We sit at the rail. The only other customer is a Mexican cowboy who spends more time staring at himself in the mirrors that cover the walls than at the strippers. He’s got a beautiful pair of boots. The two girls dancing tonight take turns, three songs each. Whichever one’s not onstage when we order fetches our beers from the bartender.
Adam’s doing a thing now. Embarrassed about what happened in the car, he’s laying it on thick. He slaps me on the back, whistles and claps and throws too much money around. The dancers play along, illegally flashing their beavers and letting their nipples brush his face as he tucks bills into their G-strings and tells them he loves them. They lie, and we lie, and that’s how it goes. The cowboy leaves. He spits on the floor on his way out.
One of the girls is named Danisha. Sometimes she speaks with an English accent, and sometimes she’s Jamaican. She complains about the jukebox. “Too much ’eavy metal,” she says. When she dances, she looks me right in the eye while grinding her pussy against the pole, and she sits beside me between sets. “Buy me a drink,” she says. “The owner’s watching.” I’m having fun. This bar, this woman. It feels good to be in the middle of something.
I ask Danisha where she’s from, and she draws little circles on the inside of my thigh with her long, red fingernail as she answers. “Baby, I been all over the world. London, New York.” She keeps clicking the stud in her tongue against her teeth. Girls like her often wind up dead. Nobody claims their bodies. After an hour or so Adam gets tired of pretending. He twists his napkin into knots and frowns at his beer. “Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
WINDOW WASHERS ARE working on the building next door. They stand on little platforms that lower from the roof like lifeboats. You couldn’t pay me enough. I wonder if they ever see anything interesting — people fucking, people fighting. Heidi taps on my door with a pen to get my attention.
“I brought doughnuts. They’re in the lunchroom if you want one.”
It’s not worth it. You never know who’ll be in there.
Donna is out today. Something about chicken pox or flu shots or chaperoning a field trip. I take her calls and sit in for her at a meeting. On my break I go down to the little store in the basement of the building and buy a lottery ticket. The girl who sells it to me wishes me luck. “Thanks,” I say, because that’s what you say.
New e-mail. A couple of ads: “See your favorite movie and TV stars in hot XXX action.” “Are you tired of working for someone else?” Adam has sent me a photo. I look over my shoulder before I open it, make sure nobody’s around. It’s a man who’s been run over by a train. Half of him lies leaking on one side of the rail, half on the other. I hate the Internet.
There’s also a letter from a girl I went to high school with. I didn’t know her well back then, but she got my address from my sister and now writes me about once a month. She lives in Alaska with her husband and a bunch of kids. The usual thing is she complains about her life, and I tell her to keep her chin up. Lately, though, she’s been fantasizing about having sex with me. Her letters make me blush. I asked her to send a picture, but she wouldn’t. Adam says this means she’s a pig.
Louise calls. She might be getting sick.
“Come home,” I say. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Probably not till Friday. It’s up in the air.”
There’s something cold in her voice. I play with the stapler on my desk, the paper clips. I don’t want to love her more than she loves me. We’ve been married six years, and I hope we make it to seven. She tells me about a dinner she had with her clients. Tapas and sangria.
“Where are you again? Seattle?” I ask.
“Denver.”
“Right, right.”
Heidi is at my door. They need me in the art department. I rush the good-byes and hang up. There is nothing for me to do but stand and walk down the hall. I’m full to bursting and empty at the same time, like the universe on paper.
I OPEN THE window and lie on the couch. Our apartment overlooks a school. A sneaky breeze clinks and clanks the chains on the swing set in the playground. It’s warm for March. About now I would usually read one of the magazines that are always piling up, but not tonight. tonight I’m not going to worry about what I’m missing. I turn off the TV. The moon climbs the palm tree across the street and sits there shining.
I’m thinking about my childhood. It used to be right there for me, but now there are so many blanks. A police helicopter flies low over the building, then circles, playing its spotlight over a house up the street. It makes a sound that I feel in my chest more than hear. I put on my flip-flops and go downstairs. One of my neighbors is standing on the porch, her hair in curlers. I didn’t know women wore curlers anymore.
“See anything?” I ask.
“I think it’s those Armenians.”
I shuffle toward the commotion. Four or five squad cars are parked in the street, doors open, light bars flashing, abandoned in a hurry. The helicopter is right overhead. Its sun gun paints the house pale blue and makes the shadows wobble, like a whole day captured in a time-lapse movie. I’m surprised that I haven’t been stopped yet. I start to cross the street to get even closer, but a cop steps out of the bushes and says, “Over here. Now!”
We are crouched behind a hedge: me, the cop, a bald-headed kid, and the kid’s two Chihuahuas. The cop closes his eyes, listening to a sputtering radio. His shotgun is pointed at the ground. I’ve seen the kid walking the dogs before. He tells me it’s a hostage situation. A man is holding a gun on his elderly parents. “They forgot his birthday,” the kid says. “It’s sad.”
I reach down to pat the dogs, and they lick my fingers. There’s some kind of flower smell in the air. The kid’s leg is touching mine. He’s shaking. Maybe he’s scared and maybe it’s crank. I’m not scared because I don’t care anymore. It’s a good feeling, like getting something over with.
Another cop joins us. He tells the first one to take us out of the area. I want something bad to happen; I dare it to. Electricity buzzes out of my balls and spirals up my throat. The Chihuahuas bounce at the ends of their leashes, pissing and sniffing, as we hurry away, bent double, and I glimpse the silhouette of someone standing in the doorway of the house with a gun to his head.
THE ALARM GOES off at seven-thirty. I spent half the night running up and down a beach, searching for a place to throw away a broken bottle. “Toss it in the water,” said dream Adam, who looked nothing like the real one. The sand sucked at my feet, and there were bruised fish rolling in the surf. I find myself on Louise’s side of the bed, my head resting on her special pillow, the only one she’ll use. I once put the case on another pillow to test her, and she knew as soon as she lay down.
Some mornings I beat the guy in the next apartment to the shower, but not today, so the water pressure’s for shit. Looking at myself in the mirror afterward, I decide to grow a mustache. I shave everything but my upper lip. There’s not a word in the paper about the standoff. I go through it page by page at the kitchen table. If that didn’t make it, what else was left out? I hate to start a day wondering.
Someone has slipped Jesus flyers under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the garage. Big black clouds are piling up on the mountains to the north, but the rest of the sky is clear. The radio says rain by noon, so the wind has a lot of work to do. I stop for gas, and a homeless man asks if he can pump it. He’s not one of those funny ones. He stinks, and his pants are falling down. I give him a buck, but he can’t figure out how to work the nozzle. I tell him not to worry about it, keep the money anyway.
Donna calls me into her office. She’s wearing a denim shirt embroidered with Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. “Did you sign off on this?” she asks, holding out the proof for an ad I okayed for her when she was out one afternoon.
There’s an apostrophe missing in the copy: Yogurts finest hour. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be concerned about. It’s difficult la
tely. I want to say, “Maybe you should do your own fucking job,” but I don’t. There are pictures of her children on her desk. I curse them instead.
The plaza is empty at lunch. The clouds have moved in, and the wind leans on the trees. I drop a potato chip bag, and it is carried off before I can get to it. The mirrored windows of the skyscrapers towering over me reflect the gray sky. Because of this, you almost forget the buildings are there. Birds sometimes smack right into them and fall to the ground, senseless.
I EAT SALTINES and Vienna sausages for dinner, sitting in front of the TV. I have a few drinks. The questions are difficult on the game shows tonight. The contestants sweat and lick their lips. We have surround sound. We have DVD. One day soon I’m going to bump us up to a plasma screen.
The phone rings. Someone says, “Sorry,” and hangs up. The bathroom smells like cigarette smoke. It comes in through the air shaft from the apartment downstairs. The lady with the curlers lives there with her husband. I can never remember their names. He’s on disability, and she’s a part-time dog trainer. They keep odd hours. “The kike came by today,” the husband says, his words drifting up the air shaft with the smoke. He’s talking about our landlord. “How do you feel about wood floors?”
I pause to look at a picture hanging on the wall of Louise and me standing in the snow. What makes it funny is that we’re in shorts and T-shirts. We’re wearing sandals. You take the tram in Palm Springs, and they haul you up a cable from the desert to the top of a mountain in about five minutes flat. The right time of the year, it’s eighty at the bottom and freezing on the summit.
I had to beg Louise to accompany me. We were on a weekend getaway. She shut her eyes and clutched my arm as we swung out of the station. Now and then the gondola shuddered, drawing gasps from the other passengers and causing Louise to dig her nails into me. Going from rocks and sand to icicles and hissing pines with such startling suddenness was like a dream. I was a little unsure of myself. What other amazing shit would happen?
The snack bar on top was full of kids in some kind of uniforms. Their screeches rose up and were trapped in the rafters. Louise and I hurried out to a deck in back that overlooked a hilly area where people sledded and built snowmen. Everybody was dressed for the cold but us. The snow was dirty, and rocks showed through. Big black birds sat in leafless black trees. Louise had a headache. She thought she might pass out. I asked someone to take a picture of us. I put some snow in my mouth. Louise shivered and started to cry.
I wouldn’t let her hang on to me on the way down. That was wrong. I told her it was time she got over herself. She closed her eyes and clung to the safety rail in the gondola, and I acted like I didn’t know her.
Dear Robin,
How is Alaska? How is your husband? How are the kids?
You asked last time for a sexy story. Does this count?
“You again?” Danisha said when I showed up at the bar. She was a stripper. I had to wait for her to get off work. The lock on the door to her building was broken, and the lobby smelled like a toilet. I was worried about my car, parked out front, because I didn’t want anything to happen that I’d have to explain. Danisha took my hand and pulled me up creaking stairs to her apartment. Her dress rode high on her ass, and she wasn’t wearing panties.
“Help me with this,” she said.
We worked together to turn the couch into a bed. The walls of the living room were papered with photos of rappers torn from magazines. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I pulled the bottle of tequila that I’d bought on the way over out of my pocket and took a drink. The lamp had a scarf draped over it, a piss-elegant touch. My eyelid twitched. My stomach fluttered.
“Want to get high?” Danisha asked, examining her forehead in a mirror.
I held up the bottle of tequila.
“Well, I’ma get high,” she said.
She stepped through a door and closed it behind herself. I heard a TV and voices.This is where I get robbed, I thought.This is where I get killed. I was too scared to sit down, so I walked to the window. The glass was broken. It was all over the floor.What does she do when it rains? I wondered. I tried to see my car but couldn’t.
“Where the fuck else am I suppose to take him?” Danisha yelled.
I couldn’t hear the answer. She appeared again in the living room with a big smile on her face. I sat beside her on the dark green sheet, and she pushed play on a boom box. It was some woman with a gravelly voice. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. Danisha put a glass pipe to her lips. Her lighter had Tweety Bird on it. The smoke she exhaled wrapped around us and drew our bodies together. It tickled our noses. Danisha fell back on the mattress, and for a second I thought she’d fainted. Then she reached for me.
While I was banging away, she coughed, and her pussy tightened around my cock. After half an hour, she pushed me off her and said, “That’s it unless you got more money, honey.” I was all shriveled up anyway. I’d been faking it for a while. I walked to the window and cut my foot on the glass. I laughed, and she laughed. Then she told me I better leave. There was blood all over the place.
Remember how you said it’s dark there six months out of the year? Well, it’s dark here all the time.
P.S. Don’t write back.
KRESS RETURNS TO work. I see him walking down the hall. I see him at the Coke machine. People seem to be respecting his wishes; they stay out of his way. He’s an old guy, with one of those comb-overs that you laugh at behind his back. Someone said that he and his wife were married for thirty years. I feel bad for joking with Adam about his loss. I don’t know where we get off.
Adam’s voice mail picks up when I try his desk. The receptionist says he didn’t show up this morning and didn’t call in. I dial his apartment, but there’s no answer there either. I wave away the worry that flutters around my head. He’s a flake. Everybody says so.
Donna and I proof some copy. She smells like sour milk. A cereal accident, I bet, while she was rushing to get her kids ready for school. What do I think of Heidi? she wants to know. I say she’s doing a great job. “She is, isn’t she?” Donna murmurs, bent over the table, squinting at a photo through a loupe. I get the feeling I’ve just cut my own throat.
It’s drizzling outside. Little drops are swallowed by larger ones that race hungrily down the glass. I order a cheeseburger from the cafeteria in the basement. Louise calls. She won’t be home until Sunday night. Things are crazy there. I can’t prove she’s lying, but I’ll hire someone who can, I swear to God.
“You know that test you wanted to give me, the one that would tell me when I’m going to die?” I ask.
“What are you talking about?”
“In the magazine on the way to the airport.”
“What about it?
“I’m ready to take it now.”
She pauses, then laughs. “I threw it away. It was stupid.”
Later, I follow Kress into the bathroom. He locks himself into a stall, and I stand at a urinal. I wash my hands when I’m done. My new mustache looks funny in the mirror. It looks like a mistake. I open the bathroom door and close it, pretending to leave. Instead I wait, my breath stilled. Kress groans. He punches the wall. “Goddammit!” he screams.
This is grief. This, I understand.
THE TRASH SMELLS awful. There must be some chicken in there, some rotting meat. I grab the bag and carry it down to the Dumpster. It’s dark outside. The streetlights have come on, a nightly miracle. I like it when things work like that. I like knowing that the garbage man will come on Tuesday. It’s comforting.
The kid with the Chihuahuas passes by, hurrying them along before the rain starts again. He yanks their leashes when they try to drink from oily puddles.
“What happened to that guy down the street?” I ask.
He doesn’t know. I walk with him to the house, and we pause in front. It’s shut up tight. There’s no car in the driveway, no flickering TV. I cross the lawn and climb the three stairs to the porch.
“Don�
�t!” the kid hisses.
The welcome mat is red, white, and blue, like the flag, and a menu for a Thai place hangs from the doorknob. I peek in the window. I put my ear to the door. Nothing. I want to knock, but I don’t. The kid and the dogs are gone when I turn around.
THE ARTICLE IS called “Hideouts: 10 Places You’ll Never Want to Leave.” I can’t get through it. My eyes drift off the page every few minutes and wander around the living room. The apartment’s pops and cracks make me flinch. I add the magazine to a new pile I’ve started so I’ll know where it is when I need it.
It’s late in Denver, but I call Louise’s hotel anyway. The phone rings and rings. She never picks up. What happened to buying a house and having a baby? I want Whatever she wants from now on.
The rain is really coming down. I stand at the window and watch it bounce off the street. My foot throbs. It’s bleeding again. I must have ripped open the cut somehow. There are no Band-Aids big enough in the medicine chest.
I try Adam again. I’ve been calling every hour all day long. Finally, he answers.
“Hello?” he says.
Tears well up in my eyes and get away from me before I can blink them back. “You’re alive,” I sob. “You’re alive.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone at Little, Brown, especially Asya Muchnick and Michael Pietsch, who took a big chance.
Thank you to my agent, Timothy Wager, who found me and stuck by me.
Thank you to everyone at the publications in which some of these stories were originally published. Without you, this book would not exist.
Thank you to T. C. Boyle and Jim Boyle, who encouraged me in the beginning.
And, finally, thank you to my family and friends, who make my life the good thing that it is.
About the Author
Richard Lange’s work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2004. He lives in Los Angeles.
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