by Dana Spiotta
Ray hand-polished his glasses. “What’ll it be today, girls?” Lorene also specified that staff refer to women (even in the vocative) as “girls,” never as “ladies,” “miss,” or (God forbid!) “women.”
“I’ll have a Norman Maine on the rocks,” Mina said.
“I’ll have a Holly Martins,” Lorene said. Ray filled two glasses with club soda and placed them on the bar in front of them, as he always did, no matter what they ordered.
“Look, I don’t mind covering for you, just let me know ahead of time.”
“Sorry, I meant to get here sooner, but I ended up walking home and then I couldn’t bring myself to go in,” Mina said.
“It’s gone on a bit, this Scott thing. Really, it’s your business.”
“Yes, Scott. A bit. My business.”
“I’m not even going to address this walking business.”
“I like to walk.”
“Someone might say you are scared to drive.”
“I’m not. I prefer walking.”
“I think someone might say that anyone with as complicated a personal life as you have might not be able to afford the luxury of preferring to walk places.”
“Lorene.”
“But I’m not even going to mention it.”
Mina had been seeing Scott regularly for about six months. Lorene was the only one who knew. She told her one day, “I need you to cover me one weekend a month.” Lorene said, “Yes?” And Mina said, “His name is Scott.” Lorene just said, “Scott. Scott. Well, with a name like Scott, he must be lonely.” So Mina would let her think it was still Scott. Not tell her about Max. She had secrets now within her secrets. Secrets from her secrets.
“Poor Scott,” Lorene said.
Yes, poor Scott. Mina had met him in a hotel bar that seemed to have been there forever and was always deserted, her sort of place. It was in walking distance of the Gentleman’s Club, and one of those places she meandered by in the early stages of her “walking places.” She sat there, taking a break from the restaurant to get a real drink. A three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon drink, something shadowed and filmish and seductive, the perversion of the sun outside. She needed a cigarette, and a man, obviously. One day after another of working, and she couldn’t bear it. She walked in and ordered an Irish whisky, neat.
A young man was sitting at the bar. When her sweater slipped off her stool, he picked it up for her. He had on a suit, an actual suit, with a tie and cuff links and a jacket. He smiled and handed her her sweater.
“Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him.
It seemed such an archaic, nice thing to do.
He smiled and nodded and went back to his stool. She felt warm from the drink and wanted another. The young man in the suit gestured at the bartender, pointing at his glass and hers. The bartender probably had a real name, like Sam, because he was so old. It occurred to Mina that she liked bartenders to be a lot older than she. She had to make a note of this for Gentleman’s Club. She smiled at the young man and gestured him over. He was drinking a gold-hued liquid in a highball glass filled with ice that certainly had to be scotch.
“May I join you?” he said and she nodded. They sat there saying nothing, sipping, staring at the bartender. She could discern the unmistakable peaty-grassy scotch smell from his glass and his mouth when he spoke. She wanted to hear him talk.
“You’re visiting?” she said.
He explained he was visiting his daughter, two years old. His wife had left him several months earlier, and now he came to L.A. once a month to visit his kid.
“You’re from New York?” she asked. He was. But not originally. He was from Georgia. His name was Scott Winter. Married his sweetheart. Became an investment banker. Worked long hours. She left him. He was in a suit, postvisit to the indifferent kid, hapless and having a few.
“A banker,” she said, “in a suit.”
“Is that bad?” he asked with complete earnestness. “I ask because I don’t know. It must seem odd, here in Los Angeles.”
He was very slender, nearly petite. He was not greatlooking, but handsome in an inoffensive, smooth-cheeked, high-school kind of way, nice-shaped face, sort of ridiculouspink cheeks and voluptuous mouth, all a bit disconcerting combined with the dark circles under the eyes. He was one of those guys who would go from looking twenty-five to forty-five overnight.
“Were you very popular in high school?” she asked.
“Well, high school was a long time ago,” he said.
“Yeah, you were. That’s okay. You really work for a bank. Sort of get up and go to work every day in a suit. How about that.” He looked at her oddly.
“I’m sorry, I’m bothering you,” he said, and his face was blank and sad.
“You’re not, Scott. Really not. I’m just talking. It’s my way, I’m sorry, I don’t mean anything I say,” Mina said. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of me.” He again looked at her oddly. She realized he was a bit struck, and it was amazingly attractive to Mina.
They sat quietly, mid-distance staring. Two people drinking in a dark bar while the sun burned brightly outside. He didn’t leave. They sipped their drinks. She leaned her head in close to him.
“Scott,” she said. He looked at her.
“Scott, I love the way a man’s mouth tastes after he’s been drinking scotch.
“Scott.” She put her hand on his sleeve. She touched his tie. “I’d like to undress you. Your tie and your cuff links.” Scott opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. When they had closed the door to his hotel room, he fastened the chain lock. After she took her clothes off, he touched her with reverent slowness, as if she might run out the door any second.
“I think you’re beautiful,” he said. She couldn’t wait to pull him on top of her. She didn’t want his dutiful body kisses. Shepulled him on top of her and, putting her hands on the backs of his thighs, she pulled him inside her. He came pretty quickly, and she did not even approach coming. But the thrusts, the long wet and the deep fast of them, made the world basic and elemental to her. She let him stroke her back for a long time afterward, and listened to him talk about his divorce and how his daughter didn’t seem familiar to him. She listened to him talk about the long hours he worked and she played with his cock until he wanted to have sex again, and she said to herself she liked it short and uncomplicated. When she left she agreed to meet him in the same place a month from then.
It had felt as though she were watching this unfold from somewhere else. That someone wrote all this down beforehand for them to recite.
That first time, when the dusk air hit her face on the street, a heat blast of tropical stillness, she felt invincible and lonely. But her loneliness was at a distance, something she could control and look at, specific and acute. It had a reason and a logic. She already longed for next month. Months slid by and she found these meetings (dates, trysts, assignations — what should she call them?) could go on indefinitely, isolated, contained, like a secret cigarette in some back-stairs room.
Max was not merely an escalation of this, not simply a revision. Max was the time bomb, the flash point of doomed relations, the Florence and Normandy of her Secret Life. Max was not contained and isolated. Max was her husband’s oldest and best friend.
Lorene ordered another drink. “A Lost Weekend,” she said. Mina looked at her.
“Another, Mina?” Ray asked.
“I’ll haveAn Affair to Remember.A double.” Ray obligedwith the club soda and the lime squeezes. She sipped her soda and watched Lorene smoke.
“Do you think if you are semi-involved with two people, or three, or four — let’s say twenty-five percent engagement with each. .”
“Yes?”
“Does that mean you are fully engaged? In the aggregate?”
“No.”
“Or is it just the same twenty-five percent over and over, and nothing ever even reaches thirty percent?”
“What?”
“Skip it.”
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“Take the night off. Take a walk. Take care of David. I’ll cover things here,” Lorene said, smiling and patting her hand.The Metro section was spread open and out of order from when her husband, Mark, had thrown it at the refrigerator earlier in the morning. Lisa picked it up, smoothing its creases, just glancing at headlines but not getting too involved until she had her coffee and had set up Alex and Alisa with their shows and the saltines with grape jelly.
He had trouble with mornings.
Lisa rarely missed reading the paper. She read it, at least the front section and the Metro section, every day. She had to, it seemed. The Metro section covered the local human disasters from the hundreds of suburban-sprawl cities, Spanish named, all inter-paso-changeable. El- and Santa- and Del- and La- and Costa-named places. But the freeways too, lately, always there, impossible for Lisa to place precisely. Living in the city, you know the freeways you use, and to read of the others — whole other worlds right there, apparently — made her feel the hugevastness of the place, something so intangible when she went to the Safeway, or even the west side to clean houses. The Santa Ana, the San Diego, the San Gabriel, the Pomona — freeways named for their origins or destinations like rivers. But how could that be, a freeway ending? Wasn’t the very point that they became an endless, seamless circle? Or the names that seemed to promise things — Garden Grove Freeway, Artesia Freeway, Century Freeway. Harbor Freeway, Golden State Freeway.
He had a headache, of course. He had to do a lot of drinking to just unwind and get some sleep. And when Lisa woke at five, she paused for a second before she woke Mark up. She looked at him in bed next to her, watched him sleep. He had long brown hair, which he didn’t braid, as she suggested, so as he slept it tangled and knotted. He had a heavy, noisy man’s way of sleep-breathing, as if he managed to aggravate the air even unconsciously, a constant announcement or battle. A labor, that’s what they called it. His breathing labored, even in his sleep. And that word,labor,made Lisa feel sorry for him. She felt bad, actually, that he would now wake and have to go to the job site and labor — climb things and hammer things and do the things that made his hands swollen at the end of the day. He hated it so much. She, on the other hand, didn’t mind cleaning the house, or Lorene’s house, or any of the houses she did. Sometimes her back hurt and she couldn’t believe how much laundry and shopping and dishes still had to be done after she had done so much. But it kept her focused and she liked having things to do. Poor Mark, though, he really hated it.
Lisa started to read about local disappearances. There was the child found dead in a trash pail. The story about the one held captive in a basement. Found was harder to take, usually so tortured they may as well be dead, so horrendously damagedthey were. But what got Lisa were not the found victims but the missing children. The victims-to-be, certainly, awaiting their stories. The dopey school picture reprinted — Lisa scanned the awkward smiles with the new, still-jagged-edged adult teeth just grown in, the strange school picture with matte wash color backdrops, the ribbon at an innocent angle on the head. Couldn’t there be something in the faces that indicated the horrors to come? That they would be chosen for the worst, most horrific random disasters? But there was nothing in these faces that made them any different from any other kids. No different from Alex and Alisa, no predicting their victimhood.
He still had his trim, smooth-skinned athletic body. Sometimes, when he came to bed stoned and only a little drunk, she would rub his back, massage him, and it felt nice to touch the smooth, hard muscles. Watching him sleep, with one arm bent under the pillow under his head, she noticed how his bicep muscle swelled, distinct and strong, the angle making a sculpted furrow underneath the muscle and a pleasing curve on the top to his shoulder. How she used to ache to see it, how she liked to curl in there and feel surrounded by strong maleness, cared for. How amazingly hard and different from her own this man’s body felt. She was so certain this was what she needed and wanted. All this hard flesh around her. And she would stroke his muscles and feel girlish and safe. She grew ever softer and he grew ever harder.
Lisa didn’t let the kids watch the TV news. That’s why she turned to the paper. No TV news with Alex and Alisa nearby. No — they watched theirLittle Mermaidvideo, orAnastasia,and she must read of the world around them, a world of hunted and hated children. A world in every way hostile to children. Mindy Brown, seven. Missing three days. Last seen at a playground. Ina red sweatshirt with a hood and a zipper, and with her101 Dalmatiansbackpack. Items to find in mud somewhere, bloodstained and zip-locked in plastic bags. She just knew what came next — canvass the neighborhood, because it’s only bad — right? Lisa knew from reading every day how it went, the search, the increasing futility, then the body part found, and the story became matching decomposed bodies to missing babies. Then the grisly back-telling of events. The rope burns indicate the time of asphyxiation. Evidence of penetration. Struggle indicated before water filled lungs. One shoe missing. Strange lacerations across shoulders. Head injuries indicating bludgeoning with perhaps a pipe or a crowbar. The technical language attempted a clinical precision, but it was pornography. Lisa hated to read it, could not stop reading it, couldn’t help but visualize events. Dylan Simonson. Age five. Lisa knew what five was. Alex and Alisa were five. Five was animal crackers and full-throttle energy, finally with an agile coordination that encouraged them to be more independent, to play by themselves at times, to feel a sense of littleness as liberation — maybe the realization that small people can do things grown-ups cannot, a first wave of self-esteem, even able to trick Dad and call Mom “dumb.” She had just left him in the car for five minutes. Or she just sent him ten feet away to the gum ball machine. He was playing on the slides and I was just sitting here talking to Mrs. Williams. I looked around and he was gone. One negligent moment and then it’s get the dental records.
Sometimes she caught Mark looking at the three of them like he’d wandered into the wrong house. That is the word,caught,he looked caught, and you could read it as something else, but she knew better.
Lisa began to read less of anything but these stories. She gotto know them so well that if a body was found she knew which kids were still missing, which child it probably would turn out to be. She had a vague feeling that this wasn’t good, thinking so much about these things. Or maybe it was crucial she thought about them. She remembered when they used to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons. So America would wake up in the morning, and there next to their Wheaties and multigrain toast would be the face of some certainly dead child, hopelessly missing for years, computer altered to simulate age. Lisa supposed the milk companies finally wised up and realized that these death cartons were not the most pleasing packaging for their products. She remembered the joke Mark made to her when they saw a small child wandering around the mall by himself, so absorbed in a toy he turned around to find himself separated from Mom. “Look, Lisa,” he’d said with a cryptic smile, “a milk carton kid.” It was true, the solo child was a potential candidate for the milk carton. But those milk cartons on the table — maybe off-putting, but maybe a reminder to the kiddies: Hey, be careful. Hansel and Gretel. To the parents: Pay attention to every second. No second chances in this forever larger and unfamiliar freewayed world.
Second Road Stop: Between Arizona and New Mexico
“Why do I hate the ocean? Well, I don’t, I just don’t have the sentimental fetish for it that all these people do. As if the oceanon the one side and the desert on the other sort of justifies whatever lies between.” Lorene smokes her long cigarette and will not take off her sunglasses. We sit in a bar in a town halfway between Flagstaff and Santa Fe. We sit in the afternoon light and she will not take off her sunglasses.
“The sun is our enemy, don’t you know, Mina, beware always of the sun. Relentless, inexhaustible summer is no way to live your life.” I eat a hamburger. She watches. I can feel her hunger like a wave behind her glasses. I eat with gusto, but not too fast. I sense her watching my ev
ery move. She keeps speaking as if we were having a conversation.
“It’s important to live in a place that is affected by seasons. Where time is measured in weather. Where there are constant reminders that your approaching death is inescapable. You know, leaves falling, that sort of thing.” I slurp on my Coke. She lights another cigarette.
“Mud slides don’t count. Disasters, fires, unusual weather systems don’t count. Earthquakes don’t count. They are just random, a kind of meaningless natural hysteria. Earthquakes, when you grow up in California, they are like an E-ticket ride at Disneyland, a joke, a way to make the nonnatives come forth and identify themselves.” The afternoon light on her white face makes her look celluloid, as if she could shift the whole world to black-and-white. Michael said there is nothing more beautiful than white, white skin because it is so unforgiving, so bruisable, and the person inside seems only barely covered. To me her cheek looks cool and poreless, not at all trembly and translucent. But she may have been different then. Or maybe he could see through skin.
“Oh, honey, you’re upset.” Lorene leans toward me as if she could see me only now, as if she had just walked into the room.I feel nothing, but there must have been a sort of look on my face. I stare out the window. A large woman is trying to get her stuff into her tote bag. Kids’ clothes and hairbrush and cigarettes all spilling out. She has blond hair cut close on the sides and left long in back. Her toes press over the edges of her sandals and the nails are not deep red but lollipop red. Her son is tiny beside her, pulling at her. I keep staring at the fat part of the backs of her legs, the part where the skin puckers whitely and it looks as if no nerves are there, that if you touched her flesh she wouldn’t know.
“Lorene,” I say.
“Yes?”
“I think I made a huge mistake.”
“Oh, dear. Do you want to go back, doll?”
“No, no, no. I don’t mean leaving L.A.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Lorene. Oh, God. I’ve made an awful mistake.”
