The Night Gwen Stacy Died

by Sarah Bruni

  She woke to the sound of him stumbling around the room looking for his clothes. He had already pulled his jeans on but his shirt was lost, somewhere under the sheets, under the other things in the room. Peter was on his hands and knees near the foot of every piece of furniture, trying to keep quiet, and he looked so earnest in his search, she watched him for several more seconds, admiring his arms, his back, the backs of his hands pressed out on the floor, before it occurred to Sheila that the reason that he was looking for his shirt was because he was going to leave. She bit her bottom lip to stifle something rising. Of course this is why you were never supposed to have sex with someone on the first night; this is what the poets, with their falling-out hearts, always failed to consider. All the poets were men—those idiots!—and there was something else that complicated it all to feel these same things as a woman, she was remembering now, something mothers said about cows and the price of milk, but she couldn’t recall if the girl was the cow or the milk or what, and anyway, what was the difference! Peter had found his shirt now and already he had his hand on the chain of the door.

  “Wait!” She was sitting up in the bed now, the sheets tucked around her chest. Peter turned.

  “What time is it?” Sheila asked. It was difficult to say with the shades drawn, but it didn’t matter. She needed to say something. She tried to stay confident, to stay calm, to ignore the red digits on the bedside clock and on the clock above the television across the room that had already answered her question: 9:45 A.M.

  Peter retreated from the doorway and sat on the end of the bed. He looked at her cautiously as if she were a rabbit or a finch or something that had just appeared in the bed and addressed him in his own language.

  “Hi,” he said. He inched closer slowly.

  “Where are you going?” Sheila said.

  “They take away the breakfast stuff in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I thought I’d try to find us something to eat.”

  She studied him to see if this was true.

  He said, “I left you a note.”

  She turned to the bedside table and held the piece of paper up to her face. It said:

  Free breakfast ends at 10. I’m not sure what you usually eat in the morning so I will just try to bring up a few of everything and you can pick what you like from it. You look pretty tired, I don’t think I should wake you up, but if you wake up in the next 15 come meet me in the lobby kid.

  Peter

  She looked up from the hotel stationery and met his gaze. He was smiling at her, but only with his eyes. Sheila leaned closer to the end of the bed, where he was waiting. She said, “Quit calling me kid.”

  He leaned over her now, balancing on his forearms so that only the sheet was between them. “What do you want me to call you?” he asked.

  She looked at him. She wanted to say, What about that name that you called me last night when we left? But she was afraid to say it aloud, as if there were some spell, some understanding, some balance between them that she didn’t want to upset by talking away the mystery of the thing.

  Peter didn’t wait for her to say anything. He let his forearms drop and his weight rested on her. When she went to kiss him, she could feel him tense and relax against her as if every muscle were concentrated on a reply, and when she asked him if it would be okay if they just got breakfast somewhere else later, he didn’t bother responding anyway and already he was working at her neck and her shoulders with his mouth.

  That afternoon Peter went to see about a place for them to stay that wouldn’t cut as deeply into their funds. He knew of a guy in Humboldt Park who owned a building. Sheila was alone in the hotel for most of the afternoon. At three, she picked up a pay phone and dialed her sister’s number. It rang five or six times and then Donny answered. Sheila hung up. She called back in an hour. This time Andrea answered right away.

  “Andy, it’s me.”

  “Jesus Christ, where are you?”

  At the sound of her sister’s voice, Sheila faltered. She hadn’t counted on that. She had to catch her breath and speak slowly.

  “I just wanted to let you know I’m okay.”

  “Okay? Well, where are you?”

  “I’m not close by,” said Sheila.

  “Sheila, don’t fuck around. There’ll be a missing person report filed on you with the cops by the end of the night. The Sinclair station’s all over the news. Dad’s about had an ulcer.”

  “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  The thought occurred to her then to tell her sister that boys don’t always like it when you make a lot of noise. Some boys cover your mouth in their hands, she wanted to say to Andrea. Here, on the telephone, Sheila felt the strange impulse to confess to what she had done with Peter. Andrea’s voice on the other end of the line sounded more like home than she’d anticipated. She could hear the worry, the phone calls, the prayers, the neighbors’ casseroles, the police visits, the aimless car rides up and down the Coralville strip.

  “It’s okay,” Andrea said. “You can tell me.”

  Sheila swallowed. “I’m,” she said. Like that, the entire thing could be over. Peter had given her an out. You could say you were kidnapped if you wanted to bail on me. She was terrified for an instant then, and she wanted her sister to tell her it was okay. And here Andrea was making it easy for her. But she hadn’t been kidnapped. She had asked Peter to take her with him. Don’t be a baby, she thought. Don’t be a flirt.

  “Honey, where are you?” Andrea said again.

  Maybe that was the difference between a flirt and cock-tease, Sheila thought then. A flirt was a woman who moved between this and that without any real sense of direction, of decision. A cock-tease pretended she knew what she wanted. She put her hand firmly around the thing and said, this is it, but then she got scared and faltered; she got scared and ran away from what she had started.

  “I’m not in Iowa,” Sheila said into the telephone. She fit the phone neatly back into its cradle, and promised herself she would call back soon, as soon as she figured out what she was going to do.

  Sheila went for a walk. She found a diner at the other end of the street where she bought herself a slice of pizza for an early dinner. An Italian man with a receding hairline worked the register. She ordered a slice with sausage and green peppers.

  “American girls, allora!” he said. “Chicago girls! They are never afraid of a little sausage, no?”

  “No,” said Sheila.

  “And I can see that you practice sports,” he said. “Tell me, which sport do you practice?”

  “I don’t practice sports,” said Sheila, fitting her tongue around his awkward English in reply.

  “But you are so thin!” exclaimed the cashier.

  In Iowa, it was easy to cut male advances short. Sheila had learned a couple of handy phrases: “Please go piss up a rope,” and “I don’t trust you any farther than I could spit you.” She could immediately see that such phrases were not useful here. She had started learning idioms in her French workbook, and that’s exactly what her little phrases were. The further you moved from home the less sense they made. It was good that she was not going to France. Just how had she expected to communicate! Sheila fumbled nervously with her wallet to pay the Italian, counting out her spare change as quickly as possible. She thought of Ned with his piles of pennies, and she felt, suddenly, that she had somehow betrayed him.

  She found a small convenience store in a strip mall on the same block as their hotel. The little plaza was tucked beyond the sidewalk on Clybourn Avenue. The Sinclair station had been surrounded by similar architecture. There were few stores that survived as self-contained structures even in Iowa. But here, there wasn’t the land between them. The space felt cramped, threatening to spill over, barricaded as it was by rows of metered parking on either side of the moving lanes of traffic.

  Sheila walked in and asked the boy behind the counter for a pack of Peter’s cigarettes. “I said straights,” said
Sheila, when the boy pulled down filtered, and Sheila saw how it would be to be Peter, having to repeat that same thing all the time. It was only when the boy—who was clearly younger than Sheila by a few years at least—asked for her ID, that Sheila noticed that the name on her driver’s license was different. Her smiling picture was the same. Under the picture it said her name was Gwendolyn Stacy.

  When Sheila returned home that evening, Peter was asleep on the bed. It was just starting to get dark in the room. She threw her purse down and sat on the foot of the bed. She had come home with the ID clutched in her hand, ready to confront him. Now she only watched him. Peter slept like a child, deeply, oblivious to her presence, as if he expended so much energy during the day that once a certain hour hit he had no choice but to give himself over to sleep. Sometimes his breathing went syncopated, worrying over some uneven thread of a dream she imagined. Sheila looked from Peter to the driver’s license in her hand. Whoever had done it had done an expert job. It was nothing like the fake IDs she had seen at her high school. The name Gwendolyn Stacy was so seamlessly merged with her personal data: eye color, hair color, height, weight, etc., it looked like it would be difficult for an authority figure to question. She felt a twitching in the muscles of her stomach as the thought took root that maybe Peter had nothing to do with the ID. It was too good to be a fake. “Baby,” Peter asked from the other side of the bed. “Is that you?”

  “I’m here,” Sheila said, shifting her weight closer to him. Then she pulled off her clothes, fit her body in the crook of his arm, and went to sleep beside him.

  In the morning, Sheila woke to the sound of pages rustling by her head. Peter was flipping through the brochures that were kept in the drawer of the nightstand. Chicago’s Most Popular River Cruise, said one. Another said, Experience the Adventure of Navy Pier!

  “A river cruise?” said Sheila. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s this?”

  “Just an idea,” said Peter. “I thought we might do something like this today.”

  “Isn’t that kind of a tourist thing?” asked Sheila.

  Peter shrugged. “We’re not from here. We’re like tourists.”

  “I guess,” said Sheila, but she didn’t like considering herself as such. In Iowa, there was a distinct delineation between those who lived in the town year-round and those who filtered in and out by semester schedules to attend the college. These boarders, renters and deserters, were treated not exactly with disdain, but there was a general sense that they were temporary fixtures—bathmats, hairpins—evaporated from town before you bothered to learn their names.

  The river cruise was an architecture tour, winding by some of the city’s most significant buildings, and the boat held fifty people in plastic folding chairs on its deck. Their guide was a lifelong Chicago resident with a hot pink visor and a megaphone. She looked to be about seventy-five, and though very knowledgeable about the city’s architectural history, she seemed most eager to dispense information about ordinances ruling land on both sides of the river public property, owned by the city. When coasting by luxury condos, the guide would assert, “Bring a picnic back to the yard here if you like—this is public property!” or “The employees that work in this building never use their riverfront property. But you can—this is city-owned, anyone’s free to use it!”

  It seemed strange to be so emphatic, the small swaths of riverfront grass being least exciting beside all the stainless steel edifices rising up from either side of the riverbank like giant dominoes. But Peter was similarly taken with the idea.

  “Did you hear that?” he whispered excitedly to her. “Public land.”

  Sheila smiled, but she said nothing.

  Peter slipped his hand into hers. “We could come back at night with a blanket. Look at the stars.”

  They had just driven three hundred miles away from a place where open land was everywhere and the night sky was so pockmarked by light, you could read by its glow. “We’re in the middle of the city,” Sheila said. “There are no stars.”

  “Shhh,” Peter said, and he covered her mouth in his hand again, as if he didn’t want the others to hear her pronouncement. “Come on,” he said. He removed his hand from her mouth and brushed her bangs off to the side of her face. It was difficult to say whether he was joking or he was suggesting that the stars were the same here as anywhere, and it was she who needed to make an effort.

  The tour guide carried on with her megaphone as the boat snaked along the river. Public land this! Mies van der Rohe that! Sheila had stopped listening, but Peter nodded along to the tour guide’s recommendations as if they were essential, necessary for their shared survival. Sheila decided then she would do what he asked of her. She would feign sight of entire constellations if that much were necessary.

  But in the middle of the night, her mind began to race again. She could choose what to believe, but she wanted more information on which to base her choices. While Peter slept, Sheila tiptoed from the bed beside him and silently pulled his duffle bag into the bathroom. The gun was on top, and she pulled it out and placed it in her own purse. It felt lighter in her hand than she thought a gun would feel. It made little difference in the weight of her purse. Sheila stuck her hand back into the duffle bag. In his wallet, she found the ID that said his name was Peter Parker. Behind it, she thought she would find her own ID, but in its place were two old laminated cards belonging to two men who looked vaguely like the man she was sharing a bed with. In both of the laminated cards, the names had been gouged out through the plastic, rendered illegible.

  There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  Sheila flung the door open and held up the handful of IDs. “What the hell is going on?” she asked.

  “Oh, I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. He sounded disappointed. “Look in your own wallet.”

  “I already did.”

  “Did you notice anything?” he smiled.

  “You changed my name.”

  Peter shook his head, as if this part had nothing to do with him. “I changed your age so we won’t always have to stay in at night. You can’t get away with flirting with the bartender here like you did in Iowa.” He smiled. “They don’t even let you through the door if you’re underage.”

  Sheila paused.

  “Thanks,” she said slowly.

  Peter kissed her on the cheek. He smoothed her hair behind her ear.

  “I really like you,” he said.

  Sheila took a few steps back into the bathroom, her stance softening. “You do?”

  “Of course,” Peter said. “Why do you think I asked you to come with me?”

  “Actually, that hasn’t been made entirely clear to me,” Sheila said.

  Peter advanced into the bathroom, and Sheila could feel his reflection in the bathroom mirror moving closer as Peter moved closer. She felt surrounded. He said, “When I saw you in the station, I felt like I already knew you. I felt close to you instantly, like we had already met somewhere else, somewhere in the past that I couldn’t quite place. Like you reminded me of someone I had already known, but had lost.”

  “Gwen Stacy,” said Sheila.

  Peter looked at the floor. “Is that okay? Does that bother you?”

  Sheila said, “I haven’t decided yet. I mean, she’s a character from a comic book, not a real person. You get that, right?”

  “Of course,” Peter said, “but understand, I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone like her to show up. And you remind me of her. Or, in some way you are her and I know you’re meant to be here with me. Now if that scares you, I’m sorry, and I don’t want you to stay if you don’t feel the same. But maybe we could spend a little more time together and, I don’t know, see how it goes.”

  Oh my God, Sheila thought, he’s fucking crazy. I’m sleeping with a crazy person. But she wasn’t scared. She was scared when she wasn’t with him, when she felt like she had to investigate and assemble clues on her own. When he spoke to her like this, she felt exhilarated, like maybe
she actually was Gwen Stacy, maybe this was why nothing else in her life had ever felt like the right thing, because the right thing was to be here with Peter.

  Sheila looked him in the eye. “I’m not scared,” she said.

  Peter kissed her other cheek, the one he hadn’t kissed before. The gesture felt calculated for a moment, like he was trying to balance something obscure though this small sign of affection, but Sheila let it go and decided to be thankful for the symmetry. It was all a matter of deciding how to interpret information, she told herself. “I’m real glad to hear you say that,” she heard him say then. He said this quietly, and again Sheila nodded. “It means a lot to me,” Peter said.

  “I’m not scared,” Sheila repeated. “We’re doing the right thing.”

  Peter smiled. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew I was right about you.”

  Then he started to pull at the buttons on his pants, as if to use the bathroom.