by Ann Bauer
“Do you want me?” she asked, running orange-tinted fingers up the front of his shirt and then down to rest on his belt. “C’mon. Tell me. Tell me what you want to do to me.”
Jobe stood, as if he were being held up, just inside the room. It smelled musty. She wanted to open a window but couldn’t figure out how to make it fit into her vamp routine. “I want to, uh …” Even in the darkness, she could see his face turn red with blood. “I want …”
“Do you want to fuck me?” She had to force herself to say it; with Jobe, especially, it felt out of character. But that was the point, wasn’t it? And she genuinely wanted to help him.
“Yes.” It came out like the sound of an animal in a trap. Sexual excitement or profound discomfort? Carmen couldn’t tell.
She was lost, too, she wanted to tell him. She was only twenty-one goddamn years old! He was supposed to be the older man. He should be taking her by the arm, leading her to the bed, then holding her wrist over her head—maybe even capturing both of them in one hand—so all she could do was writhe while he ripped her clothes off with his other hand.
Instead, she was cradling his sweaty hand in both of hers and pulling. “Show me,” she said. “Let’s just do it.”
But then they’d gotten into the bed and, for the first time since she’d met him, Jobe couldn’t. The huge erection he hadn’t been able to get rid of the first time she’d laid with him in London was entirely gone. She couldn’t tell her sister this. Nor could she admit that since that night in Richmond, her fiancé hadn’t touched her once. Not once. Not so much as a kiss.
Again, she checked the clock. Four minutes until the wedding began, until her father—who was here with Linda—was due to knock on the door. Maybe he’d get wasted and forget to come for her, Carmen thought. Or keel over on the pathway through Olive’s garden that was serving as an aisle. These were things that could save her. Because it simply was not possible to stand up at her own wedding and say she couldn’t marry today because she appeared, literally, to emasculate her groom.
There was no way she was going to call off the engagement after Jobe couldn’t get it up. She could never be that cruel. Instead she’d told him she understood and gotten out of the bed to throw open a window, which helped only a little. The room still reeked of old water and fungus. She had tried to sleep next to Jobe but done a poor job of it, napping instead in the car on the way home. And once they were back in Baltimore neither of them mentioned it; they simply went ahead with their plans as before.
There was a loud knock on the door. “The father of the bride is here,” Antonio bellowed and Carmen swallowed hard. Damn Linda! She seemed to have cleaned their father up to the point where he was more reliable even than he had been back when their mother was alive.
Carmen stood, slowly, and her eyes met her sister’s in the mirror. “Ready,” Esme said. But Carmen couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, so she simply nodded. “Ready.” And together, they went out the door.
Their wedding night took place in a hotel that Carmen had never even known existed. Blank on the outside, the building could have been a brownstone where a wealthy lawyer lived. But next to the red-painted front door there was a small gold plaque. ALEXANDER HOUSE, it read. There was a button to push for the bell and they were admitted by a tall, pale man dressed like a funeral director. Carmen half expected him to poke his head out and check, furtively, in each direction, before shutting the door.
It was like stepping into a different place, a different season. There was a fire roaring in one corner and though they’d just walked through an afternoon so sticky that Carmen had felt as if she were swimming, she shivered. This lobby existed perpetually as if it were late fall, with vents piping out cool air, and filled with dark, foresty furnishings: brocade couches, tasseled cushions, and warm, gold lighting. And it was silent. Other than the two of them and Lurch, behind the desk, they were alone.
“Mr. and Mrs. Garrett?” he said.
“No, we’re …” Carmen began, then stopped.
“Yes,” said Jobe. He handed the man a credit card, one Carmen did not recognize. She stood next to this man, her husband of—she checked the clock—three hours, and watched. This was her prerogative now. When Jobe took the card back, she read the name and saw the Johns Hopkins logo. He was paying for the hotel himself. Their first married sex would not be underwritten by Olive. Moving a step closer she put a hand on his forearm and he paused, looking from the paperwork to her face.
“Do you need to see the room first?” he asked.
“No. Why … ?”
“Oh, I thought you were trying to stop me.” He pointed with the pen to the form he’d filled out with everything but his signature.
“No, that’s not …” Carmen removed her hand from Jobe and backed up. Suddenly she was so tired, all she wanted to do was curl up on the couch in front of the fire. “Go ahead. I’ll let you finish.”
There were a couple of simple exchanges: Jobe’s signed promise to pay ($420! Carmen had read while she stood at his elbow), then an old-fashioned gold key on a ribbon and directions to a room on the second floor.
“You go ahead. We’ll bring your luggage,” Lurch said. Carmen looked at the two overnight bags, so small that she herself could have hoisted them easily up the stairs. Back at the Garretts’—home, she reminded herself now—they had eight suitcases of various sizes packed and piled up. But tonight, all she’d packed was a toothbrush, some makeup, a change of clothes, and a T-shirt for sleeping in. She’d debated over the last item, it seemed wrong. But she and Jobe had never, in all of their encounters, slept together nude.
Their room was like something out of “Sleeping Beauty,” a bed with four posts and draping whirled around them, so high that there was a stool provided for guests to climb in. A wardrobe hid a TV, as well as a drawer and a minibar full of snacks.
“No Cheetos,” Carmen said, pawing through. “There’s just stuff like paté and summer sausage and those biscuits you’re supposed to eat with wine.”
“Are you hungry?” Jobe looked at the clock and Carmen followed his eyes. It was 7:15.
“Not really. There was so much to eat at the wedding. I’m actually kind of …” She checked her stomach. “Sick.”
He looked startled. “Are you okay? Is there anything I need to do?”
“No.” She kicked her shoes off and climbed the stool—a complicated maneuver in the sheath dress, which did not allow her to bend at the hips—then lay on the bed. “It was just the heat, all that champagne, the day. You know.”
“Oh.” Jobe slumped into a chair. And after a few minutes. “I am kind of hungry. You mind if I get something?”
Carmen propped herself up on her elbows. “You mean, you want to go out?” Instantly, the idea appealed to her. He would leave. She could turn on some HBO movie and crack open one of the little whiskey bottles she’d seen in the cupboard, mix it with 7-Up, and drink while she lay on the bed.
“Nooo.” He looked again at the clock. 7:21. “I don’t want to go without you, so I’ll just get some food from the minibar.”
Frustration rose inside her. Jobe didn’t like TV—he thought of it as a mindless source of noise—so with the two of them in a single room, she was stuck. It was as quiet as a library. No, a tomb.
It didn’t help that Jobe was opening the package of summer sausage as she thought this. Their two helpless bodies lying on the bed as life outside flew by without them. Only the odor of warm meat and garlic floating through their room.
Carmen groaned and turned on her side. There was a tall, narrow window, a view of the city, the sun shining with a near midday brilliance. The evening seemed endless and blank, a symbol of the rest of her life.
She must have fallen asleep, because the next time she stirred, Jobe was turning out lights and the room was muddy. Carmen sat up, the taste of stale champagne in her mouth. “Where’s my toothbrush?” she asked. She hadn’t meant to bark, but Jobe simply pointed to the set of bags
now sitting inside the door.
She took hers into the bathroom—an enormous marble space with a tub large enough for four people—urinated, brushed her teeth, battled her way out of the formfitting dress that clung to her ribs, and slipped into the oversized T-shirt she’d brought with a sigh of real joy. Minty-mouthed and comfortable, this was the best she’d felt in days.
But she had to leave this room. With a feeling of dread she turned the knob and entered the room where Jobe was lying on top of the bed, next to the very spot where she’d been sleeping. Carmen thought back to Rory’s apartment, the thrilling pull of his bed, the beat of the music, the way she’d felt lost in something dark and velvety and deep. Right now everything was flat, static, still. For just a second, she panicked. She thought she might actually begin to scream.
“Are you coming to bed?” he asked from the grayness.
She listened hard but could not hear longing. “Yes,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could muster. And she made herself cross the room, climb the stool. Because he was on the near side, she had to climb over him, and she did this awkwardly, almost kneeing him in the stomach by mistake. Take my hand, she willed him. Turn over and kiss me. Please. Just do something.
But he didn’t. Jobe lay as still as a corpse and stared at the ceiling. Carmen would have made a little nest for herself and drifted off, but the nap earlier had left her wide awake. Finally, she couldn’t stand it.
“It’s our wedding night,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you even care?”
“I care very much.” His tone was maddeningly professorial.
“So why don’t you even touch me?”
There was a gap, filled with nothing. Then he said, “Because I’m never sure you want me to. Sometimes, when we start, you seem so”—he swallowed—“disgusted. It makes it hard for me to, you know…”
“So this is the answer? We’re going to have a celibate marriage?”
“I don’t know the answer, Carmen. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Loneliness enveloped her then, a kind she’d never experienced before. It seemed that the rest of the world had simply vanished once they promised their lives to each other and this was her sentence: Decades of life lived in silence with a man made of wood and stone. Her mind raced. She could leave this room and wander out into the street in a T-shirt and no underwear to flag down a cab. Carmen envisioned lifting her arm, the shirt rising to expose her, the feel of the cracked vinyl seat under her bare bottom, the smell of gasoline and old fast food. It was a comforting vision. The only problem was she couldn’t fathom where she would go.
Eventually Jobe fell asleep, his hands clasped to his chest, and she reached out to take them once. They were cold. She thought about waking him and encouraging him to get under the covers with her, where it was warm. But in the end, she didn’t. She watched the clock turn from midnight to one, then two, then three a.m. And sometime after that, though she couldn’t remember feeling tired, Carmen slept.
They made love, finally, on the second night—which came a surreal thirty-nine hours after the first, given their ten-hour flight into Florence.
Being in first class helped; the meal on china plates, the plump pillows, and the series of movies showing on a screen just two rows up. By the time they got to their hotel room—a square block nearly filled with a bed, unlike the luxurious suite where they’d not even touched—Carmen and Jobe fell into the bed, prickling with exhaustion, and rolled together without preamble. There was a good amount of fumbling and grunting and a workmanlike effort from Jobe. He got stiff immediately and worked himself into her the way you might wedge a matchbook into a window frame to keep it from rattling. Carmen lay under him, relieved and feeling the sort of mild pleasure she did when scratching a mosquito bite. Jobe shuddered for a long time after he came, as if the experience had hurt him and she stroked his chest—marveling at the hard bumps of bone—until he stopped.
That was the only time while they were in Florence. There were two full days at the Uffizi, but after the first morning, Jobe sat mostly on a bench reading a book while Carmen wandered. Their dinners were sedate. Surrounded by the florid sounds of shouted Italian, they ate mostly without speaking. They’d been together all day, what was there to discuss? And at night, in their room, he sat working at the desk while she read American magazines. Sometimes they shared a bottle of wine. On the third day, Jobe rented a car and they left the stinking, hot, teeming city for the seaside. Briefly, as they approached from the east, Carmen felt a glimmer of hope.
Riomaggiore was a town of colorful buildings, varied and stacked like a child’s blocks, against the side of a jagged hill. Behind it, the Mediterranean sparkled. She and Jobe bumped along brick roads so increasingly narrow, Carmen held her breath each time they were about to pass another car.
Jobe parked precariously at the top of a ridge, in a sliver of a spot perched between the roadway and the drop-off into town. Carmen got out carefully. The rental office was tiny, occupied by three small, swarthy men. “You follow me,” one of them said, after they’d each handed over their passports. And they did: down the winding path to a sidewalk lined with markets and trinket stores, past a building painted fuchsia, then up a dank set of stairs that turned three times. “Left at the lion,” the man said, thumping his hand against a metal lion’s head that protruded from a crumbling pillar. “Now right, when you see Coca-Cola,” he said at the next turn, pointing to the overhead billboard with the familiar white and red.
Jobe and Carmen were panting by the time they reached the door marked 7. The man, easily forty-five, looked as placid as if he’d been sitting in a rocking chair. He placed the key on a dresser and left, and once again the newlyweds were alone.
“I suppose I should get the luggage,” Jobe said.
“Ugh, carrying it all the way up here? That sounds brutal.” Carmen thought for a moment. “How about we grab just what we need for tonight and leave the rest in the car?”
“Sure.” He nearly smiled, and she realized it was the first time since their trip began that she’d actually seen his teeth—or remembered how they lit up his face. I need to make this more fun, Carmen thought as they descended. Get him to laugh.
They retrieved from their suitcases an odd assortment of toiletries, underwear, hiking shoes, and books, threw this into the emptiest of the six suitcases, and started off—Carmen in the lead, Jobe bumping along with the little stewardess-style case on wheels behind him.
“You follow me,” Carmen said, twitching her hips at her new husband then looking back to be sure he’d noticed. He had. “Left at the lion.” She slapped the cat’s face too hard. “Ow!” she cried, pulling her hand back, and she actually heard Jobe chuckle. “I think he bit me,” she said, even though this was going so far into cute territory, her inner voice was saying, Oh, Christ.
It was nearly evening now and for the first time since they’d arrived, a cool breeze washed over them. Carmen stopped on the stairs, in sight of the Coca-Cola sign, and tipped her head back as if to drink. “Mmm. That feels good.”
“Should we walk a ways along the Cinque Terre?” Jobe asked. For this is why they had come; Olive and George had visited Liguria on their honeymoon and trekked the five cities (which Carmen found hard to imagine: stoic, red-faced George skipping like some goat herder’s assistant down the rubbly path). It was Olive’s dearest memory, however.
“Might as well. Then we can tell your mom next time we call home. It’ll make her whole day.”
Carmen had been referring to Olive only as “Jobe’s mother” since the wedding, despite the complete reversal Olive had done, telling Carmen that morning that she should start using her first name. It had been a year of “Mrs. Garrett,” no matter how close they’d become. She felt as if she were producing something unnatural when trying to make the word Olive come out of her mouth—like the character in a book she’d just read who was put under a spell by evil witches that made her spit out fea
thers and pins.
“Olive,” Carmen said under her breath while lacing up her shoes. It helped, she found, to think about the food—green and black orbs in a dish—rather than the woman to whom the name applied.
“Ready?” Jobe was standing with the door open, looking out worriedly. “It looks like it may rain.”
Carmen shrugged. They’d had a large lunch at two, as was the custom, so she was ready for a good, vigorous walk. “Who cares? So we’ll get wet?” And she darted ahead of him out the door.
Once down on the main thoroughfare, it wasn’t hard to find the way. A sign with an arrow pointing left directed them through a tunnel and once they’d reached the other side, they were on the path. The first leg of the journey was easy, a nursery school stroll. It was called Via Dell’Amore or The Love Walk another sign told them—no doubt, Carmen thought, because this was such a cliché of a honeymoon spot. But she and Jobe walked the distance more like an old married couple, without speaking. They came to the town of Manarola, passed through, and trudged on, listening to the Mediterranean’s gentle waves.
Right before Corniglia, the next town, began a series of staircases that stretched up as far as Carmen could see. “There are 377 steps, thirty-three separate flights,” Jobe said, reading from a sign at the foot. “What do you want to do?”
She faced him squarely. “What do you want to do?”
Go back to the room and take your clothes off, lick your sweaty body all over while you listen to the water. She stared. That had been her imagination. “Let’s go,” Jobe actually said.
They started climbing, sprinting up the first half dozen staircases then slowing down. By the midpoint they were both breathing heavily, but Carmen was still managing to keep up with Jobe, whose legs were easily five inches longer. Toward the top, both were red faced and it had begun to drizzle. By the time they reached the center of Corniglia—a tilted little storybook town—the rain was steady.
