Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

I go to her and incline my head.

  She brings her mouth to my ear.

  It is a sublime and extraordinary privacy.

  We drop below the water line. Down here the noise is muted, the crowd retreats.

  She says, “The bathroom,” and I follow.

  This is an order I’ve never been given, not here, not by Tess. I abandon my post. I give the bar to the back.

  There’s a narrow bathroom out by the storeroom—facilities for the labor.

  When I open the door she’s standing, leaning against the small sink, her shoulder blades to the mirror.

  “Close it,” she says, giving a sharp little nod. I fall back. There’s a quiet click sealing us in, and the bar noise loses its treble.

  Here her expression is familiar. Lust.

  Though there is something else to it I still can’t translate.

  Maybe it is the degree.

  “Hey, Tess.” Just to say her name.

  The clock has started.

  The ice is melting.

  A towel is folded over the sink divider.

  A cap is loose on a bottle of olives.

  We’re low on cherries.

  The bar is a savage animal I’ve left untended.

  Tess is looking at me in her new way. Or the old way multiplied and laced with some new thing.

  “Joey,” she says.

  There’s a single dim bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  There’s no tenderness in her face.

  What I love is when she narrows her eyes, tilts her head just an inch to the left, and smiles at me with her lips closed. An uncanny expression, which contains both desire and sympathy.

  This is not that.

  This contains a foreign and faraway thing.

  A flake of malice.

  She draws her hands up the outsides of her thighs, beneath her black skirt, and bends at the waist. Her face is replaced by my own. For a moment I look at my eyes in the mirror. Then down to the curve of Tess’s back.

  She is upright again.

  She winds her panties around her right fist like she’s taping for a fight.

  She reaches again and pulls her skirt up.

  Not slowly.

  She widens her stance. “Come here,” she says.

  There’s no singsong in her voice. No girlish theater. “Come here.”

  I take the space between us. A single step. I’m looking down at her. If I were to look up, I’d see myself. I can sense that dark figure.

  She moves her fingers around the back of my head and squeezes.

  She looks right into my eyes.

  “Suck it,” she says. Stretching the s, stressing the k, making it all one angry word: SssuKit.

  She pulls, but I resist. She raises her other hand, my ears now between her wrists.

  She pulls and I go down.

  I’m squatting but she wants me on my knees.

  She pulls and I come forward off my heels.

  She presses her feet against my shoulders and lifts herself onto the sink. She’s still pulling. I’m too far away. I have to inch along the filthy floor.

  “Fucking suck it,” she says, her nails digging hard into the back of my scalp.

  Then all at once she lets go, reaches between her legs and spreads herself open for me. She’s so wet she’s dripping onto the tile.

  I fall forward into her, my knees a fulcrum, her legs over my shoulders, her thighs sliding against the soft skin of my neck.

  I fall into her and press my tongue flat against her cunt, my hands on her ass, holding her to my mouth. She moans, but it is deeper than usual—in sound and in origin. Lips tight, teeth clenched.

  She returns her hands to my head. She holds me hard and begins to move against my mouth.

  I can feel it running down my throat. The taste makes me harder. The smell too. I push my tongue as deep as it will go. But she says, “No. Suck it.”

  SssuKit.

  So I bring my mouth up until I feel that smooth rise. I take it between my lips, gently draw it in, move my tongue around and around and around.

  Now that sound again. A kind of growl. Her nails are cutting. She’s pushing with her hips, circling, holding on with everything she has.

  I can barely breathe.

  “Suck it,” she says again. “Suck it you fuck, you fucker.”

  I don’t stop. I can feel her close to coming. I am listening to her now. I am outside of myself. I am outside of us both. Now she is moaning higher. As if at last this groan, this tight-lipped, teeth-clenched groaning has broken her mouth open. The sound leaps an octave. I’m sure that I’m bleeding from her nails in my scalp.

  “Do it, you fuck,” she says.

  I listen to her until she hooks her ankles together. She’s closing down on me, her thighs pressing and pressing against my ears and as she comes her voice fades.

  She is soaking. She is shaking. Increment by increment, she is releasing me.

  Sound returns. She lets me breathe. My mouth is wet. My chin. My neck.

  She is trembling, her hands still in my hair, but gentler now.

  When she opens her eyes she looks down at me.

  “Clean it up,” she says.

  When I don’t move, when I only look back at her, this new person, she points to the inside of her glistening thigh.

  And I do it. I do what she asks. I lick her clean.

  I get up and pull some paper from a roll, and dry her as tenderly as I can. I press it against her to feel the pulsing.

  I step away and watch as she unwinds her panties from her fist and slips them back on. She comes to me and runs her tongue around my lips, cleaning my mouth. She kisses me as softly as she knows how.

  Then she opens the door and leaves.

  When she’s gone I stand at the sink and splash water on my face. In the mirror I see that my black T-shirt is scattered with dark patches.

  And now, today, for you, I mark those minutes in a dirty bathroom at the back of a bar in White Pine, Washington.

  I mark them as another point of change, of revelation, of no return.

  82.

  Charlie Haden died the other day. All these deaths of people I’ve loved from afar. He was a tough, gentle man who refused to betray himself. We used to pay such careful attention to the world, Tess and I. Once upon a time when we had the energy for it. The rage. Who knows? Maybe Tess is out there right now, fighting some war or another. I hope so.

  I hope so, but I will not search for her, or for anyone else.

  You will return when it is time, or you will not return at all.

  About Haden, he had always reminded me of my father and it made me very sad to read that he had died.

  Do you see the difference between sadness and all that other muck?

  Do you understand that it is not the same?

  All day long I’ve been listening to him, an album of spirituals called Steal Away. My dad sent us that record. He wrote across the back in black felt pen, For J and T, One of my very favorites. Especially the last. With love from your Jesus freak father.

  I’d forgotten about the inscription. It contains everything. His self-deprecation, his humility and humor, his awareness of my skepticism, his love of music, his love for us, his own shifting mind, inside of which Tess becomes his daughter. And also, I think, his sadness for having lost Claire.

  I admire so much about him now. Especially that he kept his humor.

  I am listening to that song he loved, especially the last, which is called “Hymn Medley,” and I think of us in his house in White Pine.

  It is the night I first arrived.

  Poor boy with his life interrupted.

  Poor boy suffering the cruelties of the world.

  I think of him unpacking my bag as I slept, all he’d lost, a
ll he’d given up. My father bent slightly at the waist, laying my clothes inside the drawers of a yellow dresser, him arranging my shoes on the closet floor, hanging my coat on the door hook, kissing my forehead before turning out the light, before returning alone to his room.

  Towards the end of this song my father loved, this medley of hymns, is Haden playing “Amazing Grace.” The bass comes in loud there for a while and the piano falls to the background. It is my favorite part of my father’s favorite piece.

  This is the story.

  This accrual of days.

  These losses.

  These sadnesses.

  This present.

  This music.

  There is never any stopping. We are always in motion. The ground is unstable, the plates forever shifting.

  Charlie Haden vanishes and the world is altered.

  That’s a strange fact and it is one I love.

  83.

  At the end of that Friday, the night Tess took me into the bathroom, after we had cleaned up and cashed out, we sat with Seymour. We three around the same table as always. A bottle, glasses of ice, a pack of Virginia Slims, an ashtray stamped with the face of The Owl’s owl. The manager locking the upstairs storeroom. Other waitresses leaving, laughing. The wild-haired barback restocking. The sound of him tearing open cardboard cases of beer, marrying bottles, replacing whatever was low, marking inventory with a pen on a chain. There was the music, which back then was all the Seattle stuff—Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Hammerbox, Temple of the Dog, Alice in Chains. But Cobain was our crown prince, our John Lennon and he was everywhere. So if you want the best guess, we were listening to him.

  It was still the time of “Nevermind,” pervasive across the land, but in a bar in Washington State in those years, it was inescapable. “Ubiquitous as harm,” Richard Hugo once wrote, another of Tess’s great loves.

  Anyway, if you want to know what it felt like at the end of a Friday night in September of 1992, that’s the best I can do. Joey March and Tess Wolff, Seymour Strout and Kurt Cobain. Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be, as a friend, as a known enemy. On and on through the night, through our strangest, most dangerous years.

  Tess was restless and wouldn’t stop talking. She kept getting up and wandering the bar. Hanging her arm on Seymour’s neck. The long night, the alcohol, our episode in the bathroom, had done nothing at all to calm her. Seymour and I were tired and relaxed, happy to be sitting, happy to be drinking. But Tess was moving, always moving. She the performer, we the audience.

  What she was this night was nearly what she’d been becoming. Nearly the culmination of her changing, prowling eyes, her mask, her secret wardrobe.

  “C,” she said.

  She’d started calling Seymour, C.

  She was standing then, half-dancing with a chair. We’d been through all the subjects, all the questions. Always Tess would ask after my mother. And always the answers were the same. She was in prison. Nothing changed. Nothing discernible anyway. She seems tired. She’s been a little quiet.

  Seymour gave me a look, which meant, what’s with her?

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t look at him,” she said. “You’re talking to me.”

  “More like the other way around.”

  Tess dragged the chair she’d been dancing with over to the table and straddled it.

  “I want to tell you something, C. See See Rider.”

  “All right.” He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the ceiling.

  “There’s a girl.”

  “I don’t want to be set up, Tess.”

  “Fuck. No. That’s not it. Just listen, just fucking listen.”

  There was that old sick feeling.

  “She lives with her family up on Vista. It’s a nice house. There’s a trampoline outside. You know it?”

  He shook his head.

  “She lives there with her parents. No brothers, no sisters. Her father’s a professor at Emerson. Sam Young. Never heard of him?”

  Seymour shook his head and glanced at me.

  Tess waited until she had his eyes again. “This man, he likes to throw his wife into walls.”

  Seymour nodded.

  She waited and stared.

  “Tess, what’s up with you? What are you telling me here?”

  “I’m telling you that there’s a man living on Vista who likes to beat his wife.”

  Seymour looked at me.

  “He’s been there, too. He knows. He’s heard it. He’s heard it, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what he does to her. I’ve called the police.”

  “We called the police,” I said.

  “It’s true. Joey too. We both did. Called and went in there and did it in person.”

  “What are you telling me here, Tess?”

  “I’m telling you that we’ve come to a point, C. That the police don’t give a fuck. They don’t do a thing about it. And they look back at you like you’re looking at me. They say the same thing you do.”

  “And what do I say, Tess?”

  “You say, why are you telling me this?”

  “That’s not what I said. I said, what are you telling me.”

  “It’s the same thing, Seymour. It’s the same fucking thing.”

  It wasn’t only that she was drunk.

  Seymour lit another cigarette.

  “You don’t know a thing about me.” He dropped his matches on the table. Some of his calm was gone.

  “No? Then do something about it.”

  He laughed. “What should I do about it?”

  “What are you willing to do?”

  He shook his head and leaned back from the table. “What’s gotten into you tonight?”

  “It’s not only tonight,” I said.

  Tess ignored me. “Tell me, C. What are you willing to do?”

  “About what? About this guy and his wife?”

  “Yes. About them. What are you willing to do? Tell me. You willing to talk to your police buddies? See if you can convince them to give a fuck? You willing to kick in the door and scare the shit out of him? Willing to put a bullet in his head? What are you willing to do, Seymour?”

  Seymour raised his chin and squinted at her.

  “Hey Tess. You know where I work, right? I mean aside from this charming place? You know the kind of women I spend most of my time with? You remember that, right? And you remember how a lot of them got there?”

  “You think they got there by protecting other women, C?”

  “I sure think one of them did. And I also think she wishes she hadn’t. I think every single day she wishes she hadn’t.”

  “Well, I know you’re wrong.”

  “What? She likes being in that cell?”

  “I think she doesn’t regret doing what she did. That she believes it was worth it.”

  “Worth it? To trade all these years, to trade her husband, her family, for that piece of shit?”

  Tess looked away to some dark corner of the bar. “You haven’t told me, Seymour. What are you willing to do?”

  “Right now I’m thinking about what I wouldn’t do.”

  He had those big hands clenched around each end of his towel. The expression of amusement, that slight smile, the detachment, was gone. Now his focus was on her and with a seriousness he used only for the rare drunk who wouldn’t follow his friendly orders.

  “What’s that, C?”

  “I’m not much interested in fighting, Tess.”

  She turned to him and laughed.

  And now I want her to say, “Some people have to fight every moment of their lives.”

  But the problem here is that she wouldn’t have said it. Not because it isn’t hers, which it’s not, but because it’s taken from the book of poems she found later in Seattle. The bo
ok she loved, the book she left behind. This one here on the table, which was published years after that night in the bar.

  I’ve been reading it. I know it’s a mistake, but I don’t have much discipline lately. And in with the sadness of it, the pain, there’s pleasure too. In seeing her notes, her lines, her stars. The enthusiasm of a person, a self that no longer exists.

  In that damp Belltown apartment, in those days when we were reading so hungrily, she found that line, which is here now, boxed and starred.

  Some people have to fight every moment of their lives.

  “This is mine,” she said to me then.

  “And this is yours, ‘He feels the lights like hard rain through his pores.’”

  It was a joke for us then, an affectation of our youth, which until yesterday I’d not thought of for so many years. Something from those early Seattle days when we spent our time and money at Left Bank, and Elliot Bay, Showbox and Rock Candy. When, for a brief period, I’m ashamed to report, we were writing wretched poems, and reading them aloud in cafés and bars, when we imagined ourselves artists, part of a scene.

  “This is Joey,” Tess said, “he feels the lights like hard rain through his pores.”

  “This is Tess,” I said, “she has to fight every moment of her life.”

  Can you fucking imagine? It is mortifying and I have no excuse other than that we were very young. It embarrasses me to tell you all of this, but remember what it’s like when you’re that age? When you believe that you are unusual and your anger is unlike any other that has ever been. When you’ve not yet discovered just how boring you are. When you believe your every gesture is some kind of poem. When you’ve come to town so ravenous and frightened that you believe there is no one else in the world with more desire, more rage or more fear.

  I’m ashamed, but there is, along with all of that pretense and delusion and self-importance, something tender and lovely. Isn’t that true, too?

  I like to think of it now, of us in those days in our warm bed, of the bookshops we thought of as our own, of our friends then, all of whom, to a one, have dissolved. Of our life together, our life which felt, as it had in White Pine, a thing of such absolute solidity.

  There is the time when you believe in permanence, and then there is the time when you do not. All change is a variation on that fundamental difference.