Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  During a true blackout, the brain records no memories, so I suppose mine are more like brownouts. But to me, that word sounds warm and nostalgic, like an old box of sepia-tinted photographs. Whereas the images that come back to me after a lost night are crystal clear, glaringly bright, and lapped all around with impenetrable black. Like stills from a movie, they appear unaccompanied by dialogue and exposition, cryptic and unsettlingly free of context. They don’t feel like memories, even—​more like seeing a photograph of someone who looks like me, doing something I don’t remember doing. In this particular photograph, I am sobbing stupidly on the table while Gwen awkwardly pats my shoulder.

  The sinking in my stomach suddenly reverses course, and I feel like I’m going to throw up. I have a sickening feeling that the me in the photograph has just confessed to something.

  “Claire? Are you even listening to me? ” Harvard taps my shoulder. “Jeez, people told me things, but I thought at least you’d be fun.”

  Ignoring him, I hop out of bed and start hunting for my clothes in the dark. I have to hurry. I don’t know exactly how much time I’ve lost, but if Gwen isn’t already asleep, she will be soon. I have to talk to her, find out what she knows. Tomorrow will be too late.

  I slap the light button by the bed, and the room leaps into life around me—​not a swirling void after all, but an ordinary if rather plush hotel room outfitted with the corner-cutting luxuries of plush hotel rooms everywhere—​too-hard sofa facing wall-mounted TV, angular breakfast nook, fake orchids. Ah. There are my pants, draped carefully over the back of a chair. Even my id is careful about those leather pants. I pull them on.

  Harvard sits up in bed. “Do you mind? Some of us need to get sleep tonight.”

  “I suggest you get some, then.” I can’t find my top. I round the corner and check the bathroom. Nothing. “I’m sure your room is much more restful.”

  He glares at me and leans back on his pillow, arms folded and shoulders squared as if to anchor him to the headboard.

  I find my boots in the closet and pull them on, leaving the laces untied for the moment. Stomping around a hotel room in boots and leather pants and a bra makes me feel powerful, which, in turn, makes me feel generous.

  “Fine. You don’t have to leave yet. I’ll be out for a little while. Charge some porn to the room if you want. Just try to be gone by the time I get back, okay? Remember, you’ve got that early panel.”

  One more visual sweep of the room reveals my T-shirt and wool wrap tangled up on the floor under the bed. When I stoop to pick them up, I notice a room key lying on the floor, just the bare plastic card without its sleeve. It must have fallen out of my pants when I was getting undressed. I grab the card and shove it into my back pocket.

  On my way out the door, I pause and glance back at Harvard. I can easily imagine returning in a few hours to a trashed hotel room or, say, a thousand dollars’ worth of room service.

  “I’ll write you a recommendation,” I call over my shoulder just before I step outside.

  Out in the hall, my head clears a bit. I’ve got to find Gwen. I don’t know her room number, but I could call down and have the front desk ring her. I reach for my phone and suddenly realize that, in my eagerness to get out of the hotel room, I left it on the nightstand. I whirl around just as the door clicks shut, locking itself behind me.

  The door handle blinks red when I slide in the key.

  Damn.

  I try again. Red again.

  It must have been Harvard’s room key, not mine, that I found on the floor—​they all look alike without their sleeves. I feel around in my other pockets. Nothing. I’m locked out with no phone, no key, and no clue how to find Gwen.

  I briefly consider knocking, but Harvard is probably already masturbating to porn on the department’s dime in there. Down to the lobby, then. I’ll get a new key and ask about Gwen’s room.

  The elevator is empty on the way down. I step out into the lobby, confirm with a quick glance that Gwen has left the hotel bar, and hurry to the front desk, where I am greeted by the night concierge, a young man of about Harvard’s age but infinitely more self-possessed.

  “Good evening. What can we do for you?”

  “Claire Woods. I’m in 1102. I left my key card in the room.” With a sheepish expression, I show him my ID, and he waves it away while at the same time discreetly glancing at the picture.

  “Certainly, madam.” After a few deft keystrokes and some sleight of hand behind the counter, he produces a freshly programmed card, writes “1102” on the sleeve in neat green Sharpie numerals, and slides it across the marble countertop. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Oh, one more thing,” I say, as if it’s an afterthought. “Could I get the room number for a Gwendolyn Whitney staying at the hotel? She gave it to me earlier, but I forgot to write it down.” The concierge’s expression remains frozen in polite expectation. “We were sitting over at the bar earlier, maybe you noticed?”

  The concierge makes a face of exaggerated regret. “To ensure our guests’ privacy, the hotel doesn’t share that information. Let’s just check . . .” He clicks a few keys on the computer. “Ms. Whitney’s room is on ‘do not disturb’ and cannot be called at the moment. Would we like to leave a message for her?”

  “It’s a bit of an emergency,” I begin, taking in the condescending shift from “you” to “we” with a hint of panic. I close my eyes for a moment and summon up my single memory from the bar, willing the context to appear around it. If only I could remember what I was crying about. But what else could it possibly be if not our shared history, Gwen’s and mine? The fallout from the dinner party, culminating so horribly in the accident?

  I open my eyes after a prolonged blink. The concierge hasn’t moved a muscle.

  “The thing is—​well . . .” Inspiration strikes. “She picked up my phone by mistake. And I’m waiting for an important call. So, you see, I really need to reach her.”

  The concierge’s smile goes stony, and he repeats his “do not disturb” script word for word, his voice half a degree chillier than last time. But before I can come up with a wheedling response, joy of joys, a new memory surfaces. This one must have taken place just a moment before or a moment after the first, because I’m still at the table, hiccupping and wiping my nose, but I’m alone. My gaze falls to something small and sparkling on the table. Refracted through my tears, it looks like a pile of shifting white sequins. I see my own hand approaching the tiny object, like the woman reaching for her jewelry in the opening scene of The Earrings of Madame de . . . I close my hand around it, and the memory ends.

  Hardly daring to believe it, I slip one finger into my watch pocket and find the tiny circle, weighed down on one side by a large, many-faceted bump.

  I interrupt the concierge.

  “There’s something else. She has an early flight out, and I have something of hers she’d be very upset to miss.”

  “Would we like to leave it at the front desk for her to—”

  “I think she’d rather I return it in person. You see . . .” I reach into my pocket and hold the glittering circle up to the light. “I have her engagement ring.”

  * * *

  Click, click, click, click.

  The concierge’s fingers positively fly as he dials up Gwen’s room from the front desk phone. Apparently, a ring this size trumps even the “do not disturb” setting.

  Gwen’s room is on the second floor—​a dismal view, but then I suppose she’s only here for the night. Standing outside her door, I try to gather my thoughts, make a plan for finding out what we talked about in the bar—​Bethany, Rocky, the accident?—​without implicating myself further. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe I confessed everything. If so, how did she respond? Did she forgive me?

  The thought makes me wince. There’s a long list of things I want out of Gwen, and forgiveness isn’t on it.

  Anyway, no matter how she reacted in the moment, I have my doubts as to whether she’l
l feel so forgiving after thinking it over on her long flight. I feel a thread of panic. Gwen has always been a terrible liar. Eventually she’ll tell someone: her parents, the fiancé.

  I can’t allow that.

  I dip my hand into my pocket for strength and feel the sharp, hard edges of what must be eight carats cutting through my nerves. I have the ring. I have the upper hand.

  If Gwen does know—​

  First things first. That’s what I’m here to find out.

  Oh, Fools

  8

  Oh, fools.

  For some reason it was Quimby’s voice that kept ringing through my head as I stumbled home from Bethany’s the morning after the dinner party. Giving the campus a wide berth to avoid running into anyone I knew, I passed townie bars I had never seen before, so empty at this time of morning they looked haunted, and churches spilling families out onto the sidewalks. Remembering the statistical racism argument at Connor’s party, I slunk past the local residents with my head down, embarrassed to be associated with a university whose long history of restrictive covenants and land grabs had kept the neighborhood in a state of artificial decline. I may have felt out of place at DHU, but I didn’t belong here either. Maybe the last place I’d truly fit in had been Quimby’s basement, where, invisible under baggy clothes and anesthetized by pot, I’d been safe from the disastrous wants that had led me to the Program. If only I’d stayed there.

  And yet it was Quimby who had first seen me, Quimby who had singled me out. Even if it had only been a series of mistakes—​Quimby mistaking my stoned stare for curiosity, me mistaking a Max Ophüls film for porn—​these mistakes had turned into prophecy. Oh, fools, indeed. I’d accidentally tumbled into a world I hadn’t known existed, where everything was beautiful, and beauty itself was a metaphor for truth, and each brilliant surface was a door you could open if only you had the right key. I had been searching for it ever since.

  Last night, yielding to the pressure of Bethany’s body on mine as we lay together in her beautiful apartment surrounded by beautiful things, I had felt the door unlock and stepped momentarily over the threshold. In bed, our bodies had been transfigured into pure form and radiant purpose, just as the words she spoke at our meetings seemed to slip off their skins of ordinary sense in the lighted cave of her mouth.

  This morning I still felt her burned into my skin under the itchy tights and the wool dress and coat. I remembered with amazement the mechanics of our desire, my sudden craving to take her legs over my shoulders. Sex with Bethany had come as naturally to me as my prior encounters with men and produced more or less the same sensations. If there was a qualitative difference—​and there was—​it would have seemed strange to reduce it to the fact that she was a woman. Forced to locate it, I’d begin with the ache in my groin when she looked at me like one of her curated objects, the tears that sprang to my eyes when she wrote her name inside me with her fingers and tongue. Fucking her had felt like fucking power itself.

  But that was last night.

  The reality this morning was decidedly less thrilling. I’d been bundled into my clothes and exiled from the warm, richly decorated apartment, a travel mug full of coffee the only concession to my hangover. Rocky would be coming home any minute; Bethany suggested I arrange my route through the neighborhood to avoid him. It was imperative that I avoid him. Rocky must not know. She’d met my eyes for the first time that morning, giving me a look that was like a strong hand wrapped around my jaw.

  “If Rocky finds out, I will deny, disavow, and, if necessary, destroy you to protect myself,” she’d said. Then she’d pressed the mug into my hands, buttoned the collar of my coat, and brushed the hair out of my eyes, like a mother sending her child off to school. “Now, take care, darling.” A peck on the cheek. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

  So that had been it. Still sleepy, the drug of sex after so many months of abstinence still warm in my veins, I had somehow retained the buzz of belonging to Bethany until my feet hit the sidewalk outside the Libertorium and a cold gust of wind came barreling at me between the buildings, nearly knocking me down. Now I was just a grad student who had slept with her adviser after an evening of behavior that struck me, in retrospect, as both absurd and shameful. I’d felt jealous of how well Bethany and Gwen were getting along and, in response, had eaten too much, drunk too much, and flirted with Rocky outrageously. Now I wondered whether Gwen’s chattiness with Bethany had been a calculated show of deference to her lover’s wife; Rocky’s encouragement of me a trick to throw Bethany off their trail; Bethany’s seduction a ploy to alienate me from Gwen. And I’d fallen for it, all of it, so desperate was I to feel wanted.

  In the moment, the scene had seemed almost scripted: Gwen and Rocky holding hands, their locked eyes alluding to a more throbbing point of contact. Now, its immediacy faded, it took on that quality of ambiguity that tantalized me in certain films. I was less certain by the minute that Gwen and Rocky had slept together before the dinner party. Even my own motives for believing it now seemed opaque. Only Bethany’s reasons for putting the idea in my head were, retrospectively, crystal clear. It had been a trap.

  The whole evening had been a trap.

  It didn’t really matter, I realized with a pang. If they hadn’t gone to bed before, they certainly had now.

  Anyway, there was something else by comparison with which the fitting of parts into parts—​whether mine, Bethany’s, Gwen’s, or Rocky’s—​felt unimportant. Anyone could have a lapse of judgment. Even Gwen.

  But Gwen going for the Joyner was something else again. She’d let me think she was wooing Rocky to get closer to Bethany, when in fact she was positioning herself to shoot to the top with only this boyish lightweight in her debtor’s column. If Gwen snagged the Joyner, it would be Rocky who would benefit by association with her, not the other way around; no one would be under the mistaken belief that he had procured it for her. She would be in a league of her own. Once more, Gwen would get what I wanted most, and I would be left with the scraps.

  That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst was that if I knew Gwen, she didn’t even really care about the Joyner. She was simply accustomed to the best, and when she saw something worth having, she opened her hand for it. People accustomed to the best didn’t need to do more than that.

  Over and over again, I had stepped through one doorway only to find myself stuck in yet another of power’s endless waiting rooms, staring at another locked and bolted door. The Program was no exception. It wasn’t just the money and prestige that made the Joyner so vital to my long-term plans for escape. It was the certainty of a tenure-track job at the other end, no small promise in an academic market hit hard by the latest recession. The Joyner was the shibboleth that would open the final door to a world where money wouldn’t matter because I’d finally have enough of it. I could build a new home for myself in thoughts and ideas while furnishing the one I’d left behind with every comfort. While I didn’t for a moment doubt that Gwen was the rightful recipient of the award—​“She’s perfect,” Bethany had said, drily and without romance—​I knew just as deeply that I deserved it more.

  “Mac!”

  Paranoid at being seen, I almost ducked. By the time Tess caught up with me, flushed and out of breath, I’d recovered. She loosened her scarf. “I’ve been calling your name for half a block.”

  “Sorry. I’m kind of out of it.”

  “Yeah.” She looked me up and down, taking in the rumpled dress. “Where are you headed?”

  “Home.” I said it before I could think of a better reason to be out this early in the morning in smeared makeup and clothes that had spent the night on the floor.

  “Right.” She nodded. “Do you mind if I walk with you? Don’t worry, I won’t ask any questions. Strictly your business.”

  I nodded my thanks with a sickly smile. “What about you?”

  “I’m heading home from breakfast with my ex.”

  “Strictly your business?”

  �
��My business is incredibly boring.” She rolled her eyes. “If I have to hear about his band one more time.”

  “Are you still friends with him?”

  “I have to be. He’s close to my family, especially my dad. Ronald is the son he never had, and they’ve given up on grandkids. Correctly.”

  “I’m not having kids either.” I realized as soon as I said it that I’d always known it was true. Too many people depended on me already, and all I could think about was getting away from them.

  “Do your folks give you all kinds of shit for it, like mine?”

  I imagined my mom’s face if I ever told her I was pregnant, and for a moment thought it might be worth it. “No.”

  “Lucky you. I stay friendly with Ronald because my friends still love him and he knows more about my dad’s health than anyone. But I have to be careful. As far as they’re concerned, I’m crazy for leaving him. If they knew we still get together sometimes—​and yeah, not just for breakfast—​they’d be all over me to marry him again.”

  We were only a few blocks from the apartment. “Tess, can I ask you something? Why are you in the Program?”

  She stiffened. “Why would you ask that?”

  My face turned red. “You just seem like you have so much going on.” I fumbled for words. “A family that loves you, lots of friends, a career that makes actual money. I’ve never had any of that.”

  “Well, you’re not going to find it here,” she said wryly. “So, I could ask you the same thing, really. What brought you to DHU?”

  I couldn’t say Gwen. Instead, I reached for words to describe what it was about her that made me want to follow wherever she went. A way of being that’s about more than paying the bills, I wanted to say. More than money, even, or success. I just wanted—​more. But that wasn’t something I could say to someone in the Program, not even Tess.