The next Tuesday his truck pulled up, she was back in her own bed and wouldn’t get out. Around her were candles she had burned way down, books she’d barely started. He was calling from the car, a laugh in his throat, “Git in this gole-dang car, rose-buddy!” She knew how he would look, the stubble on his jaw a blink short of a genuine lilac, how he would smell, metal and dairy. He was whistling now, the theme from Oklahoma!, something he knew she found obnoxious. She had assumed that the first she had seen of his wife would be the last she had seen of him, and had accepted that sentence. What could another hour with him do, besides describe to her the reckless person she was? Ten minutes passed and she could still hear the engine. When she emerged, barefoot on the filthy porch, she could see him using the surface of his horn to scribble something, a note for her he’d tape facing in to her window. He called her Bess Rainy in these notes, she didn’t know why, something that made him laugh. A rainy look to you sometimes is all he would say when asked. Dear Bess Rainy, he had written once. I smelled you on the back of my hand in a room full of people today and it was so painful I had to excuse myself. His tenderness was stunning because it was rare.
In just the way he leapt down from the cab, a hop onto one boot and a boyish stomp with the other, she could tell he didn’t know. It made her furious, that she should have to be all parts of the crime, the cause, the victim, the messenger. As he saw her face his gait slowed, and he set down the things he had brought her, a book on trees, some lemons he’d preserved with rosemary. He always came with gifts, a protection against the things he wouldn’t talk about. On the uneven planks he sat two steps below her, his arms around her calves. She spent a foggy minute waiting for him to ask, then another, rage-smeared, realizing he would not.
“Your lovely wife didn’t mention her visit?”
His arms returned to their place at his sides. He looked at his boots and then his truck, as if hoping the things in his life were the life itself.
“What did she do?” His voice was light, his bottom lip pushed out. She was standing now. It felt like she had to use her body or it would use her.
“What did she do? Why do you ask it like that? Is it so hard to believe she could have done something?”
He hopped up, raising himself from his seated position without the use of his hands. The vim of it infuriated her. She would not turn to face him. She was aware of every part of her that did not belong to him, her feet in perfect line with her hips, her hips with her shoulders, her chin with her navel.
“She doesn’t do a lot of leaving, is why. So my thought process seems to stop before her even—”
“Let me give your thought process the kick it needs. She came here dressed to be painted for a portrait and she ordered everything on the menu, one by one over the course of the longest two hours of my life, looking at me like I was a broom.”
“I can’t always get her to the front porch for some sunshine.”
“Your thought process in general seems to rely on convenient omissions.”
“Car I bought her I have to turn over the engine to make sure, sometimes.”
“I wonder why she’s been so unhappy.”
Vincent stared at her then, trying, she thought, to calculate how total her anger was, where he could find the break in the fence. She could feel her face was ruined with color. He tried to take her hand, but her fingers wouldn’t curl around his, so he slipped an arm behind her back, another under the joint of her knees. Carrying her, pacing the porch, he raised and lowered and raised her.
“Sir, I’m going to guess that one thousand one hundred twenty-two beans are in this jar. I’m just a simple hog farmer, but I believe in this like I believe Jesus Christ gave some damn good speeches. If that doesn’t win me a prize, I don’t know what.” She snorted against the thin cotton of his shirt, hated herself for it, all in the same second. They were inside in under a minute, her feet never touching the ground.
In her bedroom the noon light was invasive, highlighting the clutter made by her sunken week, the western shirt of his she’d slept in and left balled in her sheets, a plate still holding two wilted fries at the foot of her cot. Pint glasses of water at different levels lined the length of her room. The reminder of it separated her from him again, and she insisted he put her down, pushed the flat of her feet against his stomach.
“Who’s the lowlife done been living in here, rosebud?”
She climbed onto her narrow cot and he followed, mirroring the shape of her body, pressing the points of his knees into the backs of hers. When he spoke it was into her neck, the words coming into her body before they came into her mind.
“I couldn’t have known, Fay. Babe, I could not have known. I deserved that, not you. I did.”
That was as much of an apology as he gave her, no sorry inside it, but still she felt the breadth of her ribs pushing back into his chest, his leather belt digging against her hips. It was the first but not the last time that she wondered what it was about a woman truly distraught, disarmed by crisis, that planted the idea of sex in a man’s mind. It was perverse, she was thinking, disturbed, and soon after the thought arrived it disintegrated. She began to hear very clearly. The pop of a jet gone sonic, the snort of Lloyd’s nose in the pool. She couldn’t explain it to herself, but then she was pressing against him, too.
He liked to arrange her and she let him. She was pliable under his wishes, to put her thighs just so, to slide a doubled pillow under her hips as he lowered his mouth. When she looked up it seemed the colors in the room wanted to become each other, the blues of the sky through the windows braided into the gold of his hair where it moved a little between her legs. He came up with his eyes open and she turned over, her forearms crossed in a point where she rested her head. She didn’t want to see him.
When it was over she knew that nothing had been resolved, but the fact of this seemed less urgent, an unpleasant appointment she would endure after many more warm and gentle hours. There was nothing in her body to alert her to what had changed, the switch that had been pulled on, the microscopic reactions beginning. Whether it happened then or in that parking lot on La Cienega, it made sense, she thought later—it could not have been a daughter.