by Mike Heppner
“So you’re a libertine?”
“Hell yes. It’s everyone’s duty as an American and a free-thinking New Englander to have as much lewd sex as possible, in every position, in every room of the house—and even fuck your family members if that’s what you want, because it’s all beautiful.”
Hearing such licentious sermonizing reminded Stuart why he’d been drawn to Pike in the first place: his utter lack of self-consciousness. Stuart envied him his wit, his wicked tongue. What masqueraded as strong-willed convictions was really just the perverse ravings of a sadist. Pike didn’t stand for anything, except maybe the need to stand for something.
“Everybody wants me to be like Gregg Reese,” Pike said, “who has as much money as I do, and he’s just as selfish as I am, but he feels guilty about it, and that’s why there’s the Reese Foundation, the Allison Fund, all that bullshit. What’s wrong with people, Stuart?”
“Not enough lewd sex, I suppose.”
“How’s that?”
Stuart grumbled; he no longer felt like playing. “Never mind, I’m just acting like an idiot.”
Pike grinned affectionately. “Well, anyway, you should get back to your wife.”
“She’s at work,” Stuart said. He wasn’t sure why he disliked talking about Marlene. Was he embarrassed by her? No. Well, a little. She made him angry sometimes, and impatient, and annoyed. She reminded him of that line in the old Flannery O’Connor story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” It bothered him how much he liked that line.
He sighed. “Marlene can live without me.”
“Of course she can, it’s you I’m worried about.” Pike knelt to close the safe, then came up again. “Next month won’t be so bad. Once I get this straightened out with the DOI, we’ll all be moving up to the White Mountains.”
Stuart shrugged. Moving to the White Mountains made about as much sense as anything else—that is to say, none at all. “I wouldn’t mind living in New Hampshire,” he said. “But Marlene’s tied to her job, so that’s that.”
“They have banks in New Hampshire. I’ll build one.” Pike chortled. “Now there’s an idea—instead of a parking lot.”
The parking-lot idea wasn’t a new one; in fact, he’d been joking about it for years, developing it the way a comedian might shape a particular routine, taking a little out, then putting it back: “You know what I’d like to do? Buy up a thousand acres of who knows what, maybe Yellowstone National Park, and just pave the whole thing over,” elaborating on it a few weeks later, “No, I’ll build a parking lot in the middle of the woods, maybe up in Vermont or New Hampshire, miles and miles from the nearest access road,” the idea growing on him until it began to wake him up at nights, this silly image of a pristine parking lot consigned to the rocky barrens of the White Mountains, never driven upon, each pointless parking space meticulously detailed in bold yellow lines, waiting for no one, an affront and an insult and a fantastic jest. Smiling in bed, he imagined blue-and-white handicap spaces, maybe three of them at the end of each row, the rows stopping where the smooth black macadam butted up against a wild, encroaching border of ragged beech and twisted pines.
Visions like these had delighted him ever since he was a boy. He’d grown up in South County, Rhode Island, a hodgepodge of small and diverse villages that included a range of economic classes, from the millwrights and construction workers who lived in old duplexes on Route 1 to the nouveau riche who’d bought up property on Wickford Harbor. He was hyperactive as a teenager, so his parents moved him out of the sticks and enrolled him in a private school on Providence’s East Side. Surrounded by new classmates, he began to spend less time at home and more time chasing girls. He loved being popular but didn’t lord it over anyone. One of his closest friends was a tomboy from the East Bay, Sarah Cranberry, who was far less pretty than most of the girls who would’ve gladly gone out with him. Years later, after he’d dropped out of school and spent a decade producing a handful of mildly scandalous art films for the European market— Vanessa’s Caress and The Succubus among them—before bottoming out as a filmmaker and investing all his remaining funds in the commodity exchange, after he’d gleefully rounded second base with some eighty-plus women in Providence County alone, Pike still kept in touch with Sarah and visited her several times a year at her ski lodge in North Conway, New Hampshire. She was his favorite excuse to get away from the office.
Nowadays, he didn’t like to work much, though every so often he forced himself onto a plane to make a circuit of the various corporate HQs where he held stock. All of the buildings were clean and boxy. One company manufactured computer chips for the defense industry. Another built payloads for NASA. The whole trip took about ten days, from Providence to New York, Washington to Dallas to Sacramento (great Vietnamese place in downtown Sacramento!) and then back to Providence. Work dispensed with, he returned to what he did best: enjoying himself, putting food and drink into his mouth, and plotting more ways to provoke Gregg Reese.
Gregg Reese was Rhode Island’s other megamillionaire. The Reeses were an old Rhode Island family that had made a reputation for themselves as philanthropists, good-deed doers and, some might say, indiscriminate supporters of social causes. Every year, the Reese Foundation gave millions of dollars to parks and universities, museums and day-care centers, using any excuse to fork over another half-mil to anyone willing to change the name of their organization to the Gregg Reese Center for the Poor and Pathetic. Pike couldn’t deny it: Gregg was a good man, a kind, civic-minded individual. In private, the two rather liked each other. On some level, Gregg appreciated Pike’s little publicity stunts. Both he and Pike were making a commentary of sorts—on wealth, on being privileged in America. Gregg believed in an America founded on philanthropy, good works, and Christian charity. Pike took a darker view.
“The problem with this country,” he told Stuart, “is that we no longer understand the impulses that brought us to America in the first place. This is a thieves’ den, man! We’re worse than Australia. Go down the list of names on the Declaration of Independence. I’m more like those guys than Gregg is. But if Ben Franklin were alive today, we’d put him behind bars just like the Unabomber or any other eccentric. We don’t want eccentrics in this country anymore, we want team players. Government-controlled sycophants.”
Stuart listened politely; today was payday, and he wanted to feel that he’d earned his money.
“Anyway, I’ll let you go,” Pike said. “Unless you’re interested in sticking around for lunch. There’s some crap in the fridge. We’re allowed to have one beer before noon.”
“No, thanks,” Stuart said and followed his employer out of the library.
Heading downstairs, Pike suggested that Stuart and Marlene get out of town for the weekend.
“We are,” Stuart said. “Not this weekend. Thanksgiving. We’re taking a drive out to the Berkshires.”
“What’s in the Berkshires?”
“Nothing. Some expensive B&B that Marlene wanted to go to. We’ve had reservations since June.”
Pike reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash and gave it to Stuart. “Here, go buy yourself a good time.”
Stuart took the money without thanking him. “I could get used to this,” he said. Truth was, he’d already gotten used to it, months ago. Through no effort of his own, he’d come upon an easy way to coast through life and now felt disoriented to the point of paralysis.
Excusing himself, he got dressed in the first-floor guest room. Down the hall, he could hear Pike in the kitchen—eating again, judging from the smell of bacon frying and butter melting on toast. He dressed slowly, making frequent passes in front of the window. The shutters were open, and from a certain angle—perhaps from that lamppost, black and chilly on the opposite corner—one could see directly into the room, across a street of salmon-colored bricks, some askew and others oddly shaped to fit around manhole
s in the road. Half-naked, he placed his hand against the window; the chill of the outside world shocked him.
3
Later that afternoon, Stuart’s wife, Marlene, was approached by her supervisor, Carla Marshall, as she was putting on her raincoat in preparation for the short walk home. Carla was younger than Marlene (twenty-seven to her thirty-two) and more attractive, more likely to entertain the hungry stares of young male customers as they waited in line to cash their paychecks. She’d gone to URI, gotten an MBA and now lived with her husband in an old townhouse near Brown. Marlene often saw her on weekends, dressed down, doing the groceries or returning a video.
“I can’t wait to get out of these clothes,” Carla said, leaning against the Plexiglas divider that separated Marlene’s cubicle from the others. “I wish we could wear our pajamas to work.” She waited for Marlene to say something, then asked, “What do you wear around the house?”
Marlene blushed. “Just this,” she said.
Carla smiled, almost flirtatiously. “You’re so conservative, Marlene. I think you’d look pretty in a tank top.” She snapped her fingers. “Hey! How would you like to spend a week on Martha’s Vineyard?”
Marlene glanced out the window at the cold drizzle slapping against the parking lot. “Now?”
“No, of course not now. In May. Bill and I are renting out a time-share in Chilmark.” Bill, her husband, was a commercial photographer with a practice in Downcity. Stuart and Marlene had smoked pot with them after a fondue party a few months back, and ever since Carla had shown a strange, almost intrusive interest in Stuart’s work, projecting a life for him that involved royalty checks in the tens of thousands. “The water’ll still be cold, but at least getting around will be easy.”
“I don’t know.” Marlene checked her watch; it was 3:05. Under her arms, she felt the jiggly sensation that always came at the end of a workday. “Money’s a little tight right now.”
Carla sighed disapprovingly. “You always use that excuse, and I never believe it.” Moving away, she left a stack of loan applications on Marlene’s desk. “Besides, the Big Money goes to Nantucket. We’ve been to both, and there’s more to do on the Vineyard. Nantucket’s too secluded.”
“We’ll think about it,” Marlene said and fixed the last button on her raincoat. The coat was heavy and buttoned all the way to her throat. Many of her fantasies involved this raincoat—at the grocery store, wearing nothing but the coat and a pair of black stiletto heels; Stuart coming up from behind, the cool mist from the produce aisle breeZing against her skin as he loosens the belt, letting it fall to the floor, and people all around, staring . . .
Man’s voice: “Last one out!”
She took her purse and followed Carla across the banking floor, where a half-dozen tellers were also getting ready to leave for the day. One at a time, they filed past a security guard and out the front door. Most of the girls were in their early twenties, and they all shared connections—whether through college or childhood—that Marlene knew little about. She’d kept in touch with no one from her hometown of North Providence, only her parents, who’d both retired and were considering buying a place in Snug Harbor. No reason to go back, no need for old friends or even new ones. Marlene so thirsted for her husband that everything else was a distraction.
Heading home, she passed groups of university students smoking and slouching, oblivious to the rain, as they hung out on the front steps of two-hundred-year-old apartment buildings. They ignored her as she walked by; she was of another generation, straight and simple and no longer bursting with the potential of an Ivy League undergraduate. Marlene recognized this lack of potential in herself. Her own conservativeness continually frustrated her; it had become a self-defeating habit, like masturbating instead of going through the effort of having sex with your partner. Her mother, in particular, had always urged her to take chances, chances that Marlene ignored until, through her inattention, they eventually turned into missed opportunities. She’d acted during high school but gave it up as impractical when she went off to college. She could’ve gone to a conservatory—her parents would’ve paid for it—but didn’t because it felt like an indulgence. Time and again she’d denied herself what other young people always took for granted: the right to make an honest mistake. Her adolescent rationales now escaped her, and she wondered what ultimate goal—working in a bank? —had made all the other sacrifices seem worthwhile.
Reaching her street, she let herself into her house without picking up the stack of mail on the front steps. She’d become absentminded in the year that she’d been married. She didn’t consider herself a particularly good wife, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Her shortcomings were basic, God given. She wasn’t smart, wasn’t pretty, didn’t know much about writers or literature. Getting her husband’s attention and keeping it was a challenge she faced every day.
Other than the theater, Marlene had never had any real interests of her own. All of her favorite pictures of herself as a kid showed her dressed up as someone else: Miss Hannigan in Annie, Mrs. Paroo in The Music Man, Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! Being a senior member of the drama club had given her access to a social group that otherwise would’ve been inaccessible to her. Whenever she wasn’t on stage, she was quiet, a hardworking yet average student. Her classmates were always surprised to see her come alive for the spring musicals, where she usually played the mayor’s wife, the mother or the loudmouthed older sister; in other words, the fat chick’s part. This wasn’t a role she wished to pursue in real life, so after high school she traded in her artistic aspirations for something more conventional.
Passing through a dark hallway, she set down her purse, stepped out of her sneakers, and joined Stuart in the kitchen. He was doing the dishes; he’d been out of the house for two days, and of course she hadn’t thought to do them herself.
“Boy, you really did a number on this place,” he said, pausing just long enough to give her a quick kiss. “I took the trash out. It was starting to smell in here.”
Marlene flashed her stupid-little-me smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where my head’s been lately.” Feeling like a slob in the face of so much activity, she found a discrete corner of the room and sat down. The window above the kitchen table had its blinds down, and she yanked them open to let some light in. “It’s raining harder now,” she said.
He turned off the faucet. “What was that?”
“I said it’s raining harder now.”
He nodded vaguely. “Good night to stay inside.”
Before he could get back to work, she went over to him and put her hands on his chest. “That wasn’t a real kiss, you know.”
Their second kiss lasted longer but seemed just as rushed as the first. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“No, not really. Nate always gives me a headache, that’s all.”
“Leave the dishes, then. I’ll do them later.” Leading him away from the counter, she tugged on his belt and began undoing his trousers. “Why don’t I start some laundry?” she asked playfully.
Glancing toward the window, he said, “Careful. My wallet’s still in there.”
She took his wallet out of his pocket and saw that it was full of bills. “Hey, you’ve been holding out on me.”
“No, I haven’t. I just got paid today.”
Marlene tossed the wallet onto the kitchen table, then went back to stripping off his clothes. Stuart helped her by taking off his shoes and socks. His mind was still stuck on the dirty dishes in the sink. He didn’t like leaving a chore once he’d started on it. “How was work today?” he asked.
“Fine. Carla Marshall asked me what I liked wearing around the house.”
Stuart winced. “What did you tell her?”
“Oh, nothing. I was a good girl.”
She bundled his clothes and brought them downstairs to the laundry room. Before starting the washing machine, she took off her own clothes and added them to the load. Marlene loved being naked with Stuart, both in and out o
f the bedroom. They slept naked, watched TV naked, sometimes even ate dinner naked. Being naked made her feel like something important in the world revolved around her. Dressed, she didn’t feel anything, just a lingering discontent with herself and her body.
Back upstairs, she boosted the thermostat in the hallway to seventy-four and went back to the kitchen. Stuart had resumed his chores and was cleaning the refrigerator with Fantastik spray. Marlene noticed that he’d closed the blinds.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she said. “I don’t like sleeping by myself. I always think somebody’s going to break into the house.”
“They can break in whether I’m here or not.”
“True. Anyway, it’s good to have you here.” She gazed down at her bare feet and her toenails, painted red. Her own nakedness seemed disappointing, even though she’d spent the whole day looking forward to it. She wanted more—not just to be naked but to talk about it as well. Watching his backside, she said, “You know something?”
“What?”
“Sometimes when I’m between clients at work, I wonder what it would be like if I took off all my clothes and everyone in the bank could see me. Is that weird?”
“Not particularly. I’m sure it’s a fairly common fantasy.”
She frowned. “Common” wasn’t the word she’d wanted to hear. “I guess that makes me pretty predictable, then.”
“You know that’s not what I mean. I mean that other people probably think the same thing. That doesn’t make you any less special.”
The doorbell rang, and they looked around carefully, as if whoever it was had discovered a method, simply by ringing the bell, of morphing directly into the kitchen.
He sighed. “Where’s my robe?”
She pointed upstairs, then went off to make herself decent. Grateful for the interruption, he hurried off and came back downstairs wearing his robe. Marlene was in the bathroom washing her hands. Through a window, he saw Celia Shriver standing on the front porch holding their mail. Celia lived across the street in a three-story colonial that anyone more desperate for money would’ve divided into apartments years ago. Looking at it from the outside, one imagined dusty rooms cluttered with yellowed bundles of newspapers, the whole place smelling like an unchanged litter box. She’d lived by herself for nearly two decades, and now, at sixty-seven, recently retired from the Textiles Department at the Rhode Island School of Design, she’d begun to get out more often, going to fund-raisers and political rallies, always donating the bare minimum but also making the biggest racket.
