by John Haskell
“I can’t tell,” she said. “Are you kidding?”
Behind her were green trees and behind them was actual sky with clouds. A car drove down the street and then the street was quiet. On a lawn nearby the grass was overgrown.
“Are you coming or not?” she said.
“I probably should be going,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and she turned and started walking up the sidewalk. As I watched her walk I told myself, This is what I have to do, meaning, This is what I feel, meaning, This is who I think I have to be.
7.
As I drove around the town of Lexington, it was just me now, just my eyes and my ears and my own intuition, and to facilitate the appearance of that intuition I drove very slowly, unsure where that intuition would be coming from but trusting what I felt, and hoping I would come up with something.
Anne liked horse racing so I drove to a racetrack on the outskirts of town. I watched the horses practicing on the track, their breath steaming in the cool morning air, and then, because I felt like eating, I drove to a bar and grill. I parked the car on the street and went inside, but the grill part was closed. This was just a bar, low-ceilinged and not that glamorous, a long room, three steps down from the street, and half of its tables had chairs stacked on top of them. It smelled like dead beer, and the floor was sticky. It reminded me of a Polish tavern.
As casually as possible I sidled up to the bar and ordered—after seeing a man with a Budweiser bottle—the same thing, taking it to an empty table carved with hieroglyphs. The souvenirs on the walls were dusty. I could hear a buzzing, a high-pitched buzzing from somewhere. No one paid attention as I drank, which on the one hand was a relief and on the other was a disappointment. I might as well have not been there. Which, I said to myself, is fine. I drank my beer, glancing at the television perched at the end of the bar. In it, people were doing things and saying things, and they were all in some relationship with each other.
But not to me.
Light was coming from the street outside, through the diamond-shaped window in the door, and I walked to the door. It was locked. But it was a very simple thing to just turn the little knob of the lock and push the door open, which I did, and it opened. The morning was almost over, I could tell by the light. There was no one on the street, no cars, and since I felt like walking, I did.
I found a coffee shop and went inside. Although I’d said thank god for anger, I was saying now, Thank god it was gone. I was glad to be done with it, glad to be sitting at a counter eating a bowl of chicken-vegetable soup. It was cold enough outside so that the windows had fogged up, and I didn’t notice when the man came in, but when the man sat down on the stool next to me I noticed his smell. I looked up and the man had pulled a tea bag out of his coat and was dipping it into a cup. He held it over the cup, watching it drip, and when it stopped dripping he put the used bag into a pocket of one of his coats. It wasn’t that cold but he was wearing two separate coats. He must have sensed me watching him because he turned to me and looked at me and it looked as if he tried to smile. He showed me his brown teeth, several of which were missing, and kept the same expression frozen on his face. His lower lip stuck out like a shelf, as if it was cut, but it hadn’t quite fallen off.
Then I noticed his stomach, which was swollen, but not from overeating. He wasn’t fat. It was distended, as if something was inside of him, growing inside of him, as if, if it were possible, he was pregnant. The man saw where I was looking and before I could speak he said to me, “I can’t get rid of it.” He looked down at the thing he had down there and patted it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why?” the man said.
“It’s pretty big,” I said.
“I know,” the man said, and rested his hand on top of it.
“Is it painful?” I said.
“Feel,” he said, smiling. “Feel it.” And he swiveled on his stool. He wanted me to feel his stomach.
“I can see,” I said. “That looks pretty good.”
I saw no need to touch his stomach, but he wanted me to feel it. He reached out, grabbed my hand, and held it, in his. He was holding my hand and I didn’t know quite what would be the appropriate thing to say, so I started explaining to the man about the neurological foundation of pain. I told him it was all in the mind. I explained that when you touch something, you have sensations, but those sensations aren’t pain unless you think they are. “Thinking makes it so,” I said, and I told the man he could have control. I told him that his body was a vehicle.
The man nodded, then guided my hand between the buttons of his shirt. He placed my hand against his taut, damp belly. It was moving with his breathing, up and down, and he pressed it there, or I pressed it there, against his belly, for what seemed like a long time.
And then I pulled my hand away. I slid my bowl of half-finished soup in front of him. I stood up and looked at the man, thinking the man would be looking at me, but he wasn’t. He was drinking his tea. A song about sexual healing was playing on a radio. I wanted to say something to him, and finally, when he did look up, I said something like “Good luck” or “See you later.” And then I walked out. I walked about a block down the street and I realized I was still feeling it. It was still there. I could still feel this person’s belly on my hand.
III
(Invidia)
1.
Just as a person who buys a new pair of shoes notices other people’s shoes, so I was noticing cars. The rest of the day I spent driving around Lexington, around the public housing projects, the vacant lots, the liquor stores, and the “revitalized” downtown, watching cars and the people getting in and out of cars. The people were living their lives, or seemed to be, doing what they could do, given the circumstances they had.
My own circumstances were starting to feel used up. My intuition, which I’d been using to find Anne, or thought I’d been using, was gone. And even if I’d had a full supply, all the intuition in the world wouldn’t find her if she didn’t want to be found. She was the one who’d left me, and if, in fact, she didn’t want me to find her, even if she was still here somewhere (which she probably wasn’t), there was nothing I could do.
I realized I was going about this whole thing all wrong. I’d been trying to find this thing, and since the best way to find something is to stop looking so hard, I decided to stop looking for Anne. Let’s be realistic, I thought, and I turned my attention to the most realistic thing I had, or the most salient realistic thing I had: my teeth. They were covered in a film of day-old plaque from not brushing. So after about an hour of driving I turned onto a road called Circle Road or Loop Road, driving past the motels and strip malls lining the road, looking for a drugstore. It was my habit now to scan the streets and parking lots, so I also did that, looking for something that by this time had become a little hazy in my mind. It wasn’t hard to find a mall, a so-called megamall, filled with music and escalators and a big-brand drugstore. I walked into the upbeat music of the drugstore, bought some toothpaste, and when I walked back out into the parking lot at first I didn’t notice it. It took me a couple of steps before I actually turned around and recognized that the maroon station wagon parked in the middle of the lot was my maroon station wagon.
I wasn’t as excited as I expected I would be. I didn’t start jumping up and down. I mean it seemed to be my old car, but it had a different license plate, a California license. So I sat in my faded red coupe, watching my old maroon car from a distance, feeling that modicum of hope returning. I brushed my teeth with some bottled water, nibbled on some cheese-flavored snack food, reclined in the seat, and generally spent the afternoon drifting in and out of thought with nothing happening to the car or any people connected to the car.
I was watching the shadows lengthen across the asphalt, waiting until someone came and took possession, and when someone did finally come, it wasn’t a single person. A man and two women came out of a family restaurant named Michael’s or Anthony’s and got in t
he car. The man drove, and I followed him as he drove, getting back on the Circle Road or New Circle Road. I continued following the car around this Circle until they pulled into the parking lot of one of the many motels, this one a two-story model with a wagon wheel as part of the signage. I watched my old maroon car pull up beside another, larger car, a more luxurious car, a Mercedes or Lexus or BMW. This, I thought, made sense. Although it wasn’t silver like the luxury car I remembered from New Jersey, it wasn’t exactly black either. It was a kind of dark, dark gray, and I realized that my memory of the car at the gas pump might be faulty. And not just the car.
I was watching the people inside the car, and when they got out of the car, by this time, I’d picked out one of the people, a woman. The man and the other woman seemed somehow aligned, and the one woman seemed slightly removed, and it was this woman, the removed woman, who, whether consciously or not, I took as the primary focus of my watching. It was her I watched as she walked up the stairs—as all three of them walked up the outdoor stairs—and entered a room on the second floor.
I walked to the check-in office, past the ice machine and illuminated vacancy part of the no vacancy sign, and at the reception desk I got a room for the night. It was from this room, with its queen-sized bed and lamp and television on a table, that I looked out through the curtains to the parking lot. I was on the ground floor, not exactly below, but somewhere below, the people I now seemed to be stalking.
This was the first time I’d had a bed to myself since leaving New York, and I wanted to lie down. I needed in fact to lie down and sleep, to stretch out and relax, but I couldn’t afford to relax. When they say that the joy of a motel room is also its heartbreak, they mean that since every room is basically the same, the experience of any individual room depends on the mind of the inhabitant. If there’s an inclination in the lodger for comfort, then there’s comfort, and if the room is not quite right, if something is wrong or missing—for me, something was missing—the room is a reminder, more than a reminder; it’s a sharp stick digging into the heartache that’s already there. Which was why I couldn’t fall asleep. I was worried about losing the fragile thread connecting me to my old life. I saw the car, my old maroon car, as a thread or string, connected to a kite, and I was holding on, but the kite had a mind of its own.
In the morning, when I looked out to the parking lot, I saw that one of the two cars—it was a Mercedes—was gone. I threw on my shoes and walked out to the car that was still there, the station wagon. Standing under a cloudless sky, I examined it for signs of familiarity and remembered experience, and the funny thing was, I couldn’t find any. There were no familiar dents or scratches. When I looked inside, there was no distinguishing crack or tear or cigarette burn to mark it as anything other than an old car, like any other old car.
The doors were locked, and walking around the car I was trying to smell some smell that might be emanating from inside. Anne had given the car a nickname, Chaucer, which came from Chaser, which came from the fact that the car was a Mercury Tracer. I was looking at the car, thinking of two possibilities. Either it was a different car—and if it was a different car then that was the end of it—or else it wasn’t a different car, and these people had either bought it or stolen it, and possibly stolen Anne.
Looking through the shatterproof glass I half hoped that Anne might be hidden under the blankets in the back, that I could call in through the glass, softly, but loud enough, so that if she was tied down under the blankets she would hear me.
“Anne,” I called out. “Anne.”
And that’s when the girl, the one I’d been watching, walked up to me. Standing slightly behind me, she said to me, in a loud whisper, “Are you interested in the car?”
As I turned, I could feel the adrenaline rushing into my bloodstream. I noticed she was wearing a blue beret.
“Who’s Anne?” she says.
“I was looking at your car.”
“To buy?” she says.
“Where did you get it?”
“It’s not mine,” she tells me. “But if you want to talk to the owner…” and she begins looking in her bag for a pen.
I touch my nonexistent breast pockets to indicate my lack of writing implement, and then she says, “Follow me.” She starts walking and I follow her, back to the motel building and up the stairs to the door of her room. Where she stops. She unlocks the door and stands, wondering, I suppose, whether to let me in. I squint in through the slightly opened door, looking for clues.
“Do you like your room?” I say.
“The room?” she says, and she steps aside so that I can see inside. And I do. The room seems normal enough, and as I’m peering in she asks me if I’m looking for something.
“No,” I say. “No. Just looking.”
She says her name is Linda.
“That’s pretty,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I mean it means pretty. In Spanish.”
“Oh…”
“Leenda. Is how you would say it.”
At that, or just after that, she invites me in. Her gestures are direct and forthright and I follow her into her room, an exact replica of my own room except with more clothes hanging on the chairs. As she roots around for a pen and paper I’m watching her, and I notice a lightness in her movements, and in those movements I detect a kind of contentment or happiness. She seems to be at ease. And it’s exactly this ease or contentment that I find inappropriate, or inappropriate vis-à-vis my own world of dis-ease and dis-contentment. In this other person’s—I wouldn’t call it happiness, but her apparent happiness—in the lackadaisical quality of her trust, the seed of my envy is planted. Why does she have the ease and happiness? Why is it hers and not mine? And it doesn’t make sense, but as I stand in the carpeted room, this is the question that’s bugging me. I’m feeling it. Her abundance is creating a lack of abundance in me, a paucity to which I react, not with generosity or understanding, or even healthy competition, but with wormy invidiousness.
My response to her seeming confidence is like Claggart’s response to the goodness and beauty of Billy Budd. It’s a kind of envy in which the goodness and grace of this other person has to be canceled out.
“Take off your hat,” she tells me.
“I’m not wearing a hat,” I say.
“Figuratively, I mean. Relax.”
So I try to seem relaxed. And that works for a while, and we talk for a while, about things, like the color of the car, and the profusion of bugs on the windshield, and all the time I’m talking to her I’m gauging her, waiting for her to trip, figuratively, so I can know whether she’s had a party to play in Anne’s disappearance. I already think she’s had some part in it, but I want proof to make it all clear. Then she’ll be bad and I’ll be good and I’ll feel better. But something about the room, or about her and her apparent honesty, is making me feel worse, and so, once she gives me the piece of paper with the telephone number, I fold it, put it in my back pocket, and then I tell her I have to go.
2.
Later that day, through the curtains of my room, I watch the girl walk across the parking lot, but instead of getting into one of the cars, she walks past the cars, to the edge of the parking lot where it meets the circular drive. I leave my room and follow her, staying far enough behind her to avoid obviousness, but trailing her as she walks along the sidewalk. The sidewalk at this section of road is mostly a trail of hard-packed earth, through weeds sometimes and little puddles of water, and I note, at one point, her footprints.
At the intersection of the circular drive and one of the radial streets that feed the university there’s a liquor store and she goes in. Rather than waiting outside, I also go in. Why not? I see her head looking into the refrigerated cabinets and I look at bottles of wine, all the time watching her. She’s buying some kind of juice or fruit beverage and I’m thinking about her, and I’m also thinking about buying a reasonably priced California wine. I wait for her to pay for her fruit dri
nk at the counter, and then, as she exits out the door, I decide to buy a disposable camera. I’m thinking it might come in handy, but when I pay for it, I’m about thirty-five cents short. The man behind the counter, with his combed gray hair, tells me to give him what I have, take the camera, and pay him later. The man insists I take it, and for some reason, looking at the man, and seeing beyond his bristly mustache and bad teeth to the generous smile forming on his cheeks, I do. I thank the man and tell him I don’t need a bag. I hurry out of the liquor store because, like a good tracker, I don’t want to lose my quarry.
But when I get outside, worried that she’s gone off and that I’ll have some catching up to do, I find her instead, standing right in front of me, wrestling with the plastic wrapper on her drink. I watch her for a long moment with a strange sense of pleasure and fulfillment. In a way I enjoy her struggle. I feel lifted by her momentary difficulty, and feeling garrulous, I speak to her. “Having a little trouble?” I say.
She looks up and smiles. “Protecting us from ourselves,” she says, and when she finally gets the plastic removed from the bottle she throws the packaging into the trash and begins walking back to the motel.
That’s where I would be going too, but because I don’t want to seem to be following her, I don’t move. I don’t know if I should be walking with her or not, and so not knowing, I deal with my own packaging, and all the time I’m dealing with it I’m thinking about her, the way her hair fell, or was blown, by the spring winds, across her face, and her collar pulled up against the wind, and her fingers, and her skin, a dark skin or softly tanned skin, and her mouth when she smiled. Standing there, I wish I would have remembered more of her, and other parts of her. I’m already forgetting so much, and I think, If only I had a better memory.
That’s why I turn, follow her tracks, and catch up with her at the edge of a bulldozed field. It’s empty at the moment, awaiting some future construction, and she’s gone out there for some reason, to look around and breathe, and I find myself pulled out there as well, to her.
