Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  “TELL ME WHAT IT WAS LIKE,” I asked David. “Tell me about Vietnam.” I lay in the dark with my head on his shoulder, listening as he spoke of the long bunkered nights of shelling, how the men lined up cigarette butts, one after another balanced on end, knowing that when they tipped from the mortars’ concussion it was time to bug out. He spoke of the men and the huts they called hooches, of the young, local girls they shared, who did their laundry, swept the dirt clean of straw and leaves, gave the soldiers whatever sex they wanted for a few bucks a month. He remembered their small mouths, their smooth, hairless bodies.

  “Was there one who was special?” I asked.

  “That wouldn’t work,” David said. “Some would fuck you, then mine the dumps.”

  “Then what?”

  David let out a slow breath, the smoke rising from his mouth, a dry mist in the light from the street. I waited for his answer but heard only the beat of his heart slowing toward sleep.

  THE MORE TIME I SPENT with David, the less anything else seemed to matter. What women friends I had left were not friends but partners, caught up in the orbit of David’s pull. We convened at the bars to drink, we gathered in the bathrooms to scrape together our miniature windrows of cocaine, line our numbing lips with ochre and mahogany, brush our cheekbones to a deeper shade of rose. We were in the business of feeling good, looking good, making of the night something sharp, something brilliant, before the music ended.

  Even those occasional afternoons I spent with my grandmother, sheltered by her venetian blinds and ruffled curtains, the walls collaged with family photographs, were not enough to pull me back from the edge. Nan would lie on her couch, surrounded by the details of her life: iced tea, tissue, lotion, nail file, past issues of Reader’s Digest, a fluted bowl of hard candies. Always at hand was the small box with its cards of various colors, each citing a biblical verse. As I child, I had loved the morning ritual of closing my eyes, running my fingers across the cards’ stacked ridge, choosing the one piece of Scripture that would guide my day.

  Those few hours spent with my grandmother were made fragile by the absence of what had once held between us—the easy habits of cleaning, the endless games of checkers, during which she would fall asleep until I jostled her into her next move. Now we watched television, which demanded nothing of us except attention to its blue-lit box. Dialing for Dollars, The Price Is Right, Let’s Make a Deal, Jeopardy!: we encouraged the hesitant, shouted answers at the dumb, berated those who would not take the chance. When I moved to leave, she would beckon me for a kiss, and I would smell the lavender powder, the cologne she touched to her throat each morning, regardless of who might come by. I’d step out into the dull sound of the city, my pockets full of licorice drops and strawberry taffy, and feel like a traitor, a voyeur, a spy, inhabiting one world and stealing from another.

  It did not matter which way I drove when I left my grandmother, what structure of wood I chose to call my own. I had built for myself a house without windows. I wanted no one to look in, and I no longer remembered what reason I might have for looking out.

  “REMEMBER TO LOCK YOUR DOORS,” my mother said. “Keep your curtains closed.”

  “I will.”

  “There’s a lot of meanness in the world.”

  I listened, only half hearing the direness of her warnings—I had heard them so many times before.

  When I had told her about David, I’d said only that he was a truck driver, that he made good money. When I told her his age, she had made a small noise in the back of her throat. “He’s nearly as old as I am, Kim.”

  I did not tell her that his age was the least of it. There was, in fact, little that I could tell her, and into my silence she must have read shame. Every word I uttered seemed a lie.

  Still, I sensed some relief on her part: at least I was with one man, not the one she would have chosen for me, but someone I might eventually marry and leave my life of sin, someone who could shelter me from the evil lurking outside—a man to protect me from other men.

  I said good-bye and hung up the phone. The sudden stillness sucked my breath away. David was in Seattle, and though he seldom called, I hoped that he might think of me, dial my number from the bar or motel. Sometimes he phoned from the strip joints, and I would hear the music and shouts, the voice of a woman urging him away.

  I moved to the couch, covered myself with the colorful afghan my mother had knitted, its squares of blue and brown domestic and contained. The television’s picture skittered and jumped, and I closed my eyes, grateful for the voices filling the room.

  It was well after ten when I heard the knock at my door. I thought for a moment it might be my neighbor, Mrs. Daniels, who came sometimes to remind me that the next day was garbage pickup or that I had left my laundry in the communal dryer, but she’d surely be sleeping.

  When I cracked the door and peered outside, I saw a man in his thirties, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt, and ball cap.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m trying to find the apartment of a buddy. We’ve got a softball game tonight. Could I use your phone to call?”

  I hesitated, then shrugged. He looked familiar. Maybe an old friend of John’s. “Sure,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen.

  He acted a little shy, shuffling and ducking past me. “Do you have a phone book I could use?” he asked.

  I watched as he thumbed his way through the pages. He seemed nervous, distracted. Something wasn’t right in the way he was searching, as though he had forgotten his reason for doing so.

  “What’s your friend’s name?” I asked. “Maybe I can tell you which apartment he’s in.”

  He hesitated. “Bill Talkington,” he said, then quickly flipped the pages to the T’s. He found a number and dialed. I can’t remember what he spoke into the receiver, but when the call was over, he asked to use my bathroom.

  I waited for the toilet to flush. It didn’t. I moved quietly into the hall and saw him in my bedroom. He was surveying the walls, the window, the closet, and I thought then he must be a burglar. The only things of value I owned were in that room: my Ithaca shotgun, my Remington 6-mm, my father’s 30.06.

  A trill of fear caught in my chest. I stepped into the kitchen and coughed. A few seconds later I heard the toilet flush.

  He came out with his hands in his pockets, hesitated, looked around the room as though he had forgotten something. I opened the door, encouraging him outside.

  “Thanks,” he said, and I smiled with relief, but just as he stepped onto the porch, he caught the door in his hand, wedged his foot across the threshold.

  “Tell me your name. Just your name.”

  Fear welled up in me, and I fought to control the waver in my voice. “Go, or I’ll call the police.”

  The hand withdrew, and then the thick-soled tennis shoe. I locked the door quickly, then dragged a chair from the kitchen and wedged it beneath the knob.

  I slumped onto the couch. The rush of adrenaline seeped away, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by exhaustion. I wished desperately that David were with me.

  What I believed was that David would protect me, and my belief seems strange to me now. It was David, after all, whose sexual appetite was fed by the desire I kindled in other men. It was David whose greed manifested itself in scenes of physical domination. But I knew, too, that it was David who controlled and directed, who chose the beginning and brought about the end. Above all else, I was his to take or offer; he would never allow this man his trespass.

  I pulled the afghan around my legs and focused on the television. The screen’s blue flickering and the low voices lulled me, and after a while I fell asleep.

  When I awoke, the television was hissing its off-air sound. I stumbled over to turn it off, and then I heard what had roused me: the scratching, thumping noise at my bedroom window.

  I stood frozen in place, every nerve in my body sparking. A few seconds passed. Then there was a shuffle on the front steps. The door latch clicked once, twice against its lock.


  The decision I made then seemed no decision at all but automatic, instinctual. I turned and walked into my bedroom, where I took the 20-gauge from its rack. I opened the top drawer of my dresser, found the cardboard box of shells, then sat on the edge of my bed and loaded—four into the magazine, one into the chamber. The gun felt good in my hands, the stock sleek, the action and slide well oiled.

  I rose and walked back into the living room, turning off lights as I went, the darkness falling in behind me until I reached the lamp by the couch. I stood for a moment, then turned the switch. I felt my way to the room’s center, lowered myself to the carpet. Crossing my legs, I rested the gun on my knees, clicked off the safety, and waited.

  The sounds became louder, more insistent. He was growing impatient, moving from the door to the kitchen window, from there to the bedroom, then back to the door. I followed his movement with my eyes closed, visualizing his steps from one entry to the next, feeling his growing frustration and then his fury as he hit the door hard, as he tore the screens from my windows.

  But then it was quiet. He had given up, aware, perhaps, that the noise he was making might undo him. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but the familiar silhouettes of furniture.

  How long had it lasted? Two minutes? Ten? Certainly, long enough for me to have dialed the emergency number in the front of my phone book, which still lay where the man had left it. But I didn’t. How could I ask the police to defend me, defend a virtue I no longer possessed? I wasn’t even sure I knew what rape was anymore. Somehow, whatever was happening was between me and this man, who wanted me so badly.

  My legs were numb, and I stretched them out in front of me. I clicked on the safety. I pulled a cushion from the couch for a pillow, spread the afghan across my feet. Lying there, in the darkness of my apartment, listening to the sounds of distant traffic, I felt the rigidness ease. I slept that way, my gun beside me. I did not wake or dream that I can remember until the sun shone in my kitchen and I could hear the rasp of Mrs. Daniel’s rake across the concrete edges of her garden.

  IT WAS MRS. DANIELS who reported to the landlord what damage had been done. Not only had the aluminum screens been torn from my windows, but her flower bed had been trampled as well.

  “You’ve got to call the police,” she demanded, pointing at the large footprints that surrounded and crossed her lovely mums.

  They sent a detective to my office at the insurance company. He smelled of fish sandwiches and coffee. I pushed aside the ledgers detailing the benefits of whole-life versus term to make room for the heavy album he unfolded, the pages of men who fit the description I’d given: medium build, dark hair, mustache. Some were dirty, faces scarred and pitted. Others looked pale but well mannered, like the shoe salesmen from my childhood who sold my mother our Buster Browns. Still, it wasn’t hard to find the one whose features I’d studied that night in my kitchen, trying to place his eyes, his lips, his hair. My only surprise was that the name of his supposed friend—Bill Talkington—was actually his own.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked the detective, who finished scratching his notes and bound the folder tight.

  “Best that you identify him by sight,” he said. He blinked several times, cleaned the corners of his eyes with a spittled finger. He sighed, tapped his tired pencil. “You should know,” he said, “that we suspect this man of other crimes.”

  “Then why did he use his real name?” I asked.

  The officer stood, slid his chair against my desk. “That was a mistake on his part.” He gathered his jacket, nodded his head. “This man,” he said, “would not have expected you to live through the night. You will need surveillance until we can get something on him.”

  I felt impatient with the detective’s smugness, his store of covert knowledge, the way his eyes settled on my knees, my wrists, but never my face. What other secrets did he shield? What topless bars and seedy back rooms had he visited? What fantasies swirled in his head, perhaps even now, as he straightened his belt and settled his change deeper in his pocket?

  “What I need,” I said to the officer, “is time to get my work done.”

  He looked at his hands—the unblemished fingers and two gold rings, the dark hair that tufted obscenely from beneath the cuffs of his shirt. “Call this number,” he said, and left me with his card.

  Chase, a young coworker bound for annuities and safe margins, stuck his head in the door.

  “Everything all right?”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Did you get his number?”

  I looked at the detective’s card, its stern lettering and gold emblem, then held it out to Chase.

  “Here,” I said. “He’s all yours.”

  Chase’s eyes brightened.

  He didn’t notice me gathering my briefcase, filling it with my nameplate, the few supplies I owned. By the next week, he would be thumbing through my Rolodex, adding to his accounts the clients whose files I left neatly alphabetized in the drawers of my desk.

  WHEN DAVID RETURNED that evening, I showed him the jimmied windows and broken flowers. He kept his hands in his back pockets and nodded, kicked a few rocks.

  “I should have shot the bastard,” I said.

  David looked at me, then smiled. “Maybe next time,” he said, “it will be me.”

  I followed the movement of his hand, the cigarette brought to his lips, the way his eyes lidded themselves against the smoke. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’ve done it before. To old girlfriends.” He inhaled deeply, ran his thumb and finger down the corners of his mouth. “Wait a few years, then hide behind the door, find a closet. They always fight at first, but they want it.”

  I stared at him longer than I should have—his hair unkempt, the tightness at his temples. “They know it’s you,” I said.

  David dropped his cigarette to the gravel, crushed it with the toe of his boot. “No,” he said. “They never know.” He held my eyes for a moment, then shrugged. He turned, stepped back into my apartment, and I followed him, locking the door behind us.

  That night, after David had gone, I looked from behind my curtains to see a patrol car parked across the street. Sometime before dawn, another came to take its place. Unable to sleep, I watched the spotlight penetrate my shades, trail the walls of my room. Each hour, as the false moon cast itself through my window, I pressed myself to the corner of my bed, as though I were the one they were seeking.

  AT MY MOTHER’S ENCOURAGEMENT, I made plans to introduce David to my parents. David agreed to go but bristled when I urged him toward a nicer shirt, a less ragged pair of jeans. My father was in his recliner when we came through the door. I hadn’t seen him for months. Nothing about him had changed. He wore a clean, Western-cut shirt, fresh jeans, white socks, no shoes. He had a pack of Winstons in his pocket and three or four toothpicks, a cigarette wedged in the V of his first two fingers. He nodded a terse greeting, then re-focused on the television opposite his chair.

  The air in that room could not have been colder. I was shaky with nervousness, with the gall it took to do what I was doing. My mother was, as always, civil. She had dressed nicely, as she did when welcoming company, and I was struck again by her youthful beauty as she busied herself between us, offering iced tea, a plate of saltines and Kraft Deluxe. She was as tense as I was, fearful of my father’s reaction, knowing I was skittish and might fly again with the slightest provocation. My father furrowed his eyebrows, motioned at her with his two fingers. “Up and down, up and down,” he said. “Why don’t you just sit?”

  While my mother and I made small talk, the two men smoked, wary and watchful, my father at least speaking, which I’d half expected him not to do. The conversation turned to trucking, common ground between my father and David, and now between my father and me. Was this yet another way I thought I might subsume my father’s identity, become the projection of his interests and skills? Tandems and tons, torque and compression—I could hold my own, describe the stiff clut
ch beneath my foot, the machinations of backing a double-trailered tractor toward the narrow chute of a loading dock.

  I could tell by the stiffness in my father’s shoulders, the intentional aversion of his eyes, that even though he assented to join in the discussion, what my father felt for David went beyond simple indifference, beyond dislike. Beneath the patter of axles and engines ran a muted dialogue of embattlement. The unspoken umbrage I allowed myself in response to my father’s taciturn criticism dovetailed with another emotion: whatever judgment my father lodged against David was a token of his residual devotion to me, the blood link between us.

  Did David feel my concentration, my loyalties shift? He reminded my father that, as the supervisor for his trucking company, he had the power to hire and fire. He told my father that he should consider long-haul, to give him a call if he was interested. I understood, even then, the patronizing message such an offer invoked, and I felt the hair on my neck prickle. My father said nothing but blinked slowly. He would not allow himself to be so easily drawn in. Instead, he turned his attention to the television, leaving my mother and me to find a means of exit. I rose, shuttled the dishes to the kitchen, hesitated for a moment at the window, where the leaves of my mother’s philodendron grew green and waxy along the sill. The lingering smell of sausage and fried eggs, the bleach-brightened cloth draped neatly over the faucet, the satisfying clack of drying laundry—for a moment, I felt the pull of familiarity, the deep draw of comfort and care.

  I rinsed the crumbs from the plates, knew that I had taken all the time I could without raising suspicion. From where the plant grew thickest, I snapped a shoot no longer than my hand, rolled it into a delicate wreath, secreted it away in my jeans’ pocket, then walked to where David waited at the door. I don’t remember that my father rose from his chair or that my mother kissed me good-bye. I remember sitting next to David as we pulled from the driveway and feeling that I mustn’t look back, that what lay before me was now of my own making. I could feel the downward course of it, but I could not admit such fault. Better to suffer the consequences than to become the prodigal daughter forever doomed to gratefulness and humility.