Then Delaney invited Susan Lori to move in with her, which Susan Lori did on a warm and windy afternoon, the smell of rain in the air, and that’s when her in-betweenness began to feel less like a floating stasis and more like a warm, dry place of refuge.
Refuge. She’d forgotten that part of it. But how could she have forgotten that? That was central, wasn’t it? How could she have forgotten that that fall, winter, and spring with Delaney, she had felt oddly protected?
We had no air conditioner and slept together naked in front of a fan. One morning she woke me with her tongue and it felt as natural as floating on water, though it’s not what I prefer.
I learned how to do it to her too. I did not not like it. Her taste and smell began to pull me to her, and because I had the same parts I knew so quickly what to do that it was like speaking a foreign language in your dreams.
Delaney gave me Rilke, and Rilke gave me this: “Beauty is the beginning of terror which we are only just able to bear.”
But being wanted by Delaney was like a drunk getting used to drinking iced tea.
An engine downshifted outside. Lois and her VW. Shit. Susan should have put on the rice by now. Her cheeks heated and she swallowed, and she felt caught doing something perverse. She was seeing Delaney’s vagina again. Just inches from her face.
It was neither beautiful nor ugly, but its smell and taste, Susan Lori had come to want them in a way that surprised her. There was satisfaction, too, in using her fingers and tongue to make Delaney come. It was not unlike the pride Susan Lori took in doing anything well: serving a four-top with warmth and efficiency; having written papers till dawn that sang right to their final sentences and periods. But when Delaney did it to her, the pleasure Susan Lori took felt tinged with the hollow gratitude you give to someone for a gift you never asked for or wanted in the first place. A sweater you know you’ll never wear, a scarf you know you’ll give away.
“Suzie?” Lois was calling from downstairs.
“I’m coming.” A snort came out of her, a truncated laugh of self-loathing. Was she really writing about this, for Christ’s sake?
But living in heterosexual abstinence had brought a lovely stillness and clarity then. And because Delaney did not drink, Susan did not, either, or not much anyway, and when she sat down at that coffee shop table and wrote across from her friend and sometime lover, what kept coming was the pull of that other Danny, the one in Gainesville.
“You identify too much with these girls.” Delaney handed her back her notebook. She had a cold, and the skin beneath her nose was chapped, her eyes slightly clouded. “God, it’s like you’re jealous he never killed you.”
She was wrong. There was no jealousy, but there was something else, the belief that if that other Danny was going to kill anyone it shouldn’t be the nice girls. It should be girls who needed to be punished.
It should have been girls like her.
Yes, it should have been me.
“Want me to start the rice?”
“Fine. I’ll be right down.”
Fuck.
It should have been me.
Susan deleted that last sentence.
. . . girls like her.
She could hear Lois down in the kitchen moving things. Probably pulling out a pot for the rice. Probably pissed off that her little Suzie was still the same unreliable bitch she’d always been. “Talk is cheap, young lady.” How many times had she said that to her? How many times had she used the word cheap?
What changed in those in-between months with Delaney in her rented clapboard house in the shade of live oaks a mile from a campus full of young women and men, was that Susan Lori stopped feeling cheap. There was still shame. There was still that factory town on that dirty river and its grassless wino park, its street of half-open shops and a cop in his cruiser across from the building that housed the man who kept his thumb on the one who helped to give her life but had taken her mother. There was still that trashy strip on the beach. But some of us will always come from the dark undersides of things, like turned-over mushrooms in the woods, like squirming maggots in a dead dog on the side of the road, like a young woman curled on yellow linoleum while Susan Lori stood there calling and calling her.
But for a few months, at least, Susan Lori did nothing that took from her more than it added. Then Delaney told her it was time for her to go, that she carried too much “baggage” and it was starting to feel like work just being around her.
“Suzie? Are you coming down? What do you want to do with this chicken?”
It might have been Brian Heney after that. It didn’t matter who it was, only that Susan Lori would soon go back to the push and pull of a man as he withdrew funds from an account he had never earned, and neither did she, this falling, reckless sense that she was spending some dark inheritance she could not get rid of fast enough.
25
IN HIS room at the Econo Lodge ten miles south of Richmond, Daniel lies on his bed with his shoes on. His eyes ache, and there’s a pulsing in his back that isn’t going away. When he’d checked in, he’d pulled down the shades, but outside there are voices, a woman calling a man’s name, Bob or Rob, and the man calling back, “You have that!”
The chances of Susan wanting to see him are low, and there was what that young woman said to him in the motel’s restaurant less than an hour ago. Daniel had eaten only two bites of his steak, but what he’d swallowed felt like warm stones in his gut, and he wanted to leave. A woman was sitting at the bar. She was wearing a black skirt and a white blouse, a thin leather briefcase at her feet. At her elbow was her glowing telephone and she was tapping it with her fingers. She looked to be forty, forty-five years old, his Susan’s age.
Daniel waved over his waiter and told him to bring his check over to the bar. Then he made his way between empty tables to this woman he did not want to scare off, though he knew what this looked like, what he looked like.
The woman bartender gave him the once-over. She was pouring white wine into a glass. She slid it on a coaster toward the businesswoman. “Menu?”
“Yes, please.” She glanced up and smiled at the bartender, and that’s when the young woman saw him standing there a stool away. She kept her smile nailed to her face, and she slid her finger along the screen of her phone.
“I don’t want to bother you, miss.”
She didn’t say anything, or look up from her phone. What was he doing anyway?
The bartender set a menu to the side of the businesswoman’s glass, and she was eyeing Daniel like he was her first bit of trouble in an otherwise easy shift. “Would you like something?”
“Just want to see the news.” On the TV now was footage from a baseball game, some pitcher’s wincing face as he watched a ball sail high over his head. The young businesswoman had a shiny diamond on her ring finger, a silver bracelet on her wrist. She tapped her phone and the screen went blank and she picked up her menu and sipped her wine.
“Your check, sir.” Daniel’s bill was on the bar. He pulled his cash from his front pants pocket and picked out one of the C-notes and dropped it onto his check. The young businesswoman pretended she hadn’t seen his wad, but she was sitting more erectly on her stool, and Daniel could feel things had just changed between them, that that four grand in his pocket had made him less dangerous or more so, but either way he had her attention and now was the time to move.
“I just want to ask you a question. Then I’m on my way.”
She looked up from the menu, then at him, taking him in for the first time. He was aware of his khaki work pants that might have a splash or two of varnish on them, of his yellow shirt with the frayed collar, his smudged work glasses hanging down against his chest, those white hairs of his sticking out above the top button.
“Look, I really have a lot of work to do.”
His face was on fire, and he may as well have been the boy he was before he became “The Sound,” every girl looking at him like he was some distant neighbor’s pit bull to be ig
nored or put down.
“Thank you, sir.” The waiter left his receipt and change, and Daniel’s eyes were on this girl who could have been his daughter’s sister. Her hair was dark, her eyes brown, but her nose was a bit more like his own and had robbed her of the beauty that might have been hers, though she didn’t carry herself like a homely girl but more like one of the smart ones used to leading a roomful of other smart ones.
“My daughter’s a professor.”
“Good for her.” Her voice was neither warm nor cold. She pressed the button on her phone, the screen lighting up. “I’m sorry, I have a meeting soon.”
“I haven’t seen her since she was a little kid. I’m driving down to Florida to visit her.”
Now the woman stared at him as if she was not sure how to take any of this.
Again, that heat in his face. A burn and an ache in his lower back, his legs tubes of smoke. He rested his hand on the bar to steady himself. “If that was your father, would you want to see him after those many years?”
“That’s up to her, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you’re her age and—”
“It would depend on why he’s been gone so long.” She reached down for her briefcase and pulled out a computer she opened on the bar. She turned it on and sipped her wine, the screen opening up into a pale glow on her face, that light on her cheek and throat. After Suzie was in bed, Linda liked to watch TV with the lights off, and he’d sit beside her on the sofa, his legs and arms heavy from another day of climbing and descending ladders, from hauling cans of paint and dipping his brush and brushing it along clapboards and the casings of doors and windows, the skin of his hands dry, his fingers slightly swollen, and he loved to look at the side of his wife’s face in that light when she laughed, when some pretty actor on some stupid show made her laugh. Even for that, Captain Suspicion would take notice, and Danny tried to ignore him because she was sitting there on their couch in their house with him, wasn’t she? That soft TV light flickering across her face?
“Is this one bothering you, ma’am?” The bartender set down the young woman’s silverware wrapped in a napkin.
“No, it’s just—I have a meeting now.”
“You heard her, sir.”
Those stones in his gut. His face in front of some invisible fire. That ache in his back and hips and that young lady’s words like kicks into his head. It would depend on why he’s been gone so long.
He gathered up his change, leaving the coins and a ten for the waiter. The young woman tapped keys on her computer, and her screen became a video of a man in a tie smiling at her, behind him other men in ties, and Daniel wanted to thank her but did not, and as he walked back toward the exit and the elevators and his room on the second floor, he saw himself starting up his truck first thing in the morning and heading back north, back to his trailer and shop and small fenced-in yard in the shade of the pines, though lying on his bed now, he knows he won’t.
He wishes he made a copy of his letter on the library’s xerox machine. He remembers most of what he wrote, but not enough, and why did he put in all of that shit about the Reactor and Captain Suspicion? She’s going to think he’s nuts.
On the desk is the printout for how to write your own will. He’ll just rest a bit, then he’ll go sit at that desk and get to work. But he needs to find a typewriter or a computer and a printing machine somewhere. His professor daughter would have one, and he pictures some university office like he’s seen in the movies, shelves filled with books, a big desk in front of high windows overlooking the trees and grass of the campus, her college degrees framed and hanging on the wall. Maybe next to them are photographs of her husband and kids. Maybe one of their crayon drawings, too.
Linda liked to draw. She’d buy Susan coloring books and they’d color together. But then Linda got tired of the coloring books and she bought blank paper, and she and Suzie Woo Woo would color whatever the hell they wanted. Linda’s weren’t very good, but they weren’t bad, either. There were a lot of daisies and shining suns, and once a little brown dog. Things like that.
Every picture Suzie drew, even if it was purple lines across the page, Linda kept. The best ones she thumbtacked to the window casings above the kitchen sink. Orange squiggles and red circles and one that looked like a heap of black branches.
A sick roiling through Daniel’s gut, a band of sweat along his scalp. That night, standing there, Linda on the floor at his feet, the sounds she made, then how quiet she was. In his head and veins, the Reactor was standing there breathing hard, mute and deaf and dumb, this piece of shit who could only come out swinging, and Captain Suspicion may as well have been smiling. It was not anything Danny could see, just feel, his dark satisfaction that all movements had finally led to this one: Linda smiling up at Squeeze’s brother Bill, her hips pointed at him; Linda smoking out front of the arcade like signage, one arm crossed under her breasts; Linda’s tongue in his mouth, the easy way she let him lead her under the Himalaya, her shorts off, his down around his ankles, the way she gave herself to him so easily. Too easily.
What she’d been screaming at him in that small kitchen of the Ocean Mist was that she’d had enough. She was leaving and she was taking Suzie with her and, “You can’t do shit about it!”
That one word can’t, it was the button that had always switched on the Reactor: you can’t be one of us; you can’t talk to that pretty one; you can’t walk with the basketball players and the smooth talkers and the boys who drive to school in Mustangs and Chargers; you can’t change that hooked nose you got or all those zits or your eyes that are so close together you look stupid. You can’t change anything.
All you can do is shut them up.
All you can do is stop them from laughing in your face.
All you can do is stop her from leaving and taking your daughter, too.
But that’s where he was full of shit. It was his wife leaving that did it. He knew if she left then she could go fuck whoever she wanted to. He loved his little girl, he did, though maybe he should’ve given some thought to her standing just six feet away.
A low burning behind his ribs. Daniel has to sit up. His mouth begins to fill with saliva, and he knows what’s coming and he stands and hurries to the open door of the bathroom, the wine and the chewed meat rising and retching out of him onto the sink, then he’s on his knees over the toilet, his pink piss there from before dinner, an upward heaving, then a sloshing and a half heave and a string of bile and air. He rests his forehead on his arms. There are the smells of what’s come from him, the nearly sweet rot of the dead and the living side by side.
Daniel’s work glasses are pressing against his chest. He stands and flushes the toilet and sees his glasses are bent and the sink is splattered with what needs to be cleaned. He feels better, though his legs may as well be walking through high mud. He needs to lie down again.
He rinses out his mouth and takes a dampened washcloth to the sink. He hangs it to dry on the shower curtain and walks back to his bed and sits on the edge of the mattress. He pulls his glasses from around his neck, squinting at them and bending them back straight. He folds them and sets them on the bedside table. He wants to lie down again, but that ache in his back remains, and he stands on legs he’s grateful he can still count on. At his desk he gathers up the printed-out pages on “How to Write Your Own Will.” He takes them back to his bed where he puts on his work glasses and lies back against the pillow. He wonders how many heads have lain on it. How many men? How many women? How many of them were alone, like him, and how many were in bed with someone else?
Daniel props the second pillow behind his head and reads the first sentence of what he’d printed out.
Create a list of personal information that you will need for your will. The listing should include your full legal name, birth date and address; your marital status and if married, your spouse’s full name; the names, birth dates and addresses of your children, even if you do not intend to leave anything to one or more of them
; the names, birth dates and addresses of every other person who you intend to name in your will; and the name, birth date and address of the person who will act on your behalf when you die to execute your will.
His daughter’s real address. Daniel pictures himself in a day or two on her university campus. If she doesn’t want to see him, if she won’t come near him, how will he find out where she lives? He’ll just have to put down her work address, that’s all. And who the hell will “act on his behalf” ? He thinks of his parole officer years ago, that nicotine gum he was always chewing—though he’d still sometimes go smoke out on the street—those circles under his eyes. But he was stand-up. He laid down the law without ever looking at Daniel like he was a nobody. Nor as a somebody, either, simply a necessary part in the big punishment machine that churned out the PO’s check every week. If he’s still alive, he might do this for Daniel.
There’s the lady at the Council on Aging too, Marnie or Marjorie. She’s a big girl just a bit younger than he is, and she smiles at him whenever he comes in to find out who he’ll be driving around that day. She has blue eyes and a pale double chin, and he bet she likes her wine at night. She might do it for him.
Create an inventory of your belongings. This includes all your possessions and property—for example, stocks, bonds, cash, real property and promissory notes—and their estimated values.
This one’s easy; everything’s going to his daughter: his truck and his lot, his shed and trailer. All of it. That and whatever cash he has in the bank, which after the four thousand he’d withdrawn is now eight thousand and change. He’d paid $97,000 for the lot and his trailer, all from Liam’s life insurance policy his mother had kept for years and years. His new shed and fence would increase the value, too. Susan should be able to get over a hundred thousand for it all. But then Daniel pictures her keeping it. Wouldn’t that be something? A place for her and her family to use for a vacation now and then? Why not? It’s two miles from the beach. But why would she want to go back there? Did he really think she’d want her kids there?
Gone So Long Page 23