Finding a Girl in America (22 page)

‘Why?' Kathi said.

‘Because married people do chores and errands on weekends. No kid-days.'

‘I love the beach,' David said.

‘So do I,' Peter said.

He looked at Kathi.

‘You don't like it, huh?'

She took her arm from her eyes and looked at him. His urge was to turn away. She looked at him for a long time; her eyes were too tender, too wise, and he wished she could have learned both later, and differently; in her eyes he saw the car in winter, heard its doors closing and closing, their talk and the sounds of heater and engine and tires on the road, and the places the car took them. Then she held his hand, and closed her eyes.

‘I wish it was summer all year round,' she said.

He watched her face, rosy tan now, lightly freckled; her small scar was already lower. Holding her hand, he reached over for David's, and closed his eyes against the sun. His legs touched theirs. After a while he heard them sleeping. Then he slept.

Finding a Girl
in America

Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living
. Antoine de Saint Exupéry,
Wind, Sand and Stars

for Suzanne and Nicole

O
N AN OCTOBER
night, lying in bed with a nineteen-year-old girl and tequila and grapefruit juice, thirty-five-year-old Hank Allison gets the story. They lie naked, under the sheet and one light blanket, their shoulders propped by pillows so they can drink. Lori's body is long; Hank is not a tall man, and she is perhaps a half inch taller; when she wears high-heeled boots and lowers her face to kiss him, he tells her she is like a swan bending to eat. Knowing he is foolish, he still wishes she were shorter; he has joked with Jack Linhart about this, and once Jack told him:
Hell with it: just stick out that big chest of yours and swagger down the road with that pretty girl
. Hank never wishes he were taller.

Tonight they have gone to Boston for a movie and dinner, and at the Casa Romero, their favorite restaurant, they started with margaritas but as they ate appetizers of Jalapeño and grilled cheese on tortillas, of baked cheese and sausage, they became cheerful about the movie and food and what they would order next, and switched to shots of tequila chased with Superior. They ate a lot and left the restaurant high though not drunk; then Hank bought a six-pack of San Miguel for the forty-five minute drive home, enough for one cassette of Willie Nelson and part of one by Kristofferson, Hank doing most of the talking, while a sober part of himself told him not to, reminded him that he must always control his talking with Lori; for he loves her and he knows that with him, as with everyone else, she feels and thinks much that she cannot say. He guesses her mother has something to do with this, a talk-crackling woman who keeps her husband and three daughters generally quiet, who is good-looking and knows it and works at it, and is a flirt and, Hank believes from the bare evidence Lori so often murmurs in his bed, more than that. But he does not work hard at discovering why it is so difficult for Lori to give the world, even him, her heart in words. He believes some mysterious balance of power exists between lovers, and if he ever fully understands the bonds that tie her tongue, and if he tells her about them, tries to help her cut them, he will no longer be her lover. He settles for the virtues he sees in her, and waits for her to see them herself. Often she talks of her childhood; she cannot remember her father ever kissing or hugging her; she loves him, and she knows he loves her too. He just does not touch.

Until they got back to his apartment and took salty dogs to bed, Hank believed they would make love. He thought of her long body under him. But, his heart ready, his member was dull, numb, its small capacity for drink long passed. So Hank parted her legs and lowered his face: when she came he felt he had too: the best way to share a woman's orgasm, the only way to use all his senses: looking over the mound at her face between breasts, touching with hands and tongue, the lovely taste and smell, and he heard not only her moan-breaths but his tongue on her. and her hands' soft timpani against his face.

Now he lies peacefully against the pillows; the drinks on his desk beside the bed are still half-full, and he hands one to Lori. Sometimes he takes a drag from her cigarette, though he remembers this is the way to undo his quitting nine years ago when he faced how long it took him to write, and how long he would have to live to write the ten novels he had set as his goal. He is nearly finished the second draft of his third. Lori is talking about Monica. Something in her voice alerts him. She and Lori were friends. Perhaps he is going to learn something new; perhaps Monica was unfaithful while she was still here, when she was his student and they were furtive lovers, as he and Lori are now. He catches a small alcoholic slip Lori makes: No, I can't, she says, in the midst of a sentence which seems to need no restraint.

‘You can't what?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I promised Monica I wouldn't.'

‘When I tell a friend a secret, I know he'll tell his wife or woman. That's the way it is.'

‘It'll hurt you.'

‘How can anything about Monica hurt me? I haven't seen her in over a year.'

‘It will.'

‘It can't. Not now.'

‘You remember when she came down that weekend? Last October? You cooked dinner for the three of us.'

‘Shrimp scampi. We got drunk on hot sake.'

‘Before dinner she and I went to the liquor store. She kept talking about this guy she'd met in art class.'

‘Tommy.'

‘She didn't say it. But I knew she was screwing him then. I could tell she wanted me to know. It was her eyes. The way she'd smile. And I got pissed at her but I didn't say anything. I loved her and I'd never had a friend who had two lovers at once and I thought she was a bitch. I was starting to love you too, and I hated knowing she was going to hurt you, and I couldn't see why she even came to spend the weekend with you.'

‘So she was screwing him before she told me it was over. Well, I should have known. She talked about him enough: his drawings anyway.'

‘That wasn't it. She was pregnant. She found out after she broke up with you.' He has never heard Lori's voice so plaintive except when she speaks of her parents. ‘You know how Monica is. She went hysterical; she phoned me at school every night, she phoned her parents, she went to three doctors. Two in Maine and one in New York. They all placed it at the same time: it was yours. By that time she was two months pregnant. Her father took her in and they had it done.'

An image comes to Hank: he sees his daughter, Sharon, thirteen, breast-points under her sweater: she is standing in his kitchen, hair dark and long; she is chopping celery at the counter for their weekly meal. He pulls Lori's cheek to his chest and strokes her hair.

‘I'm all right,' he says. ‘I had to know. I know if I didn't know I'd never know I didn't know; but I hate not knowing. I don't want to die not knowing everything about my life. You had to tell me. Who else would? You know I have to know. I'm all right. Shit. Shit that bitch. I could have—it would have been born in spring—I would have had all summer off—I could have taken it. I can raise a kid—I'm no Goddamn—I have to piss—‘

He leaves the bed so quickly that he feels, barely, her head drop as his chest jerks from beneath it. He hurries down the hall, stands pissing, then as suddenly and uncontrollably as vomiting he is crying; and as with vomiting he has no self, he is only the helpless and weak host of these sounds and jerks and tears, and he places both palms on the wall in front of him, standing, moaning; the tears stop, his chest heaves, he groans, then tears come again as from some place so deep inside him that it has never been touched, even by pain. Lori stands naked beside him. She is trying to pull his arm from its push against the wall; she is trying to hold him and is crying too and saying something but he can only hear her comforting tone like wind-sough in trees that grew in a peaceful place he left long ago. Finally he turns to her, he will let her hold him and do what she needs to do; yet when he faces her tall firm body, still in October her summer tan lingering above and between breasts and loins, he swings his fists, pulling short each punch, pulling them enough so she does not even back away, nor lift an arm to protect herself; left right left right, short hooked blows at her womb and he hears himself saying No no no—He does not know whether he is yelling or mumbling. He only knows he is sounds and tears and death-sorrow and strong quick arms striking the air in front of Lori's womb.

Then it stops; his arms go to her shoulders, he sags, and she turns him and walks him back down the hall, her left arm around his waist, her right hand holding his arm around her shoulders. He lies in bed and she asks if he wants a drink; he says he'd better not. She gets into bed, and holds his face to her breast.

‘Seven months,' he says. ‘That's all she had to give it. Then I could have taken it. You think I couldn't do that?'

‘I know you could.'

‘It would be hard. Sometimes it would be terrible. I wasn't swinging at you.'

‘I know.'

‘It was just the womb.'

‘Monica's?'

‘I don't know.'

That night he dreams: it is summer, the lovely summers when he does not teach, does not have to hurry his writing and running before classes, and in the afternoons he picks up Sharon and sometimes a friend or two of hers and they go to Seabrook beach in New Hampshire; usually Jack and Terry Linhart are there with their daughter and son, and all of them put their blankets side by side and talk and doze and go into the sea, the long cooling afternoons whose passage is marked only by the slow arc of the sun, time's symbol giving timelessness instead. His dream does not begin with those details but with that tone: the blue peaceful days he teaches to earn, wakes in the dark winter mornings to write, then runs in snow and cold wind and over ice. The dream comes to him with an empty beach: he feels other people there but does not see them, only a stretch of sand down to the sea, and he and Sharon are lying on a blanket. They are talking to each other. She is on his right. Then he rolls slightly to his left to look down at the fetus beside him; he is not startled by it; he seems to have known it is there, has been there as long as he and Sharon. The dream tells him it is a girl; he loves her, loves watching her sleep curled on her side: he looks at the disproportionate head, the small arms and legs. But he is troubled. She is bright pink, as if just boiled, and he realizes he should have put lotion on her. She sleeps peacefully and he wonders if she will be all right sleeping there while he and Sharon go into the surf. He knows he will bring her every afternoon to the beach and she will sleep pink and curled beside him and Sharon and, nameless, she will not grow. His love for her becomes so tender that it changes to grief as he looks at her flesh in the sun's heat.

The dream does not wake him. But late next morning, when he does wake, it is there, as vivid as if he is having it again. He sees and feels it before he feels his headache, his hung-over dry mouth, his need to piss; before he smells the cigarette butts on the desk beside him, and the tequila traces in the glasses by the ashtray. Before he is aware of Lori's weight and smell in bed. Quietly he rises and goes to the bathroom then sneaks back into bed, not kindness but because he does not want Lori awake, and he lies with his dream. His heart needs to cry but his body cannot, it is emptied, and again he thinks it is like vomiting: the drunken nights when he suddenly wakes from a dream of nausea and goes quickly to the toilet, kneeling, gripping its seat, hanging on through the last dry heaves, then waking in the morning still sick, red splotches beside his eyes where the violence of his puking has broken vessels, and feeling that next moment he would be at the toilet again, but there is nothing left to disgorge and he simply lies in bed for hours.

But this will not pass. He will have to think. His employers at the college and his editor and publisher believe his vocations have to do with thinking. They are wrong. He rarely thinks. He works on instincts and trying to articulate them. What his instincts tell him now is that he'd better lie quietly and wait: today is Sunday and this afternoon he and Lori are taking Sharon for a walk on Plum Island. He lies there and imagines the three of them on the dunes until he senses Lori waking.

She knows what he likes when he wakes hung over and, without a word, she begins licking and caressing his nipples; his breath quickens, he feels the hung-over lust whose need is so strong it is near-desperate, as though only its climax can return him from the lethargy of his body, the spaces in his brain, and he needs it the way others need hair of the dog. Lori knows as well as he does that his need is insular, masturbatory; knows that she is ministering to him, her lips and fingers and now her mouth medicinal. But she likes it too. Yet this morning even in her soft mouth he remains soft until finally he takes her arms and gently pulls her up, rolls her onto her back, and kneels between her calves. When it is over he is still soft, and his lust is gone too.

‘It wasn't tequila,' he says. ‘This morning.'

‘I know.'

Then he tells her his dream.

The day, when they finally leave his apartment, is crisp enough for sweaters and windbreakers, the air dry, the sky deep blue, and most of the trees still have their leaves dying in bright red and orange and yellow. It has taken them two hours to get out of the apartment: first Hank went to the bathroom, leaving a stench that shamed him, then he lay in bed while Lori went; and because he was trying to focus on anything to keep the dream away, he figured out why his girl friends, even on a crapulent morning like this one, never left a bad smell. Always they waited in bed, let him go first; then they went, bringing their boxes and bottles, and after sitting on the seat he had warmed they showered long and when they were finished, he entered a steamy room that smelled of woman: clean, powdered, whatever else they did in there. Very simple, and thoughtful too: let him go first so he would not have to wait with aching bowels while they went through the process of smell-changing; and they relied on him, going first, not to shower and shave and make them wait. It was sweetly vulpine and endearing and on another morning he would have smiled.