by Lisa Taddeo
I looked back at the bar and saw a black leather wallet on the bamboo bar. The bartender noticed it at the same time.
—I know him, I told the bartender, I’ll catch up.
The bartender nodded carelessly. I grabbed the wallet off the bar and ran after him, barefoot, in my two-piece. He’d already made it to the upper-level parking lot by the time I got there.
—Wilt, I said breathlessly.
He was opening the door to a big black car when he turned to look at me. He smiled wide and his teeth were very white in a way that was frightening. I was holding the wallet out and hopping from one foot to the other because of the burning macadam.
—Jesus! he said. Get in for a second, will you?
I slid into the passenger side and he got into the driver’s side and started the car and lowered all the windows and blasted the air-conditioning. The front seat was one long black leather bench. It smelled so foreign in the car, like snakeskin and old people.
—Joan of Snark, thank you. What a chivalrous thing to do. You know how rare it is to find a chivalrous woman in the world?
What’s funny is how I remember almost everything up until that point. After that my memories are little blots. Driving through the Top of the World community, the light blue sky interrupted by trees. I don’t remember talking. In the home of his dead parents, I do remember an old-fashioned wet bar. It was the coldest place I’d ever been. All the furniture, polar to the touch. We drank brown liquor in thick glasses with giant ice cubes. There were low leather couches the color of the cordials in my parents’ liquor cabinet.
I don’t think I chose not to be afraid but maybe I did. Maybe his hands did not frighten me because they were the only warm things in the place. I know that he helped form my body into the certain position he wanted, which was on all fours, on the mustard carpet next to a gold-edged glass coffee table. But I knew from HBO movies how to hold myself. Also because of HBO, I’d already been having orgasms for over a year. Watching steamy scenes and riding a balled-up comforter in the early morning while my mother made breakfast. As long as I could hear the spatula against a pan and the fridge opening and closing, I moved heartily toward a sensation I could barely comprehend.
I don’t know if the decor of the house comes from my memory or from the movies I saw. Maybe it’s both. I don’t remember if he ever went inside of me but I do remember feeling pain. Sometimes I could see very clearly the way he licked every part of me above the knees and below the belly button, like a mother animal bathing its young with a wide tongue. He never took my bikini bottoms off, just uncovered the fabric section by section, looking for unlicked strips of flesh. I stayed very still. There was no music, no sound at all, except the sound of his tongue.
I was back at the Top of the World Pool by four. I went into the deep end, sinking myself down to the uneven aqua floor and sitting there for as long as I could hold my breath, which was a very long time.
By the time my father arrived at 4:29 I was inside the gate, exactly where he told me to wait, holding two books and drying my wet hair in the yellow mountain sun. The man had left the number for the landline of his parents’ house on the first page of Tropic of Cancer.
20
ELEANOR STOOD AND STRETCHED HER arms, extending the barrel of the gun at me.
—You have no idea how you fucked up my life! she screamed, and the walls of windows rattled in the hot house. You know my fucking baby brother is dead! Do you?
—Yes. Your mother told me.
—Did she tell you she’s pretty much the reason!
She cocked the gun.
—Please, I said, and I didn’t know where the next thing I said came from; it came from beyond me, from the seat of my stomach. Please, I lied, I’m pregnant.
—You’re what?
—I’m pregnant. I found out last week.
—What the fuck!
The gun began to shake so much in her hand that it dipped toward the floor. I pictured it falling, going off, and opening a cherry hole in my belly. One of those accidental deaths, the specialty of toddlers in Walmarts.
I imagined Alice at my funeral. Big Sky, too. Then I imagined him seeing her. She would be in a black tuxedo. She would lay a red rose on my gleaming coffin and he would get an erection.
—Is it my father’s!
—Yes.
—Are you fucking sure!
—Yes.
She found the wall with her hand and slumped down against it until she reached the floor. She cried and the gun shook in her hands. I was not one to comfort other women. I never embraced them or ran after them when they cried.
—Eleanor—
—Fuck you, don’t talk to me!
—Okay, I said. I wanted to get up and clean some dishes. But I knew she wanted what everybody wanted—for me to remain in the same place forever. My rigidity reminded me of the way I used to still my body when I’d finally reached my mother’s bed, afraid to make any moves that would wake her so that she might tell me to go back to my own room.
The girl was trembling. I saw the ant-colored hairs piercing through her white skin. I’d stolen from her. I was a very careless thief who didn’t even want her plunder. I’d been stealing my whole life. I’d walked out of bookstores with armloads of books, carried whole lobsters thwapping about in their sturdy white bags out of supermarkets. I’d stolen truffle honey, truffle salt, two-thousand-dollar dresses, twenty-dollar dresses, bras and underwear and shoes, headphones and batteries and flatware and Sharpie markers. I’d never in my life bought a container of Advil. And I’d stolen this child’s father and then dumped him off. By proxy, I’d stolen her little brother.
I thought to move toward Eleanor, to kick her hard in the face and take the gun and call the cops. But she kept her eyes on me even through the tears. Anyhow, I didn’t trust myself to do those things.
Her face was so remarkably his, it was as if he were right there. We sat for what seemed like a half hour and I had the time to recall the things Vic told me he’d done for her. Out of the blue he would write to me, I’m going to be busy a little later, kid, if you don’t hear from me, I have to fix Eleanor’s car. Eleanor has a deadly banana allergy so I’m going out to stock up on about ten thousand more EpiPens. Or in conversation he would say, I’m buying Eleanor a pony for Christmas. Many of the things he said he was doing for her I knew he was telling me so I’d see what a devoted father he was. That he had the money to buy a horse, the skill to fix a carburetor.
One night after I said I wanted ruby-red slippers like Dorothy’s, my father stayed up very late to glue red glitter onto a pair of ballerina shoes. In the morning the shoes were at the foot of my bed, twinkling like fire. They were very hard with glue and when I put them on they scratched my skin. I was enthralled with the love behind the effort, the sweat on his brow. I loved him even then as though he were already gone.
—I remember that day I met you, Eleanor said. At the office.
—I remember, too.
—You ate half of a grapefruit, cut into sections, with a spoon. I started doing that, too. Basically I wanted my father to see me eating grapefruit like that.
I nodded. I didn’t remember eating grapefruit in the office.
—When my mother was pregnant with Robbie, she found out from the doctor that he had a one-in-three chance of having trisomy twenty-one. And she didn’t tell my dad. Because she knew, or she thought, he would have made her get an abortion. When Robbie was born, that’s when he found out. When he saw his face as he came out of my mom’s stomach. That was the moment Dad left us, that was the moment we lost him. It wasn’t you. You’re nothing.
—Eleanor, I said, I’m sorry.
—Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You’re a piece of shit.
She transferred her weight from one foot to the other. She wiped her nose with the side of her arm.
—If you’re telling the truth, then you’re carrying my baby brother. His second chance.
It was hard to believe Vi
c had a child who could believe a thing like that. Eleanor had been brought up by a religious mother and a devout grandmother. Vic hadn’t been much for religion, though he took his wife to church every week. He christened his children. But the notion that Eleanor thought an unborn child might be her brother reincarnated was a bridge too far. On top of that, I wondered how she could be so sure that my fake pregnancy was a boy.
—And I’ll let you live until you give birth to him.
It was a ludicrous, medieval thing to say. I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to laugh. I wanted her whole family out of my life.
—Please, Eleanor—
—Don’t say my name. I will cut your face. You don’t need your face to give birth. And if you’re lying, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to cut out your eyes!
Her eyes were so little. I was tired of being a sponge. I wanted to kill her for saying something so silly.
—Where’s the nearest supermarket? she said, as though she were asking for directions.
* * *
ONE TIME WITH BIG SKY there was a scare. We never used condoms. He always pulled out. He was good at it. There are men who don’t know when they are about to come, and those men shouldn’t be allowed to fuck. But Big Sky was careful and aware. This one time he was about to come at the same time that I was. And I didn’t want him to pull out and ruin mine. I was on top and I squeezed my knees into the sides of his waist and crushed myself onto his pelvis with all my weight. I could feel him bucking to get me off, but I kept my eyes closed and pinned myself down. It was like the time I rode a mechanical bull in Nashville. I just concentrated on becoming one with the thing beneath me. At last I went limp and he shoved me off. What the fuck, he said, are you fucking crazy?
And I thought, Am I? No, I decided, I was not. In fact, I believe that was the only time in lovemaking that I truly acted for myself.
He was in agony for the weeks that followed. I could tell that Sundays were the worst. Probably he and his wife and son would come back from a stroll around Central Park, eat a nice summer dinner on that impressive stone patio and, after putting the child to bed, the wife would retire to their bedroom with the book that everybody was reading and he would tarry downstairs, drink a Boddingtons. He would text me around eleven, just a question mark.
Once I waited until the following morning and typed only the letter N. And then, realizing he might think I meant Negative, I wrote another message to follow the first: Nyet.
We had the talk one weekday afternoon at Salumeria Rosi. I ordered prosciutto and bufala and, to fuck with him, I also ordered a pot of pickles. He said, Listen, if it’s. If you are. I’ll take care of everything, obviously.
To make sure I didn’t misunderstand, he said, I mean financially, the procedure. I’ll come with you, too, of course. If you need me.
I nodded. I loved that restaurant, the silken slices of prosciutto and the pillowy discs of mozzarella, but I didn’t have an appetite. I thought that if I swallowed the pickles, I’d throw them right back up. Then he really would have shit his pants.
My period finally came on a Sunday and even then I didn’t tell him I’d gotten it until Wednesday. When you’re in love with a married man, the truth is that you are in hate with a married man, and you have to take succor where you can find it.
* * *
THE SUPERMARKET I CHOSE WAS the Ralphs in Pacific Palisades. I liked it because it was easy to park there.
In the car Eleanor kept her gun pointed at my face the whole time. She told me she didn’t care about going to jail, that she would shoot me anywhere. I didn’t believe her. The gun was likely not loaded. Or maybe it was. It’s not that I didn’t care if I died. It’s that I knew I would survive.
I parked my Dodge next to a motorcycle. She pressed the gun against my back going into the market. Once we got inside she put it in her pocket. She followed me down the women’s health aisle. There was a teen and there was a woman in her forties. The teen was looking at Monistat, the older woman was reading the back of a lubricant box. I took an EPT off the shelf because it was the brand I always bought.
In the single-stall bathroom I knew there was a small chance I might die. There was nothing I could do. I said, Everyone will hear. And she said, I have nothing.
I held up my mother’s white dress and peed over the cream strip. I had always been fanatical about peeing for a very long time on the strip. But that time I did it quickly. Then I shook it off and rested it on the edge of the grimy sink. In the past I would leave the strip in the bathroom for a long time. There’s nothing more horrendous than coming back too soon.
I didn’t think about the possibility that the strip would be positive. I obviously hadn’t fucked Big Sky the night Vic killed himself. I hadn’t slept with Vic in ages and I hadn’t slept with anyone else.
Until Marfa. Which I didn’t consider sex. Because the thing is, one could call it rape. It was half a rape, or three quarters of one. Like Alice said, there are rapes for which we shower, put on our nice shoes. The man, John Ford, had one of the ugliest faces I’d ever seen. Large brownish teeth, horny gray eyes, zero lips. There was a sign outside the hotel: WE’RE OPEN WHEN WE’RE OPEN. I sat in the lobby bar eating ceviche with too-thick rings of jalapeños and drinking Bloody Marys. The cubes of tuna on my plate were dark and warm and stringy. He sat down next to me and asked the bartender for a grasshopper. Even from not very close his breath smelled like metal.
A song I liked played in the lobby and he smiled as I moved my body to it. Later, when we were in his motel room, he would play the same song. He acted like I should be impressed. I found it ridiculous.
I tried to leave twice. I couldn’t say how he got me to stay the first time—maybe it was the idea that it would be a free night of sleep—but the second time he gripped my arm. The hold didn’t really hurt. I could have freed myself in that first moment. He turned me so I was facing away from him and lifted up just the back of my dress. He swiped my underwear to one side and pulled my right leg away from my left. He did it very crudely, laughing, so that it was like a mock of rough handling. His penis was indefensibly small. When he slid himself inside of me, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a finger. It felt like a little length of chalk. Yeah, he said over and over, going in and out, pincer-gripping my arm. I squirmed and said, Please stop. But I didn’t say it loud enough. I didn’t try to push him off because I was worried he would become more violent. Grossly, I was feeling bad about the size of his penis. I didn’t want him to know how absurd it felt and yet I hated him with every cell in my body. That was when the seed of what I would end up doing was planted. Of course, it was planted when I was ten years old, but I hadn’t been paying attention to how tall it was growing all my life.
Finally I kicked a leg back at him, like a horse, and tried to free my arms. But he exercised a remarkable strength, pinning both my arms against the wall. It lasted less than a minute. He thought he pulled out in time but I guess he didn’t. In the morning I washed my dress in his sink and left before he woke. I sped away in my car and the first minute on the road a bird flew into my windshield and remained there—orange, red, and blue—until hours later, when I stopped for gas. The horrified attendant scraped it off while I bought lottery tickets.
So I suppose Marfa was the thing that did it. In the wheelchair-accessible bathroom of the Ralphs the test took a minute or so. Eleanor stared at it and I stared at the ceiling. I was waiting for the sound of the gun. I knew what one sounded like now. Then there was an intake of breath and the small noise of a dumb young kid. I looked down. I saw the plus sign, rendered in cornflower.
21
SHE PUT THE WET PREGNANCY stick in the pocket of her shorts. She had no idea what to do. I suggested we go back to my house.
In the car she sat with the back of her head against the window and the gun pointed at my face. I scraped the doors of the Dodge against the branches of the dead trees that flanked the road back up the canyon. She flinched like it was an affront.
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I imagined a little cream bubble swimming in my blood. I imagined calling him up. Is this John Ford? Do you remember me from Marfa? I’m the woman that you held against a wall. I am fairly confident you didn’t fuck anyone else on that trip, and I for certain did not. The reason I’m calling is that I’m pregnant with your child. Shall we raise it together? Are you in Virginia? Shall I come to you or would you like to come here? I forgot what you do for a living but there are lots of industries in Los Angeles.
—Slow down! Eleanor yelled. I hadn’t been going over twenty-five miles an hour.
At the top I saw that Kevin’s car was not there, but Alice’s Prius was. I’d forgotten she was coming.
Alice wasn’t inside her car. She could have been walking around the place, down in the ravines. I didn’t know what I would do when she found us.
—Whose car is that? Eleanor asked.
—My friend.
—You knew she was coming?
—I forgot. The events of this morning. I hope you might forgive me for forgetting.
I saw Alice at the door of River’s yurt. Then I saw River in the doorway. His arm was raised, his hand against the top frame of the door, right over her head. The nearness was unsettling.
—Get in the house, Eleanor hissed, before they see us.
—She’s going to come and knock on my door because my car is here. What do you want me to do?
—Tell her I’m your friend!
I felt Eleanor put the gun in her pocket. I called down to Alice. It was strange to say her name. Her head snapped up. She was startled. She ran up the ravine. I wasn’t imagining the guilt. Its concentration was like a skunk smell in the air. River, nonplussed, waved and went back inside.
—Hey, she said. She was out of breath. She wore a red dress that could twirl. She was breathless and extra pretty.
