Virgin Territory

by James Lecesne

  “So what do you think?” I ask them. “Is this what you had in mind?”

  “Not bad,” says Angela. “Not bad at all. You think they have a Jacuzzi?”

  There’s nothing with my name on it, nothing to give my game away in here. Still, what’s wrong with my heart? It’s pumping like a native drum designed to send out warning signals to neighboring tribes.

  “Hey, guys,” I say a little louder than I intended. They’re headed into the living room, and that just won’t work. Who knows what’s out there just waiting to blow my cover? “Let’s stick together. Isn’t that the idea? For us to experience this as a group?”

  Angela smiles at me as though I’ve just won an around-the-world cruise contest for the whole bunch of us. She’s definitely on board. I’m her captain.

  “Esssaaactly!” she says as she sidles up beside me. “Okay, what next?”

  They’re all looking to me for instructions. Funny. For years, no one’s come here to visit me. Not one friend. And now I’m playing host and giving a tour in my own house. Corey, my aforementioned and alleged BFF, was always promising to spend the night, have dinner with Doug and me, download stuff off the Internet, make crank calls; but he never made it through our front door. Then one afternoon, he confessed that Marie’s house depressed the hell out of him. Admittedly, it isn’t as nice as his, but still I don’t think that’s a good reason to avoid a sleepover with someone who is supposedly your best bud. Anyway, this just proves why I’m out of practice as a host and have no ideas about what’s next.

  “I know,” Crispy calls out. “Why don’t we try and figure out who these people are. That could be fun. Y’know, like detectives.”

  Desirée picks up a Popsicle-stick napkin holder and offers an opinion: “I’d say these people have fallen on some hard times.”

  I want to tell her that I made the thing for Marie when I was eight years old. And even though the glue has gone dry and flakey and some of the glitter has lost its original shine, we keep it around because it has sentimental value. But I don’t say a word. There’s sweat running down my spine like someone forgot to shut the faucet tight.

  “I don’t know,” Crispy offers as he stares into one of the empty cupboards. “Maybe the mother is depressed or something. I mean, this kitchen doesn’t look like a mom’s in charge of it. Or if she is, where are the spices?”

  Kat wasn’t much of a cook, but she did have a small repertoire of dishes and recipes to which she was devoted. Six, to be exact. But she didn’t know from spices. She served up her meals like clockwork, one for each day of the week, and she rarely veered from her set menu. The meals themselves weren’t inventive or especially delicious; they weren’t even that memorable, but they were distinguished by their reliability, and we learned that sometimes the greatest spice is anticipation. We knew, for instance, that Monday was the day for meat loaf; Tuesday meant spaghetti; Wednesday was chicken and rice; Thursday gave us macaroni and cheese; Friday found us eating fish; on Saturday we ordered pizza; and on Sunday she cooked pork chops. This routine was so unvaried, so predictable, and in its way so comforting, that when we moved to Florida I was not only surprised to learn that the whole world didn’t conform to this round of food, I was also angry.

  Kat claimed that because she had the menu all worked out ahead of time, she didn’t have to waste her mental energy deciding on the menu, or flipping through cookbooks in search of a fricassee or a green curry sauce. She knew what we would be eating when she woke up, and that was that. She could devote herself instead to the crafting of her poems all day long, and when dinner rolled around, she could throw together that same old meal.

  “What kind of spices are you talking about?” I ask Crispy.

  “And not so clean, this place,” says Angela as she runs a finger along the grout in the counter tiles. Then she looks up at me and acknowledges the shame of it all by tsk-tsking and giving her head a mournful little shake.

  I feel an unexpected desire to defend my family’s honor.

  Crispy is dragging a kitchen chair across the room. He places it directly under the air vent. Now he’s standing on the chair and holding up a finger so that he can to feel the breeze that’s blowing through the vent with arctic fervor.

  “Wow,” he says without any of the enthusiasm that usually accompanies a wow. “These people ought to be publicly shamed. I mean, who leaves the AC on when they’re not home? What’s up with that?”

  Doug can go on and on about the environment; he knows all about the danger of the disappearing polar caps and the growing hole in the ozone. But once we moved to Florida, all that info just flew out the window. He says that he likes the house to be refrigerated when he gets home from work, so he keeps the AC going throughout the day. He refuses to accept the fact that he’s an energy hog and a hypocrite of the highest order. Listen, buddy, when you grow up and have a house of your own, you can do what you want, but till then, chill out. I point out that by the time I’m old enough to buy a house, there will be no more ozone to worry about and we’ll both be dead from skin cancer. The winner of the argument is the last person to leave the house—hence the AC.

  Desirée’s phone rings.

  “Hey, Momma,” she says into her phone, putting on her thick Southern patois and sounding like the girl she once was. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … No, I’m at a friend’s house right now.… Who? Um … his name’s Alex.… Of course there’s other people here. You can talk to them.”

  She holds the phone out toward us, but Angela and Crispy don’t want any part of it; they bumble through the kitchen door and disappear into the living room. I grab the phone from Desirée and start talking.

  “Hey, Desirée’s mom! This is … Alex.”

  I’m doing such a convincing imitation of someone who’s in control, I actually convince myself.

  “Desirée’s here at my house.… Well, I’m kind of a new friend to Desirée and Angela and the gang. I’m showing them around town a bit, giving them a tour.… Okay … Yes, ma’am. I will. I’ll be sure to say hey next time I’m at the golf club. Bye now.”

  I flip the phone shut and hand it back to Desirée. “Your mom’s just checking up on you, making sure you’re not hanging out with ax murderers.”

  “She didn’t always worry so much. We lost our house a few years back. Just me and her now, traveling ‘round. Naturally, she’s always gotta be shinin’ a light on me. You know how it goes.”

  “I do,” I say, though I have only a dim memory of a light like that shining on me. “What do you mean you lost your house?” I ask.

  She hikes up one shoulder and looks around the room as though trying to find something to explain her situation.

  “I dunno. They took our house from us. My momma lost her job, and we weren’t able to pay. Next thing I know, I’m packing stuff and we moved to South Carolina with my aunt Tee. Then we stayed some time in Alabama with my momma’s cousins. But we’re gonna get back on track real soon. We are.”

  I remind her about her plan—four houses, a private plane, and perfume. And then I tell her that my name is really Dylan.

  “What do you mean?” she asks, tilting her head and looking as though she’s been insulted.

  “My name,” I repeat. “It’s actually Dylan. I just thought you should know.”

  She smiles at me kindly, as though I’m insane and possibly dangerous, and then asks, “Where’re the others?”

  The others are in the living room, standing in front of the china cabinet and ogling Marie’s plates of many countries through the glass.

  “Sad,” says Angela.

  “Tragic,” Crispy adds.

  Desirée nods as though some things don’t even need to be discussed.

  For me, those plates represent the good life, the part of my family story that I prize.

  “Really?” I remark as casually as I can. “They look like they might be worth something. And besides, I think they’re kinda—”

  They all turn toward me to find out what
I’m going to say.

  “I don’t know, quaint or something.”

  Quaint?

  No one is convinced.

  “You mean quaint like third-world peasants making crap dishware for crap pay so that some American can fill her cabinet back home with fancy knickknacks?” Crispy asks.

  “Essssssactly,” Angela says. Then she looks around the room and adds, “How come these people don’t have any family portraits? Everybody’s got family portraits.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they’re not that kind of family.”

  If Doug hadn’t been so stupid and lost all our family pictures, we would have a portrait of Kat propped up on the mantel so everyone could see that we were that kind of family. When people came over to visit they’d say, “Is that your mom?” And I’d say, “Yeah.” And they’d say, “She was so pretty.” And that would be that. It would’ve been the portrait that Kat had taken a year before she met Doug, back when she was at the height of her beauty. According to family legend, she went to a portrait studio at Macy’s because she wanted to send her parents a decent picture of herself. At the time, her parents were in Seattle, and they missed her badly. The photograph was meant to sit on top of their piano, a placeholder until she got back home. But she never did get back. Instead, she met Doug and then I came along, and life unfolded right where she was living. I love that portrait. And I miss it. Still.

  “Where’s Angela?” I ask when I turn around to find her missing. “Where’d she go?”

  Crispy looks around. “Who knows?” he says.

  Just then, Angela appears at the top of the stairs, and she’s looking about as freaked out as a cat trapped on top of a moving vehicle. She flies down the stairs, taking two at a time, and then makes a mad dash across the living room, her black hair flying behind her like the tail of a sideways exclamation point.

  “Angela?” I offer tentatively.

  “Out!” she cries, and to prove that she means business, she doesn’t even bother to explain. She just keeps pointing toward the back door and moving through the kitchen like she’s on fire.

  We follow her instinctually, like rats diving blind off a sinking ship. We don’t even need to know what’s causing her to panic. We just run. And we keep running until we are out of sight and out of breath.

  “What? What?” we ask her all at once. We whoop air into our lungs; we hold on to our kneecaps; we wipe the sweat away. “What happened? What was it?”

  “Oh. My. God,” she replies, covering her eyes and wildly shaking her head in what seems like a violent attempt to un-see whatever she’s just seen. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You’re never going to believe it. None of you.”

  “What?” we all yell at her in unison. “What?”

  “Okay. I heard something, some noise, so I slowly—very slowly and quietly—opened the bedroom door. And there they were. Two people. A man and a woman. Naked. Both of them. And they were having sex.”

  Doug has been seeing Mary Jo Kowalski for about six months. I’ve known about her since day one because I heard him talking on the phone to her. He was saying her name over and over and speaking to her as though she were a Boeing 737 that he was trying to land at the local bar. Why did he think it was a good idea to keep her a secret from me, I want to know. Naturally, he sidesteps the question by asking if it was me who barged in on them this afternoon. He wants to know if that’s how I found out about Mary Jo.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He then explains that Mary Jo lives in nearby Tequesta and works for a company that designs and sells software to turbine engine manufacturers. She’s a specialist in the field of non-intrusive stress-management systems (whatever that is), and she works with some pretty high-level clients, like the U.S. Navy. She offers them stuff like data acquisition electronics, as well as optical and eddy current probes. Sounds gruesome. Apparently, her job is very demanding, and though she’s often needed in the office, she also has responsibilities that take her out into the field. Sometimes, he tells me, she has to travel as far as Daytona Beach to lunch with clients or to meet with manufacturers.

  Doug confesses all this while he and I are eating dinner (Chinese takeout), and as he pushes the piles of moo shu into his mouth with his chopsticks, I imagine Mary Jo driving her Honda Civic the length of Florida with no one breathing down her neck. “She calls her own shots on the job,” Doug declares, as if I ought to be impressed by this bit of news. I’m guessing this means that Mary Jo can sometimes manage a little detour and stop by to see Doug in the middle of the afternoon and then hop into the sack with him.

  “Anyway,” he says, wiping his chin with a paper napkin, “you want to meet her?”

  “Sure,” I tell him. “Someday.”

  Doug has left the house now, and I’ve popped in a Bob Dylan CD. Songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “Lay, Lady, Lay,” or “Meet Me in the Morning” can bring me back to a time when someone like Mary Jo wasn’t even a possibility. In my mind, I can see my mom doing dishes over the sink in our old loft on Warren Street. It’s a small moment, but the sound of Dylan can still conjure it up in its entirety for me after only two bars of music. These are the only images I have left of her, and they’re fading fast. Naturally, I treasure them.

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  Honey, we could be in Kansas

  By time the snow begins to thaw.

  The phone rings. When I pick up the receiver, there’s no one on the other end. Again. Or rather, there’s no one speaking—just breathing.

  “Gram? That you?”

  No answer.

  I decide to tell her about my new friends and what it’s like to know people my own age who can understand the feeling of being trapped in a life that isn’t exactly my own. I explain the rules of the Virgin Club, how we have to (a) want something, and (b) take a risk.

  I sense that she understands. She was there once upon a time. But this may be just my wishful thinking.

  “And it’s working,” I tell the phone. “Because here I am with a whole new life and new friends. I think I might even be in love.”

  Nothing.

  “Gram, you still there?”

  This is the first time the thought occurs to me that the person on the other end of the phone might be my mother. I know it’s crazy to believe in ghosts, especially the kind that use the telephone, but we aren’t always in control of our thoughts, and sometimes hope is a thing that goes bump in the night.

  “Mom?” I try.

  As usual, there’s no response. So I sing into the receiver, tentatively at first, then with a bit more confidence.

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  Meet me in the morning, 56th and Wabasha

  Honey, we could be in Kansas

  By time the snow begins to thaw.

  By the time Doug gets home, I’m lying on the couch, tangled in a blanket with my guitar and fast asleep. He pokes me until I wake up, and then informs me that I’d be better off if I went upstairs and got into my own bed.

  “Are you in love with whatshername?” I ask him.

  Doug stands there mulling over the question. He looks pained, like someone who just stepped on a rusty nail and is already thinking about the follow-up tetanus shot. He lets out a sigh and plops down on the sofa alongside me. The sofa cushions let out a sigh of their own, and then he leans his head all the way back so he can examine the ceiling.

  “Mary Jo,” he says, and then he closes his eyes so that I can’t see that he’s about to lie through his teeth. But I have ears. “That’s her name. Mary Jo.”

  “And is this Mary Jo the love of your life?” I ask him.

  When he turns his head to look at me, I know for sure that I’m in trouble. The blood has drained from his face, and his eyes look as sharp as tacks. But if anybody should be mad, it should be me. I’m the one who is being lied to. I’m about to tell h
im that, but he beats me to the punch.

  “What’re you up to?” he asks. “Just what’re you trying to do?”

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “I’m not up to anything.”

  “Okay,” Doug says. “That’s enough. You’re going to bed right this minute.”

  He gets up from the couch and starts toward the kitchen, but when he realizes that I’m not going anywhere, he turns and hollers, “Go! Now!”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I ask him as I turn toward the stairs. “You’re acting totally weird. I just asked a simple question. I have a right to know.”

  He turns his back on me. Just like the Hulk before he explodes into monster form, he’s shaking, his shoulders heaving. He’s trying to contain himself before something bad happens, but even from behind I can tell that he’s about to explode. I quickly gather up my blanket and head upstairs. When Doug gets like this, you don’t want to be around.

  Then I realize that Doug is trying to muffle his sobs; he probably doesn’t want to scare me. But it’s too late. He’s standing in the middle of the living room crying like a beat-up kid.

  “Doug?” I say.

  He lifts his head, begins to shake it from side to side, and murmurs, “No, no, no, no, no.”

  I’m standing behind him now, feeling sorry for the guy. I gently place my hand on his back. His shirt is damp, and I can feel the heat of him. He doesn’t want me to see his face. That much is clear. He’s turned away from me and is holding up his whole arm like a shield.

  “Why?” he cries out. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why do you always have to be stirring things up? Reminding me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

  Until this moment, it never occurred to me that seeing me must be some kind of torture for him. No matter how hard he tries to move on with his life, I’m always here, pulling him back, reminding him of what he’s lost, reminding him of her. He can’t escape it any more than I can escape the fact that my eyelashes and my toes and every particle of me carry the unmistakable imprint of her DNA. I’m like a broadcast station sending out the last dim signals of Katherine Anne Flack on a daily basis and right in front of his face; and every day he has to look at me. If I stare at him from across the kitchen counter, he sees her eyes. If I talk back to him while riding in the passenger seat of his Explorer, he’s reminded of her voice. If I touch him, he feels a hand that isn’t hers. He lost the photographs, but here I am reminding him. Why haven’t I ever thought of this before?