21
The Lake Sumner motel, room number five
We slept like hell.
I made toast on the hot plate around sunrise, because I couldn’t think of what else to do with the morning. I could hardly focus and burnt it before changing over to brew coffee.
When Wesley came out of the bathroom and shuffled to the kitchenette, he stood behind me with his arms around my waist and his cheek resting on the back of my neck. Sunlight was finally starting to feather into the room with slim, pale fingers. I turned to look at him over my shoulder, and Wesley examined my cheek.
“Does it still hurt?” he asked. He’d sat with me in silence last night at the rickety wooden table; as I tended my bruising with a hefty chip from the crusted-over icebox wrapped in one of the bath towels, Wesley took a kerchief soaked in club soda to his shirt where Haas’s blood had touched him.
“Not really. Is it still red?”
Wesley’s lips drew into a thin line. “A little.”
I shrugged. “Makeup.”
“Christ.” Wesley sagged his face into my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said against the lower slope of my neck, “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“How could we have known?” I shrugged again and moved to shut off the hot plate when the percolator began to rumble. There were only two cups on the counter. “I’ve been alone with him before, we both have. We couldn’t have known.”
Wesley’s gaze was unfocused, fixed to an unseen middle distance for a long moment. He finally blinked. I turned to pour us each a cup.
“I just feel like—”
“If you’re about to blame yourself,” I cut in immediately, “don’t.”
Wesley took the second cup from me and searched my gaze before I let go of the mug’s edge. “I feel like I should have…felt something. I’ve known men like him before. They’re all the same.”
“So have I. It’s not your fault, Wes. We’ll be back home in a few days and can pretend he never happened. We don’t have to remember him if we don’t want to.”
Wesley frowned as I made for the table, where I laid out the toast and the spreads on one plate. “You’re better at shrugging off men than I am,” he groused.
“Of course I am. I’m married.”
My reward for the teasing came as an edgewise thing: a smile, barely there at the corner but there nonetheless. I sat down and took up the butter knife to scrape with unintended violence at the butter dish.
Wesley pawed a hand down his face. His unshaved chin rasped across his palm. “God,” he said and sighed, aimless into the morning.
Silence sat thick and ill-fitting between us. As I mulled over a bite of toast bright with stale jam, I watched Wesley drag his butter to the edges of his bread with tightly sewn concentration.
“He was so fucking selfish,” Wesley said suddenly to his plate. “Nitpicky. I didn’t think anything of it before, but he always took, never gave.”
“Even when it was just the two of you?”
“Especially then. Trust me.”
I thought of the times Haas and I had had sex alone. He found a masochistic rapture in denying his own pleasure as far as he could stretch it every time, fixated on delivering himself to near delirium with delay. I turned the shape of the word around at the back of my mouth. Selfish.
Like a selfish child!
“I do,” I said, and focused on my sad little breakfast instead of the primal fear of disappointing someone.
“You should call Edie,” Wesley suggested. He took a tidy bite of toast. “She’s good at picking the shit from the Shinola. She’d find a silver lining here.”
I snorted. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“Start from the beginning. She’s a good listener.”
I took a ruminant bite of my own toast.
“Do you ever wish you could un-fuck someone?” I asked, and felt the barest inch of weight lighten on my shoulders when Wesley finally chuckled.
The farewell party was to be later that night. Slapdash invitations—handwritten again, this time on scraps of motel letterhead—were shoved under our doors around midday: Party, No Show. Caravan leaves motel 9 sharp. Late? No Party. REMEMBER: Leaving sunup Monday!!!
Our room was a mess. I was doing my best to get some preliminary packing in order, and I had lost track of my pocket calendar. There were piles of clothes, both laundered and unlaundered, scattered shoes and makeup in disarray, both of us tired of this place and grown sloppy in its upkeep. We had two days to get our luggage ready to go. It made my teeth itch to be surrounded by chaos.
I had to call Edie. I didn’t need the agenda book, her number was memorized…but it rankled me to be missing it.
No matter. I would find it later, doubtless under a dress I’d neglected to hang.
I hunted the little sachet of Jesse’s powder in the vanity drawer. I had hardly left the room since the episode with Haas, and I was doing my utmost to conserve it and not just tear through it all in a stir-craze.
Only enough to stave off the worst of a splitting headache—I put on my sunglasses as I slipped from the room and made for the phone booth at the far end of the motel.
I dialed long distance.
“Operator; number, please.”
It wasn’t the usual switchboard girl. I gave Edie’s number. The woman made a doubtful sound.
“That isn’t local.”
I frowned. “This is long distance.”
“You’ll have to connect locally from here.”
“Right. Fine. Could you send me to the New York exchange?”
“That will be twenty-five cents.”
I jammed a quarter into the machine.
“Hold please.” The switchboard gave a cloudy click. I crossed my arms and shrugged up into the corner of the booth, examining my nails. They were a wreck. Thank God we’d be done with this place soon.
New York picked up, a sleepy-voiced woman—“Operator, how may I help you?”
I gave Edie’s number again.
“Thank you,” she all but yawned. “Hold please.”
As the line hissed and cracked, I chewed on the tip of my tongue.
“Bishop,” Edie said breezily.
“It’s me. I need some advice.”
“Margaret?”
“Have you ever had a tryst go belly-up?”
“Slow down.”
“We’re coming home early.”
“Margaret.”
I shut my eyes and took a deep, slow breath. I held the handset away from my mouth to let it out in one great huff. “Hi, Edie,” I said, forcing myself to evenness. “How’s your day going?”
“Not nearly as eventful as yours, by the sound of it. What’s going on?”
“Do you want the short or the long?”
“It’s collect, save my money. Short is fine.”
I shut my eyes and rested my forehead against the glass siding, made warm as a wheel well in the baking sun. “Dress rehearsal went great, I got gun-shy, and we aren’t opening the Scottish play at all, but we all still get paid, we’re coming home early because there’s no run, and the tailor Wesley and I were fucking is an asshole, so that isn’t happening anymore.”
Edie was quiet for several long seconds in the ensuing silence.
“Happy summer stock,” I deadpanned.
“You’re alright?” Edie asked lightly.
I stared and stared and stared at the very edge of the mountain far against the foot of the sky. “I don’t know. I might be pregnant.”
There came then the deepest cruelty in a phone call: the silence of a machine speaking its own volumes—the stillness of Edie hearing me, processing my secret, fluttered and clicked ever so faintly like a living, jeering thing.
“By the belly-up tryst,” she finally asked, her tone very careful, “or by your sweet husband?”
I shook my head, smearing my forehead against the glass. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“It’s been a long couple of months, Edie.”
I stared along the stretching shadows growing tall toward me across the dirt, reaching with their slow infinity.
“Well, Margaret.” It wasn’t a chiding reply but held liminal concern. “Do you even feel equipped to…be someone’s mother?”
I made a doubtful sound, warbling and manic. “I haven’t been very good at being someone’s daughter in the first place.”
Edie was quiet again. Edie Bishop thinking before she spoke meant she really was taking it seriously. “Worse things have happened to less capable people,” she said gently. “We’ll figure this out. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I’m just…done.” My shoulders sagged. I stepped back and rubbed the pressed-up spot on my forehead.
“Everything will be fine. I promise. I have a good doctor; I’ll get you in to see him. Alright?” Edie insisted.
“I have a doctor.”
“Not like this one. We’ll get you sorted, Margot. I promise.” Edie made a cagey sound. “I’m so sorry, I need to go.”
“I always call when you’re on your way out. Sorry.”
“What sorry? You’re no bother at all, my darling. Break a leg.”
“I told you, we’re not opening the show.”
“I know. But you’ve got a lot of life to figure out right now. It feels cheap to wish you good luck. Keep your head on, poss.”
Ka-klik.
I went back to the room and stared at my suitcase. I wanted to find my pocket calendar. I wanted to be back home now.
I pawed around at my vanity, its drawers and clutter and half-done work of returning me to where I belonged. I needed more bobby pins.
“Hey, Wes?” I called up, still poking through the mostly emptied drawers. “I’m going around the corner for more pins.”
Wesley emerged from the bathroom freshly groomed and fragrant with aftershave. “Want me to get some for you? Chap and I are about to head to the tobacconist.”
“No, it’s fine. I’d like the walk.” I examined myself in the mirror, the careful makeup covering the angry red stain under my eye, and practiced a smile in the glass. Good enough.
Keep your head on, poss.
At the general store, the shopkeeper grinned as he rang up my flimsy card of hairpins and a pack of Marlboros—my usual Benson & Hedges were impossible to find out here. “How much longer are y’all in town?”
“We’re leaving in two days,” I said. My sunglasses were still on, even in the sleepy half-light of lowering afternoon barely pushing through the dusty windows.
“It’s been a wild summer for us with that motel all full, I’ll tell you what,” the old man said. He sounded a little wistful. The register pinged as he tallied my total.
“It certainly has been that,” I said, watching his bony fingers pluck at the summing keys. When I passed him my change, I looked at the endless lines of his palm and wondered at the doggedness of life; to grow old out here where nothing much happened—but then with nothing happening, every day must have been its own monumental miracle.
It’s called an affirmation, Dr. French had instructed me early on, soon after our appointments began. Think of it as the mental equivalent of easing your foot onto the brakes of a speeding car.
What if I don’t believe it?
I put my sunglasses back on and left the shop. The sun beat down on the empty, cracked sidewalk with a vengeance. I found that I missed the feeling of Dr. French’s exacting stare, reaching down into me to knock politely on doors I didn’t even know were there.
He had watched me in silence the day we created my “mantra” for a long moment with cool, professional obscurity. The human mind is shockingly easy to dupe, Mrs. Shoard. If one tells herself something for long enough, it only takes enough times before one will believe just about anything.
I returned to room five to continue getting ready. Room six was shut tight. I forced myself not to rush, or fumble the latch, or drop my keys.
“Every day of mine is a gift,” I said to myself under my breath, praying to my own sanity, and was met with only silence in reply.