The Parallel Apartments (48 page)

It was on a visit in 1985 that Olympe discovered (the fruit of a snoop through the family account books) Aaron and Beatrice's public and private exploitations of her little niece. Within thirty minutes of this discovery, Olympe had seized Rose, a suitcase of her things, and the account books, and was soon speeding toward Nuevo Laredo in Olympe's grumpy little Fiat. Some days later, a border crossing brought them to Sir MacCrear's Belt 'n' Bootery in Laredo.

Discounting the persistent curiosity and intrusion of the medical community, a relatively ordinary upbringing followed, its adolescent component not appreciably worse than the average teenager's. Soccer, library science,
Harry Potter
fan fiction, and matchmaking consumed her college years (Texas State); her sexual life, which in another age would have been at best lonesome and humiliating, was, thanks to the internet's agency to like communities, neither. She was surprised to find on her very first internet search dozens of websites devoted to atypical love connections. She joined a couple, and was soon crowded with people who wanted to date her. Some even declared love. And there was the occasional other who became infatuated, sometimes to a creepy, frightening, illegal degree.

Even the internet could find no one else quite like her, physically, anywhere. Every other kind of sexual rarity she read about or became acquainted with was, simply, less. She was the lone, fully ambisexual human being of the world.

The Room's overachieving air conditioner kept Justine and Rose safe from heatstroke as they spent every day fucking and confiding, confessing and fucking, declaring love and fucking some more.

They put all else on hold. For Justine, there wasn't much to put off—maybe collaging and sleep. And confronting her treacherous family. And thinking about the birth or death of her child.

But Rose, she had to pause all of her many hobbies and avocations, not to mention her job.

As conscientious an employee as Rose was, she had not seemed at all compunct about calling in fake-sick (mucopurulent double pink eye, a potent, convincing fiction), day after day, in order to stay in the Room with Justine and engage in their sexual
Cirque de Soleil,
from which they broke only to eat breakfast tacos or to power-nap or to track down Lacey for more sheets and towels or to hike over to Squealers to shop for restraints and chrisms and erotic simulacra or to share with each other their sins and secrets. Some of them, anyway. Justine confessed her affairs with Fleur de Lis and others while Franklin was in prison. Rose, cheating once—but only to win a soccer game; Justine, a sick hamster she'd tried to euthanize in a freezer but which had merely hibernated for the three cold months, emerging alive but sicker than ever and had had to be put down by a vet who did house calls, carrying out his ghastly work in an unmarked van, and whom Justine had paid with two convincing “twenties” she'd made herself with the color photocopier at Kinko's; Rose, skipping a funeral to go on a date in which good sex was assured, and another time skipping sex to go to a funeral; Justine, vividly wishing her mother dead; Rose, that she was presently two years into a three-year probation for assault (she socked a bartender who wouldn't give her the happy-hour price on a pint of Shiner exactly ten seconds after happy hour ended, but whose real crime was his known hatred of non-heterosexuals and who'd had a cold-cock coming for a decade); Justine, stealing from Midgie and then quitting without notice; Rose, that she'd been prostituted by her family for part of her early childhood; Justine, her family.

Of this last Justine held nothing back. Lou and Dot, Lou and Livia's devastating kiss, 9/11 and Valeria, the recently uncovered truth of Livia's being Justine's mother, and the mystery of why Charlotte and Livia had contrived such an extravagant, hideous lie to hide this truth from Justine.

“That's why you came back to Austin?” Rose asked one afternoon as she dabbed at the little dots of prolonged-standing-up-sex sweat that kept appearing on her forehead. “To confront all your people?”

“It's why. Mostly. To leave Franklin, too.”

“And find Gracie?”

It was the one subject, the one word, that caused a hiccup in Rose's general good-naturedness.

“No, of course not. She's married anyway. I bet. No, here to confront the Durants.”

“What are you waiting for?”

Fear
was the answer, but Justine told Rose she didn't know. Moreover, she didn't know why she'd just lied to Rose.

“You ought to just call them up.
Hey what's up with lying about me being adopted,
Mom?
Why'd you aid and abet,
Gramma
?
You could tell them to go fuck themselves in the same phone call, then hang up. Confrontation over. On with your day. On with us.”

“Maybe,” said Justine, yanking out a hospital corner of the bedsheet to dab at her own sweat-points. “But maybe I don't really want to know.”

“Or I could intercede. I could get all y'all back together. Intercession is a close relative of matchmaking, and I'm quite good at that, also. We could all have a big sit-down. You could tell them about the baby. Babies on the way can be a nice glue for broken relationships, you know. Even tricky, multipronged relationships, like yours.”

“I just don't know,” said Justine. “I just don't know, don't know, don't know.”

“Well, I recommend it. Hey, I think I bruised my butt bone on that doorknob.”

Justine said nothing.

“Oh, darling,” said Rose, getting into bed. “Come lie down. I'm going to have to lie on my stomach, though, to let my butt heal in the open air.”

During the next several weeks the duties of ordinary living grew more and more pressing. Rose had to return to all the matchmaking projects she'd deserted. She had soccer games to ref or compete in. Rose was also finally obliged to return to her noon-to-nine shifts at Crammed Shelf.

Justine spent the lonesome, Roseless hours in one of two distinct states: sleeping and pining. There had been no talk of moving in together, as powerful as their relationship felt—Justine endured as August and September burned themselves out. Sleeping was the obvious way to pass the hours, but that was not so easily done, because pining kept her awake.

Pining itself consisted of imagining Rose in the embrace of other lovers who were more attractive and stabler and happier, and who were, unlike Justine, terribly excited to be expecting.

The principal (and touchiest) subject of their growing relationship, and
the most likely to cool their otherwise-substantial ardor, was the fate of the baby. Rose wanted it. Justine, who would have done anything to please Rose but had—as always—profound ambivalence about whether to keep her baby, expertly dissembled whenever the subject came up. That Justine was beginning to resent and hate the child inside of her was becoming the only real secret she kept from Rose. A practical corollary of this secret (a lie, in fact) was that Justine had kept her stash of mifepristone, even though she'd told Rose she'd gotten rid of it. “It's way, way too late for that stuff, anyway,” Rose had said. “It would just make you sick and hurt the baby. Maybe kill you both. So I order you to flush 'em.”

One afternoon in early September, while Rose was on her knees on the floor of the Room, naked, ironing a shiny soccer shirt, and Justine, in bed, was watching the shadows wiggle between the little muscles in Rose's shoulder, Justine was most distressingly visited by the idea of Rose's leaving her for another lover if she gave up the baby.

“If it's a boy, I like the name Walter,” Rose said. “And if it's a girl, I like Babette.”

“Are we together?” Justine said.

Rose stopped ironing and stood up straight on her knees.

“What?”

“Are we a thing?”

“You mean in a real relationship with meaning and a future and monogamous underpinnings?”

“Yeah.”

“You betcha. I was planning to go home and tell my old landbitch I'm outta her moldy roach hovel, fuck the security deposit.”

“Oh, Rose.”

“So we can go apartment hunting on Saturday. It's about time to say adios to the old Room. What about that?”

“I love you.”

“Baby, you should've told me you were feeling so insecure.”

Rose climbed onto the bed and got under the covers with Justine. “Look. You can stay home in our new place and play Spider Solitaire on the computer and read all the uncorrected proofs and advance-reader copies I get from work and think up new sexual adventures and just generally mellow out in maternal repose while I work and bring home the bacon.”

“But what if you meet somebody and when you're going through your files you find out
you're their
match?”

“Don't worry. You're her. You are she.”

“So we are a thing.”

“As far as I'm concerned we've been a thing since I got my Bingo over you and then came over and seduced you during
Law & Order.
”

Justine felt Rose's erection filling out against her leg. Rose quickly arranged a couple of pillows in a formation that best supported the version of 69 they'd discovered together, with Rose on top, her penis between Justine's breasts and her tiny, nearly invisible but highly passible and charged clitoris just flush with Justine's lips. This was how it should be. This close, always.

“Sure I'm not hurting Walter?” said Rose, pausing to gather up a knot of bedspread to tuck under Justine's rear end.

“Positive.”

bite lick play flick rub fuck

“Mng.”

Rose pushed herself back into Justine's lips and spasm-shuddered in the peculiar, arrhythmic way that allowed Rose to stimulate both her sexual organs at once, and, occasionally, come with both. Like now.

Rose flooded Justine's solar plexus, semen spilling down her sides like opium-poppy milk. Rose lifted herself up, slowly, and lowered her erection into Justine's mouth.

“Wow,” said Rose, not even slightly out of breath. “That was quick. See, I can only come like that if I'm in a real relationship, with love and commitment.”

“Mlt.”

“Baby, don't talk with your mouth full.”

Baby.

Along with Rose's cock, Justine swallowed her own rising and filling-out idea that Rose really was an apparition; her perfect human, available only in the form of a skittery ghost, easily scared away, easy to lose forever.

In early November, Justine and Rose moved into an efficiency located on the second floor of a Motel 6–style apartment building of the sort replicated
at least once on virtually every street within three miles of the UT campus and which collectively domiciled quite a few of the university's fifty thousand students.

Rose and Justine's building, the Parallel Apartments, was demographically typical in that it housed mostly students, but it was atypical in its percentage of asocialites: there were far more chess phenoms and shell-shocked cuckolds and shifty, deadbeat dads and warrant-dodging speed eaters and overworked Mexican graveyard-shift grocery-store stockers and lonesome mezzo-sopranos and corrupt eBay rare book dealers and whoever-else-have-you than most other apartment complexes around. The singer was especially noxious; she seemed never to quit practicing, and she lived just two doors down.

Rose and Justine's unit was tiny, but neither owned much. Justine had only what she'd brought from New York, a couple new outfits and purses, and a Styrofoam cooler she'd picked up at Academy months ago to keep her Dr Peppers cold. All Rose owned was a wall's worth of books, a drawer's worth of clothes, an old PC equipped with a 0.9 kbps dial-up modem, a few boxes of papers and correspondence from the physicians and specialists and photographers and sideshow scouts that had taken an interest in her over the years, a one-drawer metal file cabinet filled with the plans and details of her past matchmaking triumphs, and an aromatic double bed as concave as a radio telescope.

Rose also owned about eighty soccer trophies, which took up a good third of the apartment. One was a gold and ebony colossus nine feet high that had to be wedged into a corner at an angle. When Justine was alone in their new home, pining while Rose was out doing her many things, it was the sight of the colossus canted over its busy kingdom that brought her own lonesomeness into sharpest relief.

“Just before Walter's due,” Rose said while rearranging her trophies to make room for a new one that she had just won, a fake-brass three-footer fangled as a coffin standing on end, Death perched on top, a soccer ball impaled on his scythe, the monument just acquired as champion of the East Side Halloween Torture Dungeon Round Robin, “we'll put all these in storage and park his little bassinet here.”

Justine fell heavily onto the unmade bed. The pining bed, the sex bed, the collage bed. The bed with a history. Justine often wondered who else had slept here, bawled here, dreamed here, gotten fucked by Rose here.
Who'll be after me?

“Or Babette,” Rose added. “And I'd like to remind you of your promise to go see Dr. Nomb and at least get a checkup and find out the sex of the baby. Dr. Nomb'll love you; she loves me. My aunt and I have been seeing her since the eighties.”