Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  “Why is it men find promiscuity so attractive? I used to eat myself up over it. Are men just naturally lazy, they want to save themselves the chase? That didn’t seem like the whole answer somehow. Part of it, but not the whole deal. Then it came to me. It’s not that women like Debra are so easy to get into bed. It’s that they’re so easy to leave.”

  “What did I do that’s got you so upset?”

  “Nothing. I guess I’d just hoped for more from you.”

  “More than what?”

  “Do you deny that you wanted to fuck her?”

  “She’s attractive. Very…sensual. The point is, I didn’t fuck her. And I don’t intend to. Jesus, we sound like we’re married.”

  The idea seemed to amuse her.

  “You’re from the South somewhere, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Was my accent showing? You can tell when I let myself get mad.”

  “Kentucky?”

  “Tennessee. Thank you for not saying Mississippi. I come from a suburb called Murfreesboro.” She pronounced it in Tennessee fashion, with about one and a half syllables.

  I told her about my two years in Nashville. She’s a year older than me, was away in St. Louis at college then, only home for the holidays. She wouldn’t have seen the Duotones anyway, she would have been at the Grand Ole Opry, in the Ryman auditorium downtown.

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for a country music fan,” I said.

  “Why not? What does a country music fan look like?”

  “I don’t know. Bouffant hairdo and a polyester smock?”

  “I like country music. It’s music for grown-ups. At least some of it is.”

  “Drinkin’ and cheatin’ and drivin’ a truck.”

  “Some of it. And some of it’s about getting up and going to work every day and still not having enough money, or about living with somebody who treats you like shit, or about watching your kids grow up and leave you behind…”

  “You don’t have any kids. Do you?” She shook her head. “And as jobs go, yours doesn’t seem too bad.” Silence then, while we both thought about the third thing.

  “So what do you listen to?” she asked after a while.

  “Lots of stuff. I guess my favorite is the kind of stuff the Duotones used to play, R&B, those great Stax/Volt songs from the sixties, Motown.”

  “Sounds like you’re living in the past.”

  I thought of Brian, Pacific Ocean Park, the studio. “Maybe I am,” I said.

  We were back at the dive shop. The place was dark and quiet, even though it was only ten thirty. “They must still be at Scaramouche,” Lori said. Neither of us had made a move for the doors of the VW. I didn’t want to be the first.

  “Are you tired?” she said. I shook my head. “Come and talk to me for a while.”

  She headed for the bar next door. The place was shut down, the tables empty in the moonlight. “I’ve got a key,” she said. “You want something?”

  My hormones were in a state. I didn’t know what I wanted any more, I only thought that a beer might smooth me out, take some pressure off. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to see the disapproval in Lori’s eyes. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  I sat down at a Tecate table. I could smell the ocean and hear it, but I couldn’t see it because the dive shop was in the way. Lori came back with two bottles of Tehuacán water that dripped tiny granules of ice.

  She’d overheard what I said about the stereo business and wanted to know more. I said I was consulting now with a record company in L.A. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. We got talking about music again and she went to her room for a jam box and a Rosanne Cash cassette, King’s Record Shop.

  Lori has a psych degree from Washington University and she reads a lot: biographies, pop psychology, romance novels like I’d caught her with that afternoon. I would be amazed, she said, how many women read romances. “Career women, intellectuals. It’s like this Cinderella Complex thing. No matter how great your career, no matter what degrees you have or how great a physical shape you’re in, women in our culture are brought up to believe they’re nothing without a…a Grand Passion.”

  “What if I said I feel the same way?”

  “Only not about your wife, right? Obviously not about your wife.”

  “I thought I did. It didn’t last. I know you have to accept that, that your first blazing passion isn’t going to last forever. So you think at least you’ll have somebody there to share your life with. To talk about the movie you just saw or the dinner you just ate or something you just happened to think of. Only you find out that when you want to share it she doesn’t want to hear about it. Or the only time she wants to share something with you is when you’ve just fallen asleep, and then you know it’s because of that extra cup of coffee that she had after dinner that you didn’t dare complain about because it would piss her off, even though you know it means she’s going to toss and turn and thrash all night long and you might as well get up and go sleep on the couch right now, but if you do she won’t understand and she’ll be pissed off about that, and even if she’s not you’ll lie there on the couch and worry that she might be, so might as well forget about sleeping at all. That’s not romance, it’s…I don’t know what it is.”

  “Life in the real world.”

  I was all worked up. I hadn’t even seen it coming. “Well, if that’s what it is, it sucks.”

  “You say passion never lasts. Do you believe that?”

  I saw something in her eyes behind the tough talk, an empty place that I knew she would deny. A longing. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t guess I’ve ever seen it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t mean it can’t.”

  Around midnight we heard voices up the road. Lori shut off the tape player in the middle of John Hiatt’s Slow Turning. We sat there in the dark and silence while Tom and the others shouted good-nights and staggered off to their separate rooms. When it became obvious that Lori wasn’t going to let them know we were there I felt vaguely guilty, like we were getting away with something.

  “I have to go in,” she said, standing up. “I don’t want to, but there it is.”

  “That’s twice.”

  “Twice what?”

  “Twice you’ve said something like that about Tom. If you do it again I’ll have to ask.”

  “And if you ask I’ll have to tell you, being the personality type that I am. So I should make up my mind whether I want to talk to you about it, shouldn’t I? Instead of dropping all these hints. But before I make up my mind, are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “I’ve got no place to go.”

  “Do you mean that? Oh, hell, I can’t ask you to…”

  “To what?”

  “Wait for me. Tom’ll be asleep in half an hour and I could come back…?”

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  It was closer to an hour. I didn’t mind the time. It was warm and the night was full of soothing noises: the sea, traffic on the highway, the hum of a fluorescent light at the back of the shop. I might even have dozed off for a few minutes.

  When Lori came back there was something different about her. Her hair was damp, like she’d washed her face, but there was something more, in the way she held herself. I wondered if she and Tom had made love. It didn’t seem possible, that she could be so matter-of-fact about it. She put the tape on again, quietly.

  I asked her where she met him. She told me how after college she worked temporary jobs, secretarial mostly, and used the money to travel. Sleeping on the beach in Greece, waiting tables in a small town in the Dordogne. For some reason the stories gave me a real pang, like jealousy. Not of the places she’d been, but of the experiences she’d had without me.

  Slow down, I thought. It was her eyes that did it to me. I almost wished she would put the sunglasses back on. I’ve never seen blue eyes that dark before. They look black in the moonlight.

  S
he met Tom in Greece. He had a sailboat then. He taught her to dive and sail. It sounded like something out of a movie, out of one of her Silhouette romances—the perfect weather, the photogenic couple, the azure water, the sun-bleached islands. It makes my life feel squalid and dull.

  “So what happened?”

  “It’s the real world,” she said. “You don’t get paid to sail around and drink retsina all day. Tom heard about this shop for sale and it seemed so perfect. A little stability, the chance to know where your next meal is coming from. He traded the sailboat for the dive boat and used the difference to make a down payment on the business.”

  It sounded like there was more. “And?”

  “And then he wasn’t happy about it. Tom’s the kind of guy that is always refiguring things. I mean, he makes quarterly estimated tax payments, and no two payments are ever the same.”

  “And you’re different.”

  “I’m different. I’m slow to make up my mind…well, not always slow. But I think it out, I make up my mind, and that’s it. I live with the results. When I quit drinking, that’s what happened. I did a lot of reading and thinking and then one day I stopped. No more booze. Tom quit the same time as me and then started up again two weeks later.”

  There was that tone again. “You’re thinking about leaving him, right? I warned you I was going to ask.”

  She looked away. I waited for her answer so long I almost forgot the question. Then she said, “Yeah, I think about it. I think about it a lot. But where would I go?”

  “What about your family?”

  “My mother’s a drunk. I can’t be around her. My father is remarried with teenaged kids. It’s like, not really my family, you know?”

  The tape ran out and the machine clicked off. “Wait here for a second,” I said.

  I went back to my room for Smile. This is crazy, I thought. She’ll hate it. Then I thought, I have to know.

  I put it on the tape deck. “What is it?” Lori said and I shook my head. When “Heroes and Villains” came on she said, “Oh, the Beach Boys. I used to really like them.” I watched her face during the cantina section. “This is different. Isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Do Ya Dig Worms” started and I saw the music actually take hold of her. She stopped talking to listen, and I watched a smile start on her face.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  I didn’t tell her about Brian and 1966. I told her it’s part of the work I’ve been doing in L.A., to put together lost albums from “newly discovered” master tapes. Which is all true, as far as it goes. I told her about Smile and Brian and the Beach Boys and she really listened. The grim stuff about Tom fell by the wayside. The snippet of “George Fell into His French Horn” made her laugh out loud. I thought how proud Brian would be to see that.

  It was three o’clock before we were too tired to have anything left to say. Lori was the first to stand up. “This was really nice,” she said. “Thanks for waiting for me.”

  “Hey. You were buying the drinks.”

  She smiled again. Her smile is off-center, unselfconscious. Like the monkey with the wire in its pleasure center, I wanted to push that button again. Instead I said good-night and took the tape back to my room.

  I remember I said the words to myself when I got into bed. I said, “I think I’m in love.” It’s something I’ve said too many times before and I suddenly felt guilty for it.

  I wasn’t in love as much as I was scared. I was off the map and going much too fast.

  Tom pounded on my door at eight. “You diving today?”

  I sat up and tried to focus my eyes, which were gummed shut. “Uh, not this morning. Maybe this afternoon?”

  “It’s an all-day trip. Take it or leave it.”

  “I guess I’ll pass. But thanks.”

  “Later, guy.”

  I dozed for another hour or so, then went downtown for breakfast. Afterward, sitting in the clear morning sunshine of the zócalo, I thought about my marriage. In eleven years I’ve never been unfaithful. There were a couple of opportunities when I wasn’t ready, and there were more than a couple of nights when, if the opportunity had come up, I don’t think I would have held out.

  There was a moment last night when Lori turned back to say goodnight when I think she would have let me kiss her.

  I wandered through some of the tourist shops, full of polyester T-shirts and onyx chess sets and brilliantly colored hammocks. I found Elizabeth a pair of seashell earrings, long and dangling, the kind she likes. On some level I was buying off my conscience. I got some postcards and stamps and then I couldn’t think of anything to write.

  When I got back to the dive shop Lori was sitting in a lounge chair near the bar. I couldn’t help but think that it was a good spot to watch for somebody coming in or out of any of the rooms. She was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, open over the blue-and-green flowered swimsuit. And the red sunglasses. She had a different romance from the day before.

  I said good morning and she pushed her glasses down so she could look over the top of them. I liked it that she was showing me her eyes.

  “Hi,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Good.”

  “You didn’t go diving.” She folded over a page in her book and put it aside.

  “It’s not like diving is that big a deal for me. I don’t take pictures like my father did. It doesn’t, I don’t know, mean anything. Maybe if I was with friends.”

  “Or your wife?”

  “She’s afraid of fish. And she wears contacts and she’s afraid of losing them. I’m amazed I got her to go out at all ten years ago.”

  “Tom goes out there day after day and he can’t seem to get enough of it. Something about being in control of all those people. He gets off because they do.”

  “You sound like Dr. Steve.”

  “I’m addicted to psychobabble. I already warned you that I’m an addictive personality. What about you?”

  “Addictions? I guess I drink too much. I used to smoke but I gave it up twelve or thirteen years ago.” I took a breath. “Sex. I mean, you can still be addicted to something even when you’re not getting it, right?”

  “Definitely,” she said. Neither of us had looked away. “But I haven’t seen you drinking since you got here.”

  “Just giving it a rest, I guess.”

  “You managed to keep me talking all night last night and you didn’t say much at all about yourself.”

  “I thought I did all the talking.” I shrugged. “I guess I’m just interested.” The words hung in the air. “In what you were saying, I mean.”

  It looked like we were done. She reached for her book and pushed the sunglasses back into place. I started toward my room.

  “Hey, Ray,” she said, still looking down at her book. “What are you doing for lunch?”

  She knocked on my door an hour later with an honest-to-God wicker picnic basket and an ice chest. I had an awkward moment with her in the doorway, not knowing whether to ask her in. Her voice was a little too bright. The Wailers on the CD player sang “Could You Be Loved.” We were both aware of the bed in the corner of the room. I switched off the music and followed her out to the VW.

  We drove south past the commune and across to the eastern side of the island. We were in sight of the ocean when Lori turned right onto a badly rutted dirt road.

  I asked her, “Isn’t there a lighthouse down here?”

  “On the Punta Celarain. We turn off before then.”

  She turned left on a road that was barely there at all. “Tom and I used to come here,” she said, almost as an apology. “It’s been a long time. I hope I’ve got the right place.”

  The road, such as it is, winds between sand dunes and purple-gray lava. Small palms and thornbushes grow out of the dunes. I could smell the ocean. She put the VW into four-wheel drive as the sand got softer and she finally pulled up behind a big rock. “All ashore,” she said.

&nbs
p; She took the food and towels; I brought the ice chest and sunscreen. We came up over the rocks and there was the ocean. It frothed pale blue at the shore, turned impossibly deep and blue at the horizon. Straight ahead, unless you veer off to Cuba or Jamaica, is ocean all the way to Africa. The beach is no more than a pocket of sand between black lava hillocks, with enough room for two people at most.

  “So what do you think?” Lori said.

  I was thinking about how jealous I’d been of her romantic youth, thinking that my life was not necessarily over after all. “It’s great,” I said.

  She set the jam box on the rocks and then shook out the towels. Hers was a faded red with the sun in the middle and mine was a washed-out yellow green. “You don’t mind a little music, do you?” she asked. “I mean, if it’s going to spoil the mood…”

  “Music never spoiled anything.”

  She pushed the button and it was the Wailers’ “Is This Love,” the first cut on the Legend album that I’d been listening to that morning.

  She said, “I heard you playing it. You had it cranked up a bit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It sounded good. I don’t just listen to country, you know. You can’t live in this part of the world without hearing a lot of reggae. God help me, I even like the Rolling Stones.”

  I was beyond words. I lay down on my towel and felt the heat of the sand underneath. I heard Lori settle a few feet away, knew, like I had from that first afternoon, where she was by some internal radar. I could feel the grass on the slope behind me, the salt drying on my skin, the fish in the sea. I asked God to kill me where I lay, while everything was still perfect. It could only turn real from here, or not happen at all, and either way lay certain disappointment.

  After a couple of minutes I sat up and rubbed sunscreen on my arms and legs. Between the hospital and the exercise I’d gotten rid of my pot belly, but I was still pale. The coconut smell of the lotion was full of images. Lori reached for the bottle and I handed it to her without speaking. Then I let the music wash over me.

  Neither one of us talked until the side was over. I was nearly empty of desire, living completely in the moment, from one tick of the cymbal to the next. When she finally got up to turn the tape over she said, “Hungry?”