Dirty Love (31 page)

Beth had gotten lost in a stall of glass figurines, and Francis found himself staring at an open walnut case of dueling pistols. They lay side by side in green velvet. When he lifted one out, he was surprised at how heavy it was. Then his wife was standing beside him. He could smell the wet vinyl of her raincoat.

“You’d defend my honor, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?”

“To the death,” he’d said, aiming the pistol at a photograph of Babe Ruth. Beth leaned her head on his shoulder, and he’d kissed her damp hair.

The tickle of release. A few drops. Then a few more. Not even enough to warrant a flush. Francis rinses his hands and splashes his face. So many moments with Beth like that one. It used to be a memory for both of them, but now it’s only his. And when he goes, will it really be gone? Will they all be gone? Some private library burning to the ground? There is a crack of light beneath Devon’s door.

It has to be after three in the morning. Maybe she fell asleep with the light on. At first he hears nothing, but then comes the tapping of computer keys followed by a voice, strangely tinny. “C’mon, we been doin’ this a long time.” A boy’s. A young man’s. Francis is about to open the door, but there’s more tapping, Devy hunting and pecking out sentences, he’s sure. This must be some kind of Skype. Beth used to do it with her sister in Virginia, his sister-in-law smiling at them both from her bedroom, chatting about her work saving street cats while her second husband—a quiet and aloof tax attorney—read a book in bed behind her.

It was probably a good thing, this technology, but it seemed to Francis like just one more stripping away of privacy. What was wrong with talking on the phone and
imagining
what your sister looked like and what room she was sitting or standing in? Why did we have to see how large her eyes looked behind her reading glasses? Why did we have to see the covered form of her husband reading in bed?

“C’mon, Sarah, I want to hear your voice.”

Sarah. So whoever she’s typing to is a stranger and she’s lied to him.

Devon types again, and Francis turns away and walks on his toes back down the carpeted hall and into his room, his empty bed, the red glow of time too bright and insistent. After Devon had left for the restaurant, he’d reread Marie’s emails to him from last spring. But they were filled with the language of self-help books:
Devon’s been “acting out”; Devon’s in a “shame spiral”; Devon’s been “isolating” herself; what she needs is to feel “validated.”
Like a parking ticket. The language of today becoming increasingly mechanical and cold, the machines taking over one word at a time.

Francis lies back in bed. He pulls the sheet up over his chest, but there’s the nagging pull he’s left a duty unfulfilled.
I want to hear you
. This boy with a southern accent. What else does he want? There’s something basely sexual about the whole thing. Devy onscreen for a man she does not know posing as a Sarah. Shouldn’t her uncle do something?

He closes his eyes and waits for sleep. He can feel the empty expanse of bed beside him like a silent reproach from his wife. Like he can do better and she fully expects him to do so. The truth is she was rarely wrong in her complaints about him. There were just so many of them.

To the death
. Her head on his shoulder, her damp hair against his lips. They must have had thousands of good moments like that one. Surely they must have.

From down the hall comes the muffled click of Devon’s bathroom door closing. Did the young man make an exit? Or is he still there? Francis pictures him waiting for her in her machine, his eyes on the wall of Francis and Beth’s guest room, this boy they do not know and never invited into their home.

D
EVON WIPES HERSELF
and flushes. She washes her hands and looks at herself in the mirror to see what Hollis from Texas has been looking at. She looks tired. Her hair isn’t short anymore, but it isn’t long either, and she wishes tonight it was one or the other. The blue stud in her nose looks like a bug or a mole, and she’s surprised he only mentioned it once.

“You have a lot of them?”

What?

“On your nose.”

Did he mean more studs to put in that hole? Or more on other parts
of her body? But he didn’t sound creepy when he asked, just curious.

And she was curious about him. All these months doing this, and that had only happened once. A boy in Denmark. He sat there in a black sweater staring at her through the screen. He had blond hair that stuck up in a cowlick he didn’t seem to know about, and he was quiet like her, only typing his questions, not drawing any pictures on the screen or talking right at her. He wrote:
What do you want?

I don’t know.

He read what she wrote to him at the bottom of the screen. He looked back up at her. That night she’d worn all her ear rings, her stud too, and he seemed to be seeing them for the first time. He looked sad. He typed:
People should know what they want.
Then he nexted her and she ended up in a party of drunk Turkish boys and she closed her laptop and felt like crying.

After that she stopped talking or writing much to any of them. Maybe a
Fuck U
if they were jacking off, or that man in England who reminded her of her father. Once she got a fat black girl in Florida and she did write to her, just a few words because she looked so lonely and was only wearing a red bra. Behind her on the wall above her bed was a poster of a rapper who hit his famous girlfriend and people still downloaded his songs.

Don’t give them anything. They don’t deserve it. None of them deserve it.

Devon had nexted her before she could respond; she didn’t want to get sucked into that hole again.

So she just stared at them all. She waited for the talking or the typing or the drawing on the screen to begin, and she’d just stare and say nothing.

Y arnt u talking?

C’mon,
pleeease
?

U just wanna fuck, don’t u? Give me your number.

Ur a cold cunt huh?

A bald man with a kind face drew a heart on the screen with an arrow through it. Another, young and with a chin strap like Bobby Connors, took out his guitar and sang her a song he’d written himself. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad and Devon had listened to it with her arms crossed and she felt like a bitch when he finished and she still didn’t say anything.

“Man, you’re
tough
.” But he played her two more songs. She liked them but not as much as she liked how much he needed her to say or do something. Nothing was better than watching them all want her to do something for them she would never ever do.

Till now.

It was the way he leaned back and stared at her, like she was the one he’d been looking for though he wasn’t desperate about it. He also didn’t seem to be playing any games or looking for someone to jerk off in front of. His name was Hollis, and he was twenty-seven years old and lived in a small town near Houston. He said he’d had a girlfriend and they were going to get married, but when he came home in ’05 she was pregnant with the baby of one of his best friends.

“You probably think I’m a big loser now, Sarah.”

She’d typed
: No I don’t.

“Well. You should.”

He spoke softly and had an accent that made Devon think of cinnamon rolls. On his bare right shoulder was a tattoo she couldn’t see too well.

Can I see your tat?

At first he didn’t say or do anything. Then he leaned forward and turned his shoulder to the screen.

“See it?”

A little.

He grabbed a small lamp with a shade and a bulb burn on it, and there, etched into his shoulder were two crossed swords, a big number 7 sitting on where the blades touched. She typed:
What’s it mean?

He put the lamp back. He read her question, then lit up a cigarette and took a deep hit. “The Garryowen.”

What’s that?

“Seventh Cavalry.”

Horses?

She was trying to be funny. It was like stepping your bare foot into the ocean after a year away because she hadn’t tried to be funny in so long. But he wasn’t smiling.

“It won’t be there for long.”

It’s a good one though.

“No, ma’am. It’s not.”

Mam
?

“What’s your name?”

That old question. Usually she’d just sit there and stare at whoever just asked this. Let their need build up. Let their love and hatred for her show up, too. But tonight she couldn’t say nothing. Not to him.

Sarah.

“That’s a good name. It’s from the Bible, did you know that?”

Maybe.

“Maybe you know that?”

Yeah.

“How come I’m talking and you’re not?”

She shrugged. She hoped he wasn’t some Christian like a lot of southern people seemed to be, and she felt bad for lying like she just did. He took a short hit of his cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of his mouth as if she was really in his room, sitting there in front of him. A woman’s voice broke from behind a wall. She sounded angry.

Who’s that?

“Nobody.”

Your wife?
Her fingers were shaking slightly. Why did she care so much what his fucking answer was?

“You don’t want to know, Sarah.”

Yes I do.

He drew in on his cigarette and looked away as he blew out the smoke and stubbed the butt in an ashtray Devon couldn’t see. She craved a Merit, could feel the kick of heat down into her lungs, the tingling clarity of everything after. He crossed his arms and read her answer. She liked his body. He had shoulder and chest muscles without being all pumped up, a thatch of dark hair on his sternum. She thought of Sick’s narrow, pale chest.

“She’s my mother.”

Why did she feel relieved, almost happy? She didn’t know what to write.

“You gonna next me now, Sarah?

She shook her head. She typed:
I lied. My name’s not Sarah.

“Why did you lie?”

Why do live with your mother?

He didn’t answer her question, or maybe what he started talking about
was
his answer. He told her about his “stepdaddy” Roger, how he used to take him hunting out at Big Bend when Hollis was only eleven or twelve years old. He told her about how pretty the woods were, the jack pines and live oaks, the sun coming through. How much he loved the smell of gun oil, and he told her more things. How he liked hitting his target but hated killing anything. Always did. Couldn’t look at what he’d done. Was both proud and ashamed of what lay in the back of his stepdaddy’s pickup, its beautiful antlers sticking out.

He told her other things, and she listened. Couldn’t remember the last time she cared so much to listen. Sick maybe. Yeah, it was Sick and how he’d lie beside her after and talk about music. How sometimes he wanted to
be
music. Just notes floating through the universe and into the ears of living things who’d appreciate him.

Hollis talked about the first time he saw his girlfriend Bonnie, or the first time she saw him, how he was in camos coming in from a three-day hunt, a few whiskers on his face, mud caked on his Timberlands, so maybe she started falling in love right then with someone he never really was.

Every few minutes he’d stop and light another cigarette and ask her to please say something, that he wanted to hear her.

“C’mon,
Sarah
, I want to hear your voice.”

He said Sarah with an emphasis that wasn’t happy but wasn’t too pissed off either.

I told you, that’s not my name.

“Then tell me what it is.”

I have to go to the bathroom.

“You comin’ back?”

She nodded at the screen, and now, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, she’s so tired her eyes burn and she wants to brush mascara onto her eyelashes, just a little, but she can feel her heart in her chest and hands and she worries that even after all he’s told her, or maybe because of it, he’s going to next her or already has, and she hurries across the dark hallway and closes her bedroom door and sits on the bed to see him staring back at her from his laptop. He’s wearing some kind of black cowboy hat. It has a strap under the chin and it makes him look older, ageless somehow.

“I like your hat.”

“I like your voice.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“The Garryowen.”

“You look good in it.”

He takes it off. He tosses it somewhere she can’t see.

“I should burn it.”

“Why?”

He’s staring at her again, like he’s trying to see if she really wants to know. But then his eyes seem to narrow with some kind of dawning respect for her.
Respect
. She has to swallow and she wishes she had water or hard lemonade or beer. She says: “You want my number?”

“I want your name.”

“I know.”

“I feel like we’ve met before.”

“Me too.”

He puts an unlit cigarette to his lips. He takes it out. He gives her a sad smile.

“It’s Devon.”

Slowly he shakes his head. Like her name is something he’s always known but from a life he hasn’t lived yet and he can’t believe that tonight she’s sitting right in front of him. “That’s perfect.”

“Why do you want to burn your hat?”

“Give me your number, Devon. I’m afraid this wheel’s gonna start spinning and I’ll never find you again.”

She types it out for him, her breath high in her chest, her fingers feathers in the air.

“You done talking?”

“No, but I should go to sleep. I’m meeting my mother for breakfast.”

“You don’t live with her anymore?”

“No.” She’s about to lie and say she lives alone, but she can’t. With this ex-soldier from Texas, his nice shoulders and warm accent and respectful eyes, she just can’t. “I’m living with my great-uncle. He’s old but he’s sweet.”

“My mama’s old but she’s mean.” He laughs, and she can see his teeth are yellow, and he has a lot of fillings, and this makes her like him even more.

F
RANCIS PULLS INTO
the lot of the country club and parks his Buick between a black SUV and a sun-glinting Mercedes sedan. He has only been to this place once and that was for the wedding of a colleague’s daughter thirty years ago. It was built not long after the war—George’s war—as a refuge for businessmen like his brother, a pretentious two-story red brick compound with fluted columns flanking the front double doors as if what lies inside is something grander than what it is, a mediocre restaurant and two function halls of artificial blue carpet overlooking a patchy golf course. A cell tower looms in the distance.