Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

by Kate Wisel

  “What are you doing?” he said. I set the cleaner down.

  “What are you wearing?” I came back with. I contemplated his soft-spoken British accent, his inflection so authentic I thought I could hear it in a voice-over. He just sat there looking like someone from the past, like Steven Tyler, the pouty-lipped version from my mom’s broken, old records. I started wiping beer puddles with a stiff rag across the laminate, afraid I might actually get in trouble this time.

  “Tell me, who’s in charge here?” the guy said.

  I glanced at my boss, the manager of Bukowski Tavern, this nice kid named Larry who sat on a barstool by the door. Not to check IDs but strictly just to stare out the window like a lapdog. His hair was going prematurely wispy. He kept one leg on the floor with the visible outline of his penis through his gray sweatpants. I grimaced.

  “That would be me,” I said, making my way behind the bar.

  “Young lady,” he said secretively, bending forward like we were on the surveillance. “Care to route an old-fashioned my way?”

  He tipped back on the stool so his ladies’ blouse slid up, and for a second I wished he would tip all the way back, get embarrassed, then scatter out of my bar.

  “Who are those for?” he asked. He pointed to the tiny pairs of stockings hanging from the top liquor shelf, the Christmas decorations Larry hadn’t bothered taking down. The stockings were ice skates, bowed and pink. He wanted me embarrassed.

  “They’re for Nancy Kerrigan,” I said.

  He had no idea what I was talking about, so I just ignored him, wet the sugar, then crushed and stirred the way Larry taught me on my first day, when I handed him a W-2 and my fake ID. I turned back briskly for a touch of drama, held up a crinkled plastic bottle of soda water. I let it fizz to the top till I felt him looking at me, deep, like it didn’t occur to him that a stare like that could hurt me. A stare that recognized how bad I was at pretending. I screwed the cap back on and kept my eyes low.

  “Emma Chizit,” he said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Ow, much, is it?” he said.

  When I smiled, he said, “Are you having a laugh?” and I nodded, noticing the rice pilaf coloration of his front teeth.

  I said, “Ten bucks,” rounding up because I could. When he looked at me sideways, fishing through his pockets, I said, “Cheers,” and reminded myself of the tube-topped waitresses I saw in movies when I was a kid at sleepovers. Girls who leaned in and winked at their regulars like plastered ads on billboards. Those nights I’d miss my mom so much that I’d lay awake on a trundle bed convinced she was getting hit by a car, or the one hitting—right that second—though it was two in the morning and I knew she was home, asleep on the couch with the light from the TV pouring over the bottles of Carlo Rossi on the coffee table. The QVC ladies sweeping mops across the floor, their mouths moving on mute, though I wished she would hear: This broom will change your life, I guarantee it.

  “I just returned from this festival called Pitchfork,” the guy said. “Have you heard?”

  “No,” I said. I leaned my palms against the bar and stretched my calves. The balls of my heels going up and down as I thought of how many calories I could be burning. He tapped his dirt-etched fingers on the bar, then ran them through his hair. It was long and coarse with streaks of gray running through.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Villy,” he said, twirling a toothpick between his fingers.

  “Billy?” I said.

  “No. But I like the way you think,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  He wiped his lip with a silky sleeve, then turned out his palm. I looked at Larry with his eyes closed and his arms crossed and his mouth open to the point of almost fogging the window, and after a few seconds I heard this other girl inside me say, “Sure.”

  After we ducked into a cab and Villy called out, “To the races!” and the Pakistani cab driver shook his head, spat out the window, then shot into traffic, Larry called me eight times and left three voice mails, one asking if I was in the restroom, the second to update me on the fact that he had checked the restroom and that there was shit in the toilet, which was also technically my job to clean, and the third to tell me to come the fuck back to work or he’d fire me and he really didn’t want to do that. I told you he was nice. We left the cab after Villy tossed some fives towards the dashboard.

  “This way,” he said, and we cruised through the automatic doors at the Prudential. We took the elevator up all the way to the fifty-second floor, and when we got to Top of the Hub, he kissed me. A man in a black bowtie played a cello in the corner, his arm dipping to scrape the strings, his torso convulsing theatrically. Villy and I were in each other’s eyes, every look a dare, and the waiters who darted around us felt far as planets. But then the hostess glanced at my lower half. I was in torn jeans and a black apron. I thought to crawl to the table. Beyond the blue reflective glass, the buildings sat below us like a village of batteries. Villy took his time with the wine list as sweat fell between my boobs in the lines a necklace makes.

  Outside, smiling as I accidentally burped, the taste of grape juice in the air, Villy lifted me up so our noses touched in one long goodbye. His hair smelled like smoke, when you tear off the filter. Instead of pulling a penny from my ear, he slid a pair of sunglasses from his sleeve, then perched them on my ears.

  “Ray Charles,” he said. “I wish you luck getting home.”

  Boston is small, meaning you can go far without actually going far, so I walked the fuck back to work after I blindly wrote my number on Villy’s forearm with a green permanent marker he’d extracted from his coat pocket along with a packet of ketchup, which he also let me keep.

  Villy and I started going on dates—strictly at hotels with names like Alibi or the Envoy. It was like something I didn’t order but came in the mail anyway, Villy: a man, one who sniffed wine before sipping, who thought the New England Patriots were colonists, not the spandex-wearing beef-balls on the flat-screen at my bar. Plus, his name stuck to the tip of my tongue so I could say it in my mind over and over until it crashed into itself: Villy Villy Vilililily.

  He wore fitted wallpaper suits and brown and green braided bracelets that I assumed some topless woman tied to his wrists at Pitchfork. I wore Serena’s black dress, the one she kept on the floor of her closet after her father’s wedding, and each time a different sweater in the hopes Villy wouldn’t notice. If he did, he didn’t let on, because one night, when I climbed into the cab outside my mom’s house, he said, “You look positively smashing.”

  “And where are you going?” my mom asked before I dipped. She tapped her cigarette into a mug, the kiss of her orange lipstick stained on the brim.

  “Does it matter?” I said.

  I saw the cancer in her lungs like a seismic monitor, the red orbs blinking across the length of her chest, then up her throat, curling out her lips like contagious neon smoke.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” I added.

  “Does it matter?” she said, her throat so dry she began to cough like a barking seal. I took advantage and slipped out the front door.

  On our third date, Villy cued the waitress and she bent down to his lips as he cocked his head back to her ear, the sharp line of his jaw moving up and down just slightly. It was the first time I can remember feeling jealous, like this creamy-skinned waitress was jotting her pen directly onto my heart, carving something intricate and critical there that I would never be able to see. Villy was pointing to the dimly lit calligraphy, one leg crossed over the other, his arms hanging loose on either side of the upholstered chair as her blond hair hung like a fancy curtain around his head.

  “Fantastic!” he said as she tucked the menu back under her arm. He’d ordered vinegar fries with aioli that swirled at the top and I was impressed, though later I learned the sauce is just mayonnaise that went to college.

  The drinks between us were twirling pink and bubbling as he stared at me for melodramatic paus
es like a psychologist. I wanted to mimic his pose, challenge his own notion of himself back, but under his gaze I felt like a broken toll—anything could pass through me. Satisfied with my blankness, he’d lurch forward to take my hands.

  “You’re blushing,” he said.

  “It’s rosacea.”

  “I used to be the creative director at an ad agency when I lived in London,” he said. “Before that, an intellectual property lawyer.”

  I squinted as I chewed my straw. I couldn’t picture either, but I liked all those words strung together, property and intellectual, director and agency. Also lived. When I lived somewhere. I hadn’t lived anywhere but with my mom in our same split-level off the highway with the aboveground pool in the back, the whir of cars from Route 9 making coastal sounds through the rotting fence.

  “My father was a plastic surgeon,” he said. I think my face dropped, because he said, “Not like that. He’s retired now. He performed rare and complex surgeries for children with cleft palates. Do you know what those are?”

  “Children?” I said.

  He loosened his jaw. “Fissures around the lips.” He pointed.

  “I’ve seen that,” I said. “On commercials.”

  “So I lived in Nicaragua. My mum, she was a photographer for Italian Vogue but shot miniatures in her spare time.” He lifted my hands from the table, and they dangled, pale and reflexive.

  “She’s going to love you,” he said. “You have such Lilliputian wrists!”

  Then he grew serious; he looked at me acutely as he held his drink to the side.

  “They could be on display,” he said, “at a museum.”

  I don’t know why, it was the weirdest thing, but I started to cry.

  Outside, we stood pressed together under a blue awning. Villy had his coat collar turned up, and it outlined his neck like a cape. His sideburns were dark and artificial looking. He marched ahead to wave down a cab, clasping his thumb and forefinger around my wrist like a bracelet. My heels scraped against the black ice, the wind slicing past my cheeks like welcome razor blades.

  The first time I went back to Villy’s apartment I stayed for four months straight. I only took the bus home once for a backpack to fill with clothes and makeup. It was just getting to be spring and the grass in my front lawn bent in frost-laced patches. My mom’s sister’s red Corolla was parked on the curb. I walked through the back, the porch I’d painted the past summer already chipping where the wood curved, two of the rails broken and damp from spring rain.

  My aunt had sprayed Febreze to mask the sweet smell of vomit from the bathroom hallway. Her wooden clogs clunked across the floor of my mom’s bedroom and echoed like trees falling in dreams. Outside the door, I listened as the sheets shifted. My mom’s steady wheezing was that of an extraterrestrial.

  My aunt hung on to the doorway of my bedroom as I hurled bras into a duffel bag. She had the laundry basket balanced on her hip and her glasses strung by beads down her neck. I despised how well she played nurse when my mom had been one for the better part of her life. Now her cough was breaking through the hallway.

  When my aunt asked me if I was in school, I lied.

  When she asked where I was going, I lied.

  When she asked if I would call my mom when I got there, I told her the truth. I said, “No.”

  Villy said, “After you, little wing,” and we stepped into his building for the first time in Dorchester, across the street from a Mobil station. The stairway was dark and smelled like Indian food and ash. I thought I could hear a baby crying from down the hall. Villy tossed his keys on the counter and flicked on a twitching kitchen light. I think he was nervous as I walked the length of his studio apartment, because he offered to make oysters Rockefeller. He also had bacon. I said that would be fine. He clicked on the stove.

  I recognized the Kirkland-labeled dish soap and the flimsy look of discount furniture, the gleam of the screws on the outside of the bookshelf. Villy had tacked silky emerald-green sheets above the windows to resemble the inside of a nightclub. Bacon crackled in the stove like Pop Rocks, and Villy forked out strips, then set a plate down on the piano bench he kept in front of a red leather reclining chair. He uncorked a bottle of red wine and we clinked glasses.

  “Salut,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Ha!” he said, tucking the hair behind my ears. “It’s like I found you on Star Search.”

  We shared the sunken recliner, flipping through the channels on his tiny TV. I nibbled at the burnt bacon and he let me pick a rerun of Sex and the City, one of those early episodes where Carrie’s hair is genius-crazy and she’s always saying, “I got to thinking . . .”

  It was the first time I felt like his girlfriend because he had his arm around my shoulders and kissed me right on my neck freckle every minute or two.

  “You know,” I said, looking at him, “I always thought I was a Charlotte, until that one episode where Miranda eats cake from the trash.”

  He let me finish the bottle of syrupy wine. I slurred something about loving him, then went to the bathroom to yak. Villy held my hair back. The toilet bowl looked like some reckless girl had her period.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice echoing in the bowl.

  “Oh, Ray, you’ve only spilled your drink.”

  By the end of that first week we had a routine. Every morning we would lie around listening to records and I would try not to think of my mom, what the doctor said about the dark blood that stained at the corners of her mouth as if she’d done her lipstick while turning off an exit on the highway. It was the hardest then because it was the only time it was bright in Villy’s apartment and I could see things exactly as they were: toothpaste uncapped in the bathroom, the kitchen sink brimming with streaked glasses, the spill of sun on the twisted sheet, the scare of Villy’s dyed hair peeking through.

  It was the first few minutes of morning, when you look around and there’s light everywhere, so much light you can see particles floating towards you as you blink, and you piece yourself together object by object: the toothpaste in that bathroom is mine, I drank from those glasses in the sink, the breathing man under the warm sheets is now speaking to me.

  Villy liked to give me what he thought was a proper education, which mostly had to do with good wine and vinyl records. Band of Gypsys was second-best to Are You Experienced. Bridges to Babylon made the Rolling Stones sellouts. He banned the TV and liked to pace around as if he was standing in front of a chalkboard. I’d have on one of his button-ups as a dress, a hole stabbed in one of his old belts to make a tight notch, my knees clutched together on the side of the recliner. I’d go to work at night at Bukowski Tavern, then come back on the last bus to Villy’s with a to-go bag of soggy french fries to split.

  Each week that passed, I noticed something new and ridiculous about Villy that I hadn’t before. His fashionably advanced garments started to look like discounted neon windbreakers on an Urban Outfitters rack.

  One day, after he wiped down my back with a dress sock, he said, “I’d like to institute a new method to our lovemaking—condoms.” He said this as I crouched in front of his antique floor-length mirror, looking at him looking somewhere far off, shirtless and gleaming like he’d just made a new rule as king.

  Villy said he’d been laid off because of the economy, but instead of applying for jobs, he sat on the recliner with a pipe between his lips.

  He said, “Ray, we need to mobilize resources.”

  This meant selling the recliner outside his building to a pregnant chick for twenty bucks. I helped her lift it onto the bus. When her T-shirt rose, the purple swell to her belly button looked like a black eye.

  I lost my Boston accent but regained it when we fought. Sometimes six fights a day. I have to admit, the fighting was exciting. It made me feel proactive, like I was using some kind of gym membership, rhetorical kickboxing.

  One day I made PB&J, and Villy said, “Ray, that’s not the correct knife to spread the jam.
”

  I pointed the knife at his chest. “Then what kind of knife is it?” I said through my teeth.

  Villy looked down at me, his hair in all directions. “The jagoff bar you work at. What’s it called again? Is it called Smart Little Bitch’s?”

  I’d bring him tea in bed and he’d look at me like I poisoned it. “Did you make this with the Boston water you grew up on? You’re derailing my morning process.”

  “Strange,” I said. “Last time I checked it was four o’clock.”

  “You need to be one hundred percent nicer,” Villy said, whipping off the sheets.

  “Do you want to go to lunch? Or dinner at this point. I’ll pay,” I offered.

  “Every now and then,” Villy said, cupping my face, “you say something worthy. Then we give you a lot of praise and we move on.”

  Instead of going to dinner, he opted to gift me with a joint-rolling lesson.

  “Not a psychobabble amount, Ray. Roll it like a pinner.”

  “A what?

  “A real toothpick of a joint.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “I think I might not have graduated from the same finishing school.”

  I started to wonder—how could Villy be so poor and pretentious at the same time? Where was he getting money from, when he wasn’t getting money from me? We had sixty-six bucks from my last paycheck at Bukowski Tavern. Larry had fired me a week earlier because Villy would walk in during my shifts just to sit at the end of the bar and stare at me.

  “All right,” Larry said finally, after Villy had flicked a maraschino cherry at my head and missed. “You’re done.”

  Before I left for good, I had to wait at the end of the bar for twenty minutes till my french fries resurfaced in the fryolator.

  “I already fucking ordered them!” I screamed from the other side of the window as Villy held his palms up outside, then paced the sidewalk with a cigarette perched on both ears. That was during the second month, month two, and I couldn’t even look at Larry. Larry didn’t look at me, either. He never had anyway.

  But Villy found something out when he looked over my shoulder as I was depositing that last paycheck at the ATM. I had two thousand bucks sitting smack in my savings from a school loan before my mom got sick and I dropped out of community college. I’d skipped a grade and was young for a freshman, seventeen.