Down a small side street there was a little place offering rooms.
It was called Royal Desert Inn and Bar. The name was written on a sign above the door and the letters were neon green and pink but some of them didn’t work and flickered on and off, so that sometimes the sign said ROYAL DE ER INN AND BAR.
The bar was in evidence.
It was built across the main front of the building, tables and stools spilling over into the little alley, and there was a woman standing behind the bar under the dirty yellow light and she had bright dyed red hair which looked odd in the odd chemical lighting. It was hard to tell how old she was. Her body looked young but her face was haggard in the shadows. In her ears there were large rings.
She was talking to a man who leaned on the bar. Every now and again they stopped and stared together at the people around them.
Others sat on stools at the little outside tables, or they stood in the alley and pulled at cigarettes and talked, and the air was thick with smoke and its hazy swirls were picked out by the neon.
Cal asked and the woman at the bar pointed us through a side door.
She said, “Reception’s in there.”
Then she said, “Have a nice night.”
Through the door there was a small room and the walls were painted dark red and they were stained with squashed mosquitoes. In one corner a big dark plant stood with heavy leaves, ugly, obtrusive, and there was a desk which took up a lot of room and behind the desk on the wall was a calendar. It was a joke calendar. It showed three men posing in kilts and they were topless and muscular and tanned and behind them rolled the soft green of some hilly countryside on the other side of the world.
Under that were rows and rows of sticky notes and on the sticky notes was crass rounded handwriting, phone numbers I think, and names and things like that.
There was a girl behind the desk.
She smoked a cigarette and the end of the cigarette was crumbling ash, a fat wad of crumbling ash hanging on the glowing end and quivering with the movement of her hand as she held it there slightly away from her to blow a long stream of smoke in the other direction. And there was a can on the countertop, a beer can, which had been cut open and folded and bent so that it could be used as an ashtray. And the girl tapped the cigarette on the side of the can and the wad of ash fell off and landed on the ash that was already in there. This girl had dark hair and it was cut into a bob in line with her chin. She wore a pink shirt. On the front of the shirt was black writing.
It said, Cherry Bomb.
The girl stared belligerently.
Cal said, “You have a room free for the night?”
She snorted. “We always have rooms free.”
“A double. One night.”
Her left eyebrow twitched and she stared at us and drew dolefully at the cigarette. Then she said, “Yeah,” and reached under the desk and brought out a paper.
“Fill this in. That’s yours. Then fill this in. That’s ours.”
She dropped a key on the form. “Room six. It’s the second floor along the hall. Green door.” Upstairs the corridor smelled strongly of insect repellent, and then once we had unlocked the door and gone inside, room 6 smelled the same.
I said, “Let’s open a window.”
And Cal said, “Probably not a good idea here.”
I heard him fumbling along the wall for a light switch.
He said, “Jesus. Does this dump not have lights?”
I went over to the bed and turned on the bedside lamp.
Cal’s face looked white and worn in the light.
On the bedside table was a little porcelain statuette of a spaniel dog. It was white and it had gold ears and a gold collar and the gold had rubbed off in patches and its eyes bulged and they pointed in slightly different directions.
I nodded at it. I said, “One eye to watch you, one to watch me.”
He scoffed.
Outside in the street there was the sound of breaking glass.
Someone shouted loudly and then there was silence, then a woman’s screeched laugh.
Cal lay down on the bed and I came over and lay down beside him and he put his arms around me and for a while it felt only good and not confusing to have him do that, for a moment it was only sensation.
He leaned over me and turned off the bedside lamp.
In the dark there was a shape on the opposite wall.
I stared at it.
I said, quietly, “Cal.”
He said, “Yes.”
I felt his hand. He was stroking my hair. He said, “I think I know. But you can’t think about it. You said it yourself. Don’t think about it.”
I said, “It sometimes comes into my head when I’m trying to sleep.”
“I know.”
“What the alley looked like.”
“It didn’t look like anything. It was dark.”
“I know. But in my head I change it. When I remember. It’s hard to think how it really was. I think I make up being able to see more than I actually did.”
His hand stroked my hair.
After a moment I said, “Do you think about it?”
“Yes. Of course.” His voice was flat. “It doesn’t take it back. You can think about it for a thousand years but it doesn’t take it back. It was just what happened. Better him than us.”
Then he said, “Go to sleep, Anne Marie.”
His hand on my hair felt somehow unsettling.
It wasn’t something he had done for a long time, even when we were married, I think by that time he had more or less already stopped doing it. Strange that I hadn’t thought it was wrong at the time. Strange that I hadn’t second-guessed it.
After we were married we rented an apartment in a big old pink townhouse one block away from the ocean. The building was tumbling down into the street like all the other buildings in that area and so it always had scaffolding on its front face to keep it held up and that meant that you could climb out of any of the front windows and sit on the wooden boards of the scaffolding at night and listen to the sea with the hot breeze on your face.
And I was living there with Cal, of course, although at that time things were already going bad.
One night I found a message from another woman on his phone.
I didn’t know who she was; I didn’t recognize the name. Cal had never spoken about her. I found it by accident because I had picked up his phone to see the time and there it was on the screen.
And I had gone straight through to the bedroom, lain on the bed with my back to the door looking at the dark wall with my eyes open. There was this ugly old stucco stuff on the walls and it made patterns in the light coming through the door from the far hallway, and I touched it with my finger and I remember being surprised that it was cold.
Cal had woken me up later that night moving around in the room.
He made small noises when he tripped over things.
I was afraid of his reaction and afraid of losing him, and so I never told him I had seen that message.
He never knew I knew.
The glowing clock face under the TV on the wall said five o’clock in the morning.
I had woken abruptly and at first I thought that there must have been some sound or something to wake me, but I lay still and there was nothing. Cal was burning hot beside me and his arm was pressed against mine. His body twitched a little with dreaming.
Gently I moved away from him toward the edge of the bed. He rolled over and I stopped, and then he settled back and I moved again. I sat with my feet planted on the floor and looked at him sleeping.
I knew it was time to go.
I didn’t know how long I had known that for, without admitting it. Some time anyway.
I had felt it and I hadn’t wanted to look at it but I had known that sooner or later I would have to.
This way round was better.
I felt about on the floor for my backpack and my hands moved over it and I picked it up and put it on.
I was still wearing all my clothes.
The door of the room creaked a little when I opened it and a line of light came in from the corridor, and grew, and became a wedge with the opening of the door. I stood for a moment in the doorway and looked back in at the room. It was full of the heavy sounds of Cal’s breathing.
I closed the door quietly behind me and walked down the corridor to the stairwell.