Always Chloe and Other Stories

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“Look. I took precautions so we wouldn’t have to do this.”

  “Well, you know, you tore through that sucker.”

  “I tore through it? How about you’ve been having a problem with dryness lately?”

  If Sandoval were here and spoke English, he’d say, “Want me to kill him now? Can I? Please?”

  “I have a good idea, Web. Let’s get into a lengthy argument about whose fault this is.”

  He says, “Yeah, okay.” But he doesn’t mean, Yeah, okay, let’s argue. He means, Yeah, okay, point taken. And we go back to that silence I mentioned before. It’s a strange sort of progress. If any.

  I moved to Santa Barbara to be closer to Web. Proximity is always the fatal misstep. I’m pretty sure that goes without saying, but I say it all the same, as is my habit.

  I allow a lapse in tradition. No, strike that. I force a lapse in tradition. Traditions arrive on Earth pre-equipped with a built-in momentum. They don’t take to being broken. Not without a struggle.

  I don’t call Web to say goodnight.

  Sounds like a small thing; as it turns out, its absence feels massive and conspicuous and impossible to ignore, like a new planet between the Earth and the sun. The less we both say about it, the louder it gets.

  It started more than three years back, with a complaint about Diana, his live-in. Possibly the only one to ever part my lips. When something is always there, like Diana, you learn to let it stand quietly. It takes up enough space as it is. But in a rare weak moment, I verbalized the unfairness of Diana’s accessibility around bedtime. The fact that she is always there to say goodnight to him, and I never am. When taking aim at something genuinely troublesome, it’s usually advisable to strike it a glancing blow. Dead-true aim can injure the shooter as badly as the target. But I digress.

  “Beg to differ,” he said. “I spend all evening locked away in my study alone,” he said. “I don’t come out until midnight or later, and she is long asleep.”

  So that night, I called him on his private line, the one that rings in the study. To make a liar out of him. To cause trouble in a way he could never entirely blame me for, starting as it did with his own lie.

  But he was there, apparently alone, quite able to talk. Oddly receptive to the moment. I told him I had only called to say goodnight. I remember the timbre of his voice, the way it dropped into an almost gravelly range. I felt I’d glimpsed something I’d never so much as imagined in the revealing light of day. I tend to think of Web as something like a turtle. I know there’s soft inside. I’ve seen it, almost touched it. But he retains the ever-present option of retracting his head. It serves him every time.

  Now, for the first time in more than three years, I don’t call. I lie on my bed in the servant’s quarters, Sandoval sleeping with one twitching paw across my belly. Listening to Artemis snore in the corner. Noting that Minerva, who is also present, always seems silent and invisible. And I admit to myself that if Web doesn’t want to talk about it, there’s something very real that he doesn’t want me to know. Something more than what I know already.

  Then I begin to see that I may have been put at genuine risk. If I haven’t, it would certainly be easy and comfortable to assure me that I haven’t. And no such assurance seems forthcoming.

  While I’m thinking this, the phone begins to ring downstairs. On the fifth ring, I say, “Yeah. I’ll bet you wish it was just that easy.” Out loud. Minerva lifts her head off the carpet, stretches, studies me briefly. Goes back to sleep. The phone is still ringing.

  I wonder if Diana also has someone going on the side. I wonder if that’s the risk factor. I guess I want it to be, for any number of reasons. But of course, it’s not like that. I met her once. I know she’s just like me. Just like me. Which means I am not Web’s only indiscretion. Which, somewhere in my gut, I knew. I didn’t know I knew it. But I know I knew it now.

  The phone stops ringing, and the absence of the sound is louder than the real thing. An inaudible echo.

  I picture our imaginary scoreboard, the one that’s always read: Web, points in the hundreds. Me, nothing. And I know I have one point now. I watch myself mark it down. And I think, A victory of a thousand scores begins with a single point.

  I feel strangely satisfied, and I sleep.

  Before leaving the house for my morning run, I have my usual chat with Murray. I step into the front closet, address Murray’s white pushbutton-filled control panel, press Status.

  I say, “What’s the status, Mur?”

  The usual long double beep. Then his voice, amplified from a source I’ve yet to identify, somewhere in the direction of my humble quarters.

  “Alarm. Something something. Off.”

  In all the years I’ve known Murray, I’ve never been able to decipher the something something. Asking him to repeat himself doesn’t help.

  “Sector one-one open,” he adds.

  “Shit,” I say. “Sorry, Mur. What would I do without you?”

  Sector one-one is open. Nobody’s fault but my own. In layman’s terms, this is sector eleven. Actually, I suppose a layman might call it the kitchen. I find the window I have carelessly left cracked, rectify this risky oversight.

  Nowhere in my job description does it say I am in charge of security, nor anything else, for that matter; my job description is not committed to written record. But security is a constant issue, and should it ever go wrong, who do I suppose the police will want to question? From whom will My Employer and her personal secretary demand answers? Was everything locked? You were out with the dogs; did you set the alarm?

  I step back into the front closet and set the alarm. A four-digit code followed by the button marked “Away.” Only because I am taking the dogs. “Away” activates the motion sensor. If the dogs are home, they trip it in my absence. I grew tired early on of finding the police waiting on the doorstep. The police might not have liked it much, either.

  Murray beeps again. He says, “Alarm. Something something. On. System two.” I’ve asked My Employer. I’ve even asked her personal assistant, who tends to know things. They don’t know what the something something is, either.

  I have exactly forty-five seconds to get out the door.

  If not for Murray, I would have no one at all to talk to.

  Life on the Rincon Point is full of surfers. They don’t talk to me, because I am not a surfer. I am not an Us. I am a Them.

  Unless, like this morning, one notices me descending the steps from My Employer’s house to the beach. Then they speak.

  This one says, “Hey. Do you know her?” A variation on what they all say.

  I say, “Who? Do I know who?” I ask only to be polite. The question needs no clarifying. I know no one. And I know what he means.

  “You know,” the surfer says. “Her. Rachel Falk.”

  “Who?”

  “The actress. This is her place, right?”

  “Oh, her. No. I think her house is the third one down on the other side of the slough.”

  “Really? I thought it was this one.”

  “No.”

  “Big dogs. Man. Big goddamn dogs.”

  I smile blankly and walk on.

  Rachel Falk is not an actress. She is a Movie Star. She is Box Office Draw. She makes more on one celebrity endorsement than my entire nuclear family combined will earn in a lifetime of nine-to-five employment. She has shattered the glass ceiling to earn twelve million per movie, a record for a female personality.

  I know all about Rachel Falk. She is My Employer.

  But I don’t know her.

  I begin to run.

  I notice immediately that I am running harder, faster, today. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to keep this pace all the way to the Chevron Pier and back, but I don’t feel able to slow. The dogs streak out, stretching their impossibly long legs, passing me like I’m running in place. Making it look easy.

  To avoid rocks and shells, I run on the shiny, wet edge of the surf, in a half-inch of saltwater, where clouds and early su
n reflect, forcing a sheen of colors back into my brain, blocking out other considerations, such as whether my heart might burst.

  Someone pulls level with me. Before I even turn my head, I know it’s Web. It makes me angry. It makes me angry that he caught up, because I am running faster than I ever did before. So I put on a burst of speed. He surges with me but can’t quite pull level again. Minerva swings a great arc around us, splashing through a wave and wagging her tail at Web in cheerful greeting. But we are busy attempting to best each other. In time, she gives up and runs on ahead.

  Actually, he might be trying to talk to me, join me, get through to me. I know this in a far-back place in my head where I keep all things easily ignored. I am busy proving I can run faster than Web. In his favor, maleness. In my favor, a twelve-year age advantage and a stubborn insistence on proving a point.

  I can’t see him in my periphery now. I see the pier looming, growing closer. Amazing, because it’s miles from where I started. I have reached the far end of Rincon Beach, the seal rookery, a place we are not allowed to go in the winter, the dogs and I. A place where low tide exposes strange treasure. Pilings of old piers, gone and forgotten. Huge rusted-metal pipes, big enough to crawl through, if one weren’t busy proving a point. Angular, vertical juts of metal, worn smooth. Two gargantuan tractor tires that shift in position from week to week, tide to tide, sliding out to sea only to be abandoned again.

  I feel a burning in my chest but not much else. I can’t feel my legs. Can’t or just don’t. They are working alone.

  The way becomes rocky; I chart my steps carefully, as in chess, thinking always three moves ahead. The dogs are circling the pier pilings, knowing we will not go further. We never go further. I reach out for a piling. In a second or two, I will touch it. Then I will have won. Then my heart might stop, my lungs might collapse; I may lose consciousness. I’m suspended in a euphoria of oxygen debt, where none of these potentialities seems like a problem. I touch a piling and stop. I lean on my knees, feeding myself air. Normally, I would turn and run back now, but this is not normal. This is war.

  I count off seconds in my head. At the count of twelve, Web arrives. Almost. He catches his foot on a rock, flies onto the sand on one knee and the heels of his hands. He flops to his side, lies motionless, gasping for breath. Minerva stands over him, kissing the air in the direction of his face with a curled, swollen tongue. He pushes her away.

  “You’re fast,” he says on an outrush of air.

  I turn back toward the point and begin the run home. Strong but reasonable in pace. The dogs abandon Web and canter along.

  At about the place where the seal-rookery signs will be posted in winter, I glance over my shoulder. Web is still down. I don’t look back again.

  I’m sitting on a hard plastic chair at the county health department. In my hand is a number, the kind you hold at the deli or the butcher shop, awaiting service. #88. According to the digital counter on the wall, We Are Now Serving #76. I wonder how long it takes each person to be served.

  Also in my hand is a small blue information booklet that explains, among other things, the proper use of condoms. It even utilizes diagrams. A line drawing of an erect penis, startlingly realistic in every aspect. I think, under better circumstances, this could be considered sexually explicit material. But nobody ever has, ever will, ever could become sexually aroused at the county health department. If there’s an exception to this rule, I don’t want to know him. Still, I expect that somewhere in the country lives a Republican senator, heavily backed by the religious right, organizing a bid to ban the use of public funds for just such diagrams. I know he’s out there. I can smell him.

  The woman who gave me the number comes through the waiting room to adjust the volume on The Movie. It’s playing in a corner on a wide-screen TV that makes everybody’s skin look green.

  She puts her hand on my shoulder and tells me I am supposed to be watching The Movie. So far, my chair is not even facing in that direction. She told me before to watch The Movie, when she gave me the number. It seems humiliating to have to be told a second time. I feel my face redden, and I assure her with all due gravity that I won’t deviate from the plan again. Not in those exact words. I’m relieved when she exits. I realize this place makes people feel dirty and small.

  On the TV screen, Generation X actors play out skits of various reactions one might encounter when broaching the subject of Safe Sex with a potential partner. I can’t prevent myself from evaluating their performances. Two young girls sit watching in the front row of hard chairs, poking each other and giggling. I feel somehow cheated, because they don’t appear to feel dirty and small. A man sits against the wall, thirtyish, the kind of man you always hope you won’t get stuck with on a blind date. He is staring at his hands. I think he probably feels dirty and small wherever he goes. Otherwise, the waiting room is empty, causing me to wonder who holds all those other numbers.

  A woman comes to get me. Well, to get #88. As soon as she does, I feel better. Because I like her, before she even opens her mouth. She’s tall, a trace heavy, stunningly, gorgeously black, with great facial bones, her hair skinned back, and a loose flowered dress. She leads me into her oppressively tiny, windowless office. Her plastic county health department badge says Zoe Brown. I wonder if she is a genuine nurse. If she had to go to school for years to earn the privilege of doing this all day.

  I sit at her desk, and we talk. She prepares me for the fact that she is about to request detailed information about my sexual patterns. I realize that she doesn’t know my name, where I live, what or who I think I am. This is supposed to carry me through the interrogation. But strangely enough, I realize I want her to know who I am. But I don’t want to get caught breaking the rules again, so I don’t tell her. Besides, first I’d have to get that all sorted out myself.

  First, she wants to know why I’m not concerned about pregnancy, but I had my tubes tied years ago. So that one is easy. Nothing else is.

  She asks me to sum up why I feel I’m at risk. Why I decided to come in and be tested. I tell her about Web and the exploding condom. Minus names, of course. She tells me about lubrication. K-Y Jelly or some other type of non-oil lubrication. Lots of it. Oil tends to break down rubber, though. So not oil.

  I want to tell her that lubrication didn’t used to be a problem. In my heart, I know there is significance to the fact that it lately is. My own natural lubrication has gone on strike, as if it can assess reality faster and more accurately than my brain.

  Instead, I tell her that I’ve been practicing Safe Sex with the same one, repeat, one, guy for years. Even in the event of equipment failure, you want to believe you can trust somebody. Know where he’s been. And my voice breaks, and we both hear it. I’m teetering perilously on the edge of tears. If I don’t regain my balance quickly, the fall will be out of my hands. I have reached the emotional heart of this life juncture, something that obviously should be done in the privacy of my own home, if indeed I had one of my own. Or my best friend’s home, if I had one. Or a bar, if I still drank. Or any place that isn’t the county health department.

  The questions. Have my sexual experiences been with the opposite sex or the same sex or both?

  Since when? I want to know. Because, you know, about three years ago, I got tested. And since then, well, it’s just this one guy. Back in L.A., okay, that got pretty wild. But since my last test, I’m a changed woman. Not that I’m ashamed of my answer to this specific question, but it’s only the first one, and already, I’m on the defensive. Besides, it sounds better in softer lighting.

  She says the questions aren’t time specific. Have I ever.

  My God. Don’t I ever get to leave my past behind?

  I don’t say that out loud. I say, Both.

  When was my last sexual encounter with a member of the same sex?

  Three and a half years ago. Right before I left L.A. Yes. I’ve had unprotected oral sex. Yes. Unprotected anal sex. Yes. Sex with a former I.V. drug use
r. Yes. Yes. Yes. Other than being an I.V. drug user myself, there is absolutely no risky behavior I haven’t tried. But don’t you see, I’m a new person now? I was having trouble with my self-esteem. Acting out. I knew AIDS was out there, but I felt the need to defy my own mortality. Besides, I wanted people to like me. Party girls have all the friends.

  The only part of this I say out loud is, Yes.

  I’m glad now that I didn’t tell Zoe Brown who I am.

  I roll up my sleeve and wonder if I should tell Zoe Brown about my veins. The way they roll. Their tendency to run for cover under pressure of needles. But I don’t. Because I’m afraid she’ll think that’s the only reason I was never an I.V. drug user. And that was my only No answer. The fact that it might be true further cements my resolve to leave it unsaid. Before she breaks the sterile cap off the number-coded syringe, she asks the approximate date of my last unprotected contact.

  “You mean the day the condom broke?”

  “If that was the last unprotected contact.”

  “About two weeks ago.”

  She frowns. “We can go ahead and take this test today, but you’ll have to come back in six to nine months to be retested. That’s about how long the virus takes to show up after exposure. Didn’t you read that part? It was in the blue booklet.”

  She rubs back and forth hard over my rolling vein, beneath the tight cuff she has placed on my upper arm. Don’t roll for her, I think. This is Zoe Brown. She’s okay. She’s a real person. Hold still for her.

  I say, “I tried to read the blue booklet, but then this lady came in and told me I was supposed to be watching The Movie.”

  She laughs. It’s a genuine amusement I know was never taught in county health department training school. She says, “Yeah, they get you coming and going, don’t they?”

  I silently tell my rolling vein, See? I told you she’s not really one of them.

  She strikes blood on the first try. It leaps into the little glass number-coded tube. That’s me, I think. I am that number. Memorize that number. That might be my true identity.