Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  Charlie doesn’t flail around, and he’s still soft between my legs. He’s so soft I could cry. I take his hand and place it on my rump, pat a little. “Would rough sex work, and get things started?”

  “No, Daisy,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.” He kisses my bra. Then, tired, he leans back and settles onto the pillow. He makes a strange, sobbing sound, and turns his head. “I’m sorry, Daisy. I’m just so damn drunk. It’s me, not you.”

  “All right,” I tell him and roll off of him. I move to go, but he places his hand on me.

  “Why are you always running off so quickly?” he asks. “Stay, and tomorrow I’ll take you out for eggs.”

  I say, “You might wake up tomorrow and see everything differently.” But when I look over at him, his eyelids quiver and I know he’s asleep and already dreaming. I don’t know what Charlie dreams about.

  Usually I’d leave now while it’s still dark, but tonight because he told me I was a good woman and held my face, and because he called me his angel and threw out his booze, I stay. I’m so close to Charlie that I can hear the sound of his heart.

  Tomorrow he’ll wake and his eyes won’t look mournful but lustery, like the sky after a storm has cleared, and then I’ll know. And it’s funny, not really funny, I guess, but sad-funny. When I look at him sleeping like a stray dog under the light from the alley, I think of the old people’s faces when I lift them from their beds, right before I unlatch their fingers from my arms. Sometimes their faces are looking off beyond me, and sometimes they look scared, like they’re closing their eyes and mouths on death, cupping their lips over death like it’s an old lover. Other times, they smile like they’ve quit being scared and are moving to a light that has all the love they need in the world. I think of me and Charlie in those faces. Tomorrow when the sun comes up Charlie will lift me out of bed and maybe, if he’s really a gentleman, smile and take me out for breakfast.

  WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

  Jess peers under his visor and squints at the sun. He’s been quiet for the past hour, but now, surveying the desert, he says, “We’re nowhere, Prue. Absolutely nowhere.”

  In the passenger’s seat, Prue fans her skirt and lifts her sticky thighs from the seat, releasing them like duct tape. Somewhere back in Kansas the air conditioner went and Jess refused to pay to have it serviced. Now, as heat blasts through the open windows, Prue breathes in the desert until she feels as though she, too, is desert, part of the endless landscape, the unforgiving sky. She should feel lucky with her man beside her. But when Jess curses the absence of road signs and markers, Prue only wants to say he could have gotten a map back at the last gas station. She wants to say he is one of those men who never asks for directions, and that it is his pigheadedness that has them here—lost, the air conditioner broken, the gas gauge flirting with E, that tenuous line of demarcation. Men and directions, she wants to say, go together like coffee and Jell-O.

  Instead, she says, “We’re on Veteran’s Memorial Highway, I think. Outside Winnemucca, like in the song ‘I’ve Been Everywhere.’ Have we been to enough everywheres yet?” she asks.

  “Hardly,” says Jess.

  “Well, there must be a gas station somewhere.”

  “There’s probably not anything,” Jess says with a hint of bitterness that surprises her. “What you don’t know is that deserts go on and on. What you don’t know, Prudence, is that deserts eat everything up.”

  Prue frowns at the sound of her name on his tongue. It is a name given by her ex-hippie-turned-banker mother, a name that caused constant taunts in high school. High school is where she and Jess met, in fact, in that time when she loved his easiness, his lank, ungainly body and long hair, his sweet teasing and laughter. They are both nineteen and have been married just over a year. Jess is on leave from Fort Bragg, where he and Prue live on base, and she is pregnant, so newly pregnant in fact that she hasn’t yet told Jess.

  She turns up the Bob Dylan song that plays in the tape deck. “How many roads?” she questions, knowing Bob Dylan irritates Jess—he has often said that Dylan is for pussies—and irritating him gives her an odd sense of satisfaction. It repays him for the broken air conditioner, for being lost with practically no money left, for this unending road trip. “A tour of America,” Jess had called it. At first the idea invigorated Prue, gave her a strange sense of purpose. They headed south to snap photographs of the big peach and the world’s largest Coke bottle. They drove to the International Towing and Recovery Museum, then to Silo X in Missouri, with its top-secret disasters and toxic gases that turned men into monsters. In Hebron, Nebraska, they admired the world’s largest porch swing. They stopped at cheap motels and out-of-the-way diners for greasy burgers and fries that coated Prue’s fingers with oil. They talked about movies, alien invasions, the cost of things, and a whole lot of nothing. When they ran low on cash, they spent a few nights sleeping on the hood of Jess’s Chevy, buried under blankets, her head on his chest. But now Prue only feels tired, a little too sick, and in need of home.

  She releases her seat from its upright position, leans back, and props one tan leg up on the dashboard. She says, “It’s been a real blast, baby, but after a while anything gets a little old. Don’t you ever get tired of going everywhere and nowhere, all at once?”

  Jess glances over. “You don’t even care that you’ve never seen anything, do you? If we turn around, we’ll miss the Hornet in Alameda. It’s only a national treasure, you know. A living monument to our history. One of the guys went to California six times to see it, it was that good.” Then he adds: “There’s a lot that’s good on the West Coast.”

  “Home is good,” Prue says, pointing. “That direction.”

  Jess snorts in disgust. “The Hornet’s better than home. Bet you didn’t know it’s haunted. Real live ghosts in that baby.”

  Prue rolls her eyes. “Only kids believe in ghosts, Jess.”

  “Bull-shit,” he says. “Two hundred sightings of soldiers lost in battle. Doc-u-mented. That ship’s seen more action than you’ll ever see, that’s for damn sure. Everything holds on to its ghosts. There’s not anything that’s been through war that gets off scot-free.”

  “Gas,” Prue reminds him.

  “Pru-dence,” Jess retorts. For a moment, his stare is unyielding, but then, suddenly, he snickers. He glances at the gauge, snorts again, then leans back and steers with his wrist. As is a recent habit, he runs his free hand over his crew cut, back and forth. It is an act that somehow hurts Prue to witness, just as it hurts her when, late at night, Jess turns and tells her they can never go home again, that he’s seen too much to ever go back.

  Prue feels a strange tiredness, an unaccustomed ache. She knows she should feel grateful that Jess wasn’t sent home to her in a coffin, like so many other husbands and wives. She has often tried to imagine what it was like for him to be in the desert, to be caught in its swirling storms. Did killing, she wondered, ever become as easy as pulling in a breath of air? One, two, three, breathe, and it’s over—no real discomfort, no real shock, but only a sweet relief that you are the one left standing? And what—if anything—dies, in the process of all that? Prue wants to ask Jess now but she can’t. He would only say she is talking stupid. He would only give her that hard look she’s seen so many times since he’s been home—jaw clenched, eyes deep, concealing—and Prue would feel unsettled, cast-off, as if longing for the boy she knew in high school weren’t enough, as if she’d met a stranger coming home instead. And that is the truth, she realizes. The boy she knew is gone.

  “I bet you didn’t know they give you at least twenty extra miles after empty,” Jess says. “I bet you’ve never been out of gas in your life, Pru-dence.”

  “I’ve been out of gas plenty,” Prue says.

  “Bullshit. I bet you don’t even know what real empty feels like.”

  “Oh, I know empty,” Prue says. She glides her tongue over her teeth and tastes the bare, gritty sand. “I know real empty, too.” For a moment, she
thinks of Fort Bragg and North Carolina’s lush forests, that weedy heaviness that hangs over everything. She says, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Hornet. I bet you didn’t know that. I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore about a whole lot of things.”

  “Oh, I know,” Jess says, nodding. “And I agree with you on that last part.”

  Prue cranks up Dylan and turns over possibilities. She will leave him, she knows. She won’t keep the baby. One, two, three, breathe, and she will walk away. She says, “I know no desert can go on and on and eat up everything, you’re wrong about that. Not if you don’t want it to, it doesn’t.”

  “You don’t know shit,” Jess laughs. He cranes his head out the window and lets out a fierce, sad howl. He speeds, kicking up dust behind them. “And I know that just like I know it’s only pussies who cry for home, just like I know that we’ve got at least twenty miles before real empty, and that the Hornet is sure as hell loaded with ghosts you’ll never see. It’s what you don’t know that kills you, that’s what I know. Bang, bang, bang, dear Prudence. Knocks you real dead.”

  CONVERSIONS ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  I think, though I am unsure, that my flatmate Cass knows what I have done. She has been stalking me around our apartment for days, laying word traps, hoping I might confess. I want to remain inconspicuous about the whole affair. We are not friends, she and I. We have only lived together six months, since the start of the school year, and we are bound by the necessity of shared rent that is due to our landlord, Mr. Tannen, on the second of each month. Beyond this, I have no commitment and refuse to suffer through the cumbersome condition of affection.

  She has said I am godless.

  Cass tells me her first mistake was rooming with an ethics student, that this fact alone should have alerted her to the potential for what she calls “certain problems of spiritual affinity.” She’s very dramatic when she speaks. Cass is an actor and a second-year graduate student in the Drama Department, both of which facts, I tell her, are something less than a miracle of nature.

  Presently, we are in the bathroom, I am peeing, and once again Cass has breached the boundaries of social etiquette by barging in. Her rear end plants itself on the tub. She sits with her arms folded. Cass wears faded carpenter jeans with frayed holes in the knees and a white V-neck sweater. She has coarse black hair that falls below her waist, and she’s wearing a pissed-off Polish look that I find intimidating. She asks if I think her boyfriend, Evan (also an actor), has another girl. She has only been seeing Evan for a month. They are not committed, but she is obsessed. Cass has a certain weakness for imposters, actor-men. She says she adores anyone who looks like a young Robert Redford, even though she also admits Evan is an oversexed dog.

  I find that when enclosed in a small room it’s best to say nothing incriminating. Now would not be the time to tell her, for example, about being tied to Evan’s bedposts, or about his deft use of electronic devices. Cass’s intuition can take her only so far. I have been very careful. After our lovemaking, I’ve washed Evan’s smell off of me, soaped every orifice, and arrived home from his apartment smelling of Irish Spring.

  You’re awfully quiet, Moira, she says. Her look reeks of suspicion. At the beginning of the school year, I once saw Cass run down an undergraduate (the girl on foot, Cass in her Jeep). Yes, she said the gas pedal stuck; yes, she was cleared of wrongdoing. Still, I can only imagine what she might do to me.

  She asks if I’m nervous. I tell her no, I’m not nervous, not especially, no more than usual, et cetera. I tell her her obsession is bound to breed psychiatric bills.

  Actors are full of fictions and lies, she says. She smacks her hand against the tub. I wish I didn’t always find myself in bed with thespians. Betrayal, she says, pervades all thespian interactions.

  Whine, whine, whine. For any proposition to be meaningful, love or affairs alike, circumstances must be verified, I say. Empirical evidence, hard facts. Show me the proof of betrayal, I tell her. Then I sniff the air, somewhat tauntingly, and say: Do you smell Irish Spring?

  As is customary habit, Cass slides a small medallion, a picture of Saint Stephen, back and forth across her necklace. She narrows her eyes in a most predictable way.

  It’s true I am not without some feelings of guilt. But once you have committed the crime, there is always the business of cover-up. Self-preservation in circumstances of betrayal is essential, and I am all for that.

  EVAN WILL SOON PLAY Jason opposite Cass’s role of the Colchian princess in the college’s production of Euripides’ Medea. He practices his lines while naked, standing over me in bed, and sometimes when he is reading, he jumps up and down, causing all manner of extremities to whirl and fly about. Like many men, Evan aligns himself with the classicist school. He believes his penis is an embodiment of nobility and that he can discern truths such as love or beauty which he then approximates with sex and nipple rings. All this should make me leery of him. The truth is, I have always imagined that I would end up in bed with a man who looked like Nietzsche, a little on the morose and philological side, possibly someone who listened (as Nietzsche did) to Wagner’s music. But it seems that, like my flatmate, I have a terrible weakness for gray eyes, good looks, and clean, classical features. (I suppose Evan does look like a young Redford.)

  Once, before we first kissed, Evan said, simply, Risk it, Moira. Before that moment, I had never risked anything. Normally I suffer from a terrible interiority of the soul that causes me to dwell in the corners of familiar, often crowded institutions—campus libraries, coffeehouses, et cetera—and pass judgments. But here, in Evan’s bed, I feel other things: sheer whimsy over our naked bodies, an unexpected affection.

  Evan plops down and nibbles my belly. He quotes Jason’s lines in a zealous way: I will listen to what new thing you want, woman, to get from me!

  I am normally not a jealous person, but today, since he has asked, I give Evan a good-natured ribbing about having two women. Is it necessary to have us both? I ask. I do not mention that I have on occasion indulged horrible images of Cass and Evan naked, a thought that makes me feel slightly ill. I tell him I want to know which one of us—Cass or me—he prefers. I say, It must be difficult to have relations with two flatmates. I ask him if he has ever indulged a certain fantasy that he might, on some occasion, end up in bed with both of us, if only out of sheer confusion, carelessness, or the simple act of forgetting. And then where would you be? I say. Think about it.

  I am thinking about it, he says. And wow. I’d be a guy in bed with two women.

  Not funny, I tell him.

  I thought you said no attachment and no jealously. I believe you said, “I’m much too smart to get attached to you.”

  I said more that smart people know better than to get too attached, and then they go ahead and do it anyway.

  I can’t help myself, Moira, he tells me. I always fall for my leads. And this, he explains, combined with a certain dogged appreciation for the female form, repeatedly gets him in trouble. Condemn not, but pity me instead, he says.

  Boo-hoo, I say. Poor Evan.

  After more lovemaking, which today consists mainly of discourse (a carryover from my love affair with Nietzsche), Cass texts Evan. There are tears involved, drunkenness, incoherent phrases. Apparently there has been an abundance of tears and drinking and texting lately.

  She’s obsessed, he says. He scratches his head. He asks, Who would have thought?

  She knows, I tell him. Evan-Jason has taken a second lover (you know who) and Cass-Medea is planning her revenge. It’s all so very textbook, I say. Suddenly I think Cass is probably on her way to Evan’s apartment as I speak. I remember the running down of the freshman; it was no laughing matter. I get out of bed and search through the tangled pile of clothes scattered on the floor. I tell Evan every interaction is eventually terrifying.

  He yawns. Like most people after sex, Evan has a very low attention span. He busies himself by draping a Kleenex over his penis like a toga. The whole draping
ceremony pleases him, confirms his own spectacular wishes about the splendor of his body, its classicism, its containment. I go to the bathroom and wash. I slip into my jeans, button my shirt, and pull on a sweater. Head still wet, I rush out into the frosty air and into the descending dark.

  A PERSON DECIDES that she is going to have an affair with her flatmate’s boyfriend, and, while in theory this should be easy, the situation is soon mired with complications. First, there is a small pang of guilt I feel constantly, along with my unexpected interest in classical theater. Also, over the last two weeks things with Cass have gotten uglier. After each rendezvous with Evan, I arrive back to the flat and Cass sniffs the air with canine cunning to see if Evan’s warm and spicy scent clings to my coat. Irish Spring, Irish Spring, thank goodness for the thin scent that masks our deception.

  Constant supervision! When Cass is not attending classes, she stalks me to the point where I am almost never alone. Cass has sworn that if I’m guilty, I will pay. She’s asked if I think I am beyond reproach. She’s said: Who do you think you are, some superwoman? I believe she is searching for proof of my amoral nature, secretly reading my books on Nietzsche while I am attending classes.