“Listen.” He muted the TV and turned toward her. “Why don’t you come with us to New York.”
“Dad, I really do have to go back.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I have a job. I have a life there.”
He snorted. “Yeah, some life.”
“How’s being a hermit in the desert treating you?”
“I want you to come along to New York, maybe stay with your mother for a little while.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“No, but I’m sure when she hears how things are, she’ll be happy to put you up.”
“How things are. How are things?”
He turned his head and looked at her for a moment. “You really want me to answer that? I’ll be honest with you, Cin, they don’t seem great.”
“I’m going for a swim.” She got out of bed on shaky legs, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and left the room. She was resigned to many things where her father was concerned, but not a lecture on good life choices. Outside the room, the synthetic piling of the blue carpet bristled between her toes; the large hallway stretched out bland and identical in both directions, implying that it didn’t matter which way you went.
The night outside was an eerie bliss of desolation broken only by the hum of cars on the distant highway. Despite the parking lot’s fullness (a gymnastics tourney, they’d been informed by the somber, garishly necktied desk clerk), the place felt deserted, vacant. It was located ten miles south of Salt Lake, on a rectangle of dust, as though a nomadic team of Sheraton executives had wandered to that spot and seen that it was good. She walked around the pebbled edge of the hotel’s patio area. The swimming pool sparkled a beckoning green-white under halogen lights, like a jewel left unguarded to lure a thief, baiting an obscure trap in the surrounding darkness.
The water was tepid, still warmed by the hot exhale of the October desert. She piled up her clothes on the rough concrete that surrounded the pool, though she kept on her underwear. She didn’t really care if some car salesman from Provo caught what he might consider a naughty glimpse from his window. That would be his problem, not hers—she was currently at the absolute limit of problems she could have. The needful water clung to her. It was a relief physically, but also mentally, to escape her father’s proximity—the radius of his personality that extended around him like a force field—and her own uncontrollable, compulsive desire for his attention and approval.
When she dove beneath the surface, the overchlorinated water assaulted her eyes with a purifying, righteous burn. She let out a few air bubbles and swam to the shallow bottom, which was littered with pennies and a fine dusty residue, the provenance of which was best left unimagined. She was a good swimmer, always had been—a waterbaby, in Eileen’s words—though she rarely used her own apartment complex’s pool, a dismal square of green water under constant siege by a squadron of intimidating teenagers. She kicked across the bottom to the deeper end, letting the weight of water overhead squeeze the uneasy dope-sick feeling out from under her rib cage. She surfaced with her hands on the cool slick of the tiled lip, then dove again.
———
From the balcony, Richard watched his daughter swim. Or, rather, he watched a blurry form with blonde hair he assumed was his daughter move around in a greenish rectangle he assumed was a pool. Whoever it was was staying underwater for full minutes at a time. He wondered if she’d seen him up there and was, childishly, trying to worry him. The blurriness of her form in his vision allowed him to imagine her as a child again, not the hard, difficult woman she had become. The yellow hair crowned the surface of the water and then disappeared again, and he idly wished he could banish her back to the womb.
He called Eileen. “Hello?”
“Ei, it’s Richard.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, fine. I’m with Cindy.”
“Really.” The musical extension of the long first syllable followed by an octave’s drop into the second conveyed an entire marriage’s worth of skepticism. “She came to your thing?”
“Yeah. We’re in Salt Lake City now.”
“She came with you?”
He had planned on telling Eileen everything—the money, the apartment, the pills—but instinctively pulled away from that tack, not wanting to give Cindy one more thing to blame him for. “I guess she felt like catching up. Is that really so shocking?”
“Yes, to be honest.”
“Anyway, I was just looking at her, and it made me want to give you a call, for some reason.”
“Do I detect a note of nostalgia?”
“No.”
“A pining for younger, better days? A sense of loss?”
“Stop it.”
“Congratulations on the book again, by the way. It seems as though it’s doing incredibly well.”
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, right?”
“No, well, obviously it could have, but still.”
“Are we on for next week?”
“I think so, call me. I have to go, there’s a thing I’m late for. Hi to Cin.”
He hung up the phone and returned to the balcony. The blurred green water flickering below, his daughter somewhere beneath it, lost to him. He’d tried, over the years, to re-insinuate himself into her life. Phone calls here and there, a standing invitation for her to visit Phoenix, even an unannounced visit to Vegas, under the pretext of writing some nonexistent travel piece for a nonexistent magazine. But each time, he was rebuffed. Not cruelly or in anger, but with a curt courtesy that was worse for its modulated lack of feeling. The message was clear: thanks but no thanks.
After that Vegas visit—the unsmiling embrace outside the casino, the terse breakfast that followed, and the little wave that dismissed him back to his hotel—he’d written her a letter. He’d never sent it and had forgotten most of its contents, but the upshot was why couldn’t she forgive him? Why? He looked at the pale face in the mirror and asked again. What had he done that was so terrible? Divorce her mother? They couldn’t stand the sight of each other at the time. Drink too much? It seemed like she should have developed some sympathy for compulsion and addiction. Cheating? He’d never really cheated on Eileen, not when it mattered—toward the end it had all felt like part of the same disaster; who cared if the waiter spilled his drinks, if the piano hurtled into the first mate, when the ship was going down?
He’d left, that was all. She couldn’t forgive his not being there, not fighting to be there as much as he could. And the truth was he hadn’t wanted to at the time. He’d wanted to be left alone to work on his lousy novels and tile houses and drink and occasionally get laid and always be hungover. She couldn’t forgive him those years, and she couldn’t accept his interest, or the possibility that, in some admittedly incremental and insignificant way, he might have changed.
But she couldn’t refuse him now. So this was, then, maybe, the second chance he’d been looking for. He didn’t deserve it, but he would take it. He was glad she needed him. He was glad she was fucked up.
———
On the other side of the pool, near the salt barrens at the edge of the parking lot, Vance stood frozen. He, too, watched Cindy, though he knew for certain it was her, even at a respectful distance. He’d gone for a little walk around the hotel, stretching his legs after the eight-hour drive, when he noticed a blonde woman taking her clothes off. Seeing her through the metal bars of the pool’s fence was like watching a prisoner disrobe. She lowered herself in, went underwater for a long time, surfaced, dove, surfaced, dove. Her skin was smooth, younger looking than he’d have imagined.
He hadn’t been attracted to her before at all. The intensity of her demeanor frightened him. And she was both puffy and depleted with drugs and exhaustion and age. Being close to thirty, she was, of course, to Vance, a member of that impossibly aged demographic swath that included everyone older than him. What was it, then, that held his stare from forty feet away? The consanguinity with a man he
admired, or whose work he admired, was one thing, he supposed. Her breasts, full and pale under the greenish glow of the sodium lights overhead, were another thing. Her skin was an innocent white, not what you would have expected from a longtime desert dweller. Now, the thought of her in that musty apartment, stalking around like an animal at the zoo, filling every crevice with her presence, excited him in a way he couldn’t understand. There was no light where Vance stood, and he knew she couldn’t see him, yet he remained stock-still and realized he was holding his breath.
She dove again. He waited for her to resurface, but this time she didn’t. A breeze came across the desert and rippled the dull-green skin of the water. His legs tensed in the moment before he would run to jump the fence, dive in, and pull her out, when she surfaced, gasping, and leaned against the pool’s wet lip. Then she pulled herself out, wrapped the towel around her, and exited the pool area. As she did, he saw the bald spot gleaming on the crown of her head. He stared at it, into it, and it was as though a portal to her inner self had momentarily opened. A moment later she was twisting her hair up over it, walking toward the dark stairs, but he had seen it. It was there. He felt privy to an enormous secret, entrusted with something precious by her, even though she didn’t know it yet.
He walked once more around the perimeter, collecting himself. The night sky overhead could not have been vaster. Through a strip of patchy grass, he moved onto the concrete of the pool deck. Her wet, fading footprints on the ground were like a bread-crumb trail leading him into the hotel, to the elevators, and up to room 332.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the morning, Cindy lay in bed with damp sheets stretched to her chin. This was a compromise position, as she had managed to simultaneously freeze and burn up throughout the interminable night. Her muscles ached, especially her lower back, which felt like it had been stood upon for a long time by a very fat person. Vance emerged from the shower, wearing a towel around his waist, as though to put his impressive physique on display.
“Good morning,” he said to the room, and Cindy responded with a few quadriplegic blinks. He turned to Richard, on the other bed, who also didn’t say anything, who also had the covers pulled up, in his own private misery of renewed consciousness. She had inherited her father’s constitutional inability to be friendly or productive until about three hours after waking. Even at the best of times, when she wasn’t withdrawing from pharmaceuticals, she felt every morning like her joints were filled with Elmer’s glue.
“When’s the thing?” Richard asked Vance. “And where?”
“Denver, eight o’clock. We should leave soon.”
Cindy groaned. Richard turned to her and said, “You good to go, champ?”
“No.” She got up and went to the bathroom. She ran hot water in the bathtub, stole two of her father’s lorazepam, dry-swallowed them, and climbed into the water. As she did, she noticed a thin thread of blood between her legs. She was both irritated at having her period and relieved; it had been two months since she’d had one, and it also helped explain and excuse how truly horrible she felt. She unwrapped a complimentary soap, tossed the wrapping paper at the adjacent trash basket, and washed herself with the little cream-white seashell. When she got up, a single fresh drop of blood was suspended for a moment in the rusty water, spinning, before it helixed into a pink cloud.
The desk clerk looked mortified when she asked, but nonetheless provided her with gratis sanitary napkins, tampons presumably violating some stricture of Joseph Smith’s. In the car, Vance drove, and Richard again rode shotgun. Cindy again sat in the backseat, which suited her fine. Although it made her feel like a child being ferried around against her will, it also absolved her from talking as she glazed out at the land passing by. There was plenty of it to look at—in the open range of southern Wyoming, there was nothing but land to look at—and the air blowing in through the cracked window was cold and refreshing. She was reminded of a family vacation when she was six or so—during an unexpected stretch of relative sobriety and employment, her father had managed to get it together enough to take them down to Mexico. Their ancient Volvo station wagon had lacked air-conditioning, and her six-year-old legs had become almost molecularly fused to the hot vinyl of the backseat, but she’d nonetheless loved every second of the trip. Her parents had bickered their way down I-5, through Orange County, San Diego, and across the border, taking the argument international, but it had seemed distant to her, faint radio chatter as she’d stared out the window.
On I-80, outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a dark quilt of clouds was pulled over the enormous white sheet of the sky, and the temperature fell twenty degrees in ten minutes. Huge drops of rain pelted the car, so large they sounded individually on the roof. Vance took the first exit that appeared and pulled into the gravel parking lot of a diner called, cryptically, Pie O’My! Inside, pink neon lights, Frankie Valli, and the smell of rancid grease waged a terrible, pyrrhic battle for sensory dominance. A teenage hostess, chewing gum with her mouth agape, led them wordlessly to a booth by the window. A miniature silver plastic jukebox affixed to the wall next to their table featured tunes like “He’s a Rebel” and “Surfin’ Safari.”
“What is it with people and the sixties?” said Richard. “I remember this stuff. It was already bad the first time around.”
“Hmm.” Cindy was looking at the menu and intently not listening.
“I don’t know why this country always has to enshrine the past. People call baseball the national pastime, but really it’s nostalgia. Anything that happened over twenty years ago automatically becomes worthy of a statue. People’s memories are way too short. Christ, Richard Nixon got a parade and library. He should have been shot out of a cannon into a brick wall a foot away.”
She glanced up. “What are you babbling about?”
“They call it the past for a reason, you know? It doesn’t matter.”
“Hmm.”
Outside, the sky seemed to release all of the water it had been holding at one time, and the car wasn’t even visible where it was parked, thirty feet away. Cindy and Vance sat across from him, and for the second time that day, the awful thought occurred to him that something had happened between them. Were they sitting a hair too close? Did Vance’s knuckles brush her arm when he reached for a napkin? Did she glance at the boy while looking out the window? And who cared anyway? Obviously, he did—that was the answer, he knew—but the caring came in a reflexive way he recognized as being absurd on its face. He hadn’t been there when Cindy had gone on her first date, hadn’t provided a single word of advice or warning about the hazards of unprotected sex or the awfulness of teenage boys, couldn’t have named any of her boyfriends at any age—was he really going to start now?
“You two stay up late last night?”
“What?” said Cindy.
“You look a little tired today.”
Cindy gave him the Hate-Eyed Death Stare, as he thought of it, a terrifying, familiar look of murderous incredulity—familiar because he’d seen Eileen do it a lot over the years. But come to think of it, Carole had done it as well, so maybe this look was one of those things all women were just born with, like having exquisitely hyperacute emotions and no governing control over them whatsoever. All of the blood in Vance’s face seemed to have traveled to his pimple-dusted cheeks, which looked set to erupt with embarrassment. They were rescued by the heavy approach of a waitress with the body of a retired battleship and a name tag reading BECKY FANASTIC. The pad she clutched in her left hand seemed to be just barely preventing her from attacking them with the pen she clutched in her right. “You ready?”
“What kind of pie do you have,” asked Richard.
“We don’t have pies.”
“You ran out?”
“No, we don’t carry them.”
“But the name of the restaurant.”
Becky Fanastic drew several quarts of air into her ample, irritated bosom and said, “It used to be a famous pie shop. Was bought out by the cur
rent owners eight years ago. They hung on to the name. You ready?”
She took their order and left, and Vance hobbled away to the bathroom without comment. Richard and Cindy didn’t talk until Becky Fanastic returned with their coffees. Stirring in an endless column of sugar, Cindy said, “You just can’t resist, can you?”
“Resist what?”
“Being an asshole.”
“It’s hard for me,” Richard said, “try to remember that.”
“What’s hard for you?”
“Not to be an asshole. It’s hard not to be one when you are one.”
“Way to let yourself off the hook.”
“How does that let me off the hook? I’m putting myself on the hook for being an asshole. I’m putting myself on the asshole hook.”
“No, you’re copping to being an asshole, which allows you to continue acting like one. It’s a preemptive excuse for your behavior, since no one can expect a real asshole not to behave like an asshole. But then people have to give you credit for at least admitting you’re an asshole, right? Basically, it lets you off the hook of behaving like a normal person. Normal people act like assholes all the time, but when they do, they feel bad about it and try not to act like assholes in the future. They don’t evade responsibility by saying, ‘Well, what do you expect, I’m an asshole.’ ”
“Right,” he said, “because they’re not assholes.”
Drinking his coffee, Richard realized that he felt better than he’d felt in months. Not good—let’s not go crazy—but not ostentatiously bad, either. Unwretched. He glanced at his daughter. She looked absently over her shoulder as lashing fingers of rain streaked the window and left behind little scuttling beads. For a moment, everything seemed to be poised in a kind of equilibrium. It was a feeling to which he was unaccustomed; like most drinkers and writers (two circles slightly off-center, a Venn diagram like the coffee-mug stain on his napkin), he was used to experiencing life in binary terms; it was either the World of Shit, in which everything was already predetermined, mitigated, compromised, contingent, and comprehensively fucked, or else it was a numinous paradise of possibility and unknown pleasures. But in between is where most human life exists—small victories, small failures, the hard, slow effort people make, straining blindly upward like green shoots through pavement, easily trampled. He took hold of Cindy’s hand across the table.
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