Killing Time in Crystal City (13 page)

“You're lucky,” she says, allowing me to tow her along, “that the weather is in your favor and I have limited options.”

“I will agree with you,” I say, “that those things have left me lucky. I feel lucky.”

“Yeah, well, don't go feeling all that lucky. I'm not one of those girls who feel obligated . . .”

“No obligation expected,” I say. “No matter what, I already feel as lucky as I need to, and as lucky as I ever have.”

All the hoots and barks and shouts of “Way to go, Kiki,” and “You the man, Kiki,” as Stacey and I leave the beach are probably not helping my case as a gentleman.

•   •   •

All the most maniacal horror movies have the twin peaks of sex and murder that make them viscerally right and wrong enough to blow your senses to smithereens.

This is exactly where my mind is at as I pull the moose-head key chain out of my pocket. Stacey is not only with me, but it was her idea. On the other hand, if I open this door and Syd is on the other side, I'm fairly certain I won't have such a great story to tell. I look behind me, as I've done a hundred times already, because I cannot shake the feeling we are being stalked. So now I'm the meat of a paranoia sandwich, with threats in front of and behind me. It's possible that smoking dope and drinking wine do not agree with me entirely.

I am hoping my lady friend cannot see my chest heaving in and out with desperation as I turn the key and burst through like I'm expecting to confront a home invasion.

Which is ironic, since we are the home invasion.

“Are you all right?” Stacey asks, putting a hand on my thumping chest, which only stokes the thumping further.

“Sure I am. Of course I am.”

And when we step into the house and nobody cracks a chair over my head, I am a little more all right. I feel more nervous when I flip on the lights. It is so bright in this place. Nobody is up in these hours and if they are up, they are up to no good. I feel like the bright lights call too much attention to this bright shiny home and I am already looking forward to shutting down again.

“I suppose you'll want the tour,” I say.

“I want whatever Molly got,” she says slyly.

So we do the condensed version of the walk-through: living room and kitchen.

“You want food?” I ask her as we pass the fridge.

“Too tired to eat,” she says. “I'll take you up on it when we get back up, though.”

“Good answer,” I say, and am just about to switch the light off when Stacey spies the book on top of the washer-dryer.

“Ah, here it is. Kiki's big book of seduction.”

“Oh God, please don't call it that. Of all the things it is not, that's probably number one.”

“Okay. I am taking it to bed, though. Which, when you think about it, means it is exactly that.”

It didn't really matter what she said after the taking-to-bed part.

“Right this way,” I say.

I lead her to my room, but on the way past I just have to gently try Syd's doorknob. Thankfully, still locked. I imagine what it would have been like if he was already in there and just emerged at some point. The thought makes me briefly lose all the feeling in my hands and feet.

“Charming,” Stacey says as we enter my modest bedroom.

“It's home,” I say.

“Mind if I use your bathroom?”

“Sure,” I say, “right over there.”

She is gone for less than five minutes, but it's an anguished time for me anyway. I can't decide what I should be doing. Clothes on? Clothes off? Underwear? Shorts with no shirt? Bathing suit? What's the etiquette on this kind of thing? I am well lost and panicking at the notion of failing the big exam on the first question.

“This
is
a glorious robe,” she says, standing just inside the room and all inside Syd's very popular bathrobe. The book is still in her hand.

“So, you really are determined to get the full Molly,” I say.

“Yup. I hope you don't mind, I hung my wet things up on the curtain rod.”

“Mind?” I say. “Oh, no.”

“You going to sleep like that?” she asks, pointing at my own none-too-fresh outfit.

“No,” I say, but I don't do anything about it except stare at her, lovely, gleaming in that robe. Jesus, what if it's the robe? If I just fall for everybody who puts that robe on, then I think we've figured out what my freakery is.

“We didn't do anything,” I blurt.

“'Scuse?”

“Molly and I. When she was here, she just slept, and showered. Wore the bathrobe for a while.”

She is beaming at me and I have no clue what it means though I'm aching to find out.

“I was wondering about that,” she says. “I was thinking you might have a little problem that way.”

That's
what it meant?

“Huh? No. No, no, no. I
could
have done it. I don't have any problems. Well, okay, not that I don't have
any
. . . but no, not that one. I was kind of dying . . . to do it. I was way, way into it.”

“So . . .”

“I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was acting the way a decent man should act. And I guess I believed that if I showed Molly that there were decent guys out there and not everybody was just here to use her, then . . . then . . . I don't know what.”

“You thought you could, what,
repair
her? With your goodness?”

I never for a second thought of it in those terms. Until now.

The best I can manage is a shrug.

Stacey manages far, far better.

She unties the sash on the robe, disrobes, revealing herself in just her underwear and one book of poems for modesty. I have some testicular turmoil going on but at the same time there is also a form of relief, now that she has set the etiquette. I drop my clothes to the floor as quickly and awkwardly as possible, the cast on my arm suddenly deciding to fight me for the shirt. In the end, Stacey comes over and rescues me.

“You're an idiot,” she says, calmly coaxing the shirt away and dropping it to the floor. “But you are a freakishly noble idiot.”

She leads me over to my bed and we lie down, on our sides, pressed close together in the small space of it. I am behind her, with my casted arm draped over her. She nestles in.

“And then you did her laundry, while she slept. Remarkable.”

“Not too remarkable. I like doing laundry.”

“And you don't often get a chance to do ladies' undies, I imagine.”

“True. But it honestly made it harder, the whole noble good-guy thing. A lot harder, actually.”

Slowly, her head turns in my direction. “Seriously?”

I don't think I've given away anything there. Seriously. And now I'm squirming, physically and otherwise as she traps me in my corner.

“Um, seriously?” I stammer. “Seriously, what?”

“You did, didn't you.”

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “You had yourself a little Molly-whack to tame the beast within.”

This is about as caught as caught gets, and I don't even have the mental muscle to speak.

“You
are
a good guy. Molly's knight in gooey armor.”

I close my eyes tight, wishing it all to dissolve. I hear her snap the lamp off.

I feel her shift, turn to me, and start kissing me. And kissing me. And she is not stopping, not rolling away or anything. I am quaking with rushes of every kind.

“Can I turn the light back on?” I say.

“Must you?” she says.

“Yeah. Because I'm afraid if I don't see it, I won't believe it.”

•   •   •

When I wake up, she's at it.

The book.

“I assume you have read all of these,” she says with a thick voice and a sniff.

“No,” I say, burying my face in the back of her head. I don't care about the book. I care about the back of her head. And her back. I love Stacey's back and think I might just cling to it with all I've got until the fire department has to come and remove me.

“A lot of them, anyway, right? These are some of the most—”

“Some,” I say. “Though for most it's been quite a while. Growing up . . . they were a big part of everything, when I was growing up.”

I'm expecting her to roll over and take me face-on on that one. To inquire forensically about the poems and their history. She doesn't, though. She flips a page. A few minutes later she flips another page. Many minutes later, another.

I hang on to her, listen to her deep breathing along with the turning of the pages. This will be my reading of the book with my face pressed to Stacey's skin, and from here it is indeed a wonderful work of art.

“I would think,” she says, closing the book with a pop, “that I would read a collection like this if most of the poems were about
me
.”

Ah, cripes.

“They're not about me,” I say while trying to hold on to her for whatever is left of now. This painfully fine and dwindling
now.

“How do you know, if you won't even read them?”

“It's the kind of thing a guy knows.”

“Not sure I get what you mean by that,” she says.

“Not sure I do, either,” I say.

We go quiet again and I lie there breathing Stacey skin, absorbing Stacey molecules, seeing Stacey scenes playing on Stacey screens in my head. This is what I knew was waiting out here before I could ever know what
it
was. This is what I came for and if all the difficulty had to happen for this to happen then it has all been superb difficulty, and thanks for it.

She is reading the poems, and her lungs are shushing rhythmic responses that thrill me probably too much for anybody's comfort.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

Caught way, way off my guard, I come up with, “Do you always talk to books when you're reading them? That's intense. My lips move, but that's not even close to the same—”

“Ki-ki . . . ,” she says, almost patiently, almost not, completely husky-hot.

I take her all the way seriously now, which means an extended pause, which I have no doubt she understands intuitively. I do my best to assign and assemble the constituent parts of the answer.

“Certain events put me on the road ultimately, that's undeniable. But I'm convinced that that was just about timing and I would have made the same trip eventually. Probably soon-eventually. The big answer would be that I had exhausted all the other options, belonging-wise. I never fit myself in anywhere, not really, and I suspected that further afield somewhere I would find a someplace, a somebody, a collective of somebodies—”

“A tribe.”

“A tribe, who would have me and I'd want to be had.” I squeeze her around the ribs and she laughs at that.

“And you think that is this, that is us? Crystal City and the Hairy Homeless? Hey, sounds like a band.”

“You're not saying that thing about you having a beard again, right? Because you still do not have a beard.”

“Well, no, I just meant a general kind of scruffiness but, thanks. Thanks for the reminder. By the way you still don't have one either.”

“Ouch. Okay, sorry. And yeah, somewhere in the depths of my mind I think I felt like . . . I don't know. Like people in your situation were the ultimate outsiders of outsiders of outsiders. Outside of all the other insides, and so a kind of special class all your own. I think I gravitated to that.”

The silence that settles over us now feels of a different type from the warming, comfortable ones earlier. I don't like it, and want to chase it away, but think I'd better wait for something instead.

“So, this is kind of like a project for you?” she says in a tone that makes even the bad silence welcome. “What are you, a Boy Scout, working toward your merit badge in
slumming
?”

Oh God, no. Every alarm screams in the fire station of my mind, and I vault right over her to land, crouching, on the floor, looking into her face. Every last syllable of my vocabulary has been checked and found to be unavailable or unqualified to put this one out. I am frantic, pulling my lips tight and shaking my head no and no and no while I take the hand she is dangling over the bedside gently between both of mine.

She still gives me a disapproving look and triggers uncontrollable forces within me that I don't truly even want to control, but my last traces of practical sense beg me to control them for the love of—

Resistance, however, is way past futile.

“I love you, Stacey.”

Even I don't think that will pass over uneventfully.

She slowly turns her face away from me, but down, into the pillow. Then she takes the book, which she was holding up in her left hand, and lowers it to close up any spaces that let light or me in around the pillow's edges. She does, however, leave me holding the other, free-floating hand. It must look like a deathbed scene.

“Sorry about that,” I say.

There is no audible response. The hand is still with me, though.

“You could suffocate, Stacey. And if you tell me that's what you want because of what I just said, then that will crush me. It might look cool in a memoir to have a girl commit suicide because you didn't love her, but to have one do it because you
did
would be crap.”

The pillow giggles.

The heart soars.

I was making no effort at humor, but we take what gifts fall upon us.

“Don't say it again, though,” she says with the unstated trade being the sight of her face again, live and lovely. She could have held out for much more for that.

“Out loud, certainly not.” I can make no promise beyond that. I'm not even sure I can make that one.

She reappears and yes, as a matter of fact, I do see her even lovelier than before.

“You'll need to work on that ‘out loud' part, too. But I suppose it's your own little pleasure dome up there and I can't do anything about what you do inside it.”