Everything (18 page)

Salle d’attente
. Anywhere but here. She wanted to be lonely among strangers instead of lonely at home, surrounded by good coffee and strange cars, hard consonants, almond pastries.

She went inside, into the mother-in-law apartment, and was instantly drunk again in the heat. All the internal structures of her brain turned into jelly and she poured herself a glass of cold water and dissolved like jelly in the water. This longing, just wanting to be clean. The river called to her. Water flowing under ice, the little
dipper birds that went all the way under. They always made it out the other side, although, she thought, probably not always. That one miscalculation and they would come up where the ice was a solid sheet and drown trying to come up through it. Little tiny frozen dead bird under the ice, saddest thing in the whole round world.

The river smoking in the cold night air. Just clean.

Then Howard started banging on the door. You in there? he shouted. Where’d you go?

Bang bang bang.

Bang bang bang.

I’m here, she said.

Let me in, he said.

I don’t think so.

Why not? What’s the matter?

Nothing’s the matter, she said. I’m drunk, it’s late, I just want to go to bed. You’re drunk, too.

He tried the door again and it was still locked. She felt like she ought to be scared but she wasn’t. She was scared but in an almost pleasurable way, as if she were alive, outside in the cold night, running with the deer. She was dead to the world outside herself and that world was dead to her, she saw this now. This was the problem.
She went to her purse and took out her key ring with its small attached can of pepper spray. It said in big red letters that it was only to be used on wildlife and that it was a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.

Howard, she said through the door. Howard, are you listening?

He said nothing but tried the door again, which was still locked tight.

Howard, I’m going to bed, she said. I’m going to sleep. We can talk in the morning.

I don’t know what’s wrong.

What’s wrong is that you’re trying to break down my door in the middle of the night, June said. She felt lovely and lucid and calm.

Everything was fine a minute ago, he said.

No, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. And now it’s time for bed.

Howard tried the door again halfheartedly. June thought: I will huff and puff and I will blow your house down. Then heard his footsteps on the stairway down, retreating. Good night, Howard, she thought to herself. Good night and good-bye.

Then he was gone and she was alone.

The swim-up bar was three-deep
in Mormon girls ordering Virgin Marys, Arnold Palmers, Cinderellas and coco coladas. Not girls, not exactly—probably in their late twenties, early thirties, and all of them talked about their kids—but they were all as slim and pretty and blond as sorority girls and they had on two-piece bathing suits, in some cases absurdly small, and the same high birdlike twitter as sorority girls when they were in a mass together. RL sat half submerged on a barstool like three hundred pounds of half-rotten meat. Right in the middle of the Mormon girls. He was enjoying himself.

Betsy lay facedown at the side of the pool in the lively shade of the palm fronds, restless in the wind. She was swathed from hat to aqua socks in cotton and nylon, not an inch of skin exposed except
her face and fingers. The rest of her hands were cased in flesh-colored fingerless gloves which RL found infinitely creepy.

Betsy had gotten, her word,
blitzed
on the airplane down and had wept herself to sleep the night before and awakened ghostly and funereal. Through breakfast she had seemed always almost with something to say, on the tip of her tongue, but she never said it. This trip had been a mistake, then. She would not be jollied along or talked out of herself. RL was already planning his alternate week: drinking one day, fishing the next, perhaps a snorkeling expedition.

The Mormon girls were decorative. RL understood that the good skin and cleavage and orthodontia were meant for the husbands in their lives, that as much as they smiled and laughed, they were not in any sense ready to party. RL was not sure he was ready to
party
himself. But all these girls, they looked like they did enjoy a good hearty heterosexual fuck once in a while, an uncomplicated few minutes in the missionary position, maybe a quickie in the shower while the baby was napping …. RL felt a sharp nostalgia for those days, domesticated love, nothing exotic about it, no drama, no danger. Plus, it had been a while. And it looked like it would be a while longer. It was his own fault, fat and sad, drooping over a barstool in a wet shirt, a fishing shirt with many, many pockets and loops—what right-thinking girl would want to fuck him? But he wondered if this was just another symptom of his age, this feeling that everybody else in the entire world was having sex, everybody but him. Even June was having sex, he was pretty sure. June in her comfortable shoes and practical haircut.

The next time he looked over at Betsy, she was looking back at him, or at least pointing her big black sunglasses at him. The wind
rustled the fronds of the palm trees overhead, ruffling the shade, and a jet contrail drew a white line across the empty sky. Some perfect loneliness in the hard sunlight. The Mormon girls were talking about what kind of bedding they liked the best and how poor and scratchy the Mexican sheets were.

He should have figured some of this stuff out by now. It just all felt like scatter, unwilling or unable to make sense of itself. Life’s rich banquet, a cornucopia of silver and shit, oranges and car parts, a French encyclopedia under a gold cup of teeth. Scatter. The Mormon girls in their little womb of money and prettiness and not even knowing they were in the womb while Mexican girls scoured plates in the back of the restaurant and women elsewhere died in childbirth without complaint. All this in a moment of blur. His own life he had spent on triviality except for his daughter. Now he was here, in a place he didn’t belong, with a woman he didn’t know.

She was waiting for him.

She could wait for a little while. She could stand to.

But she would not.

I’m never drinking again, she said. She looked cold in the water, which wasn’t possible, the water warm as blood and the air heavy and hot. Someplace inside she was always cold.

RL tipped his piña colada in her direction. You’ll be OK by sundown, he said. I always am.

I am not you, Betsy said. I feel like I’m going to fall down.

* * *

Maybe take a nap.

Walk me up to the room, she said. Would you?

She had this quality, he had noticed it before, that when she spoke to him, everybody and everything else just disappeared, just the two of them and a blur outside. Her energy field.

Let me finish this up, he said, drinking his drink.

No hurry, she said intently.

The Mormon girls had fallen silent with her approach and were now starting to chatter again, edging away, talking about whether it was safe to eat the fruit ices that they sold by the side of the road. The dark-haired one in the tiny purple two-piece, the only interesting face, had taken a chance on a skewer of shrimp, last time they were down, and paid for it the next three days. They laughed and moved away and took their laughter with them. Betsy reached out and touched RL through the wet fabric of his shirt and he felt her cold run into him.

I’ve got to go, she said, and when he looked into her little gray face, he saw that she was telling the whole truth. He set his drink down, left the sex and sunshine outside, helped her up the breezy stairs and into the semidarkness of her room.

Betsy sat down on the edge of her bed and said, Don’t go.

The bed was still unmade from the night before, a glass of water on the bedside table, a dozen pill bottles.

* * *

I feel like I could have thought this through, she said. Just a little better.

There’s nothing to worry about, RL said.

All this way, and all this money.

I’ve got the money, RL said. I told you. It was just something I wanted to do. It’s nothing you need to worry yourself about. Take a nap, we’ll go for a swim, lay around on the beach for a while. It’s just something for you to enjoy.

I’m not even in my body anymore, she said. It’s like I’m not even connected to it.

I can certainly see that.

It feels like Purgatory, Betsy said. It feels like Purgatory already.

Take a little nap, he said. You’ll feel better.

I said good-bye to them, Betsy said.

RL felt the chill again, a cold breeze in a hot room. He went to the window and there was the Pacific, blue as an eye, stretching into haze under a few white aimless clouds.

Said good-bye to who?

Roy, she said. Roy and Ann and Adam. I didn’t really say anything to the kids.

* * *

What did you tell Roy?

The same thing the oncologist told me. That last round, it worked but it didn’t work well enough. He told me they just really had to hit it out of the park and they didn’t, quite. Then he gave me some life advice. It was all pretty low-key. I was really calm, I was proud of myself.

I thought you weren’t going to go in again till after the holidays, RL said. This was the imaging?

Oh, she said, mistake.

What kind of mistake?

I was going to go in, get the OK, she said. I had such a positive mental attitude! I was sure he was going to tell me everything was fine. I was sure of it. Then, you know, come down here with you, have a drink or two, have a little fun. It’s been a while since I was really fun. I know that’s what you wanted for me.

I’m sorry, he said.

What have you got to be sorry for? You’re trying to do a nice thing and I appreciate it.

I wanted something else for you.

Oh, she said. No more than I did.

There seemed to be nothing more to say. He floated between the bed and the window, uncertain, unattached. It was dazzling sunlight
outside the window but here in the twilight her face was a blur. A long way for a short ride, he thought. Your applause is the only paycheck that cowboy is going to cash today.

Come, she said briskly. Sit.

She patted the bed next to where she lay. RL went reluctantly. He didn’t know where he was, where he was supposed to be.

Tell me what you want to do, she said.

You know.

I do, she said. But it’s too late.

In this dream there was a baby
but there was something wrong with the baby, you could tell it wasn’t a real baby, it was like a rubber baby that bleated when she squeezed it but it was a real baby, too, and it was her baby, hers to take care of it and Layla tried, she fed it and changed it even though there was nothing there in the diaper, just a smooth flesh-colored mound of nothing like Barbie or Ken; and when she held the baby to her chest to comfort it, the baby opened its mouth and out came the sound of an electric bell like a fire drill, insistent. It was Edgar’s baby, she knew it all at once. It was the doorbell.

It was the doorbell five in the morning and there outside the door was June. Suitcase in her hand.

Her body in the afternoon half-light
lay dim and pretty across the rumpled sheet. The room was hot and damp with sunlight creeping through the thick drapes and the windows open. She might have been asleep.

RL sat against the pillows with nothing to do. He would have lit a cigar but it would bother her. Besides, the cigars were in his own room next door along with the gin. Also, it was not yet three in the afternoon. Certainly he was on vacation but there were limits. Maybe.

She wore a black tank top and a bra, nothing else. A fake breast inside the bra, and a real one. RL did not know which was which.

* * *

She was asleep, the kind of sleep that was like falling down a well, her breathing deep and slow and somewhere clogged.

He didn’t feel the way he thought he would.

He didn’t see the point of Mexico anymore.

She looked beautiful. She did. Long and slim. The bone cage of her hips. Her skin all red and rough from weather was softened by the light, by the light perfumed sweat on her. In sleep she was worried still—he could see it in her face—but slipping away, falling into nothing.

Did she even want to?

She was wearing perfume. It wasn’t like her. He hadn’t noticed until now, or at least the front of his brain hadn’t noticed. Somewhere back in the reptile brain he knew her, caught the wild scent of something sweet and fruitful. He wondered sometimes how much of his life was his and how much instinct or smell, which he thought were the same thing. Something about her he wanted. He didn’t even have to know why. Something about her that didn’t want him. Not enough.

He thought about her kids, faces in the rain.

He thought about Thailand: what she said, about letting the seed in, the start of something that only takes shape later on. Maybe he let the illness into himself. Maybe he opened himself up to it. The bug.

* * *

Maybe he would live long enough for it to make a difference.

Pick your poison.

Oh, he thought, oh. Something being shed. RL felt it dropping away from him without knowing what it was.

He left her then, left her sleeping, only for a moment, slipping silent as a robber into his fat man shorts and many-pocketed shirt—a ridiculous man, he knew it—across the cool tile floor and out into the hallway and next door, where he poured himself a glass of gin on ice and brought a Cuban Romeo y Julieta back to light. Giving way, letting go. What was it? He felt strange to himself.

Out on the balcony, the bluest ocean.

Never odd or even, RL thought. He lit the big cigar and watched the children in the surf. The air was hot and still and the water just cool enough so there was no reason to get out, the waves low and playful, surprised shrieks from the little girls as the water overtook them from behind, their backs to the deep blue sea and their eyes on their mommies …. He felt—what?—light, the dancing bear.