The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  He was nearly begging for my approval. Something, anything from me to ease the guilt.

  “Seventy pairs of shoes,” he said. “That’s a hundred and forty shoes.”

  So I gave him what he wanted. “You deserve it,” I said.

  I could tell he loved the word, “deserve.” He loved it. It spoke volumes. It was the word he was afraid to use. The word that somehow didn’t sound right.

  “I tell you what,” he said, “I’m gonna give you her number.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, I’m gonna give you her number. You don’t have to call her if you don’t want to, but you’ll have it.”

  Keith scribbled the number on a napkin, folded the napkin, and slipped it to me like a drug dealer.

  “Tell her you know me,” he said. “It’s worth it. You deserve it, too. I’ve got to go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I stayed at the bar for an extra drink. I unfolded the napkin. Her name was Gina, or at least that’s the name he wrote on the napkin.

  I was drunk. Certainly too drunk to drive home, but I did it anyway, concentrating like a madman on the road ahead, radio off, seatbelt firmly fastened, thinking the entire time about Gina and all the things she could do with a smile on her face. I wondered the price, and whether it was too late to call.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  I froze. I froze like a boy in high school confronted with a girl’s voice.

  “Hello,” she said again, and then I was unfrozen.

  I managed to talk. “May I speak to Gina?”

  “This is Gina,” she said, and her voice was exceptionally soft and smooth. It ran my imagination into a frenzy.

  “I’m a friend of Keith Perkins.”

  She hesitated, and then said, “Okay.”

  “Is it too late?” I asked.

  It sounded like she was eating something. Maybe a grape, or a tangerine wedge. Something juicy.

  “No,” she said.

  I fumbled around with a plan. A standard motel. I’d call her with the room number. And the next thing I knew I was back in the car concentrating on the road again, making my way to the motel across town.

  I felt like a fugitive at the front desk, started to give a wrong name, and then panicked at the prospect of being asked for my driver’s license. I paid cash, yawned, talked about being on the road all day and looking forward to a good night’s sleep, and then called Gina with the room number.

  I sat on the edge of the bed in the motel room, waiting. The idea a beautiful woman would knock on the door, take off her clothes, and do anything I asked, was dynamic. The thought of unconnected sex was foreign to me. No hidden agenda. No undercurrents of guilt, or love, hatred or compromise. Just two people in a small motel room fornicating, shaking hands, and walking out the door afterward.

  I took off my jacket and then put it back on. I removed a shoe, smelled my sock, and then took a quick shower, dressing again. It was all very odd. Several times I stood to leave and then sat back down.

  The knock on the door was light. Keith Perkins was correct. She was beautiful. She reminded me immediately of the sixteen-year-old girl at the beach so many years ago. The girl who took me by the hand to the pool. The similarity was something in her eyes and cheekbones.

  “How old are you?” I blurted out.

  “Twenty-two. How old are you?” she asked, with a genuine smile, looking around the room.

  My drunkenness had given way to a slight headache and a numb feeling around my face. I sat down in the chair, and she stood in front of the television. Gina wore a short dress, not too revealing, but perfectly formed around her hips. She was extremely aware of her body, but she didn’t overdo it. Her hair was brown, medium length. She could have been a college student.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

  “Afraid of what?” she answered.

  “Afraid somebody might kill you or something. I mean, it’s the middle of the night and you’re in a strange man’s motel room.”

  She smiled again and put her hands on her hips. “You’re not a strange man,” she said.

  I leaned forward in the chair and rubbed my tired face in my hands, pressing small circles at each temple in unison. The pressure relieved the pain momentarily. When I opened my eyes she was still standing there.

  I said, “When you’re finished, I mean when you’re finished having sex with a man for money in a room like this, a man like me, how do you feel?”

  She made an expression of disappointment. Not disgust. Not anger. Like it wasn’t the first time she’d been asked the question.

  “You’re one of those guys,” she said, looking down at me.

  “What guys?” I asked.

  She took a few steps forward and pulled my face against her stomach. Her hand felt small and light on the back of my head. We stayed that way, and I could feel her heartbeat, gentle and rhythmic. My right hand reached and touched the inside of her thigh. Slowly, I moved it upwards, aware of the short distance between the tips of my fingers and the magical place nestled between her legs. My hand moved so slowly upwards I could barely detect it was moving at all. The skin was smooth and accepting, sure of itself, and I moved again, now only a whisper from the warm place. She waited patiently, waited for me to do as I wished. And for a moment I thought I could do it. I thought I could be a man who could enjoy the bodily pleasures of a strange and gorgeous woman. But I was wrong. A wave of nausea rose from my stomach, and I leaned back in the chair, looking up at the girl above me.

  I was old enough to be her father. Who was she to trade intimacy for money? Who was she to mock the myth of love? The strongest, most organized and essential myth in the history of mankind, and for a few hundred dollars she’d let a man touch her and pretend she loved him.

  It was me who was disgusted, and without a word I stood up and laid face-down on the bed. I never heard another sound from her. I must have fallen asleep in only a few minutes. She could have killed me, or hit me with a baseball bat, or anything else she wanted. Instead, I suppose she decided to leave my kind alone in my own misery, untangling the reasons for being unable to move my hand the final inch.

  I woke the next morning and didn’t know where I was. I arrived at work two hours late and people stared at me like I was covered in blood. Keith Perkins winked when I passed his office door, and I was glad to close the door of my own office and sit in silence.

  On the desk was a stack of mail, and on top of the stack was a handwritten envelope from Kate. It was the first letter since the Kansas City proposal. The letters had stopped, and after a while, I stopped looking forward to the daily mail. Stopped rifling through the business envelopes searching for her handwriting.

  But there it was, the envelope in front of me. I held it in my hands and wondered if it was a coincidence, Kate’s letter arriving the morning after my night in the motel room alone. The mistakes in this life are all patiently waiting to be made, but I opened the letter anyway.

  Early,

  Whether it is true or not, I’ve come to believe you are the only person who has ever really known me. I was a daughter to my screwed-up parents, a wife to Russell, a mother to Gretchen. With you, I was simply me. It was raw, and right, and scary, which is probably why I ran away. It was like running away from myself.

  Meet me Saturday, June 10, at the Kansas City airport Sheraton hotel lobby at 2 o’clock. Two days. Room service. Hot baths. Never leave the apartment like before. I’ll wear a red dress.

  Love, Kate

  God help me, but I felt like a teenage boy. Just a few words on a piece of paper written by her hand held the power to bring me back to the way she made me feel. A lightness. Clear-headed. Ready to face the day, and June 10th was only two weeks away. The world was good again.

  four

  The definition of success doesn’t always include longevity. I mean, we think a restaurant in business twenty years is successful based solely on the period of time, or a fif
ty-year marriage, or a man who spends his life employed at the same place. I looked back at my own life and realized many of the most pleasurable experiences were short-lived. Most people would think my marriage with Kate was a failure, but that’s not true. My feelings for her, good or bad, were as intense and concentrated as any feelings I have ever experienced. I learned more about myself through Kate in a short period of time than maybe any other span of my life. And despite my best efforts, I still loved her, or at least I loved the thought of her. The idea of Kate Shepherd still existed as a separate entity, like a painting on a wall in a museum.

  If I’d been thirty years younger, pride would have kept me from going to Kansas City. I would have left her sitting on the couch in her red dress watching the glass door the same way she left me years earlier. But I wasn’t thirty years younger, and I never would be again. I was becoming an old man, and one of the benefits of being an old man, besides watching your body fall apart and thinking of suicide constantly, is recognizing why pride is included in the list of deadly sins.

  I had two weeks and a plane ride to think. I suppose I should have waited to marry Kate, at least until we got to know each other, but youth isn’t for waiting. It’s for doing. Blindly doing. What else could it be for? Would we prefer to spend youth rationalizing and contemplating, preparing for retirement and eating low-cholesterol bran muffins? Such a small percentage of my time on this earth was spent in Kate’s presence, but so much time was spent thinking of her.

  I hadn’t made a reservation at the hotel. Since Kate was the one who invited me, I left it to her. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to prepare the room, set up champagne and strawberries. I’d just arrive, and let things happen. No written format. No forcing one planned moment to follow the next planned moment, drowning in the anxiety of possibilities. Like the possibility Kate wouldn’t show up again, or if she did, we’d quickly learn we’d both become very different people. Too much in between to overcome in a few short days. Maybe we’d even hate each other, one person leaving the other in the middle of a bitter lunch, storming out, packing a bag, no strawberries.

  It was a long flight. I had a drink to calm my nerves. My thoughts flowed from fear to pure and divine lust. In my mind, Kate’s body was the same as it had been before. The same as it existed so clearly in my memory, naked and brilliant, her breasts firm and round, but it dawned on me they may no longer be firm and round, but instead elongated and elastic, attacked by gravity. Maybe her face would show wrinkles, and her hair would be peppered gray. And how would she see me? Would I look like an old man in the bedroom, a walking skeleton, my testicles distended?

  So I had a second drink and thought about the prostitute. She was young and beautiful. What stopped me from touching her, but allowed me to kill people? Who is responsible for the moral minefield inside me? Jesus was allowed to save the world. The ultimate Savior Complex. Did God make some people unsavable, even for Jesus? And if so, why? Why would He create such a person to live a life without hope? And is it true that people who live their lives to save others, like myself, are truly the people who need saving the most?

  I stared out of the taxi window on the way to the airport Sheraton Hotel. It was only 1:40. I was twenty minutes early. I considered asking the driver to ride around for the next half hour, but I didn’t. It was raining. Clear strands of water spread like long fingers across my window from front to back, witch’s hands shaking in the breeze. I became lost in thoughts I can no longer recall, and the driver had to speak before I realized we were in front of the hotel, on the other side of the glass door.

  I paid the man and stood on the sidewalk in the rain, my bag over my shoulder. Through the glass I could see the lobby and the couch where I sat before. The couch was empty. Nothing red inside. I entered the door, looking left and then right on the way to the couch, and sat down with my bag at my feet.

  At five minutes until two I felt the way I’d felt before. Was I an idiot? Sitting in a hotel in Kansas City, waiting for no one again? The same clock on the same wall. It seemed the same people, besides Jake Crane, were milling around the lobby on the marble floors. How long would I wait this time, and would I spend the night alone or fly home?

  For some reason I looked to the right at the golden elevators fifty feet away. The elevator door opened and Kate stood alone inside. We were looking at each other, me on the couch in the lobby, Kate in the red dress, standing alone. No one around us could know we were together. We’d always been together, no matter how far apart, and no one needed to understand, not in high school and not now.

  She held up four fingers. The elevator door closed slowly. I smiled to myself. She’d come all the way from California. Our room was on the fourth floor. Now it was just a matter of controlling expectations. Navigating the great abyss. Reconnecting without consequence.

  I stood casually and walked to the elevator. On the fourth floor I turned the corner to look left, and then right, down the long empty hallway. There was no one. I must admit, for a minute I questioned myself. Had I seen her at all? Had I wanted so badly for Kate to show up I’d created her in the elevator, a mirror image of the woman inside my mind, a delusion? Was I standing in the hallway once again, waiting for no one?

  I heard a door open. I saw a flash of red. Kate’s head peeked out. I walked her way. The door was cracked, and I went inside. She was standing in front of the television. We smiled at each other. A knowing smile, and she opened her arms. I dropped my bag, and we held each other. It was just a matter of who would let go first. Tears came to my eyes behind her back, and I didn’t want her to see them. There was still the part of me that needed to be seen strong. The part my mother’s letter told me to leave behind. But it’s not so easy. I was a man, after all. If not for our strength, who are we?

  I started to speak.

  “Shhhh,” she said quietly.

  On the table I could see a bottle of champagne resting in a silver bucket of ice, two crystal glasses next to the bucket, and a single red rose in a long slender vase. I’d brought nothing.

  Kate pulled away. She closed the curtains on the window and turned off the only light in the room. The bathroom light allowed me to see her.

  I started to speak again.

  “Shhhh,” she said quietly. My silence was necessary for her somehow.

  Kate was barefoot. In the near-darkness she unbuttoned my shirt. I touched her face with my fingers, and she smiled like she remembered something good.

  My body below reacted even before Kate removed my pants. It took every molecule of control not to touch her, but just like my silence, it seemed important to wait. Necessary.

  Kate’s red dress dropped to the floor around her feet. She stepped out, and we stood naked in silence, thirty-five years after the last time we’d been naked together in my college apartment, when days passed wrapped up in each other’s bodies. The darkness, the silence, the patience, were all necessary now when they hadn’t been before, but it felt so much the same. The same out-of-control desire I’d always felt in her presence. The need to harness and explode at the same time. Touch and deny myself simultaneously.

  She took me by the hand and led me to the bed. The sheets felt clean and cold. Side by side, we kissed gently. I wanted to lick every single inch of her body, but I waited, and eventually, she touched me. It seemed the entire purpose of my desire my whole life was Kate Shepherd. At the moment of my conception, that crazy moment with Bobby Winters watching outside the bedroom window, my DNA was programed with Kate Shepherd in mind. It seemed she was the reason for my existence, the intention of my pleasure, and now she let me, wanted me, to kiss every part of her skin. So that’s exactly what I did. I started at the top of her painted toe and moved upwards. There was no hesitation. The silence solidified the simplicity. Kate made low noises when I stopped at certain places, her hand light on the back of my head.

  There was nowhere else to go. We were exactly where we wanted to be, and neither of us spoke for hours until it was like go
ing back in time. The covered window could be any covered window, anywhere. The light from the bathroom could be any light, anywhere in the world, like the light in my college apartment bathroom, and with no words or sights to provide context, we were twenty years old again.

  Afterwards, we found ourselves lying next to each other in the bed. One of us, at some point, would speak. Lights would be turned on, our flaws revealed, but I didn’t want it to end. I could hear a television in the next room. Someone walked down the hall rubbing the bottoms of their shoes against the short carpet. The thin line of light between the curtains was yellow.

  “Do you remember,” Kate said, “the list you made of everything I needed to do to change my life?”

  I remembered the list. Education. Finances. Spirituality. Baby names. I remembered it was all in my handwriting, not Kate’s. They were all my ideas, not Kate’s.

  “I remember,” I said.

  Just the words, the words spoken in the air, changed everything. The context had been established. The borders of time had framed the moment. We were forced to remember.

  I reached out and turned on the lamp. Kate was on her back. The sheet was pulled up to her neck. On the outside of the sheet, Kate’s hands were folded together. I noticed her fingernails were chewed down to the quick, and I was just as surprised as I’d been in high school when I’d first noticed.

  I looked at the side of her face. It wasn’t the same. We weren’t the same. I thought of the burnt doll in the yellow house. The shirtless man on the mattress who had touched Kate before me. Jeff Temple, the baseball player who told the story of Kate Shepherd on her knees behind the concession stand, his dick in her mouth. And that day at the courthouse, my baby in the arms of Russell Enslow, my baby in another man’s arms.

  Without speaking, or looking at Kate, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom to take a shower. Under the warm water something occurred to me. Something I’d never acknowledged before. My life, my entire life, had been more affected and directed by unrequited love, by the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me as much as I loved them, than by those who loved me the most. Kate, my mother, Gretchen. My life was a reaction to their rejection, and I prayed to God Kate would be gone when my shower ended.