Fay told herself that the moment Elise made eye contact, or turned even an inch in Fay’s direction, or indicated with a raised hand that she required help, she would go to her, every part the professional. Five minutes passed, ten, and she couldn’t pretend any longer she had not noticed the exception Elise was in that room, her shell-pink manicure on the warped wood. Inhales and exhales transpired in hyperclarity. Her body was just a map of pulse points now, all of them angry. Finally Fay went to her, her face arranged in amenable servitude, and waited.
“Seltzer,” she said, her eyes still not meeting Fay’s.
Fay made a quick scan, searching for the cleanest glass on the rack, and she filled it and set it on a cardboard coaster. In a sidelong glance she saw the floral brocade of the dress as through the carbonation, and then she was imagining Elise underwater, taking great breaststrokes, surfacing to breathe and laugh and call to her nearby husband. The fantasy came to her unbidden, already fully formed.
“Ice,” Elise said. She hadn’t appraised Fay as she ordered, only as Fay filled the glass and then scooped the ice, and this was not lost on Fay, who knew how she was being seen—in her lowly position, the dirty demands of it. The fans mounted on the ceiling went at full force; the vinyl curtain to her bedroom trembled. It was a reminder of the privacy she no longer deserved, had destroyed by taking what she shouldn’t. Elise planned, it was already clear, to stay awhile.
Over the next hour and fifteen minutes she ordered a basket of french fries, a Coca-Cola, extra napkins, a Seagram’s and 7 Up, the rib-eye steak, the Cobb salad, a martini up. The things remained exactly where Fay had set them down, the grease on the paper fixing, the glasses dripping condensation. Elise would not so much as stir a drink with a straw.
Sitting up incrementally straighter, the men at the bar became a divided audience. Some grabbed Fay’s hand and patted it, offered their handkerchiefs and made benign gestures toward the cover of sweat on her face. They cooed softly as she struggled to keep up with the string of orders, called there now, you got it, as she oiled the griddle for the fourth time in twenty minutes. Others hooted, two ordered popcorn. They tipped their stools back so deep they had to hold on to the bar, and they bit down on their cheeks as they watched Elise, then Fay, then Elise. One, a man she had watched Rusty kiss on both cheeks, asked Fay to send Elise a drink on his tab. He chose a Mudslide, the most complicated cocktail on offer, and he breathed with his mouth open as he watched her dole out all the liquors, pour out the Kahlua and take down the blender.
It was not a secret, the time she spent with Vincent. They knew it in the way one knows of someone’s addiction, an embarrassment it is best not to mention. But because Fay was the person who handed them what they needed at the end of the day, the gossip had not come to taunt her beyond a look that lasted too long. This was, she knew, the end of that era, the end of evenings in which she tended the bar and felt alone in her thinking. It was the end of any invisibility, the beginning of the feeling that would consume her until she left the desert. She would come to believe that every private thought was written explicitly on her face, that every time she smiled or didn’t it was proof to them of the foolish mistake she continued to make.
In the bar that night Fay imagined her sister walking through the door, disarming the spectators of her sister’s poor judgment, slipping the guitar from around her back and opening the room with a long, bright C. But Charlie wasn’t scheduled to come in for another two hours, was hauling back a delivery of booze and meat in her unreliable truck. Fay was alone with the row of faces.
Elise never asked for the check. When she finally stood to leave, she placed a bill on the table that amounted to three times what she owed, and left without change. Fay couldn’t bring herself to collect it, and it stayed there until closing, when someone—Fay never knew who—put it out of its misery and into his pocket.
THAT WEEK SHE WAS MOST conversations at the bar, Elise, a distraction from the standard talk of explosions twenty thousand feet up and those who might jump the Air Force ship for NASA’s second round. She showed up most nights, stately in silk, gold brooches in the shape of coral. Dark with focus, she sat once and played Debussy, as private and purposeful as some nun seen walking alone, removed from her institution only in geography. Fay prepared the gin and tonics, the waffle fries, and continued to refuse the money, which sat as limp and oily as the things uneaten. At the close of the third day, Tom taped a mason jar with a label that read GOOD LUCK FUND, and at the end of every night he placed Elise’s money in it. It was the only thing left on the bar when Fay turned out the lights.
Charlie confronted Fay during an afternoon windstorm, the mean streak of weather a part of her voice. She came through the door pointing, the hour before the bar opened, at the back booth where they would talk. Around them were the smells of orange wood cleaner and pine mopping solution.
“Are you going to tell me who that belle of the ball is coming in most nights, or do I have to ask her?”
Fay was quiet, pressing her spine against the torn red vinyl. Between the pristine salt and pepper shakers, the menus stood at a slight lean, and she straightened them.
“Honey, do I have to ask her? Are you going to make me ask her who she is?”
“There are things on here we’ve been out of for months. Did we ever have a tomato pie?”
“I’m guessing not a starlet on her way to a premiere at Grauman’s.”
“Why does it say all whites are also available by the bottle? No one has ever even ordered a glass. Doesn’t really go with the taste of our nineteenth-century peanuts. Who was president when that jar was new, or did we even have one?”
“Not a friend of yours trying to lure you back to society life.”
“That is Vincent’s wife.”
“Vincent the Midwesterner of few words?”
“Astonishingly few.”
“And how much money you estimate is in that jar and not in the fucking till?”
Fay rolled one of her shoulders forward, tilted a palm up.
Unlike the transparency of her red joy, the maudlin play of her little tragedies, Charlie’s rage did not show easily. There were few tells, but Fay could see them now, a new one every few seconds. Charlie was erect, her surroundings no longer resembling a personal arrangement of pillows, without a cigarette, not reaching for one, the soft pack she always carried not on the table or in her hand.
“Okay, Fay. We have a couple options. The first being that I leave you here to burn the place down, and I take that money and go to college, become somebody’s aging typist.”
Fay looked up with a grin, but the look on her sister’s face dismantled it. Charlie’s words were as few, then, as they were in all else excessive. She would take over nights until Elise had gone. Fay would make herself scarce. Did she understand. Fay nodded, the bob of her head deep with the relief of a decision made for her. She slid a hand across the table to Charlie, who squeezed it once.
They switched rooms for three days, Fay in Charlie’s. She touched the cracked aviator’s helmet that hung over the bed, she sang through her baths, she smoked. There was no way to know how his wife reacted to her absence, and Charlie, when she delivered to Fay what Elise would not eat, refused to speak of it.
11.
The next Tuesday his truck pulled up, she was back in her own bed and wouldn’t get out. Around her were candles she had burned way down, books she’d barely started. He was calling from the car, a laugh in his throat, “Git in this gole-dang car, rose-buddy!” She knew how he would look, the stubble on his jaw a blink short of a genuine lilac, how he would smell, metal and dairy. He was whistling now, the theme from Oklahoma!, something he knew she found obnoxious. She had assumed that the first she had seen of his wife would be the last she had seen of him, and had accepted that sentence. What could another hour with him do, besides describe to her the reckless person she was? Ten minutes passed and she could still hear the engine. When she emerged, barefoot on the filthy porch,
she could see him using the surface of his horn to scribble something, a note for her he’d tape facing in to her window. He called her Bess Rainy in these notes, she didn’t know why, something that made him laugh. A rainy look to you sometimes is all he would say when asked. Dear Bess Rainy, he had written once. I smelled you on the back of my hand in a room full of people today and it was so painful I had to excuse myself. His tenderness was stunning because it was rare.
In just the way he leapt down from the cab, a hop onto one boot and a boyish stomp with the other, she could tell he didn’t know. It made her furious, that she should have to be all parts of the crime, the cause, the victim, the messenger. As he saw her face his gait slowed, and he set down the things he had brought her, a book on trees, some lemons he’d preserved with rosemary. He always came with gifts, a protection against the things he wouldn’t talk about. On the uneven planks he sat two steps below her, his arms around her calves. She spent a foggy minute waiting for him to ask, then another, rage-smeared, realizing he would not.
“Your lovely wife didn’t mention her visit?”
His arms returned to their place at his sides. He looked at his boots and then his truck, as if hoping the things in his life were the life itself.
“What did she do?” His voice was light, his bottom lip pushed out. She was standing now. It felt like she had to use her body or it would use her.
“What did she do? Why do you ask it like that? Is it so hard to believe she could have done something?”
He hopped up, raising himself from his seated position without the use of his hands. The vim of it infuriated her. She would not turn to face him. She was aware of every part of her that did not belong to him, her feet in perfect line with her hips, her hips with her shoulders, her chin with her navel.
“She doesn’t do a lot of leaving, is why. So my thought process seems to stop before her even—”
“Let me give your thought process the kick it needs. She came here dressed to be painted for a portrait and she ordered everything on the menu, one by one over the course of the longest two hours of my life, looking at me like I was a broom.”
“I can’t always get her to the front porch for some sunshine.”
“Your thought process in general seems to rely on convenient omissions.”
“Car I bought her I have to turn over the engine to make sure, sometimes.”
“I wonder why she’s been so unhappy.”
Vincent stared at her then, trying, she thought, to calculate how total her anger was, where he could find the break in the fence. She could feel her face was ruined with color. He tried to take her hand, but her fingers wouldn’t curl around his, so he slipped an arm behind her back, another under the joint of her knees. Carrying her, pacing the porch, he raised and lowered and raised her.
“Sir, I’m going to guess that one thousand one hundred twenty-two beans are in this jar. I’m just a simple hog farmer, but I believe in this like I believe Jesus Christ gave some damn good speeches. If that doesn’t win me a prize, I don’t know what.” She snorted against the thin cotton of his shirt, hated herself for it, all in the same second. They were inside in under a minute, her feet never touching the ground.
In her bedroom the noon light was invasive, highlighting the clutter made by her sunken week, the western shirt of his she’d slept in and left balled in her sheets, a plate still holding two wilted fries at the foot of her cot. Pint glasses of water at different levels lined the length of her room. The reminder of it separated her from him again, and she insisted he put her down, pushed the flat of her feet against his stomach.
“Who’s the lowlife done been living in here, rosebud?”
She climbed onto her narrow cot and he followed, mirroring the shape of her body, pressing the points of his knees into the backs of hers. When he spoke it was into her neck, the words coming into her body before they came into her mind.
“I couldn’t have known, Fay. Babe, I could not have known. I deserved that, not you. I did.”
That was as much of an apology as he gave her, no sorry inside it, but still she felt the breadth of her ribs pushing back into his chest, his leather belt digging against her hips. It was the first but not the last time that she wondered what it was about a woman truly distraught, disarmed by crisis, that planted the idea of sex in a man’s mind. It was perverse, she was thinking, disturbed, and soon after the thought arrived it disintegrated. She began to hear very clearly. The pop of a jet gone sonic, the snort of Lloyd’s nose in the pool. She couldn’t explain it to herself, but then she was pressing against him, too.
He liked to arrange her and she let him. She was pliable under his wishes, to put her thighs just so, to slide a doubled pillow under her hips as he lowered his mouth. When she looked up it seemed the colors in the room wanted to become each other, the blues of the sky through the windows braided into the gold of his hair where it moved a little between her legs. He came up with his eyes open and she turned over, her forearms crossed in a point where she rested her head. She didn’t want to see him.
When it was over she knew that nothing had been resolved, but the fact of this seemed less urgent, an unpleasant appointment she would endure after many more warm and gentle hours. There was nothing in her body to alert her to what had changed, the switch that had been pulled on, the microscopic reactions beginning. Whether it happened then or in that parking lot on La Cienega, it made sense, she thought later—it could not have been a daughter.
12.
He knew that afternoon at Fay’s would be his last—if not during, then on the dark road right after. His way of thinking, stretched far out, had snapped back. He could no longer afford it.
Afterward he bumped up the mountain, taking curves one-handed, in some way pleased by how little his headlights revealed. Sitting back as deep as he could in his truck, he never pushed the stick forward to turn on his brights. Four miles from home a buck appeared like a long-hidden memory, completely clear, its consequences real. A streak of white ran the nose, separating near-perfect circles of chestnut brown. The eyes themselves did not seem alarmed, just inquisitive, as though the leaping animal, its head turned to see him, were about to remark: Of all places, I didn’t expect to run into you here.
He couldn’t understand how quickly the blood took the paths of the shattered glass—it seemed immediate, all of it had bloomed before him as the body slipped down the hood. Turning on his brights now, he watched the red following every fissure. Its back was turned to him, keeping a secret.
He spent ten minutes with the carcass, bereft, surprised by it. He wanted it to twitch its golden ears. On the shoulder of the road he stroked the places where the fur was not clotted. In the end he could not abandon it: he hated the idea of the body among the scrubs, uncovered. Rather than lifting it by the hoofs, he carried it by its back, honeymoon-style, into the bed of his truck, where he wrapped it in the shadow plaid blanket he’d kept there for Fay. Perhaps he would bury it. The thought was a comfort, but in the vision he had he could see himself doing it, could see his shoulder blades working as the shovel raised up. What did it mean if this was your fantasy of yourself, a view that didn’t include your own face?
At their cabin all the lights were on, yellow flooding from the bedroom and kitchen and living room, because Elise liked that, the idea that every object in every room was visible to her, instantly reachable. The pearled pink toothbrush, the Japanese tea set, the driftwood shelves in the living room where Vincent kept his things up high.
Inside she acknowledged him by shifting her position on the couch, opening her body slightly from its fetal curl. He filled two tin buckets in the kitchen and carried them precisely, the horizon of his shoulders never drooping, the water in its containers barely thudding. He had brought a headlamp but in the end worked without. The light from the house was enough to suspend the body, and he could feel that it was already lighter, had already lost significant blood.
When he returned, to the noise of the telev
ision set she had fought bitterly to acquire—Wouldn’t some actual quiet do you good, he had said, so many times she mocked it—he switched it off without looking in her direction, fetched a chair from the tiny kitchen. He did not want to speak to her from the couch, where they would feel each other shifting but stare at the same wall. To her advantage was the fact that he had not been home in the early evenings the past two months. He had stayed late on the base, working on a paper about the lift and drag of delta-shaped wings. Her imagination of the time he spent with Fay was much greater than the reality, and he couldn’t prove she’d been gone.
He asked what she had been doing with herself the last week, the question thin and light and in conflict with the way he phrased it, sitting upright with his fingers tented.
She was conflicted by his interest in her, swallowing a smile, sitting up and then reclining back. Finally she spoke evenly, a departure from the typical poles of her falsetto laugh and her sharp, dark pronunciations.
“Thises and thats. I started a bird feeder from the old toaster box.”
“Paint it?”
“I didn’t quite get to that.”
“Drive out to buy some?”
“No.”
“Drive anywhere?”
As with the television, she had filibustered for a car that made no sense there, a Bel Air in a silky pink, and she almost only ever drove it to get it washed. She was as elegant and flawless a driver as she was a dancer, approaching four-way intersections with her eyes light and chin up, taking left turns with such ease not so much as a stray penny slid across the dash. It was one of many traits that had almost won his devotion.
“No,” she said, not without cheer. Nowhere on her face was the bar where his girlfriend worked, the hundreds of dollars she had littered there. They were cruel in the same way, he and Elise, pointed. When I walk in the door and make this gesture, he had told her once, digging an index into his temple, it means I need quiet to think.
America Was Hard to Find Page 5
