We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  He laughs. “Of course we’re not. I was just practising with you last week.”

  “Practising?”

  “Recruiting. For the Cult of David. It’s this new ladies’ club I’m starting.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Would you relax? I know you’re a happily married woman,” he says and steps outside.

  She sets down her Moleskine. Clicks shut her pen. A happily married woman. She cuts away a word so the rest fit more easily into her head. A married woman. As she crosses the empty living room and follows David onto the balcony, she cuts away another.

  —

  MY MOM’S OUT, like usual, and it’s already nine o’clock. So basically I don’t have a choice. I find my dad’s keys in the pocket of his jeans. Back the Jeep out of the driveway, nervous as shit the entire time. I only have my beginner’s, so technically I can’t be on the road without a fully licensed driver. And I’ve only got the one hand. And my dad has a temper. And generally doesn’t like people stealing his car.

  It’s just a swing around the block to Jess’s but I’m kind of all over the place. My stump’s stumping around the centre console, nowhere to hide unless I stick it between my legs. Which I try. But it looks weird and while I’m staring down at my crotch, I almost run over a squirrel.

  I have to reach across the steering wheel to put the Jeep into park. And of course, Jess looks gorgeous when she climbs in.

  Hey Finn, she says, real casually.

  Hey. I go over the curb backing out of her driveway, one wheel dropping down hard.

  Should I grab a helmet? She reaches for the safety strap dangling from the roof. Joking, she says, looking over at me. Let’s just have fun tonight, all right? Like we agreed.

  Last night. In the bathroom. We decided to go out. Like a normal couple, doing a normal thing.

  At the end of the street I signal the turn, it’s easy, the lever’s on the left side. The wipers would be trickier, but it’s nice out, no chance of rain, the low sun turning the horizon a glowy pink. You have a good time last night with your friend?

  Hard not to with Mel.

  I wait for more but Jess just slides down her window and plugs her phone into the Aux cable. Starts bopping along to Beyoncé, getting all in formation in the passenger seat, with her hair blowing in the breeze, and for a second I think maybe this will work, maybe we can do this, be happy out in the world. But once we’re out of Old Aberdeen, heading across town where I don’t know the streets, it starts to feel more like a driving lesson than a date.

  Jess turns down the radio. You’re a little close, she says. Move into the left lane earlier. Give yourself time to turn. Yellow light, she says, yellow light!

  My meat-stump practically resting in her lap.

  In the lobby of Silver City, posters rectangled by Hollywood lights: a couple action movies, a few romantic comedies. Love complications, ha ha. I stare over at the concession line, a long straggle of able-bodied strangers. The smell of fake butter, the gross-out picture of the nachos and cheese.

  In the arcade, some guy with a shaved head and a sleeve of tattoos is hammering the punching ball, taking two, three steps back and then coming at it, hitting it with everything he’s got. There’s a leathery smack and a loud metallic thump when the ball hits the back of the machine. Red lights flash, a siren wails. Smack, slam, wail. On the poster next to me, Margot Robbie looks cutely annoyed. Smack, slam, wail. I picture Eric punching me in the head.

  What do you want to see? Jess is standing in front of a scruffy Chris Pratt.

  You pick.

  We should both pick.

  I don’t care. Smack, slam, wail. Fuck. I look at the guy hammering the ball, the lights around the movie posters, all those strangers, and all of a sudden what happens in my bedroom feels easy. This, this should be easy—going on a date, seeing a movie—but it’s actually the other way around.

  You okay?

  Yeah. Even though I’m taller, she looks older than me. I feel people staring, at the skinny amputee, so fucking out of his league. They’re not staring, but I feel them staring. Some guy bumps into me, I bump into Margot Robbie, her perky tits right in my face.

  You want to go? Jess looks confused. She takes my hand. Crappy movies, she says when we’re outside. She weaves us toward the car, the relief of fresh air and a dark parking lot and her hand in mine. We can watch them later on Netflix, she says, as if that’s even possible. Or do ourselves a favour and skip them altogether.

  —

  “GOOD?” DAVID ASKS. He and Mia sit leaning up against the window, gazing across the condo into the far-away kitchen.

  “I feel like I’m on vacation,” Mia says. She now adores the emptiness of the space in front of her. The fact that there is nothing of consequence in the room. In the cupboards. A person can live pretty well on cold cereal and takeout. She’ll buy David a bowl and a spoon and the place will be perfect.

  He reaches over and for a second Mia thinks he’s going to try to hold her hand, but instead he slides back the sleeve of her blouse. “An injury,” he says. They both consider the band of reddened skin braceleting her wrist. “I saw it on the balcony.”

  Mia casually shakes down her sleeve. “It’s nothing,” she says, although she can’t believe Michael’s belt left that mark. Taking a page from Finn, she wore a long-sleeved blouse to cover it, yet feels remarkably unfazed by David’s discovery. So what if she likes her husband to tie her up and get a little dominant? So what if she likes her sex a little loveless?

  “Looks like rope burn.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Ligature marks,” David insists.

  “Nope.”

  “Naughty girl,” he says.

  “No.” Mia shakes her head. “Not me.”

  David bumps his shoulder against hers. “Fifty shades of Mia.”

  She just laughs and rests her head on the glass. She’s tried not to think too much about what happened in the closet. Michael’s pleas to kiss her. The way he so gently made her come. And afterwards, god…the blouse, his request to be loved.

  “I want a pool table,” David says suddenly, “and some really nice patio furniture. And one of those big stainless steel heaters so I can sit out there in the fall.” He bangs her shoulder again. “We should go shopping,” he says.

  “Now?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “We can’t drive anywhere.”

  “There are places in the Market. We can walk.”

  “But…but I’m stoned.” She wants to stretch out on the floor. Stare at the ceiling. Maybe eat something at some point.

  “We won’t be operating any heavy equipment.” David works his wallet from his back pocket, slides a credit card from a tight leather slot and centres it neatly between Mia’s bare feet. The rectangle of plastic shines up at her, a powerful pop of silver against the matte of the hardwood floor: the embedded chip, the raised numbers, the ghostly hologram, and AMANDA BARNARD embossed along the bottom.

  “Wow,” she says. “It’s so beautiful. We should put it in a time capsule for future generations to worship.”

  David rolls up off the floor. “I changed her PIN. Sixty-eight forty-four. There’s a thirty-five-thousand-dollar limit.”

  Mia peers up at him. Like the credit card in front of her, his hair shines silver in the light. “Take it,” he says. He has full lips, a lovely shaped mouth. “For the condo.”

  He holds out his hand. It is close to her face, her shoulder. His nails are well tended. He wears no wedding band. “Come on,” he says. “I don’t want to start the cult on an old mattress on the floor.”

  —

  JESS DRIVES. I sit in the passenger seat, feeling about two years old. If she’s heading home, she’s taking the long way. At one point she stops and goes into a little corner store and comes out with a bag she throws in the back. She checks her map app, takes a couple backstreets, then heads east out Number 7, a two-lane highway that connects the city to a strip of shitty little towns.
Carp, Renfrew, Cobden. I played hockey in every one—their cold country arenas. Farmers screaming at farm kids, city parents screaming at city kids. At least that much is the same.

  We drive along in silence for a while, fields of something on both sides of the car. Corn or wheat or canola, maybe—if I were older, smarter, knew anything about anything, I could probably identify the crop.

  Want to know where we’re going? Jess finally asks. We pass a junkyard, stacks of dead cars, then a gas station, two dark pumps out front, an old boat tipped against the side wall of the concrete-block garage.

  The dump?

  She ducks and points through the windshield. The movies, she says.

  And right away I see it. Up ahead, on the left-hand side, the place my parents used to take us. The lights aren’t working, burned out probably, or smashed out, but the sign’s gotta be thirty feet high. Even with just the moon hitting it, I can make out the choppy edge of the feathers, the fade of the red and green and black paint, the letters totem-poled up the centre.

  The parking lot of the old Thunderbird Drive-In is buckled and cracked and half covered over by weeds. Jess slows right down, but the car still bounces as we pull in. The chain-link gates are padlocked shut, and the ticket booths are falling down, but the board fence is still standing, and beyond the fence, I can see the top of the screen.

  Outside the car, the shrill of crickets and the far-off smell of manure.

  It doesn’t take long to find a way in. Around the corner of the fence, a couple of boards lie in the long grass, rusty nails pointing skyward.

  Do-do, do-do. Jess does the Jaws theme as we squeeze through the gap.

  We set up thirty feet back from the screen. Jess has the bag from the store and I’ve got the blanket from the trunk. I stretch it out, a scrap of red wool in a coral of weeds and gravel. The windows of the concession stand are all busted. And the boxy metal speakers have been ripped out, but some of the posts are still upright, tipped and tilted and wires dangling, like a string of telephone poles in the wake of a natural disaster.

  I lie down, and Jess sits cross-legged beside me. She opens a bag of Smartfood and starts dropping popcorn into my mouth.

  Good? she says.

  I lick the cheese off my lips and nod.

  I also got root beer. A&W. Your favourite. We should drink it while it’s cold.

  I prop myself up on one elbow, take the bottle she pulls from the bag. I use my back teeth to unscrew it, spit the cap onto the gravel beside us, don’t care about litter or being polite.

  Sorry things aren’t easy, she says.

  I just shrug, like it’s no big deal.

  But you’re strong, Finn.

  You’re strong.

  No. She shakes her head. Not like you. I know how to take care of myself, but that’s a different kind of thing. She stares at the screen, her legs tucked up, her arms hugging her knees. Remember the dancing drinks? she says. The wiener jumping into the bun?

  I raise one eyebrow and take another chug, the root beer fizzing in my mouth.

  What do you want to watch? The screen, greyed and warped from the weather, is cut by dark cracks where the plywood is coming apart.

  Whatever.

  She gives me a smile, so beautiful and simple out here where it’s just the two of us alone. Something old, she says. Something we’ve already seen.

  An Inconvenient Truth? Beasts of the Southern Wild?

  Seriously, Finn.

  I Am Legend, I say. Just a man and his dog playing in a boarded-up drive-in to a doomed audience of two.

  No, Jess says. No end-of-humanity stuff. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?

  Extremely Long and Incredibly Sad? Yeah, no thanks.

  She stuffs more popcorn into my mouth. I hold her wrist and lick the powdered cheese off the tips of her fingers. It’s the first time all night that I don’t feel like a little kid she’s being paid to look after.

  Big Fish, she says, her thumb still in my mouth.

  Okay. I let go. Big Fish.

  The field of daffodils.

  The old man dying.

  God, Finn, do you have to be so grim?

  She lies down and puts her head on my stomach so our bodies make a T. She’s on my good side. I slip my arm across her. Just under her neck. She takes my hand so it’s not on her boob. Her head rising and falling in time with my breath, our fingers laced. She turns so I can see her face, in the hollow below my ribs. The poet in the woods, she says.

  The Asian circus twins.

  Oh, you remember the twins. Every man’s fantasy.

  They were conjoined if you remember. Siamese.

  Right, she says. Not so sexy.

  I like it that she gets jealous of girls in a movie we watched when I was a kid. Somehow it makes things feel more normal.

  But they weren’t really, she says. Not in the end.

  Nothing was the same in the end.

  She squeezes my hand. Here’s where I’d tell her. Here’s where she’d tell me right back.

  The big fish trapped in the pool, I say.

  The house, she says, with the white picket fence.

  —

  MICHAEL AND THE BOY lean against the chain link of the backstop, arms propped on their knees. They’re all set up, but tonight they pause to enjoy the view: the Arm parked smack-centre in the dirt, where the pitching mound would be if the diamond had one.

  Michael reaches for the joint the kid offers, enjoying the sweet, earthy pong that clouds over him. The kid watches him take a pull.

  “You know, everyone thinks you’re a faggot.”

  “What?” he says through clenched teeth, barely managing to hold in the smoke.

  “That you’re going to ass-rape me one night or something.”

  Michael hacks up his lungful.

  “Oh, yeah,” the boy says. “You bet.”

  The kid’s nodding as he pinches the spliff from Michael and takes a drag, perfectly relaxed. “Me? I think if you’re going to do it, you’re being pretty fucking patient.” Michael laughs, barely. “But Rae Chan says we’re all rapists. Just depends on the circumstances.”

  “Christ. Who is this guy?”

  “Have to spread our seed, man. Survival of the fittest. Rae Chan’s always talking about shit like that. Or how, like, you put a guy in uniform and he can just do it on command. Yes sir! Just following orders, ma’am! I mean, like, what’s with that?”

  “War. Men are killing each other. Lines are not clearly drawn.”

  “Yeah, but just physically, how does he do it?”

  “I guess he’d get shot if he didn’t.”

  “So he’s scared into it?”

  Michael doesn’t want to think about it. Or himself in this context. Or Finn. Or any man he knows. Even the kid beside him. And he really doesn’t have to: it’s unlikely any of them will ever go to war. What Michael can’t hold at a comfortable distance is the memory of pinning Mia against the bathroom wall, the fight that ended in a hard fuck on the floor. Or tying her up in the closet. He’d been gentle with her afterwards, but still, it wasn’t what she wanted. Is it in him, declawed, half listening to reason, but there in his bones and blood?

  “Maybe it’s learned.” He’s talking to himself as much as he is to the boy. A we-don’t-shape-the-culture-the-culture-shapes-us kind of thing. Michael read that once, in one of Mia’s magazines.

  “Learned?” The boy looks at him like he’s crazy. “If that’s learned, our dicks should get an A-plus.” Dirk takes another drag—it’s always a two-for-one thing with him—before passing the joint back to Michael. “But dudes whacking to hardcore? I don’t care what anyone says, it’s fucking shit up.”

  Jesus.

  Dirk frowns out at the ball diamond, the grassy field. “Okay, like, say four bitches walk down that path, right now. Hot or just average or whatever. It’s not like I’m going to get all rapey, but I’m like yes, yes, no, yes. It’s that fucking simple. Couldn’t shut it off if I tried.” The boy’s wa
tching him again, but Michael keeps his head down, intrigued by the earth between his feet. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” the kid says. “I mean I know you’re old and everything, but you’re still the same species. It’s not like all of a sudden you’re more evolved or something.”

  “All I can tell you”—Michael wants to end this discussion and move on to a lighter topic, or better yet, just get high and play some ball—“is I love my wife.”

  “Yeah. That’s why you’re here every night.” The kid drops his head back against the chain link. From where he’s sitting Michael can’t see the river, but he can feel it, a fast, dark slide in the night. Thirty seconds pass before the boy blows out a long drift of smoke. “You wanna know what I think?”

  “Jesus, Dirk, I like it better when you don’t think so much.”

  “I think you come here every night because you’re lonely and you’re fucked up and you like baseball.”

  Michael snorts. His brain is losing cohesion, but still, the words feel close. Lately, he’s not sure about much. He doesn’t know if he’s becoming more or less himself, if the guy lounging in the dirt of an old ball diamond beside a stranger kid with a bottomless supply of weed is a man he can trust. He knows he’s fine with not working. And that when he’s out here he doesn’t feel stupid or angry or incompetent or betrayed. He feels good. Happy. He’s happy now.

  “What about you?” he asks. “Why do you show up?”

  “My dad doesn’t get me,” the boy says. “At home—I drive him crazy.” He stares out at the diamond and his mouth curls into a slow grin. “And it’s a pretty sweet set-up, right?”

  The brown earth, the heft of the pitching machine, the spread of the outfield, the belt of long grasses, and beyond it, the orange city glow hangs over the graffiti bridge like a primordial sunset. “Pretty fucking sweet,” Michael says.

  “My mom told me there used to be an access road but once that school there was built, the field got cut off.”

  “Makes sense,” Michael says gruffly. Even stoned, mention of parents, a mother he talks to about this field, and no doubt about the lonely, fucked-up guy he plays ball with and, now, smokes weed with every night makes Michael a little queasy. The slippery stew of his brain starts sliding toward paranoid.