Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights (14 page)

I thought of my moaning toe with Stroud as the new pedicure person worked. I bet she heard about as much as a bartender or hooker. I asked her what she’d heard on the subject of men knowing how to find the sweet spot. I fully expected her to give me a blank look so I was shocked by her response. She pushed back on her rolling chair, spread her legs, and pointed a pink cuticle stick at her crotch.

“I could take this stick and point right at it,” she said. “And they’d miss it, on purpose. I made a list once when I was twenty. I’d slept with so many guys I had to make columns. I can tell you they are a lazy bunch. They either don’t know how or just plain won’t give you what you want. The guy I’m with now knows where to find it, but he’s complete asshole otherwise.”

“Is that worth it?” I asked.

“I’m kicking him out tomorrow,” she said. “He doesn’t know it yet.”

“She doesn’t know it yet either,” said the other nail person. “She says that every other day.”

“This is the week,” said my woman.

She spent an entire pedicure on male sexual incompetence while her work friend nodded along, and the woman next to me asked for her boyfriend’s number. Apparently it’s a rare man who has the patience or interest to spend the required amount of time at the site of love, war, or as one of her clients put it, the call button, of the female anatomy. Stroud said it was like tangling with a hot otherworldly force. Maybe you have to teach biology to hang with that.

I dragged the discouraging sex news to Christmas lunch with Karin. I’d worn black jeans and boots, and my new winged tee shirt. In honor of the holiday I’d wound a red scarf shot through with silver thread around my neck. I thought it was festive. Karin thought I looked like a trashy biker chick fresh from shock treatments.

She was glad I hadn’t gone all out and shaved my head over Stroud. I told her I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She doubted he was getting satisfaction. I fought back a sweep of longing sadness. It would be a while before that fire was out.

I told her about the pink-stick-pointing pedicurist living with the asshole Don Juan. She understood about the magnetic force of a man who’s great in bed, and Oscar wasn’t an asshole. Even with them, there’d been a definite transition period between the time she went off just looking at Oscar, and the time after two kids and exhaustion had set in. It was one of the reasons she hadn’t married him for she thought it left some tension between them. They had worked it out; they knew how to take care of each other.

She wondered what I was doing with Steve, why the dinner. I told her we were going to finally finish it without the drama.

She looked at me. “Are you sure you’re finished? It sounds like you’re jealous about the lawyer.”

“I’m not. I know it’s not right with Steve. It will be good for me to end it like a grown up for a change.”

“Huh. It sounds like it’s the lawyer. Would you feel the same way if it hadn’t been a truck driver?”

“What difference does that make?”

“I didn’t say it did, you did.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I hate the whole going over men thing.”

We exchanged gifts to open on Skype Christmas morning. We talked about work and about our great woman Senator who we both thought should be president. Proof positive we weren’t stuck on my problems with men.

I spent the rest of the week doing research. I went down to the Indian district in town and let my senses roam free. My nose explored spices and incense. My skin studied silks and soft cottons. My eyes searched the surfaces of brass and pierced wood. It was an impressionistic journey that sidestepped the detail and list-making gatekeeper.

I took home chai and burned incense while I built a notebook for each location. I sketched ideas. I’d tossed the weary Greek chorus and spread my work out on the dining room table. Then I opened a folding table for more space. I could have moved into our office on the lot, but Margaret was gone and it felt good to work at home while I could.

Friday arrived and Steve wanted to try a new place in Beverly Hills. I’d heard it was funky casual so I reprised my angel shirt and red scarf over a long black skirt. He arrived looking handsome and smelling of his own aftershave. He glanced at my hair, but didn’t say anything. He traced the angel wings with his finger while I poured wine.

“This is a different look,” he said. “I like it.”

“The new me. I surprised myself. Karin says between the shirt and the hair I look like a trashy biker chick slash mental patient.”

“Or hooker.”

I turned to look at him over that stray bullet, but he was already walking away.

“Did you just call me a hooker?”

“I was kidding. You look great.”

We sat by the fire and caught up. New Mexico had been cold; he’d found editing rooms and a little house. I told him my plan to sublet my house in case he heard of anyone.

We kept our dinner conversation light and focused on work.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“The 18th. I’m coming back right after the New Year. How about you?”

“We’re staying less than a week. She needs to get back.”

“Sounds like it’s moving fast. Your mother must be happy.”

“I don’t want this,” he said.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

The waiter came and we split a lemon tart for dessert before heading back up the dark canyon to my house. He walked me down to the door. When I turned to say good night he took my head in his hands and kissed me. The kiss didn’t match the dinner conversation. It had a tinge of aggression. It was strangely comforting on top of the brooding sense of loss.

“Would you like some port?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

I got the fire started up again while he poured into the tulip-shaped glasses we’d bought when we had gone through a port phase a few months before. I took off my boots and sat in the chair across from him.

“I heard the strangest thing this week. My father had an affair right before he died. And all this time I thought he was a saint.”

I’d said it before I realized what an incredibly awkward thing it was to say under the circumstances. Guilty people leak all over the place.

“Did they work it out?” he asked.

“They didn’t have time.”

We sat sipping and looking at the fire. The lit pool water cast overlapping and undulating scales of reflection across the ceiling like a blue snake in one of the many hands of a Hindu goddess.

“I should go,” he said. “I’m glad we did this.”

“Me too.”

I followed him to the door; I was surprised by how much it felt like tearing away to know he was leaving for another woman.

“I’m sorry we didn’t have time,” I said.

He slid his arm around my waist and pulled me in tight. “We have time.”

“But?”

“It was nothing,” he said. “I told you that.”

He was looking at me as he backed me across the room to the bed and pushed down on my shoulders to sit on the edge. He stood over me looking down. I unzipped his jeans and he pushed me in by the back of my head. He wanted an apology. He told me to turn over. He pushed my skirt over my hips then wrapped an arm around my waist and lifted me to my knees with my face buried in the covers.

He tore aside my underpants and pushed into me while he shoved my hand between my legs and said, “Do yourself.” I did.

There is immense power in penance mixed with sex. My face was buried in the bed but he could still hear me in ways he’d never heard before. I’d never heard any of his sounds either. Like frightened animals in call and response. Remorse tried to calm hurt, his fury heard placating, fear washed back and forth between us like echoes until it was over. He lay down on my back while our heart rates slowed. I could feel the outline of heavy inked angel wings crushed between us.

He put his mouth to my ear. “Don’t ever, ever, do that again.”

He rolled off of me, turned me over, and held me close. He kissed my temple. We were still dressed, though my skirt was twisted up around my hips.

We were quiet in our own thoughts. I was trying to make sense of it. It felt like he had just reclaimed me somehow, like I should go to New Mexico, stop running away from hard things. Part of me, my gut, was frightened by what had just happened. Not afraid that he would hurt me physically, but that there was a trap in it all. I wanted to run.

He got up and pulled down my skirt. He tucked in his shirt, zipped his pants and buckled his belt. Confused frames of emotion flickered like a silent movie across his face. My absolution had been brief.

Someone once told me it’s always better to be the one asking for forgiveness. Watching his face, I knew it wasn’t that simple. I thought about my mother, left holding the whole thing. I wondered if we really had the time. He put on his jacket and walked out the door, engaging the lock as he closed me in.

I didn’t hear from him all weekend. I felt relief mixed with unease. I wasn’t ready for that again, and I was. We needed to get some connections behind us to get back on track. Was there a track?

Anna called on Monday morning. She said all was good with the kids. Their oldest, Adam, was getting ready to go to the prom. Eric and Anna had gone to the prom together; they’d seemed so grown up. It was right after our father died; as Eric said, he was only seventeen. They’d married out of college and never looked back.

“I assume Eric told you about Mom’s coochie,” I said.

“He couldn’t stop laughing. He even broke up in church. Mom and Arthur were with us, which only made it worse. Every time Mom asked if he was okay, he’d start in again. It was a relief when they went home.”

“I plan to come down before Christmas, drop off presents.”

“Sounds great. Is Steve coming?”

“I don’t know what’s going on with us. He found out about the truck driver.”

“I’m so sorry, Hannah.”

“Did Eric tell you he met someone in New York?”

“Yes, it sounds like it’s gotten pretty confused. He said at dinner that you two had started talking about having kids.”

“He did. It was out of the blue. I can’t see that happening. I don’t even know if I want children.”

“I can understand that, we’re living with two accidents. For a while there we were worried that I’d gotten pregnant in New York.”

“Would you have a caboose?”

“No no no. We talked about it for days, neither one of us wanted to start all over. We’ve replaced ourselves. I’m going back to law school. Your brother says he has too much gray hair already. He says having two teenagers now is hard enough. Knowing there was another coming when he’s old and feeble would mean years of listening to that whine bombs make right before they hit you.”

“I think it’s the ones you don’t hear that get you, but I get it,” I said. “Was he actually going to go with you to the doctor?”

“No, we were going to ask you,” she said. “He said he’d be fine going, but we both knew he’d just be trying to man up; he doesn’t have any control over his squeamishness.”

My brother may have a high-powered brain, but when he was in the delivery room while Anna was having their first child, the minute the full parade came into view and he saw firsthand the gush of water, the blotchy wax covered alien with the strangely blinking eyes, and the after-birth, coupled with the dirty looks she was giving him, he’d ricocheted out of the room, and keeled over in a planter. It took five stitches to close the gash in his forehead. He still had a scar.

“I’m leaving in a week,” I said, “so I’ll be down in the next few days.”

I was packing gifts in bags for each family when Steve walked in the next afternoon. Having him walk in unannounced was disconcerting in that place between then and an unclear now. His face was more composed than the last time I’d seen him. He kissed me like the last weeks had never happened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think we should start over.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’m going to San Diego to drop gifts. Want to go? Meet the family? See Eric and Anna?”

“Let me think about it,” he said. “I’m kind of in the middle of things.”

We swam laps and went out to dinner. He got in bed to read while I worked. I was so engrossed I didn’t notice he’d dropped off to sleep. I got undressed and stood looking down at him. He slept. He didn’t lift the blankets to invite me in.

I had a memory of my parents doing that when I was a little girl with a nightmare. No words. They just lifted the blanket to invite me into the safety of their nest. I’d had lots of nightmares after my father died. There was a mirror over my bed. When I woke up in the night I could see my father’s face in the mirror; it was a distorted and frightening mask. I used to scream and scream until my mother came into my room. Her only comfort was to say, “You’re just upset.” Like ‘just upset’ screaming isn’t somehow really, seriously, fucking upset. I slid in with my back next to Steve.

We woke up and had lazy front to back sex. What Karin calls general maintenance.

“What do you think?” I asked. “You want to go?”

“Yeah, time to meet your family.”

We packed his car with gifts and then dropped by his house for fresh clothes. I sat down at his desk to call my family. There was an envelope postmarked in New York on the desk with photos on top. They were pictures of him with the woman in New York. She was lovely and looked happy. They both did. His arm rested casually around her waist. It might have been a family affair; some kid was hamming it up by sticking his head in frame and making the peace sign. There was another of just her in Central Park; Steve must have taken it. The wind was blowing her dark, even hair. The card was signed with just a lipstick kiss and XXX. I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I know chemistry doesn’t care about bank accounts, but I could hear his words. She was no truck driver. He was standing in the door watching me; we held each other’s eyes.

“I’m going down alone,” I said.

“Come on, Hannah, our families were around.”

“Your arm is around her waist.”