cokes and candy for a nickel more than they were worth from the machine because I wouldn’t let them off the motel lot. And for some reason, they obeyed: no sass, no rebellion. One of them—could it have been Beth?—brushed and braided my hair for me that first night. I had to pretend it tickled to hide how it made me weep to be tended to that way.
23
Nora
Armando’s is an old-school, red-sau
ce Italian restaurant that Beth and I used to meet at when we were in high school—nobody got carded anywhere in those days, is my memory. I had my first cocktail there, a sidecar or some other curiosity I’d picked up from old movies on Channel 9. A zombie?
It’s dark inside as I first enter. There’s a bar up front, on my right, and the restaurant tables are farther back. Since there are exactly two people at the bar, both closer to the dining end of things, I position myself at the corner nearest the front door. Beth will have to turn her head to see me when she walks in, so I will see her first. I know she will be late. I order a Manhattan because it is something I will consume by the eyedropperful.
I am afraid of becoming a habitué of Armando’s, that it’s somehow my destiny to be transformed from the mostly un-regenerate 1970s hippie kid I was until a few years ago to the boozy old broad who keeps carfare in her brassiere and leaves orangey lipstick imprints on an ashtray full of Newports. And who is that very specific person? Never my mother. More likely a character from a movie. But I fear she is inside me, that one cocktail will awaken her like those folded paper flowers that gradually bloom when you drop water on them. Beth taps me on the shoulder and I jump.
“Nora?”
I don’t recognize her, but who else can it be?
“Beth?”
“Jill Goldberg. You don’t remember me—I was a few grades behind you at the Academy. You look exactly the same!”
She’s right, I don’t remember her. I’m even a little suspicious of her claim. “What a funny coincidence,” I say, without conviction.
“I just stopped in to kill a half hour before the show. May I?” she says, and takes the seat next to me.
“The show?”
“At Saint Ann’s.”
“Isn’t that in DUMBO now?”