by Paul Theroux
Ray said, “She’s like a stranger.”
“That’s my Shelby,” the man said, and hung up.
Shelby still worked with him. Her father’s abruptness (he had also seemed grimly amused) had rattled him, and so he said to her, “You are everything to me now. Those women are all gone and forgotten.”
This was in the office. There was a knock, the receptionist saying, “We have a new patient.”
Ray went cold when he saw her tilted back in the chair, awaiting his examination. She did not even have to say, “Remember me?” He remembered her. He remembered his mistake. She was Sharon, from the cleaning company, and he was surprised that someone so young—no more than eighteen or so—was doing this menial job. Why wasn’t she in school? He’d asked her that. “I hate school,” she said. “I want to make some money.” She seemed to linger in her work, and one evening when they were alone, Ray had surprised her in her mopping, and kissed her, hoping for more. But she’d pushed him away, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and never came back. That same year Shelby had become his hygienist, so she knew nothing of Sharon. He’d never seen Sharon again, nor thought of her—it was only a foolish, impulsive, hopeful kiss!—until now.
She stared at him with implacable eyes; her very lack of expression seemed accusatory. She lay canted back in the chair as Shelby hooked on her earpieces and adjusted the protective goggles. Sharon’s mouth was prominent and her cold eyes were blurred by the plastic. She seemed weirdly masked, with an upside-down face, from where Ray stood, slightly behind her with Shelby. Her mouth began to move, the bite of the teeth reversed.
“You got yourself a hot assistant now,” Sharon said. “Bet you kiss her when no one’s looking. Like you did to me.”
“This is my wife,” Ray said, hating the way Sharon spoke. “Now open wide and let me have a look.”
“I can’t do this,” Shelby said. She gathered the loops of the suction device and tossed them into the sink.
“Shel,” he said, then, seeing it was hopeless, that Shelby had closed the door behind her, he attended to Sharon, his fingers in her mouth, gagging her. He wanted to pull out her tongue.
When he finished the cleaning he said, “You’ve never been here before as a patient. I haven’t seen you for years. You don’t need any serious work. Why did you come?”
“Just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Sharon said. “Hey, you probably think that kissing me and touching me was something I’d forget.”
He sighed, he was going to shout, but he forced himself to speak calmly. “I’m done. I’ve knocked some barnacles off your teeth. Don’t come back. If you do, I will refuse to see you.”
Now Sharon’s goggles were off and she was upright, blinking like a squirrel. She licked a smear of toothpaste from her lips and said, “I won’t be back. I don’t have to. I’ve done what I needed to do.”
“What was that?”
“Make you remember.”
But it would be a new memory. He had not recalled her as so plain, so fierce-faced. She had been young, attractive, in a T-shirt and shorts, with a long-handled mop in her hands, and now she’d accused him of forgetting her. But he had not forgotten—he remembered her as a girl, alone in the corridor of his office, holding the sudden promise of pleasure. The shock to him on her return was that she had aged, that she was raw-boned and resentful and no longer attractive.
Before going home to Shelby that day he saw himself in the bathroom mirror and hated his face. He hated what time had done to it, he hated what time had done to these women. He had flirted and pawed these old women. They all look like you. He hated the sight of his hands. I sometimes think they are you. Each person in our past is an aspect of us. You need to know that.
Shelby treated him as though he was dangerous and tricky. She seemed afraid to be with him because of who might show up, to remind him of what he’d done and who he was, an old beast they haunted because they could not forgive him.
Shelby and he lived separately in the house, took turns in the kitchen, ate their meals apart, more like hostile roommates than a married couple—a reenactment of his last months with Angie.
He called Angie again, but this time her number had been disconnected. Then he found out why. A patient said casually, just as he’d finished putting on a crown, “Sorry about Angie.”
Misunderstanding, Ray began to explain, and then realized that the patient was telling him that Angie had died.
It had happened two weeks before. He found the details online, on the Medford Transcript website. Collapsed and died after a short illness. Instead of going home, he drove the seventy-five miles to the cemetery and knelt at her grave. A metal marker with her name, courtesy of the funeral home, had been inserted in the rug-like cover of new sod. He told himself that he was sorrowful, but he did not feel it: he was relieved, he felt lighter, he blamed Angie for the swarm of old lovers. This feeling scared him in the dampness of the cemetery, where he suspected he was being watched. It was then, looking around, that he saw that Angie was buried next to her mother, a reunion of sorts.
He told Shelby that Angie had died—“It’s a turning point!”—that they could start all over again.
“You actually seem glad that Angie’s dead,” Shelby said. “Poor Angie.”
Shelby stopped coming to work. She didn’t want to stay at home either, as though fearing a woman would appear unbidden, a hag from the past, to confront Ray, to humiliate her. She seemed to regard him as the monster he believed himself to be in his worst moments, the embodiment of everything he’d done, and now, from the return of these offended women, she knew every one of his reckless transgressions.
With the death of Angie, the visitations ceased. But, demoralized, humiliated, Shelby left him. She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay at the office, and got it. And by degrees they separated. They spoke through lawyers until it was final, and he was alone.
Ray is not surprised when, one night, he is awoken by a clatter, as of someone hurrying in darkness. It is a familiar sound. He awaits the visitation, hoping it might make him less lonely. Perhaps it is Angie, who has come to mock him. He hopes to beg her forgiveness. No, it is not Angie’s voice. It is Shelby’s, and it is triumphant. But the body, the hag’s face, is his own.
Rangers
“YOU’LL HAVE TO excuse us,” the young woman said at the rounded pulpit-like curve of the gleaming bar. She wore a low-cut blouse and had been listening intently, as though taking an order from the man beside her, who turned away to speak on his cell phone. “We just got married. Plus, we’re new here.”
Her sudden blurted candor silenced the drinkers. There was only the low bubbling sound of the TV. The woman’s face was pink-blotched and hot with exertion. She repeated what she’d said to a smiling man in a camouflage jacket and cap by the cash register, who had also been talking on a cell phone. He said “Doesn’t that call for a drink?” to the barman next to him ringing up a sale.
“Just a Coke for me,” the woman said. “I found out today I’m expecting.”
A bottle of beer and a shot of whiskey were set before the man next to her. He smiled past his phone and nodded his thanks.
“It’s Leon’s girlfriend. I don’t care—can I call you Sarge?” She tugged at her blouse, shaking her breasts loose at the barman. “I’m Beanie.”
The barman leaned closer, open-mouthed, holding his fat hands back as you would restrain a pair of puppies.
“That’s enough of that,” Sarge said. “And you just married.”
“Anyone ever tell you your husband’s got your eyes and your coloration,” a nearby woman said. “I’m a cosmetologist.”
“He is also my best friend,” Beanie said, but didn’t smile.
“I’m making a donation to the jar in your name,” Sarge said. Then, solemnly, “Beanie.” The jar was a large clear glass flask, with a colored Stars and Stripes label pasted on and a handwritten sign hung on its neck, F
or the Troops. The plugged and slotted lid was padlocked. You wrote your name on a ten-dollar bill. “More than two thousand in there. For the troops.”
The cosmetologist said, “Funny how camo makes you conspicuous, rather than the other way around.”
“Desert camo,” Sarge said. “Ranger camo.”
Seizing the barman’s attention again with her breasts, Beanie said, “Like them?” and rattled a yellow plastic pharmacy container of pills. But the barman’s face was unreadable.
They were back the next night, the serious man Leon and his cell phone, the woman Beanie drenched in light, showing her breasts and the pills, saying, “I don’t even care!”
Sarge greeted them, then said to the barman, “But I’m not going alone,” and at closing time, to Beanie, “My friend here and I are joining you for a party. You gave him a thrill up his leg.”
Later, in the empty parking lot, under the light, the four of them were silent but for Sarge, who, taking a pistol from Leon, said, “Here’s what I want you to do for us, buddy,” and the barman looked up at the three severe faces.
Talking softly, the three approached a house with the sign on the lawn For Sale by Owner, and when the muscular young man answered the door and said, “I was expecting the married couple, like you explained,” Leon said, “This is our friend.”
“Can we talk to the owner?” Sarge said, frowning under his cap brim.
“You’re looking at him, soldier,” the young man in the doorway said, pleased with himself, and folded his arms as though to emphasize his tattoos.
“We don’t want to waste your time.”
“I was military too. I know about wasted time.”
“Because you didn’t embrace the suck,” Sarge said.
“What’d you learn?”
“I learned there’s more ways of dying than ways of living.”
The man leaned back from the words. “You said something about scoping out the house.”
They loped from room to room, the young man striding behind them, praising the features. In his confident voice he said, “You two look so much alike.”
Beanie said, “He’s like a brother to me.”
Sarge said, “I don’t think this is the one.”
“Hardly gave it a chance.” And the man pushed his sleeve up further to show the rest of the tattoo, a shapely blue mermaid. He said, “Rapture of the Deep.”
They visited three more houses, For Sale by Owner, walking to the front door, full of compliments, seeming eager to move in. “Got a car?” Sarge asked at the first one.
“Out back. What’s left of it.”
The others were short visits too.
The fourth, a farmhouse off the road, lay in semidarkness.
“You mustn’t mind us, we’re both a little deaf,” the old man said, letting them in. An old woman squinted from her chair and looked futile. She said, “Married sixty-two years.”
Beanie murmured, “Awesome.”
“But somehow it seems longer than that,” the man said.
“Them are old. Them are nice,” Sarge said of some objects on the mantelpiece—silver, some porcelain, a clock.
“Family stuff. Mother keeps saying we should insure them.” The man smiled at Beanie. “What do you look so worried for?”
“Hope your car’s insured, nice-looking ride like that,” Leon said.
“I’ve always had a Caddy.”
“Tell me about it,” Sarge said. Then, “Let’s see that cellar of yours. Maybe we can convert it.”
Rolling down the window of the Caddy—Leon beside him, Beanie in the back seat—Sarge said to the skinny woman in white boots leaning against the door, “That’s not sufficient. You need to turn a few more tricks, Suzie.”
“Melba.” The woman’s smile set one of her eyes twitching. “But anyway, how about you? Feel like a party? What about your friend there?”
Beanie said, “You should do yourself a favor and get an intervention.”
“You got his features,” the woman said, as though trying to make a friend.
“I’m intervening,” Sarge said. He crumbled a pill in his palm. “This here’s for you. You can snort it or use it the other way, as an innuendo.”
Leon said, “She’s wasting our time.”
“Give her a break,” Beanie said.
But Sarge said, “Hop in, Suzie.” And to Leon, “Regular cash flow. She’s sitting on a gold mine.” And when the skinny woman hesitated, and Sarge snatched her wrist hard, it was Beanie who let out a cry.
In the back seat, moved by the infant depicted on the box next to her, the woman said, “I used to have one of them baby monitors.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
That week they worked out of a motel, Beanie bringing men, one at a time, from the bars in town and turning them over to her. With the woman in a stupor they drove to the coast and set up in a condo near the harbor, Beanie managing the johns, saying to Leon and Sarge, “This is women’s work. Keep off.”
At the condo, Beanie said to the man she’d brought, “I want to introduce you to my sister,” and unlocked the too-warm and dimly lit back bedroom. “And no rough stuff.” Sarge, and sometimes Leon, listened for trouble, and stepped into the hallway to collect the money afterward from the startled man.
Sarge said, “Ever think—a guy will crawl across broken glass to get a woman for sex. But when it’s over he won’t spend five minutes with her for a burger. Do women know that?”
“It’s why we say maybe,” Beanie said.
Still listening, Sarge shook his head. He was looking out the window.
“They got boat rides here,” he said. “Harbor cruises.”
Leon said softly, “If Beanie’s not coming, count me out.”
“You look pretty buoyant to me.” Sarge was smiling, not at what he said but at what he heard on the baby monitor. “But swimming was always your Achilles tendon. Hey, you could have been a Ranger too.”
“As if it mattered over there,” Leon said. “Because nothing mattered.”
“Wrong,” Sarge said. “It’s when you get home that nothing matters.” His head was still tilted toward the monitor. “No one’s listening.”
“Which one of them is your husband?” the skinny woman asked Beanie one morning over coffee.
Beanie frowned at her. “Neither one.”
“Because both of them hit on me all the time.”
The afternoon the john said to the woman, “If this is a financial transaction, then I have to inform you you’re breaking the law and that you’re under arrest,” the three others hearing it on the monitor hurried downstairs.
“Suzie’s nothing to cry about,” Sarge said to Beanie.
“Melba,” she said, and put her face in her hands.
“No more risks,” Sarge said. “We’ve got enough money to get us anywhere—like California, maybe.”
Beanie said, “I want to go back. I feel like something bad’s going to happen to us away from home.”
“That’s old-fashioned,” Sarge said. “It’s what I always liked about you.”
Leon stared, his eyes locked on him and going darker.
“Wish we still had that great car,” Beanie said.
“You don’t win by hunkering down. You win by moving. But that car was conspicuous trouble. And I’m never going back.”
A safe car was the secret, he said. And clean plates. And not speeding, not getting stopped by the law, staying among transients in RV parks, one or two nights, then roll.
They picked up a young man hitchhiking, to tease him. Sarge reached for Beanie’s blouse, saying, “Like these, kid?” and Leon, “Where’s your job?” When the student said, “There’s no jobs anymore,” Leon stopped the car and screamed, “Get a job, loser!” Sarge got out, panting. He dragged the boy onto the road. “Drop and give me fifty!”
At a small town, they asked directions at the local police station, one of Sarge’s dares. Leon whispered “Look” at the posted mug shots, Level 2 Sex Offenders, w
ith details of their offenses and their home addresses.
Leon said, “A hajji.”
They visited the man—Leon’s idea, and he was the one who knocked. “Police,” Leon said, the heel of his hand on his holstered gun. “We have a serious complaint,” and stepped inside while the others waited in the car.
Afterward, trembling in the back seat, he said, “Beanie, while I was in there, did he touch you?” and held his raw swollen hands against his thighs.
Beanie pressed her lips together and faced him with widened eyes.
“I couldn’t help myself.” Leon’s pale face showed pink-blotched cheeks. His wet hands had blackened the cloth of his jeans.
“Me, that’s my problem too,” Sarge said. “Thrill up my leg. I used to wonder why fat people are always hungry. I guess I know now.”
At the RV park that night, Leon said, “Beanie and I need to talk. We’ll be right back.”
“Hurry up. Three whole days here,” Sarge said. “This isn’t the safest of places.”
After their months of absence, Beanie and Leon resumed living in the family house. Whenever Sarge’s name came up, Beanie said, “It was all his fault. We should never have hooked up with him.”
Leon said, “He was my buddy over there.”
“Big buddy.”
Leon shrugged. “One of those vets that keeps his gun.”
But Beanie showed Leon that she had the gun. Soon afterward she got rid of it, threw it overboard from the boat at Hollins Pond.
“Why did you do that?”
“If you want it so bad you can swim for it.”
Leon winced. Instead of replying, he gripped the sides of the boat and steadied himself.
“But I don’t need a gun where you’re concerned. I know what you did.”
“Cut it out.”
He said it again. He knocked and repeated it that night at her bedroom door.
When Leon drowned in the boating accident, Beanie alerted the police. The pond was dragged, but Leon’s body was not found until a week later, swollen, buoyant, bumping the bars of the spillway where the river began.
