by Mike Heppner
When she was finished with her wine, she offered him her hand, which he held over the table. He could tell by the dullness in her eyes that she was drunk. He knew this Marlene as well as the other; they were like two different copies of the same picture—all the details matched up and yet, side by side, they suggested a difference.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asked.
He let go of her hand. “Of course not.”
“Because . . . I don’t know. I was a good kid, and everything seemed okay when I got to be an adult, but then I just stopped wanting to do things.” Something lit up inside, and she stared across the table. “I’ve got to do it, Stuart. Tonight. I want someone to see me.”
He glanced nervously toward the maitre d’, who was standing at the next table. “Take it easy, hon,” he said.
“I’m not drunk, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
His cheeks flushed hotly. “I never said that.”
“I know exactly where I am and what I’m doing. I want to be naked.”
“Shh, hon, you’re raising your voice. Let’s just go back to the inn. Trust me, you’ll be glad in the morning.”
Some heads were turning to look at them, so she said, “You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
Oddly enough, that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, either. He didn’t know what he wanted. I’m a mess, he thought.
After a pause, she asked, “Stuart, are you sorry that you married me?”
He scowled. Questions like this always annoyed him. “No. Why?”
“Because I’m so boring.”
“You don’t need to entertain me. That’s not why people get married.” He squinted to see what she was doing with her right hand. Having already unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, she’d gone to work on the third. “Cut it out,” he snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her hand.
“All right, Christ, fine . . . if you’re so goddamned determined.”
He pushed his chair away from the table, and she followed him out of the restaurant. Other couples were just arriving for the second seating; the men were older than Stuart, better dressed, with an air of inherited wealth that reminded him of the Reese family on local TV. As for their wives, Stuart counted a number of lantern jaws, which he’d always associated with over-bred, entitled women. He couldn’t imagine any of them doing what he and Marlene were about to.
Once outside, Marlene hurried across the parking lot, taking tiny steps in her heels. The cold autumn air embraced her, and she could feel an undefined, ethereal body racing a few steps ahead of her own physical form. It was the same sensation as when she’d streaked across the backyard with Stuart, only more intense.
Sitting in the car, he reached over from the driver’s side and put his hand on her leg. Her pantyhose was rough, and her skin felt hot through the material.
“Where should I get undressed?” she asked.
His ears pricked up; he felt as though he could experience each second of time an instant before the rest of the world did. He looked out the window, then behind him, across the backseat. The parking lot was lit up with yellow sodium lights. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s just drive for awhile.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked. Her hand had moved up her skirt as she touched herself through the fabric of her pantyhose. She did this out of a compulsion, hardly aware of it herself.
“I don’t know,” he repeated, then started the car and pulled out of the lot. The roads were perfectly dark; the car’s high beams shone cones of hazy white light across the two-lane street. Dense walls of trees flickered by, dissolving away to expose a fenced-in field, a mill, an old pharmacy, a block of antique shops—all of them closed down for the night—and then just more trees and darkness, here and there a gravel trail that led straight into the forest.
Marlene steeled herself and, in a thoughtless burst of energy, tore off her clothes. Like Stuart’s, her sense of time had accelerated; all of this was happening much too fast for her to experience it in the present tense. As if from a distance, she observed her naked body in the seat of the car, her bare feet raised and pressed against the windshield, hands moving across her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said.
The road continued straight for another quarter mile or so. When another car appeared, she spread her feet apart and thrust out her chest, staring determinedly into the headlights that illuminated her body. She couldn’t see the driver’s face, but she was fairly certain that he or she, whoever it was, could see her. She had to believe it. Look at me, she thought, then said it out loud, her right hand rubbing between her legs. Once the car had passed, she tried to remember what it’d felt like. The only way she could explain it to herself, and this revelation came much later, was that she’d given the other person something so central to herself—the sight of her naked body—that the stranger now maintained a sexual control over her, control that was total and could never be revoked.
By the time they’d reached the next little village, her need to put herself in an even more dangerous situation had increased to the point where she felt like a passenger inside her own body. She had no choice over what her body decided to do, so she had no accountability for any of its decisions. Swept along, she unrolled the window and tossed her skirt and blouse outside. Wind filled the car, wrapping around her torso like a pair of cold hands.
The woods became more sparse as they drew closer to Great Barrington, where a Mobil station stood at the junction with Highway 7, a police car parked out front with its engine running.
Marlene crouched under the level of the dashboard as Stuart drove past. Her own thoughts confused her. As expected, she felt excited, aroused, a little dizzy—but also trapped, unable to control herself, filled with regret. Climbing back up to her seat, she rolled herself in a ball and thought, Please stop doing this, please. I don’t want to do this anymore.
“Take a left here.” She pointed at a sign marked To Mass Pike. Stuart veered the car onto an empty street and continued for another few miles before she told him to pull over. He hesitated; the breakdown lane was narrow and hard to see in the dark. As he eased to a stop, his tires kicked up a cloud of dust that hung suspended like fog in the headlights. He turned off the car, and they both sat quietly for a moment, almost too stunned to speak.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
With her arms wedged between her legs, she’d managed to cover both her breasts and her pubic hair, but this only made her look even more naked. “Scared,” she admitted.
Stuart checked the rearview mirror. It reflected nothing, only black. “Do you want to go home?”
“Oh, no,” she insisted but said nothing more.
He felt as though he were looking at and speaking to a very young girl. “What do you want to do?”
She pushed a lock of her dark hair behind one ear. Because the danger had passed—this was a quiet street, after all—being naked didn’t feel special anymore. In fact, it struck her as depressingly banal. She hadn’t risked enough, hadn’t gone far enough. She lacked the courage to continue. From now on, her nakedness was a punishment—given by herself, to herself—for having a body and for being a bad person.
Stuart’s voice prompted her. “Marlene?”
Feeling pressured, she asked him for his sports jacket, which he took off and handed to her. “Just turn around,” she said. They’d both been through enough for one night—especially Stuart, who wasn’t as committed as she was. But it was a good start. She felt good about what she’d done.
It took them twenty minutes to get back to the inn. Stuart drove a few miles under the speed limit, keeping both hands on the wheel. Marlene’s silence scared him; every now and then he said, “How’re you doing, hon?” or “Would you like me to slow down?” or “We’re almost there.” She found that she couldn’t speak to him just now. They’d debrief later, back in the room.
The grassy parki
ng lot behind the inn was half-empty when they returned. Stuart noticed a young couple walking down a stone path to their car. “There’s someone out there,” he muttered. “Maybe I should run in and bring out some clothes.” She handed him his jacket, which he refused. “You need it more than I do,” he said.
She tossed it at him anyway. The parking lot was not well lit, and all he could see was the gray shape of her body in the passenger seat. “Just bring me my jeans and a T-shirt,” she said.
Sighing, he climbed out of the car and walked across the lot. The couple wished him a happy Thanksgiving but cast a curious eye at his sports jacket, which was rumpled. He smiled and continued stiffly on. At the steps, he watched them pass behind his own car and squeeze into a silver Audi. The car started and pulled away; as it did, he unzipped his pants and took out his penis. Within seconds, an aching loneliness overwhelmed him—the night was made even more silent by the sound of crickets—so he stuffed it back and went inside.
Up in the bedroom, he opened Marlene’s suitcase and brought out something for her to wear. Along with her clothes, she’d packed a hardcover novel, written by someone he’d once met while out promoting his own book on tour. The book surprised him, in that Marlene rarely read for pleasure. He felt as though he’d caught her cheating with another man—which, in a sense, he had. Still, he could hardly blame her; what this other man had accomplished was something beyond his own abilities and ambitions. He was creatively impotent, and J. Alan Sessions was not. She was better off without him, better off reading someone else’s book.
When he looked up, he saw her standing naked in the doorway. “I left the car unlocked,” she said. “I’m gonna take a quick shower, okay? My whole body’s shaking.”
For ten minutes, he listened to the sound of the shower running, then undressed and moved into the sitting area, where he halfheartedly fondled his cock by the window. Doing so gave him no pleasure, only the vague sense that he’d lost control of his life.
When she finally came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a towel around her midsection and another wrapped turban-style around her head. “We’ll try it again tomorrow,” she said, “but during the day. I think I’ll stay in the car, if that’s all right— at least just to get started. We’ll see how it goes.” Reaching up, she unwound the towel from around her head and dashed her fingers through her wet hair. “The best thing, honey, is that we’re doing this together. You’re the only one I can talk to, the only one I can share any of this with, because I know you feel the same way I do and would never judge me or think I’m weird.”
He studied her carefully. “Of course you’re not weird,” he said.
They didn’t have sex that night; instead, he watched her masturbate, then followed her into the bedroom, where they slept until morning. At seven, he rolled out of bed and got dressed. “I’ll be right back,” he whispered to her.
Her eyes opened partway. “Where are you going?”
“Coffee,” he lied.
Outside, he started the car and drove back along last night’s route, scanning the breakdown lane for Marlene’s skirt and blouse. The highway appeared wider and less hemmed in by trees than it had the night before, and its smooth blacktop— white and yellow lines freshly painted—made his behavior seem all the more appalling. It was, to Stuart, like looking at a page of his own writing, then hearing it read aloud by someone else; he couldn’t relate to it, and every nuance, every wide-open curve in the road, embarrassed and offended him.
6
The day after Thanksgiving, Allison and her dad paid a visit to his mother’s house on Benefit Street, near Brown. Keeny hadn’t felt well enough to join Gregg for Thanksgiving, though she’d rallied in time to have brunch with a few of her lady friends at the Rue, a popular spot on the East Side.
Allison and Gregg found Keeny in the living room, fiddling with the TV. “I’m taping this opera for a friend,” she said and pushed a button on the VCR. “You know her, Gregg,” she added. “Barbara Stevens, Kenneth’s wife. We went on a bus tour to the Lincoln Center together. Mozart. She’d never been to an opera before. I said, ‘You poor thing.’ Some of these CEOs keep their wives under lock and key.”
“I went to the Met last year,” Allison said.
Keeny patted Allison’s cheek. As much as she loved her granddaughter, she sometimes found it hard to take her seriously. “How’s the young man?” she asked.
“Good.”
“Job?”
“Still looking.”
Keeny grinned; these were all coded questions, and Allison’s responses were equally diplomatic.
“Let me give you some money,” she said and hobbled into the kitchen, where she unlocked a cabinet and pulled out her purse.
Keeny looked especially frail this afternoon. Her bronchitis had worsened over the fall, and she’d recently begun a new regimen of medications to help control her blood pressure. With Keeny getting older, soon all of the Reese family’s problems would fall squarely on Gregg’s shoulders.
From inside her wallet, Keeny took a check she’d been waiting to give to Allison for some time, judging from its wrinkled and creased condition. “This is too much, Grandma,” Allison said.
Keeny pshawed. She didn’t expect gratitude from her own family. There was no need for it. Whatever she had belonged to all of the Reeses.
“Mom, you shouldn’t throw your money around like that,” Gregg said. “Whatever Allison needs, I’ll give her.”
Keeny frowned. “If Allison doesn’t want the money, she can donate it to the Reese Foundation. I’m sure she knows that already.”
Allison glared at her father. “God, Dad. It’s not like I asked her for it.”
“I know, I know.” His face felt hot. “It’s just that I’ve been so preoccupied with money these days, and . . . then this lousy cleaning woman comes in and takes you for a ride every week.”
“What’s wrong with my cleaning woman?” Keeny asked.
“She . . . just doesn’t do a good job. Look.” He pointed at the sink, which had a coffee cup in it. “Right there, and . . .” Actually, the room wasn’t nearly as dirty as he’d thought it was. Little by little, he could feel his authority slipping away.
Keeny scoffed. “Oh, relax. It’s only eighty dollars a week, which isn’t much in Providence. Besides, she cleans both floors.”
Allison chimed in. “If Grandma needs a new cleaning woman, I’m sure we can help her find someone else.”
“That’s right.” Keeny reached for her granddaughter’s hand. “Very sensible, as always.”
“Thanks, Gram.” Allison pointed down a dark hallway to the bathroom. “I’ll be right back. I’ve just got to fix my contacts.”
Suddenly more businesslike, Keeny led her son back into the den. Edging the volume down on the TV, she offered him a seat on the suede leather sofa she’d brought over from her old house on Wayland Square. Most of her furniture was familiar to Gregg from his childhood, and it looked odd to him in these new surroundings, where the rooms were smaller and the various tables and chairs didn’t quite fit.
“I always forget how deep this sofa is when I sit down,” he said.
With the air of depriving herself for the sake of a guest, Keeny took a seat on a hard ladder-back chair. On her head was a silver turban, which she wore to hide her baldness. As her hair had turned thin and straggly, she’d adopted the male custom of shaving her head every few days. The result had made her look younger, if unnaturally so. A recent face-lift added to the impression of alien perfection, a kind of “old woman of the future” as envisioned by a comic book.
“I didn’t mean to go on about the cleaning lady like that,” Gregg said. “I just think that you’ve got to be careful when you’re spending a lot of money, particularly when you’re a Reese.”
Keeny squinted peculiarly. “What does being a Reese have to do with it?”
He laughed. He’d been saving this conversation for another time and didn’t want to get into it now. “No
thing, I guess.”
Under most circumstances, she would’ve taken this opportunity to lecture him about his predecessors at the Reese Foundation, who’d done so much for the needy people of Rhode Island, but a fit of coughing derailed her train of thought. “How’s Allison?” she asked. “I suppose she must find living with you terribly boring.”
“I don’t think so,” he said but allowed, “It’s probably unrealistic to expect her to live at home forever.”
Keeny reached deep into her cardigan pockets, pulled out a Kleenex and wiped her nose. “I remember, you were a real homebody when you were a kid. You hated going to summer camp because you didn’t want to be away from me.”
“No, I hated summer camp because nobody liked me there.”
“That’s not true.”
“Not a single soul,” he asserted. “And you made me get on that bus every day because you were convinced I was having the time of my life, and when your friends asked about me, you lied to them. You said, ‘He’s having a wonderful time,’ when it was plainly obvious that I wasn’t.”
She stuffed the Kleenex back into her pocket. “You’re remembering things wrong, but never mind.”
At this impasse, Allison returned from the bathroom and plunked down next to her father on the sofa. “What are you guys watching?” she asked, squinting at the TV.
“Grandma just said she’s taping a program for her—”
“Oh, right. I spaced.” Turning to Keeny, she said, “Grandma, did Daddy tell you? Nathaniel Pike came over yesterday. He looked awful. Thinner.”
This wasn’t true, of course. She’d said it only to please her grandmother, who despised Pike. He’d been a hanger-on at the Reese Foundation some twenty years ago, when he was in his early twenties and still hustling all across the state. The foundation was at that time the biggest cash cow in Rhode Island and one that Pike had set his sights on. Keeny had always suspected him and Gregg’s ex-wife of having a little fling—not that it mattered, given that her son was a homo.
