Marie got pregnant three months in. I didn,t get pregnant, she would say, years later. It takes two to tango. They were both starved, bingeing, desperate for any opportunity to meet up. Greg’s roommate leaving for class meant two whole hours to themselves; sometimes Marie borrowed a friend’s car and they would end up parked by the Dumpsters behind the grocery store, often barely making it into the backseat. It was like Greg’s penis had becoming a divining rod and Marie was a lake in the desert. They both confessed to feeling pain, actual physical pain, when they weren’t joined together, sloppily moving and repositioning and laughing until it wasn’t funny anymore. And staying joined even when it was over, talking about everyday things, how Marie’s roommate snored or how Greg had taken a second shift on the weekends. The best times were when they couldn’t make any noise; when they were in his dorm room with the walls as thin as newspaper or the one afternoon when they succumbed to the silent shelves in an abandoned aisle in the library. Staring into each other’s eyes, gasping and whispering about how it felt so good, so good, so good. Sometimes they used a condom, but only sometimes. He felt like he’d found it, the secret to a happy life: all he had to do was give in. All he had to do was get away from his mother, far away from her edicts on propriety and manners and how a woman could only love a man who could provide. He felt like he’d won a small private war inside himself. He couldn’t wait to bring Marie home, to see his mother taking her in, assessing the loose and frizzy hair, the open, makeupless face, the jeans. Marie didn’t smoke and she didn’t care what she looked like. They had met on the common one early morning, before the whole world was awake, and she’d shocked him when he’d kissed her and tasted the thick brackish saliva of sleep. He’d brushed his teeth and she had not, and she had kissed him openly and with relish. That’s when he told her he loved her, the sour smell from her mouth on his lips, the words feeling strange and scripted but all he could think of to say.
And then Marie told him she was pregnant. They were in her friend’s car, which she’d borrowed less and less lately, now that they’d gotten good at sneaking into each other’s dorm room or going to the same parties and locking themselves in someone’s bedroom. Greg felt excited about the car, like it was an old friend, but Marie had pulled into a gas station and parked. She unbuckled her seat belt and turned to him and for a fleeting moment Greg felt alarmed that she’d want to have sex in the open, families driving in and out and maybe even some of their friends. But no: “I’m pregnant,” she said. He giggled; it was a habit of his even when dealing with the disappointment or anger of his mother. He knew he shouldn’t laugh and so he did laugh.
“I’m not kidding,” she said.
He knew she wasn’t; he remembered all the times they hadn’t worn a condom, all the times he’d let go inside her because it felt so good, so good. Of course she was pregnant. She still hadn’t said she loved him, but Greg couldn’t stop telling her; it often felt like the only thing he had to say to her.
He put a hand out to touch her where the baby was. “Okay,” he said.
“Don’t do that,” she said. She had never told him not to touch her. He’d put his fingers and tongue everywhere he could think to put them and she had never balked. But now she pushed his hand away; she pushed his hand away from his own child.
He felt ashamed, like he’d done the wrong thing. “Is it mine?” he asked. He had wanted her to feel the same shame; it was right out of his mother’s playbook, and he instantly regretted it. “I’m joking,” he said, but they both knew he wasn’t.
“I don’t know about keeping it,” she said. They were throwing darts at each other now. He wanted to ask her to back out of the parking space, keep backing out, reverse the entire afternoon. He watched a child using a rag to wash the windshield of his mother’s car, the windshield getting more and more fogged with grease; nobody was making anything any better.
“Marry me,” he said. “Marie me.” Again he giggled, but he was forcing it now, attempting his own peeling tires. He had thought of asking her to marry him more than once. If they lived in the same house, they’d never have to leave each other, could sleep all night joined at the crotch; he could wake up inside her. And now they could keep the child and raise it.
She was pinching bits of vinyl from the steering wheel, rolling them between her fingers, placing them in the ashtray. “Okay,” she said.
He had felt more afraid of her saying no than of her saying yes, of what saying yes meant. Looking back, after all that had happened, Greg often wondered if she had orchestrated the whole thing. The way she’d said Okay. Like it was a given, like she was just waiting for him to assume it’d been his idea. But he had filled her with himself, it had taken two to tango.
But in the car on that hot day, her Okay thrilled him. Now they were really in it together; he had chosen his partner and the life before him. “Okay,” he said, as if they’d settled on a place for lunch. They drove back to campus, snuck into her room, and had celebratory sex on the floor by her desk, her in his lap, eye to eye, both coming quickly, thankfully for Greg, whose ass burned as it moved against the rough carpet. She had called him husband, and he had let go, no need to worry about pulling out now since it was already too late. They married the following month in the chapel on campus, Marie walking toward him in a yellow dress and him without a suit coat; it was hot and they were broke. Greg’s mother sent a funeral wreath in her absence; she claimed it was a mix-up and she’d meant to send a flowering plant for them to nourish in their new home and life together. But it seemed like a curse she’d placed upon them: Marie bled the next morning. Just as he’d hoped, they’d gone to bed joined, but they had woken up apart, in a hot puddle of blood that smelled alive. They hadn’t bothered to put sheets on the bed yet, and the mattress absorbed the blood and it dried over time into a jagged brown stain that they tried to ignore each time they changed the sheets. Marie bled their child out in their first week of marriage, both of them stunned and exhausted, drinking beer after beer, sitting apart among their boxes of books and cracked dishes in the student apartment they’d rented. He hadn’t truly faced the idea of fatherhood yet. The focus had been on getting married, moving in. His grief felt diluted, harmless, easily dissolved. For Marie, the miscarriage was a betrayal of her body, and of fate itself. Something she hadn’t overcome, hadn’t even seen coming.
“A lot of women miscarry,” she said once, shaking her head, as if all of them were stupid for even trying. Or, “You know, we don’t have to stay married now.” He had written that off as part of the unavoidable rage the loss was pumping into her body, but in the end perhaps she had been right. After the miscarriage they were just two young people who’d gotten married too quickly, who refused to admit it had been a mistake, that they should call it and start over.
But they did stay together, telling themselves it was impossible to break the lease of their student apartment, and then helping each other finish school, first Greg and then Marie, and then staying together because their friends were now marrying and it was easier to be taken by the current. But Marie began taking birth control, never forgetting a dose, not wanting to allow her body to take over her life ever again. At night they still reached for each other, still strangers in so many ways, and that was what they craved most of all: the anonymity of the dark, the shock of touch. Her chilly hands pushing him deeper and deeper in. The ability to make this person, this near stranger, cry out, beg for more; the ability to remain unknown, the ability to still feel young, at least in the dark. It was the power each held over the other, night after night, year after year: we have failed, we are failing.
It was raining when he woke up. The loft bed might have been comfortable if Greg had been six inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but he’d slept anyway, hard, waking up curled like a boy asleep under a tree. He couldn’t move his feet like usual; they felt strapped, and when he shot up to have a look he bonked his head on the loft ceiling. He bellowed, looking for something to throw, or hit, but there was nothin
g. He was just a fat old man yelling inside his rented RV. His neck ached. It hurt to turn his head. His feet were still in his sandals; now it all made sense. The wad of fifteen singles from the woman in the bikini felt embedded in his thigh. He heard trucks pulling in and out of the parking lot around him, honking to each other. He climbed down from the loft. For what felt like the millionth time in his life, he cursed his heft, his uncontrollable hunger, his helpless anchored body, even as his mouth got wet over a whiff of bacon and eggs and coffee from the diner.
Behind a slim door wedged next to the kitchenette, a tall, narrow canister housed the toilet and shower. The toilet had a white plastic seat that hid what looked like an endless cavern to Greg, and almost directly above that was the removable showerhead, its nozzle bearded with calcification. It amazed Greg, how people made do. He could sit on the toilet and wash himself if he was in a rush and needed to multitask. He laughed at the thought. He felt the same way he did when he first laid eyes on his dorm room and saw that his and his roommate’s twin beds were arm’s length apart. It felt like a novelty, something he didn’t have to take seriously.
He pulled the navy accordion blinds down on the big window that faced the parking lot and undressed, using his toes to work the sandals off his swollen feet, since bending down in the RV’s small living area felt out of the question. His body filled the canister; his shoulders brushed the cheap plastic walls. He turned right and left, trying to find the sweet spot, like his corpse was spinning in an ill-fitting coffin. He would never be able to close the pantry door behind him. He ended up with one foot planted just outside the shower, which allowed most of his body to get wet, and then he turned and planted the other foot outside the shower to get the remaining parts of his body. The RV had come with a small pat of soap in paper wrapping that claimed its scent was Forest Floor but actually smelled like nothing at all. He used that to lather his hair and chest, armpits and lower region before it slipped from his fingers and skidded out of the shower altogether. Deb never nagged him about his weight, but sometimes he felt like she challenged him in other ways. They call it a compact, she’d said about the RV. Might as well have said, Good luck, fatty. How much had he weighed the last time he saw Marie? He wasn’t wearing gym shorts so much back then. He wasn’t retired either. Sometimes he wanted to ask GJ who was the worse parent, him or Marie. He used to feel desperate for leverage over her, but he hadn’t felt that way in years, now that they didn’t speak. But here he was, his ass hanging out of a lipstick-sized shower in the parking lot of a strip club he’d stopped at so he wouldn’t have to keep driving toward her. He needed her to be fat, too. You both want the same thing, Deb said.
He used the showerhead to rinse himself as best he could, but the soap left a slippery film behind no matter how much he ran the water over his skin. The water seemed to be getting weaker, too, like it was losing heart. He’d forgotten to bring towels, so he dried himself with the shirt he’d been wearing the day before and dressed in the khakis and short-sleeved button-down he’d brought for occasions when gym shorts weren’t appropriate. He couldn’t decide what made him look larger, tucking the shirt in or leaving it out, and finally decided leaving it out at least allowed him the dignity of hiding the feminine paunch, like the bottom half of a peach, that belted pants seemed to showcase whenever he wore them.
The sack of burgers smelled sour, and Greg ran through the rain to throw them in the trash can outside the diner. He had packed only his sandals; his feet and the cuffs of his pants were now soggy and chilled, and it was enough to convince him that he didn’t want to go back into the diner and get a bite. He ran back through the rain to the RV. He sat sideways in the dinette, its chipped table pushing into his ribs. He was thankful for the noise of the trucks. He leaned over and folded back the navy blind to watch them heave themselves into and out of the parking spots, honking hellos and goodbyes, leviathans of the rain in this middle of nowhere. He folded his gym shorts and placed them in his duffel, draped the shirt he’d used as a towel over the back of the passenger seat to dry. He needed to stop for towels, a pillow, a blanket, and coffee, but that was it. There wasn’t a single other thing to do but drive until he was pulling in to the parking lot of Marie’s condo.
As he slid in, he was pleased all over again with the softness of the driver’s seat. Its plushness, its wideness. A rare place where he fit just fine. He wondered why he hadn’t slept in it the night before. As he heaved his own leviathan out of its space he honked a goodbye, the trucks honking back, and he felt a joy so sudden and sharp in his sinuses that he mistook it for grief and cried for four whole exits, when he got off at the promise of a Walgreens.
The rain stopped after he’d driven a few hours, the sky going from gray to a colorless haze, like it hadn’t made up its mind yet. He held an open box of Poppycock in his lap; he’d gotten to the dregs already. It felt good to chew, to have handful after handful to look forward to, his tongue mining out bits of salty and sweet that he could re-enjoy, washing it all down with a lukewarm Yoo-hoo. He had crossed the Florida state line fifty miles back. His clothes felt damp and wrinkled, formed to his body like strips of papier-mâché. He’d tried to call Deb, his hands oily from the popcorn, but she hadn’t picked up. He dialed GJ again, the hundredth time, the hundredth hundredth time, but it didn’t even ring. The same annoyed woman’s voice, the same disappointed The number you have dialed … GJ’s phone was often turned off, lost, traded. It didn’t alarm Greg not to be able to get him on the phone. It didn’t alarm him that GJ was out of pocket. Taken apart, each piece of evidence wasn’t damning, wasn’t out of the ordinary, he reminded himself often. For a while Greg had watched a show on cable about addicts and their families, had become entranced by the pain, the crying, the terrible things the cameras caught the addicts doing. One man took the cameras on a tour of all the houses he’d broken into; on another episode, a woman with a bald head rolled up her sleeve to reveal what looked to Greg like someone had piled mud in the crook of her elbow. I blew a vein and it got infected, she said, smiling into the camera, sheepish and unconcerned. The addicts often disappeared, came back, disappeared again, showing up asking for money or calling from the hospital or somewhere else. Greg knew an addict’s life was a selfish one. The families used that word again and again. You’re selfish. Stop being selfish. We want you around. He wished for a camera crew, for an addiction expert in a sweater vest who could come along and show him a script for how it was going to play out. Many of the addicts had been abused, or their parents had been neglectful, or they themselves had been addicts. Their families cried for all the mistakes they’d made, for all the time they’d lost. It felt good to cry with the families, to nod, to try not to make any noise even though his mouth was open, even though Deb was off somewhere and couldn’t hear him anyway. Most of the addicts went to the rehab the expert offered to them; most of those ended up using again a short time after being released.
Greg hadn’t considered what he’d do if, when, he found GJ holed up in a girlfriend’s house or in jail, perfectly fine and sheepish like always. He’d be angry. He’d let himself be angry. He’d yell and yell. It felt like a gift, this possibility that GJ was just being an asshole again.
He saw a hitchhiker up ahead, standing on the shoulder, just a black shape with its arm out. Greg couldn’t see a car nearby, he didn’t think this man had been stranded by a flat tire or an overheated engine. As he got closer he saw that the man was wearing tattered clothes and a backpack, a black-and-red-and-green beanie on his head. Holding his arm out like he was hailing a taxi. And even as Greg thought, What a dumbass, thinking he can look like that and get a ride, he slowed the RV and pulled onto the shoulder fifty yards from the man, who was actually closer in age to a kid. He jogged to the passenger-side window and Greg leaned over and pushed the button, bringing the window down halfway.
“Hey,” the kid said, smiling. Greg saw now that he was no more than college-aged. His teeth were mostly white and his eyes were clear.
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“You trying to get a ride?” Greg asked. “I haven’t seen a hitchhiker in years.”
“Looking to get to Tampa,” he said. “There’s a concert I’m trying to get to.” He looked at Greg, still smiling, his hand on the window and the other hand holding the strap of his backpack.
Greg had slowed and pulled over, he realized, partly in the spirit of the trip, the one that let him meander and reflect and that would lead him directly to his son. A hero’s journey. But seeing the man up close, hearing his voice, he realized he’d also slowed hoping the man would be GJ. Believing it was him because stranger things have happened and because he was looking for GJ, that was the sole purpose of barreling down the highway toward his ex-wife in a compact RV, and if you look for something it eventually turns up in the damnedest place, usually right where you’ve already looked a hundred times, a hundred hundred times. Was anyone looking for this man? Was he really going to a concert in Tampa? Had GJ tried hitchhiking; was he a hit-and-run or a prisoner or a corpse robbed of its drugs and the watch he’d received from Greg, which he’d never pawned, not yet?
“Call your father,” Greg said. He held out his oily phone.
“What, man?” The kid hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder, put his hand up to his ear. His smile was losing steam.
“I think you should call your father and check in,” Greg said. He leaned over, crushing the box of Poppycock under his belly, and tapped the phone on the kid’s knuckles.
It was what he wished someone would do for him. Someone offer GJ a phone; tell him what to do. Call your father. Stop hiding. Get out of the road. Camera crew and script.
“No thanks, man,” the kid said. He backed away from the RV. “I’ll find another ride.” He had his hands up as if the phone Greg held out was a gun. Greg still paid GJ’s phone bill. He wanted his son to have a phone to call and be called. But GJ had always treated it like a burden, something silly that only his dad and no one else in the world cared about. It’s just a phone, Dad.
Eat Only When You're Hungry Page 5
