JESUS HAD JUST LEFT Chicago, bound for New Orleans, when the girl beneath James stopped moving. Lit by dancing candlelight, she cocked her head as if she heard something over the second cut of side 1 of ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres, an album James would never have expected a girl to choose as sound track for a little late-night, bars-just-closed coupling. The walk from the bar to her garage apartment through the charged quiet of dark neighborhood streets, the way she laid him down on the tightly made bed while she went about lighting the half-dozen windowsill candles, the sound of the vinyl slipped from its sleeve and soon after of the arm falling, the needle scratching, the first bass-heavy notes of an album from James’s youth: James thought maybe he might be in love.
He did not hear the phone ringing. He kept up with Jesus, who was working from one end to another and all points in between. Aw, take me with you Jesus, sang ZZ Top. James was working his way down the Mississippi, muddy water turned to wine, when he finally noticed that Erin, beneath him, had stopped somewhere south of Chicago.
She had not gone rigid, as she might had there been someone in the room with them; she’d slackened a little, rocked gradually to a stop. Her eyes were wet. James heard the gurgling phone. It seemed to be buried under a towel. Boyfriend calling, he surmised. He knew squat-all about a boyfriend, but then he knew squat-all about Erin except that she’d just started waiting tables at the restaurant where he washed dishes and she was a music theory major and she was big-boned sexy, and over the fall and winter James had shed twenty-two pounds. At five ten, 137 pounds, he now favored flesh. He knew nothing about any boyfriend because he assumed it was her job to declare such a thing and it wasn’t something he’d ever think to ask of a girl who’d invited him back to her garage apartment after twenty minutes of making out on the muddy lawn of He’s Not Here, any more than he’d have thought to ask after any communicable diseases. Neither yesses were likely to make his night, which back then, late summer 1981, was about as far as his headlights shone in the dark.
“Do you need to get that?” He regretted these words as soon as they escaped, thought they sounded annoyed, clichéd, or both.
“I guess,” she said, but the phone rang three more times, muffled but persistent, before she made an effort to slide out from under him.
He watched her fish the phone from beneath the drift of clothes they’d peeled away and stretch the cord so that it reached into the bathroom. Of course she would do this — whoever called at 3 a.m. would likely require privacy. But it hurt a little. Or maybe he wanted it to hurt. He conjured a flash of jealousy or, rather, of bruised affection, which perhaps he could maneuver to sleep with her again.
She was gone for so long that James flipped the album. ZZ Top sang about a whorehouse in a Texas town called La Grange, where they had a lot of nice girls. Just let me know if you wanna go. James lit a cigarette from a candle, thumped ash into the bottom of his cowboy boot and, when Erin did not return after five minutes, figured he ought to just take off.
He was stretched across the sheets, reaching for his jeans, when the bathroom door opened, and then stopping to crank the music up so loud the window glass hummed, she had pinned him sideways across the bed. He pulled Erin down to him and while kissing her silently promised never to leave.
Afterward, the uneven candlelight made his temples hurt. He wanted another beer. He said, “There’s just something about a garage apartment.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, I mean, they have this aura. Sort of romantic, sort of tree-housey?”
Erin got up and went to the bathroom, leaving James alone to consider his desperate appraisal of garage apartments. When she returned he lifted the covers up for her, but she stood above him, biting a fingernail on her left hand. Her right arm dangled. James could see that her mouth was twisted, as if she were sucking on her lip to keep from saying something.
“My dad died,” she said.
“Oh, wow. I’m sorry.”
“That was his wife on the phone.”
James sat up. “Wait, you mean now? He just died?”
“You think they’ll be okay at work with me taking a few days off?”
“Of course,” said James. He reached out for her hand, the useless one, but she stared at the wall above his head. He could not say why, but he felt like he’d remember that arm, the way it hung, forever.
“Man oh man. When’s the funeral?”
“Monday, I guess.”
James tried to remember what day it was. It was summer, he went out every night after work, everyone did, you closed the restaurant and then went to a bar or to someone’s house, no real reason to know the day of the week. He knew he had the weekend off. After a few minutes he figured out it was Thursday night, technically early Friday morning.
“How will you get there? I mean, will someone come and get you?”
Erin said she guessed so. She said it so morosely — as if having to be fetched for her father’s funeral were the saddest part of all this — that James, because he knew she did not have a car (she rode a pea green, wide-tired Schwinn with a milk crate wired to the handlebars; he’d used the bike as something trivial to talk about when he’d moved down the bar after work and took the stool next to her), said, “Well, I could take you.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. Because she had to, he knew. You have to say certain things, especially to people you just slept with. But she never once commented on the prominence of his rib cage, on the way his jeans drooped off his ass, his belt wrenched way past factory holes, buckled into ones he’d punched himself, crudely, with a screwdriver. She did not mention the sharpness of his hip bones, which could easily bruise anyone who came even wondrously into contact with them. She did not ask if he was sick. James was thankful enough not to want her to repeat the things that rote lovers awkwardly repeat.
“You have to work?”
“Nah, I’m off this weekend.”
“I’m sure you had plans.”
She wasn’t crying. She seemed a little distracted but not terribly upset. Maybe she was in shock. He thought about the way she’d come bounding back to bed after getting off the phone with her dead dad’s wife (not, obviously, her mother; not even her stepmother), how she stopped to crank the music up, the things they’d done to each other before she said to him, My dad died.
“I can cancel them,” he said.
“They weren’t all that big?”
Now she was making fun of him. This was good — at least she’d veered from the script — but it was also, well, weird. Though he wanted to tell her that his ode to garage apartments was sincere, that he could love her just as much for where she lived and how she traveled to and from her cluttered, candlelit tree house — pea green, wide-tired Schwinn — than any of the more common and less interesting reasons people clung to. He wanted to say, Let’s just not go through all that this time. Let’s just up and skip it.
“They were medium.”
She laughed out loud at this, which did not make him uneasy as he attributed it to nerves.
“Just let me take you,” he said.
“You don’t even know where my dad lives.”
“I figure you’ll let me know once we get on the road.”
She mentioned a town on the coast.
“Just let me go home and get some stuff together.”
“In a minute,” she said, lifting the covers and sliding in close and warm next to him.
BACK AT THE HOUSE James shared with friends from his student days, evidence of a late night cluttered the porch, the living room, the kitchen. An unidentified boy lay cocooned in a sleeping bag on the couch, dirty blond bed head, cushion-roughened cheeks, his mouth opened as if his jaw, in sleep, had come unhinged. Noticing the sweat on the boy’s brow, James shook his head in halfhearted disgust, went into the kitchen to make a thermos of coffee for the road. Out the window, a water tower bearing the insignia of the university rose in silhouette against gray sky above the trees, reminding James of his own father, angry at James for not finishing his degree.
Listening to the coffee drip, James decided to call and cancel, then a second later wondered if, just in case she asked him to stay, he ought to pack his interview suit. He’d have to stuff it behind the truck’s seat so she would not see it. He whispered some things to himself in time to the dripping coffee: Just let me know if you want to go. Let’s up and skip all that.
As she climbed into the truck he studied her face for signs that she’d been crying. She appeared both exhausted and organized. She’d brought her bicycle, asked if he could tie it down in the bed so that it would not slide around.
“I don’t want to have to depend on people to take me everywhere while I’m down there.”
James nodded, though he wondered, Will she ride her bike to the funeral? He pictured black limousines, a line of old southern lady Buick 225s, her green Schwinn sandwiched between them. He added it to the list: garage apartments, Tres Hombres, rides her fat-tired beach bike in the funeral procession.
He wasn’t comfortable with the silence that overtook them out on the highway. He told her twice she could sleep if she wanted, but she just rooted through his tape box, ignoring the weepy acoustic side of James’s personality, the Joni Mitchell and the Dylan and the Leonard Cohen for louder, raunchier choices: Lou Reed’s Rock N Roll Animal, a Mott the Hoople album he only played once a year. Maybe she was trying to keep herself from sliding into despair. He kept quiet until they hit the flat, sandy tobacco fields southeast of Raleigh. The low roadside swamps made his ankles itch, made him anxious.
“Well, the seventies are over,” he said.
She had one foot on the seat, the arm holding her cigarette elbowed on a knee. He noticed it was the same arm that had appeared so forlorn hours earlier.
“Yeah, like a year ago,” she said.
“Taking a while to sink in, I guess.”
She rolled her eyes and appeared to wince.
“I mean, aren’t you glad?” James said.
“Why should I be glad?”
James shrugged. “It just seems like we got gypped. I mean, the sixties were crazy and all this important shit went down and on either side are these really gray decades where basically nothing happened.”
Her laughter was so sharp-edged that he decided to pretend to be joking. “You know?” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think about time like that.”
“How do you think about time?”
“Certainly not in decades. It’s like you’re scared you’re going to be tested or something. You sound like a history major.”
“Sociology.”
“But you dropped out, right?”
“I’m going back next semester,” he lied.
“I might have to take some time off myself now,” she said. He assumed she meant because of her dad.
James said, “Listen, if you want to talk about it.”
“About what?”
“You know, your dad and all.”
“I imagine I’ve got plenty of talking about it ahead of me. Can we stop and get something to drink?”
“Of course,” said James. He took the next exit and pulled into the rutted lot of a low wooden store. Inside, the bowed floor creaked. The air smelled of something at once rank and sweet. Brutal late-morning sun poured through faint rectangles on the plate glass, the ghosts, James guessed, of posters announcing church bazaars and turkey shoots. In the back they hesitated by the drink cooler, which buzzed in a way that suggested its inefficiency. He started to make a joke about it, but her father had just died.
Erin slid open the door and grabbed a six of Tuborg Gold. She must have noticed the look on his face because she said, loudly, “You want anything?”
He shrugged and reached for his own six-pack. After all, he had no mourners to greet, no funeral to attend. He followed Erin to the front of the store, but halfway to the register she stopped at a bin and fished out a pair of thick-soled orange flip-flops.
“What size shoe do you wear?” she asked him.
He did not tell her that he could not wear flip-flops, that they hurt his feet.
“Eleven,” he said, and she grabbed a gray pair. At the register she told the clerk, “I’m paying for his beer, too.”
When he protested, neither Erin nor the clerk looked his way. He was aware of his skin-and-boneness, self-conscious about his cheekbones, the way the word emaciated seemed to pop into people’s vocabulary the minute he showed up.
“Y’all have a nice trip,” said the cashier as he handed Erin her change. Back in the truck, James realized that it was just like a trip to the beach. The music she chose, the way she kept her window open and surfed the breeze with her hand, the beer, the way she sat with a bottle between her legs, her flipflopped feet on the dash, her knees against her chest, eyes hidden behind her shades. Yet she’d suffered the kind of loss they say you never get over. James had never had anything happen to him, really. Well, he’d flunked out of school. He’d shed twenty-two pounds. What caused it was not a mysterious illness but this crazy love. He’d loved this girl so hugely that he’d lost all his friends over it. She’d been gone a year and his roommates had just recently started treating him the way they had before he’d met her. A week after she left, she wrote him a letter that said I would die for you, and two weeks after that she moved in with some guy she knew from her English class and would not answer his phone calls. When he called her up at her job, she treated him as if he was harassing her. “Whatever happened to I would die for you?” he said to the dial tone after she hung up on him. At the time, James thought it was the worst thing that would ever happen to him, but sometimes it seemed nothing more than someone saying what they felt at the time.
“You’re not wearing your flip-flops,” she said to him.
“I would die for you,” said James.
These were the words that came to him, and so he said them, aloud, on the way to Erin’s father’s funeral. He wasn’t sure why — because this was what he felt at the time? He’d damn near been ruined by something someone said to him that she felt at the time, and this wasn’t even the worst of what he’d just done. Bringing up dying at a time like this?
Erin looked over at him, her eyes slitted behind her shades. Then she looked the other way, out the window, and drained her beer, and opened another.
“I’m sorry,” said James, “I meant. . .”
“No, don’t,” she said. “Don’t talk. Just put on the flip-flops I bought for you.”
He steered with his knees in order to slip off his sneakers and socks. When he had the flip-flops on she reached across and patted him on the knee, as if to say, There now, all better.
• • •
THEY’D EACH HAD three beers when the air began to smell of sea. They hadn’t been talking. Erin had cranked up Sticky Fingers and they’d sung a warbly duet to “Wild Horses.”
Her town announced itself in fits of fish camp and motor court.
“Tell me where to turn,” he said.
“Take the beach road,” she said. “I want to get wet.”
“I mean, aren’t they expecting you?”
“I’m always late,” she said.
She wasn’t lying. She’d been late to work twice and had only been working there a couple of weeks. In fact, Monroe, the manager, had told one of the other waitresses that Erin wasn’t really working out. Now’s my chance, James remembered thinking when he’d moved down the bar to ask her about her bicycle. It was only last night, but it seemed months ago. He wondered how long ago it seemed to her. She’d said she had a different concept of time. Plus — he had to keep reminding himself of this — her father had died. Trauma does strange things to the clock. When he’d been sick, when he’d done nothing but lie in bed and sweat, that intolerable stretch between late morning and three o’clock, when he could hear the school buses lumbering up and down the streets, the squeals of schoolchildren, the sounds of his housemates drifting in from class, had lasted days.
At the beach she directed him to a motel called the Atlantis.
“I assume you’re staying the night at least?” she said.
“I haven’t really thought that far ahead.”
“I was under the impression that you had the next decade planned out.”
“I mean, I guess I ought to hang around and sleep off the beer.”
“You always start your sentences with ‘I mean.’ What do you mean?”
James swallowed. He felt unduly perturbed by her question, which after all was innocent enough. He got out of the truck without answering and slapped his way across the hot parking lot, the flip-flops sliding off his feet.
Inside the room he went to the bathroom and stayed there for a while, allowing her time to change into her suit. He knocked before he came back out — it seemed the right thing to do — but Erin, in answer, said, “Who’s there?”
“I’m coming out,” he said, and he heard her laughter, and then the door opened and she stepped naked into the bathroom and pushed him against the sink.
They lay in the sagging bed listening to Casey Kasem on the clock radio. She got up during a commercial and put on her suit. When James got up to join her, she said, “Do you mind if I go by myself?”
She stuffed her clothes into her backpack. “I’ll just ride my bike home. It’s just across the bridge, on the waterway.”
“Oh, I don’t mind dropping you off, I mean . . .”
“I know you mean everything you say,” she said, and he remembered telling her he’d die for her, and he felt the itchy heat of shame prickling his skin, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them she was standing by the door staring at his bony torso. He knew she was wondering what was wrong with him. He could tell she wanted to ask.
“Okay, well,” he said. “Hey, I’ll be around if you want to drop by.”
James got up and fished the extra key from the pocket of his jeans.
“I’m not going back till tomorrow sometime, I mean, I know you’ll be busy with your family and all but . . .”
“I’ll see you later, then,” she said, and she was gone.
He woke hours later to the sound of her key in the lock. It was dark out, the room lit only by streetlights strained through drapery, and James heard car radios, shouts, the night noises of beach towns. He was hungry and his head throbbed. He asked Erin what time it was, asked if she slept — after all, they’d been up for more than twenty-four hours before she left for her swim — but she did not answer him. She was stripping off her clothes and then she was alongside him in bed.
Maybe it was fatigue, or perhaps it was patience, even compassion — his desire for her to get what she needed, to provide her with some fleeting bliss in this difficult time — but James lasted forever. They kept at it for well over an hour. It wasn’t the most satisfying love James had ever made, but it was different from anything he’d experienced. More physical, less self-conscious. It wasn’t violent or rough, but there was a force beneath their movements, a purpose far beyond the kind of pleasurable distraction from his problems that had led him to take a seat next to her on the barstool and, a couple hours later, stumble up the stairs to the garage apartment.
In time he figured it out: She wasn’t there. She was trying to show up. Beneath him was only vapor, only her aggressive need to materialize. It was not desire, really — at least not desire for him — but it wasn’t desperation, either. Somewhere between the two. It left him feeling weightless. Weightlessness was not something he needed to feel. He cataloged what usually motivated the friction of lovers — desire, vanity, ego, athleticism. Love, fifth and lonely on his list. He lay worrying in her arms as she slept and realized, too late, that it had to do with grief.
When he woke again she was gone. He put on his swimsuit and went out to the beach, which was empty save for a few older women seeking shells. James realized that it was Sunday, that he really should be leaving soon, but he couldn’t very well leave without saying good-bye. He went for a quick swim and spent the rest of the day sitting by the pool, watching the room, scanning the beach road for her bike.
Near dark he called the restaurant and asked to speak to Brian, the line cook.
“Where you been, man?” said Brian. “I tried to find you last night, but your roommates said you disappeared.”
“I’m down at the beach.”
“Wish I was. Hey, that one chick’s dad died.”
“Which one chick?”
“The one you were talking to the other night. Where did y’all get to anyhow?”
“I walked her home.”
“Yeah, well, her dad died. Least she said so. She’s going to get canned, man.”
“Because her dad died?”
“Monroe said he was going to fire her anyway.”
“Why?”
“I guess because she sucks at waitressing? Plus, she’s weird, right? Hey, aren’t you supposed to open tomorrow? You better get your ass back up here, man, he’ll fire you, too.
“Save him the trouble,” said James. “Pick up my check for me, will you? I’ll call you in a couple of days.”
James hung up the phone and sat at the edge of the bed, considering his role. She needed a ride; he’d given her a ride. She needed him to be there, in bed, so that she could prove something to herself that he knew had nothing at all to do with him. Maybe it had little to do with her father’s death. He thought of a term he’d heard his father, who sold insurance, use: a preexisting condition. We’re all carrying around these preexisting conditions, James decided, which are irritated or soothed by the next thing we happen to come into contact with. The thing was, he wasn’t sure if he was irritant to her, or salve. He only knew he felt purposeful enough to put on his interview suit and the gray flip-flops she gave him and wait for her return.
But she did not turn up for hours. Restless, James took a walk on the boardwalk. His interview suit was a couple of years old, bought when he was twenty pounds heavier; in the ocean breeze it flapped around him like a sail. James sweated in the light summer wool. He could smell his dress shirt, sour and yellowing around his armpits. The flip-flops hurt his feet, but he felt he wore exactly the right outfit for a man in his situation. The suit suggested compassion, sympathy, even commitment. As for the rubber shoes, well, he’d wear them until they blew out, as flip-flops inevitably did, and then he’d save them forever in a closet bottom, a reminder of the lightness of love, the low cost of its initial investment, the frivolity and giddiness of it even in the face of trauma and hardship.
In an oceanfront, open-air bar, James sat drinking orange juice in case the funeral was today. He did not want her to come for him and smell vodka on his breath. He angled his stool away from the view of the ocean, toward the boardwalk, so that he might see Erin if she came searching for him. The half drunks who came and went in groups, wearing bathing suits and T-shirts with the names of other beach bars, stared at him derisively. James wasn’t bothered, as they all seemed so clueless, so uninitiated into this world he’d discovered through motives that were admittedly less than pure. Or were they? James faced the boardwalk, trying to decide if he was wrong to move down the bar that night, if this fullness he felt, this new purposefulness, were merely the result of chance, rather like a lottery, or if he had been delivered to Erin, if their respective needs — her grief, his illness — had magnetized them.
Well, what did it matter now? Here he was, at the beach, drinking orange juice as the sun set over the arcade facing him, redeeming in its final wash the very skin it had ravaged all day long on the faces and arms of the drunken boardwalk throngs. He decided just to trust this moment of sun, though he was out of work, low on funds, dressed like a homeless insane preacher.
Because they didn’t hold funerals at night — at least James had never attended one — he motioned for the bartender to add a little vodka to the juice. All day long he’d been attracting drunks, who seemed drawn to his eccentric dress, as if anyone dressed this way at the beach had a story to tell. He’d waved them off until his third screwdriver, after which James found himself surrounded, slapping high fives with sweaty strangers, giving hugs to girls who went by their initials—B. J, T. J., even an O. J.—who wore bikini tops and cut-offs.
“Well, the seventies are over,” said James.
“We’re up to 1981, preacherman,” said a squat black guy who had taught him an elaborate, multipart handshake. “You been on vacation?”
“I’m just saying, I’m glad to be shy of that decade. Aren’t you?” he asked one of the bikini-topped girls.
“She just takes it one night at a time,” said B. J. or T. J. about her friend, who smiled easily at everything James said, as if his attire made him seem unusually amusing.
It was late when he returned to the room. He was drunk enough not to notice Erin, curled up under the covers, the air-conditioning cranked high.
She was watching him undress. She laughed a little at the clumsy unknotting of his tie.
“Where’ve you been?” Her emphasis on the you suggested playfulness but underneath he detected need.
“I didn’t catch the name of it,” he said. “Everybody there seemed to go by their initials, though.”
“That could be any place down here,” she said. She reached for his hand and yanked. He fell across her, but she flipped him over and climbed on top. It wasn’t as good as before. A problem surfaced with the rhythm; at first it felt syncopated, but soon it turned disastrous, like the ragged drumbeat of a high school marching band reverberating off buildings blocks away. James tried not to notice her frenzied eagerness to finish.
The sheets were soaked with sweat. They lay under the roar of the window unit. She appeared to be in oxygen debt. His own breathing was shallow and emphatic.
James, when he caught his breath, said, “Am I your lover?”
She said, “My dad did not die. He called me an irresponsible, spoiled rotten little bitch, though. He told me if I bounced another check he would see to it that I never got another penny from him as long as I live.”
He put his face to her side and listened for her heartbeat but heard only the air-conditioning unit, struggling to keep them comfortable. He kissed her rib cage, thinking of those things he liked about her: garage apartment, beach bike, ZZ Top. After the girl he’d loved left him, James had stopped eating. He thought she’d see him and understand how hurt he was and come back. It took over a year and twenty-two wasted pounds — it took until this moment in the sticky darkness — for James to realize how hard it was to love a crazy person.
“I fucked up,” she said.
“It’s okay. People fuck up. Also, people die.” He raised his head up, like a periscope. “I mean, you know that, right? Someday your dad’s going to really die.”
He felt the jolt of anger in her tightened muscles. “You said you’d die for me,” she said. “What were you thinking?”
“I guess I was thinking that maybe, at that moment, it was sort of true.”
She was silent. A different kind of silence from her — not sullen or bored, but rigid and anxious.
He got up to get dressed. In the dark, he found his way into his suit pants, his dress shirt. He stuffed his tie in his pocket and toed the gritty carpet in search of his flip-flops. A match scratched against a strike pad. She lit her cigarette and stared at him over the low flame.
“Okay, all right, you’re my lover,” she said to him.
“No,” said James. “I’m just an overdressed tourist.”
“There are worse things,” she said.
“Not in a beach town. Listen, I’m sorry I said that about dying for you and all.”
She smoked her cigarette. “I guess we’re even. Being that we’re even, do you want to get back in bed?”
He wanted to say that the seventies were over. But the seventies, or the end of them, meant nothing to her, and James understood that anything he said would be weighed against his one regrettable promise. He stood awkwardly by the door, knowing he had to say something, for despite what he’d whispered so many times in his head to the girl who had left him — you can’t just go around saying things — ames understood that was exactly what people did. They traded Chicago for New Orleans, muddy water for wine. They stood, like him, with their hand on the doorknob of a rented room, the air conditioner circulating words they fell back on like breath.