In the morning, Cindy lay in bed with damp sheets stretched to her chin. This was a compromise position, as she had managed to simultaneously freeze and burn up throughout the interminable night. Her muscles ached, especially her lower back, which felt like it had been stood upon for a long time by a very fat person. Vance emerged from the shower, wearing a towel around his waist, as though to put his impressive physique on display.
“Good morning,” he said to the room, and Cindy responded with a few quadriplegic blinks. He turned to Richard, on the other bed, who also didn’t say anything, who also had the covers pulled up, in his own private misery of renewed consciousness. She had inherited her father’s constitutional inability to be friendly or productive until about three hours after waking. Even at the best of times, when she wasn’t withdrawing from pharmaceuticals, she felt every morning like her joints were filled with Elmer’s glue.
“When’s the thing?” Richard asked Vance. “And where?”
“Denver, eight o’clock. We should leave soon.”
Cindy groaned. Richard turned to her and said, “You good to go, champ?”
“No.” She got up and went to the bathroom. She ran hot water in the bathtub, stole two of her father’s lorazepam, dry-swallowed them, and climbed into the water. As she did, she noticed a thin thread of blood between her legs. She was both irritated at having her period and relieved; it had been two months since she’d had one, and it also helped explain and excuse how truly horrible she felt. She unwrapped a complimentary soap, tossed the wrapping paper at the adjacent trash basket, and washed herself with the little cream-white seashell. When she got up, a single fresh drop of blood was suspended for a moment in the rusty water, spinning, before it helixed into a pink cloud.
The desk clerk looked mortified when she asked, but nonetheless provided her with gratis sanitary napkins, tampons presumably violating some stricture of Joseph Smith’s. In the car, Vance drove, and Richard again rode shotgun. Cindy again sat in the backseat, which suited her fine. Although it made her feel like a child being ferried around against her will, it also absolved her from talking as she glazed out at the land passing by. There was plenty of it to look at—in the open range of southern Wyoming, there was nothing but land to look at—and the air blowing in through the cracked window was cold and refreshing. She was reminded of a family vacation when she was six or so—during an unexpected stretch of relative sobriety and employment, her father had managed to get it together enough to take them down to Mexico. Their ancient Volvo station wagon had lacked air-conditioning, and her six-year-old legs had become almost molecularly fused to the hot vinyl of the backseat, but she’d nonetheless loved every second of the trip. Her parents had bickered their way down I-5, through Orange County, San Diego, and across the border, taking the argument international, but it had seemed distant to her, faint radio chatter as she’d stared out the window.
On I-80, outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a dark quilt of clouds was pulled over the enormous white sheet of the sky, and the temperature fell twenty degrees in ten minutes. Huge drops of rain pelted the car, so large they sounded individually on the roof. Vance took the first exit that appeared and pulled into the gravel parking lot of a diner called, cryptically, Pie O’My! Inside, pink neon lights, Frankie Valli, and the smell of rancid grease waged a terrible, pyrrhic battle for sensory dominance. A teenage hostess, chewing gum with her mouth agape, led them wordlessly to a booth by the window. A miniature silver plastic jukebox affixed to the wall next to their table featured tunes like “He’s a Rebel” and “Surfin’ Safari.”
“What is it with people and the sixties?” said Richard. “I remember this stuff. It was already bad the first time around.”
“Hmm.” Cindy was looking at the menu and intently not listening.
“I don’t know why this country always has to enshrine the past. People call baseball the national pastime, but really it’s nostalgia. Anything that happened over twenty years ago automatically becomes worthy of a statue. People’s memories are way too short. Christ, Richard Nixon got a parade and library. He should have been shot out of a cannon into a brick wall a foot away.”
She glanced up. “What are you babbling about?”
“They call it the past for a reason, you know? It doesn’t matter.”
“Hmm.”
Outside, the sky seemed to release all of the water it had been holding at one time, and the car wasn’t even visible where it was parked, thirty feet away. Cindy and Vance sat across from him, and for the second time that day, the awful thought occurred to him that something had happened between them. Were they sitting a hair too close? Did Vance’s knuckles brush her arm when he reached for a napkin? Did she glance at the boy while looking out the window? And who cared anyway? Obviously, he did—that was the answer, he knew—but the caring came in a reflexive way he recognized as being absurd on its face. He hadn’t been there when Cindy had gone on her first date, hadn’t provided a single word of advice or warning about the hazards of unprotected sex or the awfulness of teenage boys, couldn’t have named any of her boyfriends at any age—was he really going to start now?
“You two stay up late last night?”
“What?” said Cindy.
“You look a little tired today.”
Cindy gave him the Hate-Eyed Death Stare, as he thought of it, a terrifying, familiar look of murderous incredulity—familiar because he’d seen Eileen do it a lot over the years. But come to think of it, Carole had done it as well, so maybe this look was one of those things all women were just born with, like having exquisitely hyperacute emotions and no governing control over them whatsoever. All of the blood in Vance’s face seemed to have traveled to his pimple-dusted cheeks, which looked set to erupt with embarrassment. They were rescued by the heavy approach of a waitress with the body of a retired battleship and a name tag reading BECKY FANASTIC. The pad she clutched in her left hand seemed to be just barely preventing her from attacking them with the pen she clutched in her right. “You ready?”
“What kind of pie do you have,” asked Richard.
“We don’t have pies.”
“You ran out?”
“No, we don’t carry them.”
“But the name of the restaurant.”
Becky Fanastic drew several quarts of air into her ample, irritated bosom and said, “It used to be a famous pie shop. Was bought out by the current owners eight years ago. They hung on to the name. You ready?”
She took their order and left, and Vance hobbled away to the bathroom without comment. Richard and Cindy didn’t talk until Becky Fanastic returned with their coffees. Stirring in an endless column of sugar, Cindy said, “You just can’t resist, can you?”
“Resist what?”
“Being an asshole.”
“It’s hard for me,” Richard said, “try to remember that.”
“What’s hard for you?”
“Not to be an asshole. It’s hard not to be one when you are one.”
“Way to let yourself off the hook.”
“How does that let me off the hook? I’m putting myself on the hook for being an asshole. I’m putting myself on the asshole hook.”
“No, you’re copping to being an asshole, which allows you to continue acting like one. It’s a preemptive excuse for your behavior, since no one can expect a real asshole not to behave like an asshole. But then people have to give you credit for at least admitting you’re an asshole, right? Basically, it lets you off the hook of behaving like a normal person. Normal people act like assholes all the time, but when they do, they feel bad about it and try not to act like assholes in the future. They don’t evade responsibility by saying, ‘Well, what do you expect, I’m an asshole.’ ”
“Right,” he said, “because they’re not assholes.”
Drinking his coffee, Richard realized that he felt better than he’d felt in months. Not good—let’s not go crazy—but not ostentatiously bad, either. Unwretched. He glanced at his daughter. She looked absently over her shoulder as lashing fingers of rain streaked the window and left behind little scuttling beads. For a moment, everything seemed to be poised in a kind of equilibrium. It was a feeling to which he was unaccustomed; like most drinkers and writers (two circles slightly off-center, a Venn diagram like the coffee-mug stain on his napkin), he was used to experiencing life in binary terms; it was either the World of Shit, in which everything was already predetermined, mitigated, compromised, contingent, and comprehensively fucked, or else it was a numinous paradise of possibility and unknown pleasures. But in between is where most human life exists—small victories, small failures, the hard, slow effort people make, straining blindly upward like green shoots through pavement, easily trampled. He took hold of Cindy’s hand across the table.
“What,” she said, startled. She tried to pull away, but he held on.
“Listen. I have a proposition for you.”
“Oh, God.”
“Why don’t you come live with me in Arizona for a little while?” She stared at him in silence but didn’t lunge at him with her knife or run screaming out of the restaurant, which he took as encouragement. “You don’t have to say yes right now. You don’t have to say anything—just hear me out.”
“Okay.”
“I got some money for the book. Not a ton, but enough. I’m set up right now, for the first time in ever. I bought a house. It’s ugly and in the middle of nowhere. But it’s big and there’s a room you could stay in. There’s a TV and a fridge you can put food in. I have a dog. He looks like me, unfortunately. But the point is, the place exists, and you could stay there while you got on your feet.”
“Richard—”
“Hold on. I’m not going to give you a lecture, but we both know you haven’t been doing so hot. I don’t need to know the details. I don’t want to know the details. But I know you shouldn’t go back to where you were. I know you need to regroup and start over somewhere, and Phoenix wouldn’t be the worst place for that. I mean, it’s a shithole with no water, but there are jobs and people and colleges and so on and so on.” She drummed her fingers on the table and again looked over her shoulder out the window, and he could see she was upset, though which particular variety of upset, he couldn’t tell. He’d always been bad at that: he would go to his grave without correctly reading a female mood. “I know I haven’t been there for you in the past, but I feel like I can be now.”
“You could have then, too.”
“That’s true. But that doesn’t mean I can’t help you now. Think about it.”
She turned to him, seemed about to say something, and stopped, shaking her head. Instead, she rummaged in her pocket and produced two quarters. She dropped them into the jukebox and dialed up “Crocodile Rock.”
In the bathroom, Vance tried and failed to rearrange his genitalia into some kind of tolerable position. The erection he’d had for the last ten hours was so rigid and insistent that it was like a steel Maglite jammed sideways into his jeans. He was worried about it, having seen warnings in Viagra commercials about prolonged erections potentially causing blood clots. But even imagining a blood clot dislodging from his painful member and killing him was not enough to soften it one micrometer. As he’d driven, he’d tried visualizing other things against the empty screen of the Wyoming badlands, but none of them had worked: his mother, wasted and empty eyed under her sheets like a pile of rotten sticks; his dead grandmother in her faded floral nightgown with the lacy collar; a decomposing bird someone had tossed into his locker in sixth grade. The boner’s equanimity through this mental montage made him fear for his sanity. Sitting in the booth next to Cindy, grimly impaling his own stomach for ten minutes, he finally couldn’t take it anymore. He’d tuck-and-hunched his way across the parquet floor, and thereupon did he find himself masturbating in a bathroom stall at Pie O’My! outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming.
Someone had scratched the words JEWES LOL into the brown laminate of the stall divider next to him. He closed his eyes and was back in the bed with Cindy. No, he wanted to think about before that, from the beginning. How she’d been lying there in the far bed staring at golf replays on TV with the sound off, the room already filled with a concerto of Richard’s wheezing snores. How he’d brushed his teeth and laid a blanket on the floor and turned the light off and how, a minute or two after he’d shut his eyes and was just starting to doze, he felt fingers brush his shoulder. How his heart whipsawed in his rib cage and for a moment he’d kept his eyes shut, not wanting to open them and see the errant edge of the blanket touching his chest. How he’d opened them to see a hand dangling down, her eyes staring over the edge of the bed, pupils barely visible in the flickering dark.
He climbed up into bed with her, hoping she would do everything because he had no idea what came next. It was like deplaning in a foreign land, one for which he had no phrasebook—one in which he didn’t even know what the language was. To his relief and disappointment, but mainly relief, she didn’t try to initiate sex—however it was you did that—and, instead, she held him against her, burrowed into his thin, broad chest as deeply as she could. She was like a blind, nocturnal creature desperately trying to dig its way underground, and she pressed herself against him so hard that he coughed. The snores issuing from ten feet away momentarily faltered, and Vance went rigid with fear. When they resumed, he relaxed into her.
He put his arms around her waist, tentatively feeling the marble curve of her lower back. The sensation of it under his fingertips was so intense that his leg juddered in response. Even more intense was the dawning reality that she was allowing him to move his hand to her hip, down the long curving line of her thigh and back up. The thought of her entire body, or most of it, anyway, being suddenly available was like having a gift of almost-unimaginable value bestowed on him. It was as though some eccentric billionaire’s Edenic preserve, previously fenced off and viewable only at a great distance, had suddenly thrown its gates open to the public.
Over the course of the next hour he roamed the grounds, gradually building to a thorough—perhaps overthorough—investigation of her breasts. She pulled minutely away from him, and he realized he’d been fondling them too long, delaying the next thing. With a sense of urgent, excited dread, he slowly moved his hand down her side, over the soft hard curve of her pelvis and underbelly, to the damp crevice where thigh met crotch. Here, it was warm and dark, and again he felt like a colonial explorer pushing timidly into some uncharted, humid jungle, expecting to be bitten or stung, waiting to die at every moment. Of embarrassment. He didn’t know what to do, but there was only one path, and it led down. He moved past the thin elastic of her underwear, through a thatch of surprisingly bristly hair, and was edging toward a soft unknown when she pulled his hand away.
“Not now,” she’d whispered, rolling over. “Soon.”
He retrieved his wayward hand with disappointed relief and spent the night pressed against her back in a delectable agony. Soon: the word echoed softly in his ringing head. The slippery sibilance of the initial s; the voluptuous, gratified middle; the gentle moan of the final n. Plus what it meant, the actual woman pressed up against the concave mold of his torso. He would fade off for minutes at a time, only to be reawakened by his pounding heart, the movement of her skin against him, and, eventually, the thin light of the desert dawn entering the room. Finally he’d opened his eyes, knowing the night had fully passed; he did the same now, the act completed.
He hunched forward in the stall, shame and relief sprinting neck and neck toward the finish line, but his erection dwindled against his leg, exhausted and unable to continue the race. He wiped off and washed his face in the chipped plastic sink. An inadvertent glance in the mirror shocked him; he had managed to avoid looking in a mirror the last couple of days and therefore occupy his awkward body with less self-consciousness than usual. The night before, he’d been able to imagine himself as an actual man, not the gaping, pustular scarecrow in front of him cowering at its own image. There were no paper towels in the dispenser, so he wiped his wet hands on his jeans and exited back into the restaurant.
Returning to strained silence at the table, Vance could only assume Richard had said something awful, and Cindy had told him to shut the fuck up, or some variation on that general sequence of events. The old man hunched proprietarily over his shit-on-a-shingle, and Cindy stared over her coffee cup out the window, where the rain had slackened to a strafing monsoon. The neon yolk of Vance’s eggs had already half coagulated, and he ate them quickly. As he did, her leg brushed against his, and he hardened again.
The reading in Denver was at a bar called the Seventeenth Street Tavern. It was packed with the usual motley assortment of veterans, bookish readers, middle-aged women, random spectators, and celebrity seekers eager for proximity to the aura of fame, however minor it might be. Vance watched from a spot in the back of the room, by the bar, drinking free PBR from a pitcher—he was part of Richard’s crew, as the amiable and heavily tattooed bartender put it. The bartender had also warned him not to drink too much, saying, “Altitude, bro. You lowlanders can’t handle more than about two beers.”
Vance had drunk more than about two beers. Hoping to impress Cindy with his devil-may-care attitude, he’d poured himself cup after cup of the rancid stuff. She had countered with her own, more authentic devil-may-care attitude, sitting by herself at a table across the room. At first, he’d gotten into the role of spurned lover drinking at the bar, since, in books, drinking at bars is the kind of thing spurned lovers often do. It gave him a momentary thrill when he realized that a spurned lover was what he actually was, sort of. But he’d drained the pitcher and gotten into another one and now felt more like a victim of head trauma than a spurned lover, like his face was a sucking wound stuffed with cotton and gauze. Nonetheless, he continued pouring beer into his mouthhole, in hopes that eventually it would lift his spirits the way it was supposed to according to advertisements and country songs. So far, it was just making him feel leaden and stupid. It was the first time he’d gotten really drunk, and he vowed never to do so again while pouring himself yet another foaming cup.
Every now and then, through the crowd, he caught a glimpse of Cindy’s blonde hair. He thought of the pink scalp underneath, the perfect circle hidden from everyone’s view. He already felt he knew her better than anyone had ever known her, though he knew this couldn’t be true. No, but he was capable of knowing her better than anyone ever had. She glanced back at him, seemed to shake her head, and returned her attention to the stage. The combination she managed, of tough and doomed and okay with being doomed, yet vulnerable and really in need of help she didn’t know she needed, could not have been more intoxicating for Vance if it had been calculated by a team of behavioral scientists.
Onstage, Richard read something, a chapter in which something or other happened. It was all the same, thought Vance. Drinking and death and mistakes and regret and something something something. They march through the jungle and something happens. Something about hope, some kind of chance! Shoots a gun or something. Talks to someone, then something something something, and finally he realizes something.
Vance cupped his hands and shouted, “On the Something Day, the Lord said ‘Let there be something,’ and there was something and he saw it was really something!”
Richard paused and identified Vance as the heckler. “Take her easy there, Vance.”
“You okay?” said the bartender, hoisting his considerable eyebrows.
“No.” Vance looked out at the crowd, at all the people with their upturned faces, and silently despised them for blocking his view of Cindy. He poured the last of the pitcher into his cup and drained the warm froth in one swallow. Oh no. If he could press a button, he thought, he would vaporize all of them. He imagined the button on the bar, pantomimed pressing it. He would do anything for her, he thought, and it was a lucky thing, because she needed lots of things done for her. He’d felt her shaking the night before and seen how she was shivering during the drive, though he’d kept the car jungle hot for her benefit. She’d poured sweat during the night, but he thought—hoped—it was the closeness of the room and their physical proximity. Her hand, when he briefly held it while Richard napped, was moist and cold. He wasn’t stupid. He knew she was detoxing, probably from the pills he’d seen her take at the apartment.
He also knew she was avoiding him, that she felt uncomfortable about the night before. Richard had probably said something. Fucking Richard. All Vance wanted, at that moment, was a chance to demonstrate his worth to her, his loyalty. He caught a glimpse of the blonde hair again and thought, Use me. What sweeter life could there be, than to be put to use by a woman you love?
“Dulce et decorum est pro domina mori,” he said to the bartender, and motioned for another pitcher. The bartender took it away from him and shook his head. Vance wagged his finger back, solemn.
He loved her, yes. He knew it was stupid, didn’t care. There were worse crimes than being stupid; being stupid was, in fact, not a crime! His heart sang. He felt something real and true for her, and he couldn’t—wouldn’t—be cynical about it. He rose to go to the bathroom, and the alcohol in his head seemed to be released, like the trapped torrent in a water-park ride, in a noxious flume that roared to his extremities. Whoa, look out, someone said. Timber. When he looked up, the bartender was over him, pulling him up toward the ceiling, walking him to a bench in the back of the bar. People were watching and laughing. “Being stupid is not a crime,” he yelled.
“Amen,” called a bearded boy, lifting a beefy arm in solidarity.
Cindy craned her head at the commotion in the back of the room, then returned her attention to the stage. Not that she was listening to what Richard read—she couldn’t have cared less about that. But she was thinking about his earlier offer to help. A little late, buddy, she thought. She had no intention of enabling this tardy impulse toward fatherhood, now that he was good and ready. Thanks, but no thanks.
Still, help in one form or another was not without its appeal. Las Vegas, she knew now, was no longer an option. Even if she could have gotten her job back after missing two shifts, she wouldn’t have wanted to. Her future lay before her like stretches of the Wyoming badlands they’d driven through earlier—a huge, monotonous plain uninterrupted by any points of interest or comfort.
She knew this feeling was at least partly due to the withdrawal she was currently going through. Her father’s anxiety meds had provided a brittle shield for most of the drive, but they had worn off. Her back ached and her temperature fluctuated between icy, clattering chills and pinpricks of fire that flared from her groin through her armpits. But the feeling of complete desolation was by far the worst part. She’d gone through pharmaceutical withdrawals before, but was still surprised by the strength and severity with which this detox had bludgeoned her. The night before, she’d held on to Vance like a sailor in a typhoon clinging to the mast: he was approximately as tall and shaped the same way. She knew he liked her, and despite her brain fog had been aware of his adolescent attention trained on her throughout the day, but it had been all she could do not to get sick on herself in front of her father.
The money she still owed loomed in her mind, the Kilimanjaro of debt that would follow her wherever she went next. The top of her head itched, and she could almost visualize the single, naughty hair growing into the empty cavern of her skull, which she would isolate and set free later that night. Perhaps, she thought, you should really kill yourself this time and not just idly think about it.
Unable to sit still, she pushed back through the crowd and stood at the side of the bar. In the back of the room, Vance was slouched unconscious on a bench, his head lolling. She signaled to the bartender, whom she’d immediately identified upon entering the bar as a possible dealer and definite user; he ambled over with a sly smile, and she realized he’d probably identified her as a type, as well.
“I help you,” he said.
“I’m not from around here,” she said, leaning in. “I was wondering if you have any kind of a hookup.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Something to take the edge off.”
“I’ll make you a drink—that usually does the trick.”
“Come on.”
“Tell me what it is you’re looking for.”
“Downers, mostly. Painkillers.”
“You’re in pain, huh?”
She imagined picking up a beer bottle and smashing the guy in his smug fat face with it, and then when he fell on the ground, kicking him a lot. It would feel very good, might, in fact, be just what she needed in the pain-relief department. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Lots.”
Vance awoke in confusion, but Richard’s voice droning in the front of the room reoriented him. Seeing Cindy talking to the bartender reoriented him further. But what were they doing? The guy walked out from behind the bar, and she followed him to an adjacent door that they both entered. Vance rose, and his gorge followed. With his left hand on the wall for balance, he lurched to the corner, then turned and made it the twenty or so paces needed to bring him to the door.
The room was a large supply closet that contained cases of beer and kegs, and also the bartender and Cindy snorting something off a shelf up their noses. They turned; Cindy held a rolled-up bill in her hand. The bartender said, “Employees only.”
“Leave her alone,” said Vance. It was meant to sound tough and serious, but the words rolled out of his mouth in a drawl that sounded equal parts southern and mentally disabled.
The guy laughed. “I didn’t force her in here, boss.”
“Just leave her alone.” No other words came to mind, so he decided to rely on these, the way an inept foreign sightseer relies on a single greeting or expression of politeness to see them through every situation.
The bartender looked at Cindy for help. “Vance,” she said, “why don’t you go lie back down out there. I’ll get you up when we’re leaving.”
“Leave it alone,” Vance said experimentally, gesturing at the small pile of crushed-up pill residue on the piece of cardboard behind them.
The bartender sighed. “Come on, bro. Get out of here, what are you going to do?”
It was a good question, and one for which Vance didn’t have an answer. He felt like a child interrupting adults in the middle of something he didn’t understand, which was more or less exactly what was happening. His childish response was to reach out and swipe at the cardboard—a cloud of white pharmaceutical dust momentarily hovered in the air and then was gone.
“Goddamn it,” the guy yelled, and he pushed Vance against the wall. He bounced off and used the momentum to uncork a wild right hook that caught the guy square in the face. Why, then, did Cindy yelp? Why did she drop to the ground? The bartender, completely unscathed, looked down at her. He shook his head and said, “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said, holding her jaw.
“I’m sorry,” said Vance. “Oh God, I’m sorry…”
The bartender pulled her up and said, “Would you please get him the fuck out of here?”
“Come on, Vance,” she said, holding him by the shoulder and attempting to maneuver him out the door. The cardboard Coca-Cola box on the rack across from him was stained with its own syrup. One gleaming, viscid drop hovered in the air, suspended on an impossibly fine thread. It’s love, he thought, my God, love.
They were in the car, driving. Reds and yellows and blues smeared by outside the window, the primary tones of city night. Vance turned to her and said, “I was just trying to help.”
“My hero.”
“I’m sorry.”
Then they were moving through the hotel lobby, leaning in an elevator, entering the room. She put him in bed and turned the TV on. The room spun crazily. She was gathering things from the nightstand, zipping a suitcase shut. She kissed him on the forehead and straightened. “Bye, Vance,” she said.
“Wait,” he said, managing to prop himself up on his elbows.
“What?”
“Can we talk?”
“About what? I don’t think so.” But she sat beside him on the edge of the bed, looking away from him toward the TV. He stroked the wisps at the back of her head that had pulled free of her topknot. They floated in the draft of the air-conditioning like the delicate tendrils of some underwater plant, damp toward the roots from the sheen of sweat coating the nape of her neck.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. I’m starting over.”
“In Denver? Now?” On the TV there was news footage of tanks rolling through an ancient city of white-orange sand, past blackened husks on the side of the road. The images, a reminder of the greater world outside his fuddled mind here in this dark room, clarified his thoughts and sobered him a little.
“Why not?”
“What about Richard?”
“Tell him I said good luck. I left a note.” She pulled away to stand again, but he held her arm. “What,” she said again.
“Don’t go,” he said. “I love you.”
She laughed, a note that was mocking but not entirely cruel. “What a sweet weirdo you are. You don’t know me.”
“I do.”
“You don’t know anything. I spent years watching people at their worst—guys who probably had wives upstairs sleeping who would hire prostitutes, people with plastic convention tags who’d blow through their family life savings in thirty minutes at the blackjack table. No one knows anything about anyone.”
In an impulse he didn’t fully understand and regretted as soon as he’d acted upon it, Vance pulled the scrunchie off her topknot; the pink of her scalp was just visible before she whipped her head around, reaching for her hair.
“What in the fuck.”
“I know you.”
The expression on her face was not what he would have hoped for in response to these intimacies. It was a look of incredulous disgust, an ugly look, close to a sneer but containing less amusement, and it concentrated years’ worth of disappointment and anger and various other emotions, none of them good, in its crenellations and divots and furrows.
“I can help you,” he said, helplessly. He was reminded of a song by that title that his father used to play all the time when he was very young. I can help, the man sang, over a background of horns, mariachi guitars, and breathy female ahhs, pleading his usefulness: If you got a problem, don’t care what it is, if you need a hand, I can assure you this—I can help, I got two strong arms, I can help. It would sure do me good, to do you good. Let me help.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“What?” He pushed back on the bed, away from her.
“My father and you, and all your help help help. Who do you think you are? Some knight on a quest? Sir Vancelot?”
“Stop it.”
“Here, let me help you.”
In one motion, she threw her right leg over him and pulled up her skirt. She scrabbled at his corduroys, and he was pushing against her, but she was pressing down against him with an irresistible, inhuman strength. She got him free of his pants and with a little gasping exhalation forced him inside her. With one hand flat against the headboard, and the other brushing away the protesting tangle of his arms, she ground hard, back and forth. His eyes, he realized, were closed. When he opened them, her face was cast in shadow, and he was glad for that.
He shut them again, submitting to what was happening, which was easy, since he couldn’t believe it really was. In the darkness of his mind, he again saw the clogged tributary of boats, felt his own small vessel bob beneath him, buffeted by innumerable wakes. Then with a nearly imperceptible slip, he broke free of the flotilla and picked up speed, pulled along by a great warm current that held the middle of his boat in its grasp. Faster and faster he sped, past the shoreline with its ruffled outline of water grass and cattails, the current and river and his own boat becoming a unified whole, a single vector speeding him toward the water’s mouth, a boundless ocean.
A shockwave of fresh disbelief dispelled this vision and lent him the strength to force her off, beside him in the bed. Just in time—he twisted away, shuddering. She got up and grabbed the suitcase, turned the TV off, stood there a moment. He closed his eyes again.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and she was gone.
She took two quick lefts to escape the immediate vicinity of the hotel, then turned onto a tree-lined side street. Suitcase trailing her like a faithful dog, she clicked over a bridge spanning a small river, and on the other side found herself entering a commercial district tailored to the tastes of young, white professionals. Irish pubs and Mexican cantinas fought a vicious land war for retail space. Young men, mostly wearing the same uniform of khakis, oxford shirt, and white hat, clowned past, drunk on a Friday night, happy. And why shouldn’t they be? The future, for the moment, was theirs.
The moment was hers, as well. She felt the smooth plastic cover of the checkbook in her pocket. Richard’s checkbook, taken from the nightstand. Hers now. She wasn’t sure how many checks she would have to write to get on her feet here, to start over and get the debt collectors off her back, but she was pretty sure Richard’s ass could cash it. She wouldn’t get caught—she thought of the book in her suitcase, with his autograph on the front page. And she was very sure he wouldn’t turn her in.
He owed her, after all. The last ten years had been, in various ways she was only just beginning to understand, a response to him. She didn’t blame her father directly, but his large presence lurked behind many of the compulsions and tendencies that had conspired to bring her where she was. Her addictiveness, perpetual dissatisfaction, fear of abandonment and desire to be left alone, the hole in the middle of her person that cried out with the forsaken intensity of a supermarket orphan for something or anything to fill it up one more time—it was not hard to see Richard’s influence on these traits, and many others, since he had all of them himself. For better or for worse, and mostly worse, she was her father’s daughter.
He wanted to be there, he’d said. He wanted to help—fine, he could help. He could help her start a new life, a free life: free from addiction, free from debt, free of bad relationships and broken promises, free of the lifelong resentments and grievances that followed her like the suitcase trailing her now. You can be there for me, she’d wanted to say in the diner, but not on your terms—not when and how it’s finally convenient for you, you fucking asshole.
She pushed into a slavishly Anglophile yuppie gastropub—the kind that featured Arsenal F.C. memorabilia and sold wild-caught fish and organic chips for sixteen bucks—and approached a clutch of businessmen standing around. As was the case with all men in groups, they resembled twelve-year-old boys at a school dance, emanated the same awkward hormonal throb. She assumed their loosened ties were meant to signal that work was done for the week and it was playtime, baby. In here, it’s always happy hour.
To the youngest and best-looking one, she said, “Buy me a drink.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because it’s my birthday.”
The men laughed. The guy said, “I’ll need to see some ID, of course.”
She pulled her ID out of her purse and showed him. He said, “Yesterday.”
“Close enough, I’m still celebrating.”
He shrugged and said okay and bought her a fruity shot, the taste of which made her hate him even more. She drank it, then left without a word, to the amusement and consternation of the hooting douchebags behind her. Richard had forgotten her birthday again, she considered—maybe that had something to do with all this, too.
The Friday-night crowd swelled around her as she neared downtown—in front of the façade of a large art deco building, a stage was set up on which a bunch of paunchy white dudes mangled “Whipping Post.” People pushed past, and she rejoiced in it, becoming part of the throng, the multitude. Faces like the ones she’d watched on camera for so many years moved by her, each one frozen for a moment, pitched back in laughter or anger or dull confusion, and she wondered what someone watching her from above, looking at her face, might think. Would they know anything, be able to divine something about her, her life, or her mistakes? No. No one knows anything about anyone, she thought, and for the second time that day was struck with the feeling that she could start over—that nothing, in fact, would be easier. Denver, why not? She dragged her suitcase into the hot jostle, for the moment immensely pleased.