Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  But still, lately, ten days to be precise, in spite of El Salvador—with El Salvador—he feels joy that arrives to him always as surprise, such a gift. He is walking once more in absolute trust. He accepts every moment, each imperfection, even the half-rotten eggplant with the places he must cut out. With such a small parish, so few to tend, he does not know what else to do when he’s like this but cook and invite.

  He is grateful most of all that the bad time with Luz has now passed. It is nine weeks since she wandered from school to the desert, that time warp with no explanation. Nine weeks since she speaks of being called. Since the beginning of June he has carried his fears for her, asking God to take back what he hopes is only incipient, that gift of the spirit he does not believe in. Blames himself for inciting her fervor with the stories of saints, books about Fatima and Medjugorje, the little girl seers of Garabandal. Let there be nothing unnatural in the being of this child, he asks, just a very small flaw in her brain, a glitch that is right now repairing itself, a chemical gap.

  He will do what he tells Luz to do. “Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it.” The less attention they give it, the better. And soon, God willing, her obsession will fade. She will have no more out-of-time wanderings, no dreams in which the Virgin Mother opens her blue starry robe and calls out her name.

  There, he is back to himself. He is washing his dishes, reviewing the happiness of his guests. He covers the rosemary chicken with foil (he has made so much it will last him all week) giving thanks for ten easy nights, ten mornings that have found him in his own narrow bed, waking eager and ravenous—like a pregnant woman, or a happy child.

  And for Zoe Luedke, he says thank you for her, her arrival to them out of nowhere, exactly as his dream had foretold it, like the sudden brisk desert wind promising something he senses but does not yet know.

  CHAPTER 2

  For one week following this night Walt Adair tortures himself over what to do with his window, a question that has plagued him on and off for a year. Installed on the south-facing wall it will give him a fine view of traffic, just as the window next to the entry door on the north lets him see out to the Little San Bernadino Mountains, his modest white barn of a car wash, and the newly clean cars as they come through. But each time Zoe Luedke calls to ask if he’s ready for an estimate, instead of saying, “Sure, just come by,” he pleads for a little more time.

  As much as he’d like to see her again, as surprised as he is just to hear that musical voice, the thought of a window that will let him look out at the traffic makes him vaguely uneasy; he can’t quite figure out why. Each night he drives the mile on an unpaved back road to his property, a half-acre site in the desert: two-bedroom adobe, four-foot-tall River Rock fountain, old cactus garden. His only addition, the trailer he bought for his daughter’s visits (that in three years she has not stayed in or seen). Before he goes into the house, he turns on the fountain and poses his question to the night: Should he or shouldn’t he put in that window? He gets no reply. He has only the counsel of his friend, Father Bill, which has helped Walt before but is not helping now: If it’s before you, it’s yours. You bought the damn window, now put it to work. But he can’t.

  Twice that week he awakens having dreamed about Zoe, first, as a dim figure moving inside the trailer. The next time she is standing outside it, near the fountain and the cactus, everything glowing with a strange silver light. Her hair, her whole body shimmers as if in first snow. The dreams make him happy but give him no answer, only the sensation that he’s seen Zoe Luedke again in the flesh.

  Each day he does his chores a little more thoughtfully, replaces half a dozen burned-out pinpoint lights in the ceiling of the wash, flushes the crystal rinse solvent so it runs like clean rain. In the office where he welcomes his customers—the few that come by—he wipes every smudge off the Formica counter behind which he stands. Cleans every spill on the snack bar on the opposite wall, with its urns of freshly brewed coffee and tall piles of cups. Shines up the glass-door refrigerator below with its ample supply of sodas and juice. Vacuums the carpeted floor, slaps the pillows on his vast velvet couch, in front of the wall that might soon hold the window—or not.

  So obsessed is Walt with the question of his window he forgets to give several first-timer customers “the talk.” More than one customer drives out of the car wash moved by their experience in ways they do not understand.

  Still, in a single morning Walt makes the calls he has put off all year and knows what the job of installing his window should cost: one thousand dollars, on average, about four hundred more than he is prepared to spend.

  When Father Bill stops by for an afternoon coffee, he sees the couch pushed into the middle of the room, with the window leaning against it and Walt stretched flat beside the south wall, feeling for studs.

  “Who are you thinking of hiring?” Father Bill asks, pouring himself an extra large cup, then opening the refrigerator for the stainless steel pitcher of milk.

  “No idea. Not sure I am hiring anybody.”

  “How about Zoe? From what I hear she can use the work.”

  “Who have you been talking to, Luz?”

  “I’ve been talking to Zoe,” says Father Bill.

  “What’s the problem?” Walt asks.

  “That I can’t say.”

  “She’s calling me, too,” Walt says.

  “Really?”

  “She’s been pretty damn persistent.”

  “Well, she can use the work.”

  Walt could recite word for word Father Bill’s standard bid to join one who needs serving to one who can serve. A simple exchange for Father Bill, but one that ignores the normal laws of commerce that Walt still tends to respect. “If something is needed and someone can provide, what’s the issue? What could possibly stop them from giving?” “Lots of things,” Walt usually says. “It’s just not that simple.” “Ah,” Father Bill always says, “but it is.”

  Walt wishes Father Bill would come at it directly, “Here’s what I want you to do,” but that’s never his way. The priest can be downright elusive. There are things he won’t speak of that Walt wonders about but is too polite to put on the table. One day he is going to ask Father Bill about his years in El Salvador. All he will say of that time is that’s where he met Josefina. What’s the big secret, after all? What does he have to hide? It’s not as if Walt asks about their relations. But Walt doesn’t like evasion in his friends. And he does not like the sense he’s being pushed.

  “Well,” says Father Bill, then he stands up and hands Walt his mug, “here’s something that might help you see the situation more broadly. Zoe can’t pay for that radiator. Her car’s just sitting up at the garage.”

  “What’s she been using for transportation?”

  “The loaner. I helped her work something out with Platz. I’d prefer you don’t mention it.”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “In case you hear them talking at the diner.”

  Father Bill leaves Walt feeling guilty, as if knowing Zoe’s short on money he’s now obliged to help. But the more Walt muses on the problem, the less inclined he is to call her.

  He wonders if putting in the window might even backfire—like the ads he took out in the High Desert Pennysaver, and those radio spots last summer, after which business declined. Since then he has come to believe there’s a whole other way to get what he wants for his car wash. He has started to see it three, even four times a day—a nice line of traffic headed for his wash—see it quite happily in his mind.

  He used to do the same thing with his tennis game and it worked really well with his serve. He’d see the high toss, see the seams of the falling green ball, even feel the Tourna Grip sticky in his palm. And when Ryan was eight and just starting in Little League, his pale freckled arm like a reed, how many evenings did they spend wearing a groove on Gwen’s perfect lawn while they worked on the pitch? It was simply a part of their practice, no different from the long toss, teaching his son t
o see first then throw. Ryan’s eyes tightly closed while Walt talked him through every motion. “Don’t throw the ball till you’ve first seen it in the strike zone.” It is all dependent on seeing—any athlete can tell you—the whole thing begins in the mind.

  In the same way his wash came to him after six months of nothing, this is the way he now see his customers, preexisting, in a sense, already there. On the couch, dozing, an unseen effort goes on within him, half in reverie, half in dream. A riot of drivers speed toward Walt’s car wash on their way to the Palms, the Marine base, or back from the Joshua Tree Campgrounds, their cars all covered with fine white grit. And now they are stopping at his blue neon sign, their directionals blinking in red synchrony: right for the west bound, left for the east, and now the dust rises off countless hot hoods, so many cars it stops traffic. How Walt has come to enjoy this.

  He no longer questions the method that will bring the Immaculate Autos Experience its success. It’s a leap of surpassing illogic, he knows, but nonetheless wholly his. And this is the reason he can’t decide to do anything about his window except pick it up and put it back behind his couch, nearly out of sight. Seeing traffic coming at him on the freeway with his eyes would betray his process. Those cars will come, are coming, and in the right time. He doesn’t need a window to show him. All he needs is to keep to his vision and wait.

  The phone rouses him from his dream state, and he gets up from the couch. He picks up the phone, hears his son’s voice and his day is made. Walking straight to the coffee machine, the phone cradled in his neck, Walt fills his blue mug, hoping that the call will turn into a conversation. Though any call from his son is so rare, it’s already a gift.

  “Dad,” says Ryan in his newly cracked voice, which pains Walt as a lightning split tree would, the insides exposed, the living wood splintered. “We’re in the semi-finals, and they’re starting me. We play in the college stadium in Fullerton eleven o’clock on August fifteenth. Can you make it?”

  “You bet I can make it. You know I will.”

  He walks without thinking back to the big gray velvet couch that looks so out of place in this spare, flimsy structure that he calls his office. Then he sits down, puts his feet on the coffee table, and closes his eyes as he listens to Ryan report on the five miles he has picked up on his fastball. How the pitch they have worked on for six years has now taken off with a vengeance.

  He might almost be home with his son stretched out next to him, his sweet clean boy-sweat and the skunky mildew odor rising from his bare feet and the size ten sneakers.

  This is the family room couch Gwen wanted to toss when she remarried. Cost him four hundred dollars just to have it trucked the seventy miles down and worth every penny. He only has to touch it to remember who he is.

  “Here’s when I knew, Dad. I was just nailing the zone. It was so easy. It was a joke.”

  “You got it, Ryan. You own it now.”

  “I just better not lose it.”

  “Don’t go there. Stay seeing it. See it all the time. It will be there when you need it.” What do these words mean, coming from him? “I’ve just decided something pretty interesting.” Where to begin? Not doing something is a little dangerous, he knows, too much like all the not-doing Gwen thinks landed Walt here—away from them all.

  “Dad? What is it?”

  “Let’s wait. I’ll tell you at dinner next week. Be good to your mother. Tell Jen to call.”

  “Is it about you moving back?”

  “Back to Newport? No.”

  In the background he hears the low voice of a man now. He hears his wife calling out a response. David, the new husband to his wife. His son in the room. Walt knew the man. They’d had a nodding acquaintance at the club. Self-satisfied. A jerk on the court. Walt did not like him even then. First serve percentage sixty-two to Walt’s forty-eight.

  “Next time I see you I’ll explain it. And Ryan? Remember, don’t rush the arm.”

  After they say good-bye, a wave of exhaustion washes through Walt Adair. It is not quite ten in the morning, and already he feels he has had a full day. When the door to his office opens, Walt sees a tall woman with long milky legs and a Chinese straw hat.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” she says, as she comes toward him. It is Zoe in work clothes, denim overall shorts, faded blue tee shirt, work boots, and thick yellow socks, her face half hidden in the shadow of the hat. He hardly recognizes her.

  “Well, hello,” Walt says.

  “This could not have come at a better time.” Even her lilting voice is different, forced. She takes off the hat and puts it on the coffee table between them. Zoe’s face appears drawn and exhausted. It shocks him a little, as if in the week or so since Father Bill’s dinner she had suffered some kind of loss.

  “Right back,” she says.

  Then out she goes again returning with a rented sledgehammer, power saw, and four hefty lengths of wood.

  “Slow down. What is all this?” Walt asks.

  “Wait, there’s more. Don’t worry. I’m going to put up a little wall of plastic to spare you the dust. Six hundred is fine, by the way. But let me warn you, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I’ll have to go slow. Right back.”

  For a moment Walt thinks he has missed a step. Was there a phone call he does not remember? Something he said that led her to think he had agreed to go through with installing the window? All he remembers in this moment is catching her chair as it fell backward, and the silvery haze of his dream.

  Once again she returns, this time with a gray plastic crate filled with stuff: tubes of silicone and caulking, boxes of nails. Walt had no idea one window required so much equipment to mount.

  “So where exactly do you want it?”

  “I was thinking of there.” Walt points to the south wall, “But you’re a little ahead of yourself.”

  Give Walt the week, Father Bill had said to her, then show up prepared. If he waffles, don’t let him.

  “Didn’t you tell Father Bill you would do it for six hundred?”

  “I only said six hundred was all I would pay.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I would pay six hundred if I wanted the window installed, but I don’t.”

  “You’ve changed your mind?”

  “I never made it up. I don’t want it done. Never said I did. I have decided against it for sure.”

  She will have to stand firm now. Walt is waffling. He is waffling big-time. She says nothing. Here she is, ready. Having paid to rent tools, buy materials. All of it right on the floor where he can see it. She puts her hands on her bare thighs, but her touch barely registers, another piece of herself given to the air. She looks at her work boots, white with accumulated Mojave dust. Her skin feels gritty and dry.

  Now she will have to find the spark to convince Walt—not her strong point, much more Michael’s.

  “I don’t get it. Father Bill said you agreed.”

  “It’s a misunderstanding. I didn’t.”

  “Oh,” says Zoe. What am I doing here? she thinks. Not just here in this car wash, but here? Among strangers. Talking to them. Intruding myself in their lives. All week driving a loaner she can’t even pay for up and down the thirty-mile stretch of freeway between Joshua Tree National Park and the town of Twenty-Nine Palms? To theme motels and RV parks, to bowling alleys, and darkened coffee bars, to an outdoor all-you-can-eat Texas-barbecue joint packed with off-duty Marines from the nearby base, where she has found no trace of Michael, no one who recognizes his photo. All week talking to strangers. She has repeated Michael’s name, described his appearance, his airy gait and intense dark eyes, his distinctive candy-crackling voice sometimes saying who he is to her and sometimes, when asked, a lot more. Described as well their Luedke and Payne white van, tempted to take out the flyer that she keeps in her pocket, folded now, its pale lilac bond creased and stained. It has left her depleted. She is already filled up with no’s.

  Zoe stares at the wall where she should be marking
studs, making measurements. Instead she takes the stud finder out of the pocket of her shorts—it has been digging into her hipbone for over an hour—and drops it on the coffee table beside a pile of magazines.

  “I’ve rented tools, bought headers and flashing. They can’t be returned.”

  “Why would you do that without checking with me first?”

  Let Father Bill pay for the headers and flashing, Walt thinks, for now he is angry. He knows what has happened, they’ve set him up, the missing step that Father Bill likes to allow, so the server will step up to the service line. Well, it isn’t his serve, no reason for him to walk out to the court. He will try to send her off with some measure of grace and deal with Bill later.

  “Would you like a cup of water? I’ll help you carry this stuff out.”

  “I’ve got water in the car.”

  “In the car? It’ll boil,” says Walt.

  Zoe sits down. She is not ready to bend to defeat. She lifts the handle of the hammer; the familiar weight steadies her. She has fallen into the hole that is Infidelity, her options dwindling with every hot hour, her ability to resist what is happening to her as well. Six hundred dollars for a job that needs doing. Six hundred dollars to get Platz started on her car. To keep her in the loaner doing what she thought she could do but which now seems insane: looking for Michael in a place she’s not even sure he has come to, Michael who does not want to be found. If she can just figure how to make Walt say a simple yes, maybe other yeses will start to descend. Maybe Michael.

  Now Walt sits down too, keeping his distance, saying nothing. The nothing continues. Nothing and no, Zoe thinks. They are both mired in silence, the breeding ground for doubt. In a blink Michael would have Walt Adair talking, so happy to put in that window he’d pay more, who knows, maybe the whole thousand. When Zoe digs for the words that Michael would say, she only succeeds in calling up the graceful length of his torso, the disarming smile, enough to unleash him toward her. Now she feels Michael entirely, the sense of his flesh, the smoky deep fragrance that is gone.