by Nick Arvin
‘I was a little afraid you’d send me away,’ Heather said. She laughed. Without leaving the bed she was pulling on clothes.
‘That’s why you didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ he asked. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Everyone loves a surprise?’ she said.
He laughed. ‘I don’t care.’
She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running. He opened the balcony door and stepped out. A couple of crows hopped in the grass between the highway and the motel. He heard her emerge from the bathroom. ‘Is John out there?’ she called.
‘Nope.’
A few seconds passed. ‘Hey,’ she said.
He turned from the highway to look at her. She sat on the foot of the bed, and she seemed to be looking at the highway behind him. He glanced over to see if something were happening there.
She said, ‘I’ll go if you want.’
‘No, no.’ He hesitated, then moved into the room to stand in front of her. He knew enough to wait for her to go on.
‘What are we doing?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ It had been a mistake, apparently, to go onto the balcony. But she knew why he was here. ‘We’re in a motel room, talking.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Her gaze collapsed to the floor. ‘Could you possibly stop calculating what you say to the decimal place?’ She gripped the edge of the bed with her hands, then straightened and stood and moved and touched the bed, the wallpaper, the TV.
He said, ‘I’m sorry -’
‘Don’t,’ she said. Her face blushed, splotching white in the scars. ‘I just sometimes keep wondering,’ she said, ‘if there’s anything more between us than shared disasters. What are we doing? What kind of fucked-up catastrophe of circumstance are we?’ She laughed, not happily.
His breath shook. ‘We’re just two people in a room.’
‘You’re the brother of my dead boyfriend. You work for my husband, and you’re his friend, and he’s gone insane. It’s not a good situation. It’s a very complicated, very awkward and very bad situation.’
By now a liquid and opaque dread had filled him. His glance strayed between the tension in her neck, the highway, the sword-fish. ‘You drove out here to break up with me?’
‘We’re just bonded by trauma,’ she said.
‘I didn’t even like Christopher,’ he said. ‘If you think that’s all I have invested in this -’
A diesel went by with jake brakes thundering. He glanced toward it, and she said, ‘OK, go. Go. Go look for your buddy.’
‘I’m here to watch for Boggs.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Go ahead.’
He went onto the balcony and sat. He locked his gaze onto the roadway.
Some minutes passed.
In the room, something crashed.
He went back in as she pulled over the two bedside tables, then the desk. She pushed over a desk chair and then yanked the bedclothes to the floor. She turned and stood before him, gasping, her face strained.
‘Calm down,’ he said.
‘Stop that! I haven’t slept in days. I don’t know what’s happened to my life. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know what anyone wants. And you say calm down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t say that.’
Then he didn’t know what to say.
In the silence, she reached up with curious gentleness, as if grasping at a butterfly. He braced for her to strike him. But she brought her hand to her own face, gripped her cheek, and pulled down, clawing, nails trailing blood.
In surprise he shouted and lunged, and they fell together onto the bed. ‘I hate you,’ she said, while he fumbled to restrain her arms. A small woman, but strong. Finally he pinned her, and she said, ‘I hate everything.’
He panted. Blood trickled from her face. ‘Stop this,’ he said. ‘Stop this.’ She only stared at him, and he cried, ‘Stop this! I didn’t ask you to come here.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ But the resistance had gone from her arms.
He discovered he was squeezing her harder than he needed. He rolled away, stood flexing his hands. She lay unmoving except to breathe irregularly, staring at the ceiling, eyes streaming. His body shook, bright and hot. He sat on the floor. ‘You’re OK?’
She said nothing, went into the bathroom. When she came out, holding a washcloth to her face, his adrenalin had drained off, leaving him sagging. She sat beside him.
His heartbeat slowed.
She touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Let’s not use that word.’
She giggled a little, weakly, or nervously. He shook his head. Then, in a loss of control, he, too, laughed.
‘Go watch for John,’ she said. ‘I’ll join you in a minute.’ He sat moving his fingers experimentally before he stood and went onto the balcony. Time passed, and when he looked back into the room, all the furniture had been set upright again, and she was gone.
To find a clear thought was difficult. He’d never seen her do anything like this before, and he couldn’t guess what she might do now.
He sat, then stood again, and tried to analyse, to review the variables of the problem. Now, particularly, when everything and everyone had turned strange, it seemed important to be exact. Heather had been his half-brother’s girlfriend. She had liked his half-brother. Ellis, however, had not liked his half-brother. This difference had been shrouded behind the fact of his half-brother’s death. Then, she had led Ellis to his job, and thus to his boss and friend Boggs. He liked Boggs. Heather, who was married to Boggs, did not like Boggs; or, at least, she did not love him. Not any more. And now, having learned of the affair between his subordinate and his wife, Boggs threatened suicide. The shape of the relationships was not a triangle but a square bisected along a diagonal:
But this failed to adequately capture the problem, because it also had a temporal aspect, which extended along a third dimension. He tried to visualise a graphical shape for the events on that axis, but it eluded him.
But the situation was not a technical problem. Perhaps to try to understand it as such would only lead to insanity. How then to understand? To see each other clearly? How to prevent everything from being contaminated with guilt, doubt, resentment, anger? Was that why she was gone? Was she gone?
A half-hour later, she knocked on the door and came into the room with two cold bottles of Chardonnay and a package of plastic cups. She offered one to him.
He took the cup, but set it aside and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Was that you?’ he asked. ‘Before?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’ The marks on her cheek amounted to three small scratches, in the place where the fire had scarred her years before. ‘This has been hard.’
‘It made me feel like I didn’t know you.’
‘It’s over.’ She fidgeted with the wine bottle. ‘Water under the bridge?’ she said. ‘Or did I burn it?’
‘No, you didn’t burn it,’ he said. ‘But you really scared it.’ He held out his plastic cup. They sat with their wine, watching the road. After some minutes he said, ‘I figure he won’t come here after dark, when he can’t see anything.’
She refilled his cup.
They drank the two bottles of wine.
Into the evening they talked about inconsequentials and trivia, and he found himself laughing hysterically as the day’s end came with the sun cutting under clouds boiling in from the west, so that the fading light and the arriving cumulus appeared like a massive collapse, an avalanche of glory pounding down. When the sun had gone from sight he suggested the Olive Garden, but she wanted to walk farther, to a family-owned Mexican restaurant in one of the strip malls. The piñatas nailed to the wall were dusty, the carpet filthy. A pudgy girl of five or six wandered in and out of the kitchen gripping a naked Barbie doll. But the margaritas tasted strong; the salty, greasy food filled him.
‘How long will you stay here?’ Heath
er asked.
‘How long will you?’
‘Why can’t you answer a question?’
‘A week.’ He said it and felt strings and cords all through him jerk tight. Why a week? He had no idea. And what would he do then? But he had announced it, and he let it stand.
‘Today is Saturday. You got here on Thursday? At sunset Wednesday, we go home?’
He said yes.
The next day he sat on the balcony, and Heather sat with him, or she went back into the room and turned on the TV, or she slipped out of the room without notice. She returned once with a change of clothes, a magazine, chewing gum, and then a second time with food and wine. With the TV on, she called out comments on a home-decorating show. On the room’s desk she had already accumulated a little pile of things she’d found along the road and in parking lots – buttons and dimes, several bluish pebbles, a few coffee stirrers, a pocket-sized calendar.
He watched the wind striking the eighth-hole flag. A man stood on the balcony two rooms over and shouted into his cellphone about estate planning. ‘No, no! There are springing and non-springing powers of attorney!’ For a long while in the mid-afternoon Ellis heard nothing from the room behind him except for the grunts and subdued voices of a tennis match on the TV and the fainter noise of ice crunching between Heather’s teeth.
He asked, ‘You play tennis?’
‘I’ve made things out of tennis balls. You?’
‘No.’
‘It’s kind of sad.’
‘Tennis is sad? Tennis is love and matches.’
‘That we don’t know these things about each other.’
She sat on the balcony with him, and through the remainder of the afternoon they talked in a lazy, intermittent, negligible way. It resonated in him differently than their conversations in the past, and it struck him that they’d never before had time like this. The sun might track over the sky, from its first appearance to its end, and the two of them remained together, not hiding, not racing the hour. The traffic always looked the same, more or less.
‘Maybe we should stay here forever,’ he said.
She smiled.
The sun hung a couple of fingers above the horizon, and a fine layer of dust, or pollen, or pollution, had settled over his skin. ‘When we leave here,’ Heather asked, ‘what’ll we do?’
‘Live together,’ he said. ‘Get married?’
‘If John just runs away and we never hear from him again, I’m not sure how difficult it’ll be to get a divorce.’
He wasn’t sure either. ‘Should’ve done it a long time ago,’ he said.
She stood and went into the room.
The horizon line began to eat into the sun. When he went back into the room, she was lying on the bed, watching him. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘What?’
‘If you’d said something, I would have divorced him a year ago,’ she said. ‘You pursued me, you found me. You knew what you wanted. I liked that. And me, I should make that jump alone? Me? I’ve never succeeded at anything. Never. And now I’m supposed to leave everything, with no word from you. When I’ve failed at my marriage. I’ve failed as an artist. I try to teach art to little kids, and the kids hate me.’ The left side of her lip twitched. She looked toward the room’s door. ‘I couldn’t pull your brother out of that car.’
He crossed and uncrossed his arms. He lowered himself to the bed. He said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She groaned. ‘I am,’ he said.
They lay in opposite directions on the bed, his head at her feet, with a hand gripping her ankle. They were naked. Street lights threw pale slants through the half-drawn windows. A yellow light cast on the ceiling advanced, strained to reach to the ceiling’s middle point, held there, then collapsed back in a rush, only to return and work to reach the middle of the ceiling again. He watched this cycle several times, with empty fascination, like the action of waves on a beach, until eventually he became aware, too, of the traffic noise and realised that the light on the ceiling was caused by the passing of vehicles’ headlamps. He turned from it and moved his other hand to her other ankle, so that he held both.
‘Your kids don’t hate you,’ he said.
‘A few do.’
‘You’re not a failure.’
She said nothing.
‘I didn’t know,’ he tried, ‘that you felt your art was a disappointment.’
‘Well,’ she said, shifting a little, ‘I don’t take it seriously, which is the problem. I don’t have the confidence to take it seriously.’
‘You should.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not very creative or interesting. I’m not very smart. I don’t have confidence. I don’t know what I want.’ She laughed. ‘Should I go on?’
‘You don’t believe any of that, I hope.’
He heard the sheets shift as she shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you how I feel. I think some of my problems are just a part of growing up without a mother. No one taught me how to live as a woman in the world. I hate this kind of talk. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘I’m sure you can be a great artist if you want. I’ll insist. I’ll lock you in a dungeon and bring you pieces of trash to work with.’
‘Maybe I just want to paint kittens and rainbows. Flags and eagles.’
‘Eagles and kittens?’
‘Kitten-eating eagle flags,’ she said.
‘Sounds more like your style.’
He clung to her ankles and felt her settle a hand between his thighs. Eventually they slept that way.
The next day she came and went again, returning with food, with sunscreen. He waited for the times when she was out before he used the bathroom. He didn’t like to admit that he had to abandon his post even for that. On the room’s desk lay a considerable pile of cigarette butts that she had collected and a cellophane-wrapped 100 count box of matchbooks that she had found beside the road. They were bright red, with Ziggy’s Smokehouse written on them in a white script, and an address several states over. Later she came out onto the balcony with a motel pen and pad of paper. She drew a delicate scene in miniature of the highway, and the eighth fairway and flag, in blue ballpoint, cross-hatched for texture. Looming over the scene and looking down were giant flower heads with elaborately realistic, human, pinched faces, as if they’d just smelled something terrible. One smoked a cigar. Heather rolled the sleeves of her T-shirt to her shoulders, and turned her face to the sun. ‘I always wanted to live on a beach.’
‘We can do that,’ he said.
That night people on the golf course played with flashlights, hitting green-glowing balls. Ellis and Heather left the room and walked for dinner. The waitress who had given him cake sat in the booth with them to tell an incoherent story about her husband’s hair plugs. Back at the motel room, they joked of Detroit and Los Angeles, of how one might find a Little Detroit in Los Angeles. The next morning he arose before her and sat in the early cool outside, thinking pleasantly of sleeping in the same bed with her through a night and rising and not leaving, of talking lazily with her, of watching her step from the shower towel-wrapped and hair wet, of detecting the scent of her in the bed and in her towel, of watching her stretch in the morning, up on her toes. Of listening to the noise of her urinating, of the sharp odour of her shit in the bathroom, domestic intimacies that he seized and understood without complication. Much seemed unmanageably complicated, but these things were simple and granted him a knowledge of her that he had lacked.
She sat on the balcony toying with the matchbooks, folding and fitting their flaps together in various schemes of assembly. ‘What are you trying to make?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled them apart and began again and again, sometimes working in a couple of Marlboro cigarette packs she had also found. She created something like a spiral staircase. Then took it apart and worked out a swanlike creature. She had a few pieces of broken mirror as well, which she tucked into the crevices of the matchbook sculpture, so that here an
d there it shone. She hunched over the matchbooks for a long while, making tiny adjustments with small, sure fingers, and she looked absolutely capable, as if the making of small new curiosities signified the skills to do anything, to move the world.
Small dark scabs had formed where she had scratched herself. Eventually he took her feet onto his lap and massaged them, and she slouched in her chair and fell asleep. Watching her, he recalled the airport, years before, his misery and awe. And now? Now he was moved to happiness.
Later that afternoon she went into the room. Two golf carts in the seventh fairway had collided in a way that bent a rear wheel, and several men in shorts and polo shirts gathered around it. Then, one by one, they wandered off, abandoning the damaged golf cart in the middle of the fairway.
‘For some reason I keep thinking,’ Ellis called, ‘maybe a circus will come down the highway, on parade. A couple of elephants marching down the highway would make me very happy.’
Heather didn’t reply. He peered into the room, but she had gone.
He watched the highway for a few more minutes, then went in to use the toilet. A pair of red panties that Heather had laundered in the sink were hanging over the shower curtain rod. He ran a finger over the seams, then washed his hands, splashed water on his face, dried it away, and his phone rang. ‘Chinese?’ Heather said.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m just wandering around. I found a bag of water balloons.’
He returned to the balcony. An iron shot rose off the seventh fairway and fell and dribbled onto the green, still far short of the pin. ‘I’ll walk over to that Chinese place for takeout,’ Heather said. ‘All right with you?’
Ellis said OK. He leaned on the rail and looked over the traffic. On the edge of the highway away to the right something snagged his attention, a tall figure. Ellis knew as soon as he focused on it that it was Boggs – Boggs bending to look at the ground, Boggs striding along a few paces, Boggs bending to the ground again. Ellis’s breath caught, and Heather said, ‘What?’
