They sat in the boat for a few minutes. Luke kept stroking her hair. He zipped himself up and got out of the boat first and offered her his hand to help her out. On the walk back across the lawn he put his arm around her. He was different. He seemed so calm and peaceful, and it was as if Devon had opened a door inside herself that held a gift she hadn’t known she had. Something that had the power to do what she’d just done to Luke McDonough, changed him from being restless and grasping and distracted to this quiet, satisfied boy with his arm around her, this boy who first thing he did when they walked back into the thumping, sweating party was get her a hard lemonade he opened and handed to her, nodding at her lips to drink, the taste in her mouth not terrible but not as good as this. She drank down half the bottle and smiled at him. It was like stepping into the first chapter of a book all about her, and she felt more important somehow. She wanted to know what would happen next.
NOW IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT and she’s sitting against the headboard, her laptop open on her bare legs, her Dr. Dre’s on. Devon’s heard this song but never really listened to it. Behind her eyes, the famous white rapper is shout-singing over a drum machine and a sad violin about the daughter he never sees but wishes he did. Devon can hear how much he means this. How he really does miss her.
I didn’t raise a fucking whore! Her father’s reddened cheeks and forehead, the Sunday morning light coming through the kitchen window onto the side of his face. It was early, and he hadn’t shaved yet and there was a lock of hair sticking up behind his ear. She’d been up all night, and maybe he hadn’t slept either, though he was in a V-neck T-shirt and boxer shorts, his legs pale because it was March, and it was funny how Devon seemed to hover slightly above herself and to the right. Like he was yelling at Devon the body, not Devon the girl. Then her mother was rushing in from the hallway. She wore that terry cloth yellow robe, but it was open and Devon could see her mother’s white nightgown, her breasts and belly beneath that. Devon thought: That’s where I came from, that’s where I started out.
That’s enough, Charlie! Enough!
Then her father was whirling around to yell at her mother, to blame her, and Devon was back in her body yelling at them both.
The young father in her head is too much. His whole life is his daughter, even though he never sees her because he’s too busy writing songs for people like Devon. She flicks to something else and doesn’t care what it is.
She types in Chatroul, and the rest of the word comes up. Not yet, though. For so long she’s stayed away from everybody’s Fuckbook pages, but now she types in Facebook. She stares at the login screen and tries to remember her username, her password. DDBrandt and ButterFly. She types in her username but then stops. The last page she was on was Trina’s, but Trina had unfriended her so Devon had scrolled down her news feed. Party talk. Beach talk. Mall talk. Devon moved to Trina’s wall. Nothing but chatter about Dirty D. About Skanky Sick C. trying to kill himself.
Which he never did.
He probably has his own Fuckbook page now. Maybe he finally started a band. Maybe he’s got a lead singer and she’s cute and skinny like him. Devon doesn’t want to know. That Irish band’s in her head now, the singer’s voice high and angry, so tired of all the fighting, so damn tired of it. She pulls the headphones from her ears and picks up her iEverything and finds Wuz up D?
With one thumb she writes: I’m not here anymore. Where r u?
She sends it and tosses it down near the foot of the bed. She exits the login screen, tapping the red x box much harder than she needs to. Then she’s in the roulette room running her fingers back through her hair, though she never wears makeup for this. Before sitting on the bed she put the blue stud back in her nose, and she started to fill every hole in both ears with all the silver she had, but that felt too much like putting on a show for whomever she might meet and she is not putting on a fucking show. Not for anyone. Whoever she meets does not know her. Whoever she meets does not know one little thing about Devon Denise Brandt.
She presses start and the wheel spins to a dark screen in Texas. Then it lights up and a boy is staring at her. His head is shaved, and he’s not wearing a shirt, and she’s about to next him because she thinks he’s going to point his screen down at his hard dick, but he says, “Hey.” Like he’s known her a long time. Like he just got back into town from a trip far, far away.
She types: Hey.
IN THE DARKNESS Francis wakes into an old body, its diminishing state a continual surprise to him. The time glows in digital numbers on the bedside table, but even squinting at it he can no longer read it without his glasses. No matter. For years now his bladder and prostate have made him shuffle to the toilet for a long wait and then just a few drops, but he knows that if he does not follow their commands now there will be no sleep.
In the bathroom he has to steady himself with his hand on the wall. He holds himself over the toilet and closes his eyes and waits. Before shutting out the light hours ago, he’d been reading a book on the history of the duel. A duke in 1700s England had killed over twenty men in defense of his honor, a word we don’t seem to use much anymore, and it seemed to Francis that this “gentleman” must surely have been looking for affronts to his honor whenever and wherever he could.
A trip with Beth to the Adirondacks. It was early fall and he must have been retired for he had no memory of gearing up for the school year. Instead, there was a lot of rain. Beth in her blue raincoat with the belt at the waist. The way she hurried past him over the puddles in the gravel lot and into the antique barn. It had smelled like dried flowers and damp sawdust and was filled with artifacts up to the trusses: coats and hats and cane chairs; ornate fire tools and books and framed lithographs of families long gone. There were nautical flags from around the world and old road signs and a glass case of tarnished jewelry the owner sat behind reading a children’s book nearly one hundred years old. She was young, which surprised Francis, thirty-five or forty, and she wore glasses and a sweatshirt with a construction logo on the back.
Beth had gotten lost in a stall of glass figurines, and Francis found himself staring at an open walnut case of dueling pistols. They lay side by side in green velvet. When he lifted one out, he was surprised at how heavy it was. Then his wife was standing beside him. He could smell the wet vinyl of her raincoat.
“You’d defend my honor, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”
“To the death,” he’d said, aiming the pistol at a photograph of Babe Ruth. Beth leaned her head on his shoulder, and he’d kissed her damp hair.
The tickle of release. A few drops. Then a few more. Not even enough to warrant a flush. Francis rinses his hands and splashes his face. So many moments with Beth like that one. It used to be a memory for both of them, but now it’s only his. And when he goes, will it really be gone? Will they all be gone? Some private library burning to the ground? There is a crack of light beneath Devon’s door.
It has to be after three in the morning. Maybe she fell asleep with the light on. At first he hears nothing, but then comes the tapping of computer keys followed by a voice, strangely tinny. “C’mon, we been doin’ this a long time.” A boy’s. A young man’s. Francis is about to open the door, but there’s more tapping, Devy hunting and pecking out sentences, he’s sure. This must be some kind of Skype. Beth used to do it with her sister in Virginia, his sister-in-law smiling at them both from her bedroom, chatting about her work saving street cats while her second husband—a quiet and aloof tax attorney—read a book in bed behind her.
It was probably a good thing, this technology, but it seemed to Francis like just one more stripping away of privacy. What was wrong with talking on the phone and imagining what your sister looked like and what room she was sitting or standing in? Why did we have to see how large her eyes looked behind her reading glasses? Why did we have to see the covered form of her husband reading in bed?
“C’mon, Sarah, I want to hear your voice.”
Sarah. So whoever she’s typing to is a st
ranger and she’s lied to him.
Devon types again, and Francis turns away and walks on his toes back down the carpeted hall and into his room, his empty bed, the red glow of time too bright and insistent. After Devon had left for the restaurant, he’d reread Marie’s emails to him from last spring. But they were filled with the language of self-help books: Devon’s been “acting out”; Devon’s in a “shame spiral”; Devon’s been “isolating” herself; what she needs is to feel “validated.” Like a parking ticket. The language of today becoming increasingly mechanical and cold, the machines taking over one word at a time.
Francis lies back in bed. He pulls the sheet up over his chest, but there’s the nagging pull he’s left a duty unfulfilled. I want to hear you. This boy with a southern accent. What else does he want? There’s something basely sexual about the whole thing. Devy onscreen for a man she does not know posing as a Sarah. Shouldn’t her uncle do something?
He closes his eyes and waits for sleep. He can feel the empty expanse of bed beside him like a silent reproach from his wife. Like he can do better and she fully expects him to do so. The truth is she was rarely wrong in her complaints about him. There were just so many of them.
To the death. Her head on his shoulder, her damp hair against his lips. They must have had thousands of good moments like that one. Surely they must have.
From down the hall comes the muffled click of Devon’s bathroom door closing. Did the young man make an exit? Or is he still there? Francis pictures him waiting for her in her machine, his eyes on the wall of Francis and Beth’s guest room, this boy they do not know and never invited into their home.
DEVON WIPES HERSELF and flushes. She washes her hands and looks at herself in the mirror to see what Hollis from Texas has been looking at. She looks tired. Her hair isn’t short anymore, but it isn’t long either, and she wishes tonight it was one or the other. The blue stud in her nose looks like a bug or a mole, and she’s surprised he only mentioned it once.
“You have a lot of them?”
What?
“On your nose.”
Did he mean more studs to put in that hole? Or more on other parts of her body? But he didn’t sound creepy when he asked, just curious.
And she was curious about him. All these months doing this, and that had only happened once. A boy in Denmark. He sat there in a black sweater staring at her through the screen. He had blond hair that stuck up in a cowlick he didn’t seem to know about, and he was quiet like her, only typing his questions, not drawing any pictures on the screen or talking right at her. He wrote: What do you want?
I don’t know.
He read what she wrote to him at the bottom of the screen. He looked back up at her. That night she’d worn all her ear rings, her stud too, and he seemed to be seeing them for the first time. He looked sad. He typed: People should know what they want. Then he nexted her and she ended up in a party of drunk Turkish boys and she closed her laptop and felt like crying.
After that she stopped talking or writing much to any of them. Maybe a Fuck U if they were jacking off, or that man in England who reminded her of her father. Once she got a fat black girl in Florida and she did write to her, just a few words because she looked so lonely and was only wearing a red bra. Behind her on the wall above her bed was a poster of a rapper who hit his famous girlfriend and people still downloaded his songs.
Don’t give them anything. They don’t deserve it. None of them deserve it.
Devon had nexted her before she could respond; she didn’t want to get sucked into that hole again.
So she just stared at them all. She waited for the talking or the typing or the drawing on the screen to begin, and she’d just stare and say nothing.
Y arnt u talking?
C’mon, pleeease?
U just wanna fuck, don’t u? Give me your number.
Ur a cold cunt huh?
A bald man with a kind face drew a heart on the screen with an arrow through it. Another, young and with a chin strap like Bobby Connors, took out his guitar and sang her a song he’d written himself. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad and Devon had listened to it with her arms crossed and she felt like a bitch when he finished and she still didn’t say anything.
“Man, you’re tough.” But he played her two more songs. She liked them but not as much as she liked how much he needed her to say or do something. Nothing was better than watching them all want her to do something for them she would never ever do.
Till now.
It was the way he leaned back and stared at her, like she was the one he’d been looking for though he wasn’t desperate about it. He also didn’t seem to be playing any games or looking for someone to jerk off in front of. His name was Hollis, and he was twenty-seven years old and lived in a small town near Houston. He said he’d had a girlfriend and they were going to get married, but when he came home in ’05 she was pregnant with the baby of one of his best friends.
“You probably think I’m a big loser now, Sarah.”
She’d typed: No I don’t.
“Well. You should.”
He spoke softly and had an accent that made Devon think of cinnamon rolls. On his bare right shoulder was a tattoo she couldn’t see too well.
Can I see your tat?
At first he didn’t say or do anything. Then he leaned forward and turned his shoulder to the screen.
“See it?”
A little.
He grabbed a small lamp with a shade and a bulb burn on it, and there, etched into his shoulder were two crossed swords, a big number 7 sitting on where the blades touched. She typed: What’s it mean?
He put the lamp back. He read her question, then lit up a cigarette and took a deep hit. “The Garryowen.”
What’s that?
“Seventh Cavalry.”
Horses?
She was trying to be funny. It was like stepping your bare foot into the ocean after a year away because she hadn’t tried to be funny in so long. But he wasn’t smiling.
“It won’t be there for long.”
It’s a good one though.
“No, ma’am. It’s not.”
Mam?
“What’s your name?”
That old question. Usually she’d just sit there and stare at whoever just asked this. Let their need build up. Let their love and hatred for her show up, too. But tonight she couldn’t say nothing. Not to him.
Sarah.
“That’s a good name. It’s from the Bible, did you know that?”
Maybe.
“Maybe you know that?”
Yeah.
“How come I’m talking and you’re not?”
She shrugged. She hoped he wasn’t some Christian like a lot of southern people seemed to be, and she felt bad for lying like she just did. He took a short hit of his cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth as if she was really in his room, sitting there in front of him. A woman’s voice broke from behind a wall. She sounded angry.
Who’s that?
“Nobody.”
Your wife? Her fingers were shaking slightly. Why did she care so much what his fucking answer was?
“You don’t want to know, Sarah.”
Yes I do.
He drew in on his cigarette and looked away as he blew out the smoke and stubbed the butt in an ashtray Devon couldn’t see. She craved a Merit, could feel the kick of heat down into her lungs, the tingling clarity of everything after. He crossed his arms and read her answer. She liked his body. He had shoulder and chest muscles without being all pumped up, a thatch of dark hair on his sternum. She thought of Sick’s narrow, pale chest.
“She’s my mother.”
Why did she feel relieved, almost happy? She didn’t know what to write.
“You gonna next me now, Sarah?
She shook her head. She typed: I lied. My name’s not Sarah.
“Why did you lie?”
Why do live with your mother?
He didn’t answer her question, or
maybe what he started talking about was his answer. He told her about his “stepdaddy” Roger, how he used to take him hunting out at Big Bend when Hollis was only eleven or twelve years old. He told her about how pretty the woods were, the jack pines and live oaks, the sun coming through. How much he loved the smell of gun oil, and he told her more things. How he liked hitting his target but hated killing anything. Always did. Couldn’t look at what he’d done. Was both proud and ashamed of what lay in the back of his stepdaddy’s pickup, its beautiful antlers sticking out.
He told her other things, and she listened. Couldn’t remember the last time she cared so much to listen. Sick maybe. Yeah, it was Sick and how he’d lie beside her after and talk about music. How sometimes he wanted to be music. Just notes floating through the universe and into the ears of living things who’d appreciate him.
Hollis talked about the first time he saw his girlfriend Bonnie, or the first time she saw him, how he was in camos coming in from a three-day hunt, a few whiskers on his face, mud caked on his Timberlands, so maybe she started falling in love right then with someone he never really was.
Every few minutes he’d stop and light another cigarette and ask her to please say something, that he wanted to hear her.
“C’mon, Sarah, I want to hear your voice.”
He said Sarah with an emphasis that wasn’t happy but wasn’t too pissed off either.
I told you, that’s not my name.
“Then tell me what it is.”
I have to go to the bathroom.
“You comin’ back?”
She nodded at the screen, and now, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, she’s so tired her eyes burn and she wants to brush mascara onto her eyelashes, just a little, but she can feel her heart in her chest and hands and she worries that even after all he’s told her, or maybe because of it, he’s going to next her or already has, and she hurries across the dark hallway and closes her bedroom door and sits on the bed to see him staring back at her from his laptop. He’s wearing some kind of black cowboy hat. It has a strap under the chin and it makes him look older, ageless somehow.
Dirty Love Page 24
