By Theodore Wheeler
She looked beautiful, of course. She had a long neck and a small face, lovely gray eyes. That’s why I kept looking. Her hair was wavy from some chemical treatment, and a dull, dull orange meant to be blond. She wore a terrycloth shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. She was really quite common. Modest chest, soft legs, a little bump where her stomach rose. I’d never seen a grown-up look so bored before. She was childish. I thought she was stunning.
There was a toy radio she listened to at her table, a tier below me on the hotel terrace, three patio umbrellas over. I noticed because the radio wasn’t an iPod. It was just a yellow plastic toy with a drawstring that fit over her hand, black rubber grips, and built-in speakers so everyone had to listen to what she played, a political call-in show.
I couldn’t turn away. Her face was round. Baby fat on her cheeks made her look younger than she was. She was nearly thirty, I’d learn. Her skin was firm and limpid as she sipped an Arnie Palmer with lips imperceptibly open.
* * *
We fought on the departing flight, my wife and I, on our way to Atlanta. She would give a lecture about her work to the visual arts students of Emory. We always fought on airplanes, which made the fact that Jacq insisted I fly with her all the more maddening. Air travel set us off. We’re not alone in this, of course.
We lived in Alliance, Neb., and had been packed into a commuter turboprop at the airfield, a plane so small I couldn’t even sit up straight in my seat. I’m bigger and taller than a lot of people, but not so much I don’t usually fit in an airline seat. I had to sit with my neck crooked. It could be that this made me ready for confrontation. But it was Jacq who brought along that fashion rag and let it sit open on her lap. There was a spread about a designer she knew from New York, some Parisian who spent all his time with other people’s spouses in Italy now. He insisted you call him Ampiere—his mother’s maiden name—but his real name was Walt Watson. His father was Texan. Ampiere was a nuisance in our lives. I thought I’d buried the magazine in the recycling before Jacq saw it.
I wasn’t going to say anything about the magazine that enraptured Jacq on the plane. I was going to hold my tongue and let her get this toxic energy out of her system. So what if Ampiere was in a magazine. I was going to be a good husband, restrained, forgiving. I’d affect a touch of whimsy in the way I let my wife go on about an old flame. It only lasted until we were in the air. I couldn’t stomach disrespect then.
“Just look at Ampiere.” Jacq had to shout over the noise of the turboprop. “He always looks good on film, doesn’t he?”
“Have you heard from him lately?” I asked. “Do you think he remembers you?”
“Him coming out of a pool isn’t so bad either.”
I don’t recall much of what I said to her after that, but I remember every word of what she said to me.
“Your job is the problem. A man shouldn’t be home all the time. No one should be.” “After everything, and you still bring that up?” “Oh, Sam. You’re a decent man. Don’t ruin yourself by trying to be clever.”
It was painfully annoying, but such is any relationship. I didn’t think it was a big deal. There was shouting, Jacq’s purse was spilled. A flight attendant had to intervene, some exasperated Amazon who stood over us and glared. Drink service was cancelled.
* * *
I spent the first evening on the hotel terrace waiting for Jacq to return from Emory. My clothes were drenched through with sweat—it was summer in Atlanta, in 2009—and I was thirsty for bourbon and fruit. Jacq was out with the department chair, some art students tagging along, maybe an assistant dean. It wouldn’t be late when she returned to the hotel, shortly after midnight. She’d be pumped up, though, on booze and admiration. She felt her success most tangibly when around sycophants. I felt it too.
My wife could be unbearable when she was pleased with herself—I think she knew this—so it was unfortunate she was such an accomplished woman. She was an artist—wiry strong, lean, all bones and muscle—and very busy. The fees she collected for lectures and appearances provided for our lifestyle, but that also meant she was expected at parties and openings most of the year, in far-flung conference rooms and auditoriums. Her profession demanded she travel. I travelled with her. She needed me to keep her grounded, to talk back. That’s why I had to go with her on airplanes; that, and because she feared we’d die apart. She couldn’t stomach the idea of dying without me.
Jacq was supposed to visit a gallery in Savannah the next day where a collector had bought one of her collages. This was a seminal piece for her, one she hadn’t seen for years, and she was eager to reconnect with it. Jacq’s meme consisted of landscape art she made with tufts of prairie grass and matted buffalo hair. She had a peculiar relationship with her patrons, I thought, because of her medium. Most people knew her from her early work, when she did the sediment record of canyons with menstrual blood and acrylics. The pieces were really quite accurate, in a way. She often overstated line and could have made bolder use of color and space, but it didn’t really matter what I thought. I did product descriptions for a conglomerate of online specialty stores. It was all niche stuff—we rode the coattails of SkyMall—nothing I’d buy myself. The job was done mostly through e-mail and that meant I could travel freely. I didn’t need to work, but I liked having something to do. There’s a thrill in being recognized as good at something, no matter how insignificant that thing is.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand being around people who adored Jacq’s work. I didn’t exist to her admirers. Actually, it was worse than that. They saw me, they knew I was Jacq’s husband, and just wished that I wasn’t there. At galleries, museums, private showings, art schools, universities—it was all the same. Whether they were trendy or rustic, retro or futuristic, queer or confused, they all made vile faces at me, using the tannins of a bitter wine to make it clear I wasn’t wanted. They’re sinister people.
I assumed Jacq messed around with them. She’s an artist, after all, and it was easy to believe in the trappings of that identity. Beautiful, stylish people could be persuasive, young men whose pants bulged, experienced women who did interesting things with their smiles and stroked Jacq’s severe jaw with their long fingers. She might have had flings, spontaneous encounters, maybe in a gallery bathroom while I was occupied at a crowded opening night soirée. It was possible such things happened. Most people would understand how that worked. Jacq had a history, a notorious past her friends liked to reminisce about, a young woman in the city. You can do the math.
When we met, Jacq said she liked me because I was stable. “A nice, trustworthy man,” she called me. It sounded like an insult coming from her.
Sitting out on the hotel terrace in Atlanta that first night, ruminating a neat bourbon, I thought that an affair of my own was a distinct possibility. If Jacq had done it, so could I. I watched the lady with the toy radio stare off into the distance, listening to talk; I worried about what Jacq might do with the assistant dean, or a visiting professor from Lyons, if there was one. There’s something noble, isn’t there, about being the second one in a marriage to stray. If you are the aggrieved and you stand up for yourself, people should applaud.
Part Two
Jacq went to Savannah alone the next day in a hired town car. Riding in cars she managed fine without me. She liked talking to the driver, finding out about his family and where he came from. It’s different than with pilots, who you’re not allowed to see work. With a driver, you can see if they’re paying attention, or if they’ve had a few drinks, or if they’re sleepy. If they’re sleepy, you can chat to keep them awake. Drivers like to chat. They never seem to be from the place where they are, so you can ask how they ended up in Georgia, driving Lincoln town cars. That’s what Jacq would do. She grew up in Ohio, the third daughter of auto workers, and ended up spending most of her life in New York City, painting with her menstruations. She understood better than most how funny life could be.
* * *
I saw the girl on the hotel terrace again that evening. She was at the same table as before. When I asked about her, the waiter told me she’d been there all day. “All week, sir, to be exact. Hasn’t moved as far as I seen. She just sit with that radio.”
She was pale, which was odd for a young woman in that climate. She sat near the rail, dabbling at sauces with raw vegetables, drinking some sour cocktail through a straw. A wispy linen dress hung from her shoulders. She held the toy radio, the draw string loose around her wrist. I asked if there was anyway I could help.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “With what?”
“You seem stifled. Are you all right?”
“Me?”
“That radio, for example. It’s such a strange thing. Something a kid sister would carry.”
“This? It’s nothing,” she said. “Just the news. I like to hear the weather. Though they’re arguing over the school board now.”
“Do you mind?” I asked, scraping a cast-iron chair over the concrete to join her.
She extended her hand. “I’m Anna,” she said. She turned off the radio and dropped it into her purse.
Anna told me she was visiting from St. Louis while her house was under reconstruction. Her husband suggested, and she consented, that it would be more enjoyable for her to take a vacation than wait until the house was no longer a disaster area. He would summon her when the work was done.
She asked if I was married and I didn’t lie—I was an apparent tourist, middle-aged, in khaki shorts, wearing my wedding band. I had a walkers’ physique: fit in some places, not so much in others. I told Anna that my wife was an artist. Anna’s husband worked in government, she said. He wanted to be elected to high office some day. He worked campaigns for principals in the local party now, as many as he could get in on. In fact, that’s how she met him. She’d been an intern for Kit Bond while an undergrad at SLU.
“Wish I could do more for him,” she said, “career-wise. Besides making a family, I mean. We don’t have babies,” she added, quietly. “We’re not as deep of people as we were before, like when we first met.”
When Anna talked about how practically everyone who mattered in St. Louis knew who her husband was and what he wanted, it sounded like she despised him for his ambition. She had a habit of glaring at her hands. She confessed that she had no idea what she was doing in Atlanta.
“My neighbor set up the trip, honestly. Rita came over and used our computer to do it. What did she call this place? Hotlanta?” Anna grinned as she said this, hand over her mouth. “She said something about the heat and how it made folks hunger. My neighbor is a lonely woman, I think. I don’t know why I trust her.”
Anna picked at celery stalks as she talked. She somehow managed to not take bites when she put food to her mouth—she bit without biting through—there were teeth marks in the carrots on her plate. She’d only ordered so the waiter would leave her alone.
We talked about marriage a long time. The good stuff, then the bad, then the qualifications and excuses. Our conversation followed a plot arc. Something happened to Anna, she was emotional, she calmed down, something else happened a few weeks after that, and it wasn’t until later that she remembered the first thing, the original outrage, and by then it was too late for her to do something about it. Her resentment piled up. My stories were the same, structurally. Eventually we turned listless and bleak, hearing about each other’s marriage wounds. They lacked finality. We wanted firm endings and closure, but that wasn’t possible.
Neither of us had been to Atlanta before. We talked about being there. It was something different to talk about, something generic and common, being on vacation.
“I haven’t even left the hotel yet,” Anna confessed. “I took a taxi cab from the airport. I’ve been here ever since.”
I convinced her that we should see some sights together. Jacq would be in Savannah all the next day too.
“We should go to the MLK stuff, at least. I need someone to see it with. You can’t go to things like that alone. People will think you’re up to something.”
* * *
Jacq almost married Ampiere, years ago, a few months before she met me. He backed out before they had anything legalized. They’d been together for years, off and on, friends more than anything. Jacq adored him. She followed him around and let him to introduce her to people. There were blurbs about them in the Village Voice, the New York Post, elsewhere. Ampiere was prone to grand, meaningless gestures. His was the kind of sadism women found charming. Jacq let Ampiere have his way with her. He didn’t want to marry her, however. He made this clear, in a hotel room with a half dozen aspiring male models, then fled to Europe after 9/11 because he was too anxious to stay. To her credit, Jacq didn’t chase him there. She couldn’t hold it against him, I don’t think, his betrayal. She didn’t have it in her to hate Ampiere. If he wanted to fly off to Italy to explore bodies she would let him. Jacq was fine with staying in New York. She had her own occupation, after all.
Even if she let Ampiere go, I don’t think she ever really got over him. That’s why the magazine bugged me so much on the airplane on the way to Atlanta. There he was, in swimming briefs and black sunglasses, with a woman who was too beautiful for him. Jacq’s history wouldn’t go away.
She once went into detail about their sex life, after I dared her to. We were on a hotel balcony in Los Angeles, the night after she met design students at Otis College. It was late and we’d drunk enough to say stupid things. “He’s hard all the time, you know. It never goes away. He fucked me till I bled. He came on my tits. I’d be soaked all over, in both his and mine. We fucked in half the public washrooms of New York, I’m sure.” How could I forget these things? Jacq knew I hated the idea of sex in bathrooms. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t even get hard in those crummy, putrid places, such was my aversion. “He had me go down on him in theaters, in changing rooms; I took his fingers in cabs, on the subway. In restaurant washrooms he entered from behind and came inside me. Old Ampiere. There’s a man with guts.”
She would deny that these things were true later, like such denials could mean something. They meant nothing. We’d never live down that monologue, I didn’t think. Even if the marriage ended, the declaration she made that night, that anthem she sang bitterly and clear, would live on.
Part Three
Anna wanted to take a cab to Auburn Avenue, but I convinced her to ride the train with me. We went to the Atlanta Underground first because she needed to buy souvenirs. We shopped for novelty jewelry and Anna bought a Braves hat for her husband. “I’m sure he won’t wear it,” she said. “He only wears Cards hats and Pujols jerseys. It’s politics.” She bought a tube of M&Ms for no real reason. They were there. After that we bought Coke-floats from a vendor and sat on a rubbery green bench to fish globs of soft serve from cups. Anna took the toy radio from her purse and it set it between us on the bench. “Just so we don’t get bored,” she said.
I told a story from my childhood about how I had to pick up walnuts from the lawn every time my dad mowed. (I don’t know what brought this up. This was peanut country. Why should I think of Connecticut walnuts?) The shells dulled the blades if they were mowed over, so it was my job to collect them in a grocery sack and throw them away. We had a few walnut trees, all mature and thriving. Every summer we’d end up with hundreds of pounds of nuts. They were thick with green rind when they fell, nearly as big as a baseball sometimes, and they leaked a disgusting-smelling black juice that stained my skin. The juice would kill the grass if left to its purpose.
“I hated it so much,” I told Anna. A voice cackled some grievance from the radio, suddenly loud. “But that was my job, every Saturday. Dad supervised from the patio. He’d notice if I missed any, then have me crisscross the lawn with a point of his finger.”
Anna was very affected by the telling of this story. Her face glowed with sweat. “I did that for my dad too,” she said, remembering. “I still won’t eat a walnut unless somebody makes me.”
I was comfortable with women like Anna. I knew what to say to them and how I was expected to behave. I could listen without interrupting. These were things I learned in my old career, when I was a travel agent. I knew what kinds of courtesy pleased bourgeois women.
* * *
We visited Ebenezer Baptist after another train ride. At the back of the pews we stood close and stared ahead, watching tourists photograph each other. I felt guilty being there. The church didn’t mean much to me. It was famous. I’d seen it in movies, on the History Channel. There wasn’t any reason for me to be there, except to be there with Anna. It was different for other people. There were big black families alive with sweat and laughter, some in tears. This was a pilgrimage to them. They dressed in colorful, stiff dresses, in purple silk shirts and black slacks. There was an old man with a white mustache who wore a suit and hat. He leaned on a three-pronged aluminum cane. These people hugged and took photos, ones they would show off to folks at home when they got back, I imagined.
At the Martin Luther King tomb, Anna and I sat by each other on the edge of the fountain that surrounds it, sharing a bottle of soda in the sun. Anna sat with her legs crossed, a skirt floating on her thighs. We stared into the mirrored glass across from us and listened to the rippling water. There were a few people I recognized from Ebenezer, the old man with the cane. Anna talked about her husband again. She was supposed to call him during the day, after lunch, and in the evening after dinner. But she didn’t that day. She wondered if he missed her call, or if he was too busy to notice.
Anna talked about her husband a lot. What food he ate, what clothes he wore, what movies he didn’t care for. She talked about his parents and friends, his sleeping habits. I felt oddly close to Anna when she talked about Jon—and to him too. I didn’t know this man, I’d never met or heard of him, but I was privy to his private details. She told me his shirt size, where he went to high school, the names of his siblings, what he smelled like after wearing a suit all day in the hot summer sun. I wondered if Anna had a pet name for his penis, and if she did, what that pet name was. Did she call it Napoleon, his prick? Mama’s little helper? The long, lazy weekend? The fund-raiser? I don’t know why, but every detail she told me about him seemed to offer some clue as to what she might have called his prick. I fed all the information she shared into the game, hand on my chin, deep in thought, as if this was a code I could eventually crack.
I didn’t really like hearing about him, the game aside. At the tomb, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You talk about him too much.”
“Who? Jon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. It’s fine for a woman to talk about her husband.” I put a hand on her back and apologized for saying anything. I’d merely wanted to interrupt her, I think. “I just don’t care to hear about men I’ve never met. That’s all.”
She fumbled to adjust her sunglasses, turned the toy radio off. She was shaking.
“What will we do tonight?” I asked. “I’d like to drive somewhere, if we had a car.”
Anna let her eyes close and open behind her sunglasses. She didn’t have anything else to say. I looked at her eyes through the dark lenses, and, holding her arms at her sides, I kissed her. Her mouth opened, although she didn’t press back with her lips. I tasted the sugar on her mouth, from the Cokes, and breathed in the chlorine mist of the fountain.
We looked around as if we expected to be caught when the kiss was over. We looked for anyone that had seen. It was just the old black man with the mustache who looked, hat tilted back on his skull, leaning on that three-pronged cane.
* * *
Jacq returned from Savannah the next afternoon. She wanted to tell me about her time with the collector, but I wouldn’t listen. I told her that I’d be staying in Atlanta a few extra days. She would not be. I told her there was a return ticket booked in her name. She’d fly back to Alliance without me. Jacq didn’t care for the idea at all. She threw a fit in the cab, and I had to check her bag for her. It wasn’t until she was in line at security that she finally relented. Jacq couldn’t resist a parting shot, not in an airport. She said she was happy to be rid of me for a few days. “Even if the airplane crashes and I die,” she said, “I’ll be glad to do it alone.”
* * *
We killed time on the terrace the next morning. I knew Anna would be there waiting. She knew I’d come sit with her. We lounged in the patio chairs and ate hungrily from a plate of melon and avocado slices. The air was heavy with smog and vapor, the sun already high. Plants shot up everywhere, broad leafed and waxy. Trees of heaven grew all over the place, at the edges of parking lots, along the roadside, on the tops of hills. You couldn’t stop them, it seemed. They grew too fast to get rid of. They sprouted everywhere.
Anna played her radio that morning. We talked some, but didn’t have all that much to say. We’d seen each other again the night before, for a movie at a mall theater near the hotel. There were drinks after that. We stayed up late talking. I didn’t mention that Jacq went home. Anna didn’t ask about my wife anymore, she didn’t question where Jacq was. It made Anna uncomfortable to think about it. It was easier to talk about her husband, to talk about Jon, since she couldn’t stop. I didn’t mind talking about him then, not at breakfast anyway, since there were open spaces to stare off into, a busy thoroughfare nearby to watch cars. I’d listen enough to respond now and then, although it wasn’t necessary. Anna just wanted to work her mouth. I was thinking about pet names for pricks when I saw a Pomeranian wander out into the thoroughfare. I laughed when I saw it come out of the trees, a bouncing white puff of fur.
There was a neighborhood across the road, behind a trees of heaven clutch. The Pomeranian must have escaped from its yard and found its way to the thoroughfare, drawn by the noise. It looked pleased with itself as it approached the road, the way dogs do when they think they’re getting away with something, when they’re doing something stupid.
I wasn’t the only person on the terrace who noticed the dog. A woman gasped when she saw, then everyone turned to watch what would happen in the heavy morning traffic. Anna spun to look as the Pomeranian was struck by a car. We all saw and heard, the dog caught in the undercarriage of a gray Cadillac and spit out the back to tumble along the pavement. The Cadillac didn’t stop. The cars behind it slowed and bowed around the dog once they saw it heaped in the center lane. Anna wondered why no one stopped. She asked how the driver could do that.
“Maybe they didn’t notice,” I said. She didn’t buy that.
“How couldn’t they?”
Some hotel workers went out to the road and circled the dog. They helped direct traffic and give the appearance that things were under control. No one wanted to touch the dog. The surrounded it and talked. We couldn’t hear what they said. “They’re deciding who will pick it up,” I guessed.
Eventually a man in a burgundy red uniform came out and wrapped the dog in a pillowcase. He lifted it off the road and carried it to the hotel parking garage.
Part Four
We stayed in Anna’s room after that. She turned on the TV. I took my shoes and socks off.
It was three days like that. Anna curled under the hotel comforter to watch basic cable, the air conditioning on full blast, while I typed on my laptop at the black Lucite bureau. I had to catch up on work, but I crawled in next to her when I was bored. She wore pajamas, black and furry, that zipped up in the front. I hugged to her from behind. Anna and I never slept together. I enjoyed her body like I did comfort food, as if getting too much might make me sick. We napped and dozed. I laid my hand on her tummy and felt how soft it was. I rest my head on the back of her shoulder and smelled her hair. Sometimes she reared into me to spoon, but that was as far as it went in her bed.
We hardly even talked. Anna didn’t mention Jon, not after what happened with the Pomeranian. We regressed. She asked questions like we’d just met—which, I realized, was precisely the case.
“What’s it like there, where you live?” Anna asked. “Are there any people in Nebraska? I couldn’t live like that, out in the middle of nowhere. I get the creeps just thinking of all those cows out there, chewing grass.”
* * *
Jacq and I had been married seven years by then. We met in New York and were married there. She’s nine years older than me, from northwest Ohio originally. I grew up in Connecticut, in a banal, middle class neighborhood, but the tiny travel agency I operated was in Chelsea. That’s where I lived when we met. My parents started the agency in the seventies and it wasn’t a bad business. We were a small outfit with regular clients. Then 9/11 happened. Almost all small agencies went out of business the next couple years. We were no different. My parents started the agency; it was shuttered on my watch. Then I started writing product descriptions for the online novelty mall. Then I married Jacq.
Once we were married, Jacq convinced me to move out to a ranch she bought near Alliance. I had nothing else going. The agency was closed. My job with the internet people was flexible. I felt like I might be getting a little old for New York. The idea of settling on a ponderosa to grow into middle age sounded romantic. So we moved.
I liked it right away. There was a new house on the ranch—the hunting lodge, I called it—a guest house Jacq turned into her studio, plus lots of open valleys of dirt and rock I hiked in. I bought a pistol and a holster because there were coyotes, and damn if that didn’t excite me. Alliance had a country club where we’d go for drinks sometimes if we wanted to trade stories with locals, and a Radio Shack and a pharmacy and a pizza place. Most of our food was shipped to us from an organic market run by a disembodied poet in Boulder, but we frequented the greasy cafes and steakhouses if we felt tolerant of shredded iceberg lettuce and Folgers crystals. There was a swimming pool, a track at the high school. There was more than that, but those were the places we went to. The nearest Wal-Mart was in Scottsbluff, an hour away, so a few of the local stores in Alliance avoided being run out of business. I appreciated that.
There was lots of time on the ranch. I learned how to use it. I answered e-mails, worked on my descriptions. I began expansive, free-form landscape projects I never intended to finish. I talked to my parents an hour every Sunday evening, something we did ever since I took over the agency from them. We didn’t really know what to say anymore. Mostly they bitched about the commercials for Priceline and Travelocity they saw on TV. If I was bored, I trawled airfares on my computer, in the old system, a black screen with green characters. It was all prompt commands, no windows, no clicking a mouse. I loved it. It was like traveling back to a time when you had to be an expert to run a computer, the good old days.
It wasn’t something I saw coming, but I liked living in a small town. (This is what I explained to Anna when she asked how I could stand a place like Alliance.) There’s something essentially decent about walking on Main Street with the rumble of pickup trucks circling to cruise a brief highway drag, or happening into a park when the Legion team is on the diamond. You can stand at the fence a while and watch the game. “We love that,” I said, sitting up out of Anna’s blankets. “The little kids race into the weeds after foul balls. The fathers chain-smoke and lean into the backstop to grumble. At night you can see the dome of light from the highway.”
* * *
Anna and I went out to a club in Buckhead, near the hotel. I’d been in Atlanta nearly a week by then. Anna wanted to go dancing, but the place we went to wasn’t a real club. This was a suburban bar, across from the mall. There were TVs showing Braves highlights and old replays of Herschel Walker in a Sugar Bowl, years and years ago. The place made me feel my age. I was eight years older than Anna. That seemed like a big difference there. In reality, Anna was too old for this place too. It was all college students, or kids of that age, like a frat party. It made me nervous to see groups of young, drunk-fueled men in college football tee shirts and jean shorts roam the floor. I felt like such a Yankee. Most of my clothes were out with a laundry service, so I was in a black suit and white dress shirt I’d brought along just in case. I didn’t wear the tie, but it still felt ridiculous to be dressed like this in a place like that. I wouldn’t dance with Anna.
There was a group of guys at a table near us, Yellow Jacket fans, according to their branding. They flirted with Anna when they came for drinks at the rail, two or three of them at a time, asking her to dance. She was nervous about it. Her back straightened when they spoke to her. “No thank you,” she said. “Not interested.” I could tell she liked the attention. She refused them politely each time, even though she’d come here to dance.
“Why don’t you tell them you’re married,” I said. “Say you’re pregnant. Maybe they’ll give up and leave you alone.”
I saw by Anna’s face that she liked those boys talking to her. The ones she’d already said no to watched out of the corners of their eyes, alert to what Anna would do next. She looked different, watching them back. By the angle her face tilted, how she swept her hair behind her ears, I saw how she betrayed different emotions. She didn’t look so bored then.
She asked one of them to dance with her, this after an hour of racing drinks. There wasn’t really a dance floor, but they piped in a club mix and there was an open area Anna pulled the kid to. He had on a rugby shirt, striped blue and white. His hair was wet, his cheeks red, like he’d just been in the shower. Anna was obliterated, her limbs heavy with alcohol. She stumbled through raunchy, improvised steps. She wore a knee-length black cotton skirt the kid inched up her thighs. Her legs flexed and rattled, tendons showed behind her knees. She wasn’t such a good-looking woman, that’s why those boys liked her.
Part Five
Jacq and I met at an opening, seven years earlier, in New York. I was barely hanging on to the agency then, it was 2002. I introduced myself at the wine station. It would have been more awkward to not talk, so we talked. Neither of us were native New Yorkers, but we’d both lived in the city a long time. It was so soon after 9/11. We were over-emotional, over-endangered, out to prove both our cowardice and bravery. It was silly. I’d never talked so much about pizzerias and bridges in my life—and prattled on about them with such strong affection, as if they were beloved grandparents or something.
We were such opposites on the surface. Jacq was tall and pale, with short black hair, so skinny that her chin and shoulders looked like parts of a performance piece. Her parents were auto workers. She was a painter…a mixed-media…a whatever—she didn’t like having to explain to anyone what she did on canvas. She was (and still is) Jacqueline Ranier Roenicke; I was (and still am) Eric Samuel Green. I wore a tight brown cardigan, a shirt and tie underneath, wool and Lycra trousers. I was a small business owner, blond and pudgy. We were reverse parts of the same silhouette, and that’s powerful magic. She turned me on the same way an accused witch would have aroused a priest in Salem, Mass., in 1692.
We ended up at a downtown bar. It was full of suits, market and city government dweebs who tried to act tough. They couldn’t beat Jacq’s testosterone, however, her aggressiveness. She tore up to the bar and ordered Tullamore Dew, neat. She told off anyone who got near us. She accused them of trying to sneak an inch in on her man. You could get most of those guys to turn red just by accusing them of the slightest hint of homosexuality. It was too easy.
She pulled me into the men’s room near the end of the night. That’s when she fell in love with me, or so the story goes. She fell in love because I wouldn’t fuck her. I said we’d have to eat a meal first, at a table, with silver. She’d have to take me home before I’d make love with her. She kissed with her teeth while she laughed.
“Of course,” she said. “How adorable!”
I laid it on a bit thick, of course. I wanted to fuck her badly. The problem was that I’d never been able to become rigid in a bathroom. I couldn’t tenet the idea of those suit jocks listening to her moan, or them watching my ass dimple through the gaps of a stall divider. Bedrooms are made for sex. Wide mattresses, soft sheets, a ceiling fan rocking. This was the only audience I desired.
* * *
The wet-haired boy’s frat brothers egged him on. They wanted Anna to pull her shirt up. They wanted her to go down on him in the storage room while all of them watched.
She was in her own lawless world when they circled her, those boys rubbing the crotches of their jean shorts. One of them pulled her arms straight, tugging her toward the back. Anna looked to me, her face wrinkled in frustration, but I didn’t move to help her. I sat with my back to the bar, nursing a bourbon-soda. When the song was over, she shook off the frat boys and slumped into the rail next to me. The kid she danced with asked her to come to an after-party with them. She told him to fuck off. We left soon after.
* * *
Anna collapsed in the hotel elevator. She said she was going to be sick. I had to carry her to her room, her words coming out backwards. I was sure security would follow us, but we made it through the door. She flopped to the couch.
When I jabbed Anna in the shoulder, her eyes rolled back in her head. Her bangs flipped around. “What’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s just some booze, you’ll be all right.”
We camped by the toilet most of the night. She slept on the tile with her knees at her chest, hands between her legs. “Take it easy,” I said, curled around her body. My hand was on her stomach, my ear at her mouth to make sure she was still breathing.
Her head cleared after a few hours. It was four in the morning and I hadn’t slept. We were still on the floor of her hotel bathroom. Anna shivered on the icy tile despite the comforter I wrapped around her. She was feeling better though, not so drunk anymore. Not sober, but she could see at least.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You didn’t do anything.” I paused, looking at her until she shrunk away. “It wasn’t anything unretractable,” I said. “Just regrettable.”
Anna buried her head in her hands and whimpered a woeful laugh.
She moved across the tile to where I sat against the bathtub. She nuzzled against my chest and pulled the comforter around us. “What would I do without you?” she said. “You’re a very brave man.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I said nothing.
She continued on like that. I knew she was humoring me, trying to smooth things over. That’s what I thought, anyway. Maybe she believed that I stepped in on her behalf, once those boys started to paw her, and swept her safely away. I hadn’t.
“Sam,” she said. “Tell me something nice.”
Anna disappeared under the comforter. I felt her face through the fabric of my suit pants, the trembling vibrations of her breath. I didn’t think to stop her. She unbuckled and unbuttoned and unzipped.
“Anna,” I warned. “It’s not going to happen here.”
But there it was. The thing popped up on its own—impertinent, triumphant—swaying out through my open zipper. I was at a loss, seeing it like that.
She put her mouth around the thing, her whole mouth, which somehow wasn’t dry. It was melting. My hips lifted and arched as far as she allowed.
I stopped her then, while I still could.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Anna snuck out from the comforter to rest her head on my stomach and look up at me.
“It’s what I do,” she said. “You know, to make amends.”
She was not embarrassed to say this.
“Anna. Is that what you do with Jon?”
She nodded.
“God,” I said. “Just finish.”
* * *
Jacq was waiting at the airfield outside Alliance the next evening. She was in the gravel parking lot, lying on the hood of the old truck she drove, an F-250 that came with the ranch when she bought it. She adopted that truck like an orphaned child. It suited her.
We bounced up on the bench seat and swung out on the highway to reach full speed, the windows down all the way, letting the seatbelts behind our ears flap loudly in the gale, tires gripping over the patched pavement. We smiled out over the land. I was sluggish and optimistic, having slept on both legs of my return.
Jacq looked different in Alliance, on our ranch, than she did in any city. She wore jeans and a loose flannel shirt with nothing underneath. I preferred her this way. She rolled her sleeves up. There was paint on her knuckles and dirt under her nails. She tied pigtails so that the rubber band bottoms snuck out under her straw hat. I saw inside her shirt as she drove, her small breasts swaying, bouncing with the rhythm the road gave them. Her chest was pocked with moles, tanned deep and reddish in the big, rusty, Western sunset.