The guest speaker flies in on the last day of July, and you are there to meet him. You watch the speck of his plane approach from behind the terminal’s glass wall, which boils against the palm of your hand as though an invisible fire rages just outside. The sun is so powerful you can see through your thumb, which looks old, though you are young. The jet taxis hugely in, sending its thrilling, screaming roar up through the carpet. When you’re in your windowless office, only a few miles from here, typing memos for Dr. Mime, you never, ever think about this airport, the people strolling through it, the woods and swamps spread out around it, or the enormous blue sky. A massive wooden octagon a few feet from you houses four TVs, each facing in a different direction, each showing Oprah Winfrey, whose upbeat, reproachful gaze addresses those who have not taken sufficient charge of their lives. A woman in Oprah’s audience yells, “Honey, if he did it to me, he’s gonna do it to you!” You put your hand on your shoulder bag, feeling the hard shape of the stolen tape recorder through the corduroy. Actually, it is not exactly stolen, but you cannot help but feel like a criminal. It is an old feeling, the feeling that you are trying to get away with something, something for which you will surely be forced to pay, eventually, though in this case you don’t even have a plan, you’re not even sure what you’re trying to get away with.
The recorder is Dr. Mime’s; he speaks into it as though he is a secret agent, holding his lips and teeth still so that you cannot make out certain words and have to type blank lines in their place, as he has instructed you to do in such an instance. Cliff and Linda need to help me find my _______ that I misplaced the middle of last week, you type. My garden? My bargain? My Darlene? It is impossible to tell. To ask Williamson: Were we interested in whether anyone’s been looking at the litigation papers that are filed with _______ ? He uses surveillance equipment on you as well: cameras in the corridors, a computer that keeps track of your phone calls, who knows what else? He sucks Tic-Tacs all day long, keeps cartons of them in your office’s file cabinet—you can even hear them clicking against his teeth on the memo tapes—but he never offers a single Tic-Tac to you or anyone. And although he owns two or three Cessnas, his hobby, he never offers to take anyone for a ride, though he makes the mailroom guy hose down the planes on days like Veterans Day, when there is work but no mail. You yourself have tutored little dyslexic Barry Mime in fractions, though you are a part-time employee, no benefits, and Nancy, a customer service operator, always takes the Mime Mercedeses in for their emissions tests. And now it’s your job to chauffeur the guest speaker, who will speak at an executive function to which you are not invited.
To all employees, night custodial staff NOT excluded, you typed, earlier this week. Topic: Suspicious individuals in your neighborhood making inquiries of you or your family regarding MimeCo or Dr. Mime. Last night a suspicious individual was making inquiries regarding me at the residences of my neighbors. This is possibly related to the controversial nature of our upcoming visiting guest speaker. Naturally, I followed up as appropriate. If such an individual contacts you by telephone or in person, it would be helpful if you could tell them, “I don’t have time to talk now, but please call me or return tomorrow at this same time.” Thank you for your assistance in this matter. This is the unfortunate side of business and we are going to pursue it in a ________ fashion. Richard fashion? Bitchier fashion? Denatured fashion? Mature, that was it, you typed it in—and then, without even thinking about it, you switched off the recorder and dropped it into your bag, which sat slumped between your ankles on the floor. When Linda came to the doorway of your office a minute later, your stomach turned over.
“You are red,” she said. Linda sells Mary Kay and always comments on your appearance, pushing you to let her give you a makeover, but even thinking about confronting your face matter-of-factly like that causes you shame. You purse your lips and duck your head whenever you have to look into a mirror, hanging on to certain illusions. You cry at night, sometimes, like anyone: Oh God, oh God, I’m so lonely, I’m so lonely.
“Coffee makes me flush,” you told her.
She gave you a look that said, “You are crazy.” Sometimes she just says it aloud to you, so you know the look. “Well, hand it over,” she said then.
You just looked at her.
“Your time card,” she said. “Girl, wake up! It’s Friday!”
After she walked away you felt the sharp edge of the recorder with your instep, and then you cut it out of your thoughts altogether, as though Mimes clocks and cameras and computers might pick up its presence there.
Driving home you had an itchy scalp, a sign of guilt, your mother would have said, and in fact you also had the sinking sense of inevitable wrongness that you’d always felt around your mother. When you were a child your toys would disappear if you left them lying around on cleaning day; if you asked when you would get them back, she would say, “When I feel like it.” Sometimes when she was out you would visit your Dawn doll in her bottom dresser drawer, but there would have been no pleasure in taking it out and playing with it. And there was a moment that came right after the first chorus of “Killing Me Softly,” a record you’d won at a birthday party, that made your heart jump for years whenever you heard it, ever since the day your mother shouted your name at that moment in the song because she’d just discovered something else you’d done wrong, something you’d thought you’d gotten away with but which she had just then discovered.
But your mother was, or claimed to be, an unhappy woman, and when you complained as a teenager about how cold she had been, how cruel, she argued that it was only because she felt things so much more deeply than others. “Every morning I used to zip you into your parka and kiss you goodbye,” she said, “but then one day when you were in second grade you pushed me away and told me not to kiss you, and I felt so hurt, so rejected, that I never tried to kiss you again—what else could I have done?” No warmth blossomed between the two of you after that explanation, but at least she had offered one. Mime does not seem to feel that he needs any, and perhaps he doesn’t, being only a boss and not a mother.
The guest speaker pushes through the turnstile. In person he barely resembles his book jacket photo; he does not appear to be brooding or contemplating danger and loss. His head seems smaller. He wears dark woolen clothes, inappropriate in the heat, and his hand is delicate, scrubbed and vulnerable-looking on the strap of his carry-on bag. You step forward to introduce yourself and, without planning it or even knowing you’re going to do it, you use a fake name. “I’m Alex Trotter,” you say. Alex Trotter is a boy you slept with a few times in college, just after your mother’s death—he is, actually, the last boy you slept with. That was two years ago, and his name bursts out of your mouth as though of its own volition, as though it has waited long enough.
The guest speaker smiles photogenically and says, “Alex,” and you feel a little dizzied. A memory shoots back to you: when you were seven or eight, just after your father left you and your mother for his girlfriend in Norway, your mother explained to you that in real life princesses did not wear fancy gowns, were not necessarily pretty (Look at Margaret and Anne, she said, who were homely)— princesses looked, she said, like anyone, like everyone. The next morning, without planning it, you told the other children on the bus to school that you were a princess, explaining in the commanding, reasonable tones of your mother that there was no way of knowing a princess by her appearance alone. It was not exactly a lie; if there was no way of knowing, weren’t you as much a princess as a princess nobody knew was one? And though you remember almost nothing firsthand about your father—just the outlines of his kind blond face, his low voice singing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” him pressing his handkerchief to your face, saying, “You have a booby in your nose”—you remember the moment after your princess lie as perfectly as though it happened yesterday: you gazed out the smudgy bus window, changed and desperate and ordinary all at once.
“I’m all yours, Alex,” the guest speaker says. His smallness suddenly seems calculated, fierce, like that of a ferret. He writes about outrages in other countries, chemical leaks and medical scams and robber barons—“America’s angriest writer,” a blurb on one of his book jackets says. His wife has the name of some foreign, toxic flower; you read it in the dedication of his first book and thought, Of course, how perfect.
In the front seat of your mother’s old Fury the guest speaker asks polite questions about the town. You answer a few truthfully—“I can drive from one end to the other in eighteen minutes,” you tell him—but then you begin to make things up or steal information from the lives of your friends, who are mostly secretaries or assistants like yourself. You invent and describe ordinary pets and relatives, small adventures and ambitions and defeats. You have two hamsters, Hanky and Panky, you say, and one time you found Siamese twin baby turtles in your backyard; they could only walk in a circle and you named them Yin and Yang. You tell him your mother is still alive, is in fact the most popular dentist in the county, the only female dentist, too, and you mention that you heard that in Japan it only costs fourteen dollars to get a root canal. While you talk, you notice in the rearview that the couple in the car behind yours is having an animated conversation in sign language, and for a moment it seems that you too are making shapes in the air with your words, producing and erasing commonplace things like a magician manipulating scarves and coins and wristwatches. The silver windows of the Hilton flash just off the highway, but you whiz past. “Room’s not ready yet,” you lie.
“That’s all right,” the guest speaker says. “I’m on vacation. Why don’t you be my guide, show me what you do for fun?”
You smile in a measured way so that he not recognize how easily charmed you are. For fun you order Szechuan beef sometimes. You have accepted without complaint or question, though you hadn’t realized you accepted it until this moment, the absence of men attempting to charm you. But why? you wonder now. You feel anxious, like a guest arriving at a fabulous party several hours late—what will be left for you? “There’s a bar I once went to over on the Panhandle,” you tell him. This happens to be the truth. It is the only excursion out of town you have taken since your mother died—you met with your mother’s lawyer, signed papers, turned down his offer of dinner, and drank one gin and tonic alone at this bar. “They were so drunk and Southern there I could barely understand a word they said,” you say. “This man with a sunken-in face came up to me and said something that sounded like ‘Flip knot’ over and over. Then he went back to his stool and said, ‘If you see something you want, go for it,’ until the barmaid yelled at him and kicked him out the door.”
“Perfect,” the guest speaker says. “Love it.”
A moment later, he says, “So what do you think of human blood and suffering? Ever seen any?”
“What?” you say.
“Do you ever feel removed from it?” he says. “You know, being alive and all?”
You glance at him, but he looks like anyone, like everyone—there is no way of knowing a madman by his appearance alone. In his last book, titled Uh-Oh, he wrote about some children in Brazil who found glowing radioactive powder in a public dump and smeared it all over their faces, playing clowns and phantoms. How angry is he, exactly? you wonder. You think of the suspicious individuals making inquiries, you picture the guest speaker’s graceful angry hands around your throat. Traffic veers off an exit behind you as you speed recklessly ahead; the deaf couple—if they even were deaf—have vanished. Humdrum moments from your recent life crowd you, demanding payback. My God, you think, if I live through this, I must get busy.
But then he is unwrapping a stick of gum for you and apologizing. “I’m uncouth,” he is saying. He is charming again. You take the gum, and a deep breath. “I am highly visible,” he says. “I have a wife, children. But that’s all on the outside, you know what I mean?”
He is speaking again in sensible cliché, and you nod with relief, feeling your hair swing, the pretty hair of Alex Trotter. The real Alex was not kind. He asked, a day or two after your mother died, what you planned to do with your life, and when you told him that you had no idea, he said, “Well, get cracking.” His tone of voice reminded you of the way your mother would stand on the porch, holding open the screen door, waiting for the cat to decide whether or not it wanted to go out, saying, “Would you make up your alleged mind?”
“I’m forty,” the guest speaker says, “and I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never been in the hospital, never been to a funeral. Have you been to a funeral?”
“Yes,” you say, “but it didn’t seem real. It didn’t make anything seem any more real. Isn’t that what funerals are supposed to do?” You borrowed eyeliner from one of your mother’s friends in the funeral home’s rest room after the burial. Two chigger bites on your ankle itched furiously all through the service. The next day you bought a can of apple juice from the machine in your dormitory’s lobby, a can that had probably been placed in the machine before your mother’s death. Everything seemed impartial, improbable. “There was no human blood,” you tell the guest speaker.
He laughs. “You seem like a tough girl, Alex,” he says. “Do you want to wallow with me?”
“Maybe,” you say, smiling your new, offhand smile, Alex’s smile. And maybe you do. Maybe this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Go for it, you imagine your sexy blond father saying, though you know he is no longer blond, sexy, or even in Norway. You want for a moment to tell the guest speaker your real name, the real facts of your life, but, you rationalize, if what you are covering up is nothing of worth, nothing of much substance or purpose, you’re not really lying, are you?
Perhaps you know the story of the hundred-year-old woman and the ice cream, your father wrote to you one summer. The woman was asked what she would do differently if she could live her life over again, and she said, “Smell more wildflowers, and eat more ice cream.” The point is that if you go through life lying to please others, you are giving nothing to them or yourself. And if you lie to please yourself, the best you will ever have to call your own is a moment. You might as well be a ghost: you will move through the world, but you won’t be living. These are important principles and you are not too young to understand them.
You were fourteen and had just come home from the beach. Your friends Tutti and Chrissy were with you, and all three of you were excited because at the beach you had met some long-haired older boys who told you they were the members of Cheap Trick. The boys had stood in the surf a little farther in than you, grinning and beckoning, flexing their skinny chests, the waves darkening their cutoffs, and you and Tutti and Chrissy had come close to them, but not too close. You high-stepped through the rising and falling water, scared of stepping on a crab, not wanting to get too wet, picking at your bikini bottom and your hair. The conversation was not about whether they were telling the truth, as it would have been if you were all boys, but about whether or not you believed them. “I would know,” you told the boys, but you didn’t want to know, and it was not required of you to decide one way or another, since of course once you decided there would be nothing to talk about. This went on for hours.
The dim beige hush of your living room afterwards was stifling, but then you saw the letter, unopened, on the floor beneath the mail slot, and your face burned as though the sun, the boys, had sneaked in after you. You bent over to pick it up and your heart rushed as though you were stealing something. Your mother was still at work. “Who do you know in another country?” Tutti asked, and you said, “A guy,” and would tell them no more.
When your mother came home, however, you did not bother to remove the letter from the hassock on which you’d left it. She had given you permission so many times to keep secret your correspondence with your father—“or anything else you feel should be private,” she often added—that there was no point. He had only sent two or three letters, total, and never one like this—seven handwritten pages from a full-sized legal pad, talking about life and your mother and happiness—but after Tutti and Chrissy left you could not escape an odd sense of letdown, and the last thing you felt like doing was rereading it, or writing a letter back. What you wanted to do, and what you did, was to lie on your bed in the dark late, late into the night and imagine again the boys on the beach.
You take one of the county road exits and angle the creaking car onto a dirt turnoff that heads into plantings of young pine. A bleached wooden sign at the road’s entrance says SNACKS—1/4 MILE; otherwise, you have no idea what to expect. You have never been out this way. A breeze through the open passenger window brings you a whiff of strong pine and the guest speaker’s insidious cologne, probably purchased for him by his wife. You bump along in silence, taking little sips of the disturbing scent, until the road finally opens onto a dirt and gravel clearing containing two metal-sided sheds. One is set back in the high weeds and is the size of a doghouse or bathroom. The other has a door that looks like it’s woven of chicken wire, propped open against the back of a large, napping goat. The guest speaker says, “I love that.” You step over the goat, your heart pounding.
Inside are two short old women in jeans and flannel shirts and tractor caps, and, miraculously, the man with the sunken face. They are all sitting at a flimsy-looking, vinyl-topped card table, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer out of juice glasses. “You got to have that little flap, or your goddamn trowel sticks,” one of the women is saying. A cartoon of a locomotive bouncing out of control down the side of a mountain flickers on a small soundless TV on the bar, and a busy munching noise comes from behind the counter, down near the cement floor. You see the black and white hoof of another goat, like something on a keychain, poking out beside the leg of the bar stool on the end. “You looking for the sink?” the old woman talking about bricklaying says, and the sunken-faced man says, “Where you from, baby?”
“The bathroom?” you say.
“The sinkhole,” says the old woman. “Fifty yards down the path. You pay here.”
“Hey, where you from?” the sunken-faced man says again.
“How much?” the guest speaker asks the woman.
“Two dollars apiece,” she says.
“What’s down there?” he asks.
“Well now, you got to pay to see,” she says.
The sunken-faced man stands and strolls over to you. He stops when his collapsing face is just inches from yours, the yellow whites of his eyes gleaming beneath pale irises. “You know where you’re from?” he says.
“Yes,” you say. He can’t possibly know your name; you’re sure you never told it to him on the Panhandle.
“You’re from your mama,” he says. ‘You’re from your mama.”
“Thank you kindly,” the old woman says to the guest speaker, taking his money. They are smiling at each other like friends.
Gnats fly into your mouth as you and the guest speaker follow the path through the brush. The goat from the doorway has waked up and is trotting a few feet behind you, making worried human sounds. Every time you turn to look at it, it stops and turns its long, sad face away, as though embarrassed. At the end of the path the ground dips and runs into the very round, very dark pond, which looks hundreds of feet deep. Moss hangs from the cypress, breaking up the glare and shading a line of seven sleeping turtles at the water’s edge. “Ah,” says the guest speaker. His small hands move down his shirt, unbuttoning.
“I’ll go back and get us some beers,” you say, blushing. He just laughs. You turn your back and hear, rather than see, his splash. Back in the little bar you interrupt the women again. “You can only do it two ways, honest or dishonest,” one of them is saying. “You turn your hand, bring it down the line, and it’s boogety, boogety, all fun and games.” The other woman nods with satisfaction before they turn to you to see what you want. The sunken-faced man never looks up from his glass, just stares down into it, shaking his head as though agreeing with something.
When you return, the guest speaker is floating on his back in a patch of sun, his eyes closed. His boxer shorts balloon up around his legs like a tiny life raft. The goat is kneeling shyly beside the dozing turtles, nibbling sand. You wedge the cans of beer in the ground and roll down your panty hose, feeling ridiculous. It seems there should be a way for you to skip from dressed to undressed, traversing shame and fumbling and uncertainty, but there isn’t. At the last moment, you reach in your bag and turn on the tape recorder, thinking, This is the part I want to remember. Of course, there is no way the little machine will be able to record the two of you at such a distance, through corduroy. But you do it anyway. You are naked, but there are still things he doesn’t see, doesn’t know.
The solid cold of the water is shocking. Treading, you feel split in two, your scalp dry and burning and exposed, your body lost in the slow, deep cold. You try to relax, but beneath the surface you feel both invisible and vulnerable, almost itchy. You are afraid of little, sinister things: worms and weeds and biting fish, all of which are down there, sensing you in ways over which you have no control. Let me out, your twitching body seems to say, but the guest speaker says, “Come over here.” Stuck to his cheek is the wing of some large insect, a lacy oval that looks like a third eye, a ghost eye. You paddle closer, and as you do you notice for the first time how blue his real eyes are, as bright and deep as the springs. They are real, but they don’t look real. “Are you wearing colored contact lenses?” you ask.
He smiles his slow, remorseless smile. “No,” he says. “I’m just beautiful.”
“Oh,” you gasp. You cannot shake this coldness, this strange invisibility. Your body lists toward his, desire hurtling through you. But you wonder, Will I even feel it, if he touches me in this cold? And if I can’t feel it, is it really happening?
“You know, even if your mother were still alive,” Alex Trotter once remarked, “she couldn’t tell you what it is you want. You’d still have to figure that out on your own.” He was sitting at his computer, his back to you, programming his resumé into a mail merge. It had been ten, eleven days since the funeral. “Even your perfect daddy couldn’t do that for you,” he said. His fingers never stopped moving, tap-tapping the keys.
“Why are you saying these things?” you said, your face growing numb.
Alex’s fingers paused and he turned his head halfway. You noticed the stack of wrinkles that formed in the back of his neck; they reminded you of TV MagicCards, the man who did the tricks in the commercial, so many years ago. “I’m only saying one thing,” he said, “and I say it because I care: Whatever you’re doing five years from now, you’ll have no one but yourself to thank or blame. That’s all I have to say.”
You stood and walked down the hall to his clean kitchen and opened his cabinet and got down a package of Hydrox cookies. You ate two quickly and dropped one on the floor, crushing it to powder with your boot heel before you went out the back door. The tap-tapping went on and on. “Goodbye,” you called, when you knew you were too far away for him to hear.
What kind of a favor had he thought he was doing for you? Advice has nothing to do with reality, your mother sometimes said. Live your life. But maybe that was just another way of saying what Alex was saying; maybe she and Alex were not so far apart in their views, after all. In the hospital, even, after her heart attack, she was efficient. Get my purse, she said, and You know which drawer I’m talking about, right? The last thing she said to you was, sensibly, “Good night.”
When she died, your father contacted you for the first time in years, a flowered card among other flowered cards, containing, as the others did, phone numbers. He also enclosed a photo of himself and his family: not an action shot, a team of glamorous blondes caught by the camera in the midst of their whirling pursuit of wildflowers and happiness, but four stocky, sweatered people set up against a false cornfield backdrop. On the back of the photo, in a confident, ballooning hand, was written, “Please phone us!” There has been no shortage, these past two years, of people offering you sensible solace, guidance through the real world. And, really, Alex was right: you can’t blame any of them for whatever it is you are missing now. It is not as though you even thought to ask any of them—your mother, your father, Alex, Dr. Mime, Tutti, Chrissy, or anyone—why it was, in their opinion, that people bothered to go on living.
Monday morning you walk through the shimmering glass and leather lobby of MimeCo with the gait of a ghost or movie star. Your forearms, face, and scalp are sunburned, but the sting, disappointingly, is already gone; you keep touching the part in your hair to make sure. The chigger bites you had on your ankle at your mother’s funeral continued to itch for a week—whenever you had a chance that week you examined, picked, and scratched them, dabbed them with witch hazel, pulled off their scabs. When they finally faded you had the oddest feeling, as though they had deserted you.
Two silent, newspaper-clutching men from the promotion department step into the elevator beside you. As the heavy door hisses shut, you notice the lit panel of buttons—someone has pressed them all. One of the men says, “Crap,” and shakes his head. The other, who is shorter than you are and has bad acne, kicks the wall of the elevator with the toe of his loafer and says, “Whoever done that’s an idiot.” Neither man glances your way.
After the men get off, you go seven more floors, standing as though hypnotized through the rising and stopping, opening and shutting. You keep remembering something, playing it over and over in your head—not anything as real or definite as the guest speaker’s sharp, handsome face, but just a moment, a split second in the cool, conditioned dark of his hotel room, before you changed your mind and put on your clothes and went home. All you could see was the blackness, when against your neck he said softly what he thought was your name: Alex. You almost said What? but then you caught yourself, caught your breath, because he wasn’t going to tell you anything, he was simply speaking out loud what he thought was your name. And at that moment you realized you had made the leap, had swung over or past the wrong answer like a girl on a trapeze, that you were not even required to answer, but only to listen to a man who desired you speak your name in the dark. You might not have even remembered it but for the tape recorder, which picked up the word clearly, the first clear word in an hour of muffled rushing and bumping noises, faint, vaguely human sounds, like a record of poltergeists. You’ve erased the tape already, and the recorder’s safe in your bag, ready to return, probably never missed. It may have been, as your father said, only a moment. But it is yours, yours.