Pins & Needles

by Karen Brown

  “Are you nervous?” she asked, teasing him.

  He cleared his throat. “A little,” he said, always honest.

  She put her hand on his chest and felt the thudding there. She laughed.

  “No one could find this place,” she said.

  The closest main road was two miles away. There was a famous hot dog restaurant where she had told him to turn off. He kidded her about the places she chose. “What about the Holiday Inn?” he’d asked. “Wouldn’t a Marriott work?” She told him how she drove around to find the motels, always some reason why she picked the one she did, its proximity to some odd landmark, its kitschy sign, its past popularity replaced with a forlorn look. He told her he liked the hot dog place. It had a big gaudy pink-and-blue sign, rimmed with shiny chrome, studded with lit bulbs. Had she ever eaten there? She told him once or twice, as a child. That was all. Next door to the restaurant was a Dairy Queen where she would have liked to get a sundae with whipped cream. He said, “Do it. Get extra whipped cream.” But she did not feel like getting dressed, driving away from him, leaving him behind in the room.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  But he would not budge. He moved his hand up into her hair. He shook his head no, and pulled her face to his and kissed her. “I could taste that on your mouth,” he said.

  She bit his lip. She slid her body onto his. Sometimes, she thought about him at home with a wife, doing daily things. Sitting at a table with a book, half listening to her tell a story about people whom they both knew, her hands busy in a sink. Watching her dress in the morning, or at night, flinging off her clothes, and having it mean nothing much. She imagined them together in their bed, covered with the sheet, in sleep, his body turned toward her, or away, his body touching hers, or not. It did not bother her to imagine these things. She did it once in a while to remind herself he was someone already loved.

  He told her a story about waterskiing once with his brother. He was eleven. His brother fifteen. Their parents let them take the boat out on the lake and watched from the porch. It was an eighteen-foot Chris Craft, he said. It had been his father’s boat, a wooden classic, a 1952 Runabout. He knew how to handle the boat, but on this day, for some reason he still could not explain, the throttle stuck as he turned to pick up his brother bobbing in the water. The engine gunned, he swerved in time to avoid hitting him, but one of the skis was tossed up and struck his brother on the head. There was a lot of blood. He was unconscious at first, still bobbing in his life vest, a darker circle spreading out in the muddy brown lake water.

  She listened to the story. She already knew the brother hadn’t died then. But still, to hear him, it seemed he believed he had. His voice was awed, the words small, hesitant sounds.

  “It turned out all right,” she said.

  “That time,” he told her. He readjusted the pillow under his head with his balled fists. He was resentful, angry. He stopped talking. She got the feeling he would have liked him to die then. That he should not have been made to fear the event twice. She hadn’t known what to say to him. She saw he lived with an unremitting expectation of loss, part of himself held in a deep and untouchable reserve. She set herself to his body, as if she was hungry. She distracted him from the past and he returned to her and the bed and the quiet room and attended to his relentless need, his face above her beautifully cruel, until it was time to go.

  The Lamplighter was surrounded by what was once a stand of long leaf pine, invaded now by laurel and turkey oak. There was still one pine left in the middle of the circular drive, its tall trunk impervious to flame, its crown of long needles falling soft and aromatic, onto the hoods of their parked cars. Outside, he would not touch her. He did not say he would see her again. She was prepared to see him or not see him, and she ignored him climbing into his car, the sound of the engine, the sweep of his headlights pulling away. She brushed the pine needles from her hood with her arm, slowly, taking her time, waiting in the dark, though for what she wasn’t sure. His headlights circling back? Something else from him? A word, a moment she would not forget, some miracle falling out of the sky, through the ancient pine boughs, onto her body waiting tense with its own promise.

  ———

  They met again throughout that year. Once or twice at the motel in the orange grove with its gift shop and produce stand on the side, its round, ripe oranges advertised on a peeling wooden sign. The orange blossom smell would get caught in her hair. He would keep his face there, breathing it. A few times at the New Orleans, a two-story motel with ironwork balconies, with rumors of mob hits, surrounded by strip malls and marquees. Next door was the Space Odyssey, a strip club with a replica of a flying saucer on top, where they had seen the girls arriving for their afternoon shift, the sun on the asphalt radiating heat, making their faces waxlike in their makeup. Another time at the beach, at a place with a large plaster buccaneer and a miniature golf course next door, the metal of the door corroded with salt, the windows stuck shut, and everything mildewed and smelling of the Gulf. They had listened to the tide move out, the long, withdrawing over sand and pebbles and coquinas. Eventually, he said he could not see her anymore, and she assumed he had met someone else, had tired of it all, which she had expected, half-dreaded. She had not risked anything to keep him.

  Secretly, she had mapped and unmapped her own life on his body. He could not see in the dark. He had no way of knowing how much of her she left like silver trails and then erased. She was unsure why the burden of the past followed them there, to the room. Why he always told her something he had not thought about in years, how each irreversible error she had made traveled with her into his arms. How she would keep it all in check, saying nothing. Yet she saw, clearly, he was someone in whom she had invested the whole explanation. She asked him for one last meeting, at the first place with the nursery in back. He had agreed. “I’ll buy you a keepsake plant,” he said. There was nothing sentimental about it. They had uses for each other that prevented that.

  They met and it was afternoon again, almost a year later. The orchid tree petals blew down, a violent splash on the concrete. The odor of the plants, yellow poinciana, camellia, and sweet viburnum, followed them into the room. They didn’t think of it as the last time. It was just the same as any of the others. He still appreciated her body, more so now, out of nostalgia. They had their own history. They had times before that set precedents, they had moments particular to certain meetings. She knew his loneliness, his longings, the places to move her mouth that pleased him, how to lie, when to hold still, how much to say. He was still the boy in the house on the lake, in the town with narrow roads and clumps of mayflowers and galvanized mailboxes. He still carried some guilt for the loss of his brother, desperate and self-serving. His eyes glowered with it. The muscles in his arms tensed to fight it off. She still eased him into the present, her body making its invisible mark, her own past held at bay. Out of respect, he granted her this silence. To prod her would be a false step into some form of caring, which they both knew to avoid.

  They stood apart from each other in the room, and he smiled at her. He never reached for her first. He always waited. She had to show him that her desire was not something she could suppress, that it filled her lungs like a long intake of breath requiring release. She had to say she wanted him, aloud, always meaning it, never like a line she knew she was supposed to speak. She smiled back, revelatory, corroborative. Something he could read and know she meant. She would say what she wanted and not hesitate to slide his shirt up, to touch his skin, to take his face in her hands and just look at him. He let her do all of this. Then, he told her it was his wife, that she had suspected, and at her urging he had confessed. Don’t be angry with me, his eyes said.

  “I want a ginger lily,” she told him.

  He let his arms fall and was relieved to have something to give her. He went out the door, the sunlight dropping in for a moment, until the door swung shut. She heard the bell on the gate. She heard him speak to the old man, their foo
tsteps among the nursery plants. When he returned he had the lily, its blooms white and heavy and sweet smelling, the leaves shiny green spears. She took him in her arms, laughing. She felt a small, terrified happiness. The meaning of his confession, its feeling, like betrayal, weighed on her while he took off her clothes, while his mouth found hers, and his hands, softly sliding, drew her in.

  She would not admit to loving him. It was too late. She had pledged indifference and made herself a prisoner, trapped in her body’s longing for something else. At one time, years ago, she’d thought it was a child. She had imagined it solidly in her arms like a warmth, a reprieve. She imagined the child’s hair, its skin, its body growing long and beautiful, its eyes on her, waiting for a sign she feared she would not, finally, know how to give. She had gotten pregnant and then panicked, realizing her error, and she had gone on her own and gotten rid of it, and come to this motel, to the old man in the straw hat who had handed her a key. She had been newly married. She had not told anyone. She had wanted to be alone afterward. She had thought, maybe, she would not return home, that all of her mistakes might be so easily erased, and she would start again.

  But the doctor had botched it, somehow, and she had bled too much, awakening on the bed in it all, her surprise a kind of dulled one, mixed with a strange grief. Outside, she heard the old man in the nursery, moving around the plants. She heard the chain-link gate open and shut, its rusty latch. It had been late afternoon. The sun slanted in, hot looking, filled with dust, lighting up the sheets and the bright blood, her clothing wet and stiffened, her arms cold and pale and dampened. She had not been afraid. She had lain there and accepted it, her life ebbing away, a steady pulse between her legs, until the wanting to go on living urged her up. She knew that she would pull herself to the door and summon the old man, that he would come into the room and see the mess and call someone else, that the paramedic’s penlight would awaken her and drag her back from where she had been headed, a blank space, palely lit, where she did not ever need to know what she wanted or what she was expected to give. And later, she would be delivered into her old life, the life a debt that had not been satisfied, that had increased now, the ledger expanded to include one child.

  In the room she saw the sun slip low through the Venetian blinds. She felt his hands glide, kept her mouth on his, wet and soft like a wound. She smelled the lily in the room, its scent moving into the folds of her skin, into the places nothing reached. Her body forged on ahead. It opened itself, it gave an edge to the light. She was not without the knowledge, always, that when they left the room the world they’d made dissolved, transformed to molecules, blood, skin, strands of hair, traces on sheets shaken out by maids. The moment no longer existed to hold anything of them together, the lake’s lapping water, the stillness of the cedar-shingled house, the boy in his childhood bed believing in a last breath, still waiting, inexorably, for some truth to be revealed. What she admitted to him with her body was dismissed by her silence, made unceremonious and absent of farewell. He held his weight above her on the bed. She felt his deference in the tensile strength of his smooth arms and steady legs. His tenderness sprung from deep-rooted mother-love. He looked down at her, his expression heady. You do not know me at all, she wanted to say. I could be anyone.

  the ropewalk

  I never named my daughter. She lives with her father on the coast of another state where it snows, and the snow melts as it lands on the salt marsh, on the brackish still water of North Cove, on the gambrel roof of the house we bought together. When she was born I handed her over, a small bundle weighted with sleep. I remember only a red, wrinkled fist, the smell of milk on my blouse. Now, she may have a new mother whose hands smooth down hair I imagine is my husband’s color. She has my grandmother’s eyes and smells of the lily of the valley that grows, secretly, behind the hedges at the front of the house. She goes out in the dinghy with her father and he tells her the stories of the sea captain’s houses—Pratt, Hayden, Bull, and Starkey—of the square riggers and schooners that came to the Essex port, their cargos of ivory and silk, sandalwood and teak. He tells her about the drawbridge and the road through the great meadow. They will take the dirt path and have picnics on the big rock overlooking the river. Her hair is long, to her waist. She writes her name on the rock with a small stone shining with mica. I am filled with longing for this other life, but who knows what I would have longed for if I’d lived it?

  Where I work the patrons come in for draft beer and wait for someone to single them out for a game of darts or pool. It might be a weekday or a weekend afternoon, the heat and the sun slipping in through the door with them, the humidity curling the posters tacked to the walls—Thursdays, Ladies 2 for 1, Dollar Draft Friday Nights. It might be the dinner hour, when only a block away people are waiting for a table in the new French Vietnamese restaurant, or sitting down in dining rooms with wives or husbands and children and cloth napkins in their laps. Here in the bar they light up a cigarette and wedge it into the notch in the plastic ashtray and let it burn down, forgetting. They switch to bourbon when it grows dark. They tell me about the women they love, the men they despise, casually, as if it is the most normal thing in the world to love anyone that obsessively, to plot the ruin of someone who has hurt them. They twist the truth to invoke sympathy, or to hide from me their dire need. They are desperate people and they do not know it.

  The owner of the Tap Tavern approached me eight years ago and offered me the job. He sat down next to me on a bench in the neighborhood park, newly landscaped with palms and bird of paradise and caladium, its life-sized concrete lions spitting water, and children running through it barefoot, their nannies holding tiny socks and shoes. I felt out of place in my clothes from the evening before. He was a stranger, and I ignored him. It was a December afternoon with a breeze. There is a sculpture in the park made entirely of keys, thousands of them strung on thin, dangling wires that I could hear from my apartment’s balcony, and we heard it then, sitting there on the bench. He cocked his head, listening. “Imagine every one of those keys deprived of their tumblers,” he said. I looked at him, surprised. I may have smiled, thinking about what he said. He took my hand then and introduced himself. He had damp palms and wore jeans with bleach stains. A full white beard covered his chin. He held my hand in his endearingly, and squinted at me in the warm winter sun. I remember his hand shook with tremors, and I thought he was a gentle old man who had mistaken me for someone else, or a lonely person seeking solace in conversation. He is none of these things.

  His name is Dr. Chambley. At one time he practiced veterinary medicine. He still retains the manner of treating people calmly, as if they, like his animal patients, held the potential of sudden revolt with nails and teeth. Now, he is an alcoholic who imagines himself a poet, who bought the Tap Tavern two days before he saw me on the park bench. He had noticed my silk Prada pumps, the way my slit skirt showed my thighs. His plea for me to tend bar was initially a pickup line, an elaborate one that had me standing that evening in my heels and skirt, pouring draft beer, while he posed as my first customer. He sipped from his frosted glass and told me I looked like the woman in A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. The wet glass left water droplets on his beard. He had changed to one of the Brooks Brothers shirts that hang in the small back room, still wrapped in the dry cleaner’s blue plastic. I had my own drink beside the well, and I thought the game was slick of him, and I planned to play it all the way through, just to see where it would take me.

  I am still here. The Tap Tavern is on a narrow brick-lined street in the heart of a neighborhood built in the 1920s by wealthy citizens. The large two- and three-story bungalows had once known a long period of decline. Paint chipped off wood siding, jaunty striped awnings decayed, porches with elaborate balustrades sagged, and the heart pine floorboards, rare and expensive, succumbed to termites. During this time houses were split into apartments, and less affluent people moved in, and a few eyesores popped up, buildings that now, since the neighborhood has bee
n so impeccably restored, everyone pretends aren’t there—a frame shop and an accountant’s office hidden by kudzu, overgrown philodendron, and wild, climbing jasmine. They remain signless, known only to the people who have frequented them for years or by word of mouth. The Tap Tavern is one of these, a small, windowless, concrete block building, with an old wooden screen door and an appropriate sense of the forlorn about it.

  Inside the door there is no opportunity to assemble yourself to make a good impression, to peruse the crowd without being noticed. There is just the one room, twenty-five feet by fifty—pool tables to the right, bar to the left. Directly in front of you against the wall is a refrigerator, an ancient white Frigidaire that Dr. Chambley inherited from his deceased mother, and between the door and the back wall are some round tables with metal chairs. The floor is pine boards, darkened and swollen with age and spilled liquor. Ceiling fans spin the cigarette smoke overhead. Two air conditioners cool the place off, even in the winter months when the metal door is left open, and the screen door lets in the smell of the neighbor’s star magnolia.

  I like the odd, homey sense of the place, as if you have just walked into someone’s kitchen. I like the people who come every night and the newcomers who pop through the door expecting something else, the looks on their faces, startled, then amused. We get couples in evening clothes, tired of the party at an associate’s house. There are young people, tattooed and pierced, and pale, shaking ones who appear at all hours collecting their drugs. And on weekends, the men and women who work in offices as legal assistants, as real estate agents, as secretaries and marketing experts, searching each other out, seated on the stools at the bar. Some of them, like me, live in the apartments made from the old houses. Some live in the newer lofts and townhomes built in the empty lots left by houses that were torn down. They slide their fingers up bare thighs, play with shirt collars, flatten their hands against chests, order pitchers of drinks. They keep me, conditionally, on the fringes of their lives, and I rarely see any of them outside the bar.