Get in Trouble: Stories (36 page)

“Look at her,” Alan said.

She looked down. A woman dressed in a way that suggested she had probably been someone important once, maybe hundreds of years ago, somewhere, probably, that wasn’t anything like here. Versailles Kentucky. “I’ve seen sleepers before.”

“No. You don’t
see
,” Alan said. “Of course you don’t. You don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors, do you? This kind of haircut would look good on you.”

He fluffed Versailles Kentucky’s hair.

“Alan,” she said. A warning.

“Look,” he said. “Just look. Look at her. She looks just like you. She’s
you.
”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Am I?” Alan appealed to Jason. “You thought so, too.”

Jason hung his head. He mumbled something. Said, “I said that maybe there was a similarity.”

Alan reached down and grabbed the sleeper’s bare foot, lifted the leg straight up.

“Alan!” Lindsey said. She pried his hand loose. The indents of
his fingers came up on Versailles Kentucky’s leg in red and white. “What are you doing?”

“It’s fine,” Alan said. “I just wanted to see if she has a birthmark like yours. Lindsey has a birthmark behind her knee,” he said to Jason. “Looks like a battleship.”

Even Hurley was staring now.

The sleeper didn’t look a thing like Lindsey. No birthmark. Funny, though. The more she thought about it, the more Lindsey thought maybe she looked like Alan.

not herself today

She turned her head a little to the side. Put on all the lights in the bathroom and stuck her face up close to the mirror again. Stepped back. The longer she looked, the less she looked like anyone she knew. She certainly didn’t look like herself. Maybe she hadn’t for years. There wasn’t anyone she could ask, except Alan.

Alan was right. She needed a haircut.

Alan had the blender out. The kitchen stank of rum. “Let me guess,” he said. “You met someone nice in there.” He held out a glass. “I thought we could have a nice quiet night in. Watch The Weather Channel. Do charades. You can knit. I’ll wind your yarn for you.”

“I don’t knit.”

“No,” he said. His voice was kind. Loving. “You tangle. You knot. You muddle.”

“You needle,” she said. “What is it that you want? Why are you here? To pick a fight? Hash out old childhood psychodramas?”

“Per bol tuh, Lin-Lin?”
Alan said. “What do
you
want?” She sipped ferociously. She knew what she wanted. “Why are
you
here?”

“This is my home,” she said. “I have everything I want. A job at a company with real growth potential. A boss who likes me. A bar just around the corner, and it’s full of men who want to buy me drinks. A yard full of iguanas and a spare shadow in case one should suddenly fall off.”

“This isn’t your house,” Alan said. “Elliot bought it. Elliot filled it up with his junk. And all the nice stuff is mine. You haven’t changed a thing since he took off.”

“I have more iguanas now,” she said. She took her Rum Runner into the living room. Alan already had The Weather Channel on. Behind the perky blond weather witch, in violent primary colors, a tropical depression hovered off the coast of Cuba.

Alan came and stood behind the couch. He put his drink down and began to rub her neck.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “That storm.”

“Remember when we were kids? That hurricane?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I probably ought to go haul the storm shutters out of the storage unit. We got pounded last summer.”

He went and got the pitcher of frozen rum. Came back and stretched out on the floor at her feet, the pitcher balanced on his stomach. “That kid at your warehouse,” he said. He closed his eyes.

“Jason?”

“He seems like a nice kid.”

“He’s a philosophy student, Lan-Lan. Come on. You can do better.”

“Do better? I’m thinking out loud about a guy with a fine ass, Lindsey. Not buying a house. Or contemplating a career change.
Oops, I guess I am officially doing that. Perhaps I’ll become a do-gooder. A do-better.”

“Just don’t make my life harder, okay? Alan?” She nudged him in the hip with her toe, and watched, delighted, as the pitcher tipped over.

“Fisfis tuh!”
Alan said. “You did that on purpose!”

He took off his shirt and tossed it at her. Missed. There was a puddle of pink rum on the tile floor.

“Of course I did it on purpose,” she said. “I’m not drunk enough yet to do it accidentally.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He picked up her Rum Runner and slurped noisily. “Go make another pitcher while I clean up this fucking mess.”

do the monster

“He’s got gorgeous eyes. Really, really green. Green as that color there. Right at the eye. That swirl.”

“I hadn’t noticed his eyes.”

“That’s because he isn’t your type. You don’t like nice guys. Here, can I put this on?”

“Yeah. There’s a track on there, I think it’s the third track. Yeah, that one. Elliot loved this song. He’d put it on, start twitching, then tapping, then shaking, all over. By the end he’d be slithering all over the furniture.”

“Oh, yeah. He was a god on the dance floor. But look at me. I’m not too bad, either.”

“He was more flexible around the hips. I think he had a bendier spine. He could turn his head almost all the way around.”

“Come on, Lindsey, you’re not dancing. Come on and dance.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be such a pain in the ass.”

“I have a pain inside,” she said. And then wondered what she meant. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

“Come on. Just dance. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m okay. See? I’m dancing.”

Jason came to dinner. Alan wore one of Elliot’s shirts. Lindsey made a perfect cheese soufflé, and she didn’t even say anything when Jason assumed that Alan had made it.

She listened to Alan’s stories about various pocket universes he’d toured as if she had never heard them before. Most were owned by the Chinese government, and as well as the more famous tourist universes, there were the ones where the Chinese sent dissidents. Very few of the pocket universes were larger than, say, Maryland. Some had been abandoned a long time ago. Some were inhabited. Some weren’t friendly. Some pocket universes contained their own pocket universes. You could go a long ways in and never come out again. You could start your own country out there and do whatever you liked, and yet most of the people Lindsey knew, herself included, had never done anything more adventuresome than go for a week to some place where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream.

There were sex-themed pocket universes, of course. Tax shelters and places to dispose of all kinds of things: trash, junked cars,
bodies. People went to casinos inside pocket universes more like Vegas than Vegas. More like Hawaii than Hawaii. You must be this tall to enter. This rich. Just this foolish. Because who knew what might happen? Pocket universes might wink out again, suddenly, all at once. There were best-selling books explaining how that might happen.

There was pocket-universe spillover, too. Alan began to reminisce about his adolescence in a way that suggested that it had not really been all that long ago.

“Venetian Pools,” he said to Jason. “I haven’t been there in a couple of years. Since I was a kid, really. All those grottoes that you could wander off into with someone. Go make out and get such an enormous hard-on you had to jump in the water so nobody noticed and the water was so fucking cold! Can you still get baked ziti at the restaurant? Do you remember that, Lindsey? Sitting out by the pool in your bikini and eating baked ziti? But I heard you can’t swim now. Because of the mermaids.”

The mermaids were an invasive species, like the iguanas. People had brought them from one of the Disney pocket universes as pets, and now they were everywhere, small but numerous in a way that appealed to children and bird-watchers. They liked to show off and although they didn’t seem much smarter than, say, a talking dog, and maybe not even as smart, since they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures, they were too popular with the tourists at the Venetian Pools to be gotten rid of. There were freshwater mermaids and saltwater mermaids—larger and more elusive—and the freshwater kind had begun to show up at Venetian Pools at least ten years ago.

Jason said he’d taken his sister’s kids. “I heard they used to drain the pools every night in summer. But they can’t do that
now, because of the mermaids. So the water isn’t as clear as it used to be. They can’t even set up filters because the mermaids just tear them out again. Like beavers, I guess. They’ve constructed this elaborate system of dams and retaining walls and structures out of the coral, these elaborate pens to hold fish. Venetian Pools sell fish so you can toss them in for the mermaids to round up. The kids were into that.”

“We get them in the canal sometimes, the saltwater ones,” Lindsey said. “They’re a lot bigger. They sing.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Lots of singing. Really eerie stuff. Makes you feel like shit. They pipe elevator music over the loudspeakers to drown it out, but even the kids felt bad after a while. I had to buy all this stuff in the gift shop to cheer them up.”

Lindsey pondered the problem of Jason, the favorite uncle who could be talked into buying things. He was too young for Alan. When you thought about it, who wasn’t too young for Alan?

Alan said, “Didn’t you have plans, Lindsey?”

“Did I?” Lindsey said. Then relented. “Actually, I was thinking about heading down to The Splinter. Maybe I’ll see you guys down there later?”

“That old hole,” Alan said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was sending out those old invisible death rays in Jason’s direction. Lindsey could practically feel the air getting thicker. It was like humidity, only skankier. “I used to go there to hook up with cute straight guys in the bathroom while Lindsey was passing out her phone number over by the pool tables. The good old days, right, Lindsey? You know what they say about girls with two shadows, don’t you, Jason?”

Jason said, “Maybe I should just head home.” But Lindsey could tell by the way that he was looking at Alan that he had no
idea what he was saying. He wasn’t even really listening to what Alan said. He was just responding to that vibe that Alan put out. That
come hither come hither come a little more hither
siren song.

“Don’t go,” Alan said. Luscious, dripping invisible sweetness rolled off him. Lindsey knew how to do that, too, although she mostly didn’t bother now. Most guys, you didn’t have to. “Stay a little longer. Lindsey has plans, and I’m lonely. Stay a little longer and I’ll play you some of the highlights of Lindsey’s ex-husband’s collection of pocket-universe gay porn.”

“Alan,” Lindsey said. Second warning. She knew he was keeping count.

“Sorry,” Alan said. He put his hand on Jason’s leg. “
Husband’s
collection of gay porn. She and Elliot, wherever he is, are still married. I had the biggest hard-on for Elliot. He always said Lindsey was all he wanted. But it’s never about what you want, is it? It’s about what you need. Right?”

“Right,” Jason said.

“We’ll talk later,” Lindsey said.
“Beh slam bih, tuh eb meh.”

“Sure,” Alan said. “Talk, talk.” He blew her a kiss.

How did Alan do it? Why did everyone except for Lindsey fall for it? Except, she realized, pedaling her bike down to The Splinter, she did fall for it. She still fell for it. It was her house, and who had been thrown out of it? Who had been insulted, mocked, abused, then summarily dismissed? Her. That’s who.

Cars went by, riding their horns. Damn Alan anyway.

She didn’t bother to chain up the bike; she probably wouldn’t be riding it home. She went into The Splinter and sat down beside a man with an aggressively sharp cologne.

“You look nice,” she said. “Buy me a drink and I’ll be nice, too.”

there are easier ways to kill yourself

The man was kissing her neck. She couldn’t find her keys, but that didn’t matter. The door was unlocked. Jason’s car still in the driveway. No surprise there.

“I have two shadows,” she said. It was all shadows. They were shadows, too.

“I don’t care,” the man said. He really was very nice.

“No,” she said. “I mean, my brother’s home. We have to be quiet. Okay if we don’t turn on the lights? Where are you from?”

“Georgia,” the man said. “I work construction. Came down here for the hurricane.”

“The hurricane?” she said. “I thought it was headed for the Gulf of Mexico. Watch out for the counter.”

“Now it’s coming back this way. Won’t hit for another couple of days if it hits. You into kinky stuff? You can tie me up,” the man said.

“Better knot,” she said. “Get it? I’m not into knots. Can never get them untied, even sober. This guy had to have his foot amputated. No circulation. True story. Friend told me.”

“Guess I’ve been lucky so far,” the man said. He didn’t sound too disappointed, either way. “This house has been through some hurricanes, I bet.”

“One or two,” she said. “Water comes right in over the tile floor. Messy. Then it goes out again.”

She tried to remember his name. Couldn’t. It didn’t matter. She felt terrific. That had been the thing about being married. The monogamy. Even drunk, she’d always known who was in bed with her. Elliot had been different, all right, but he had always been the same kind of different. Never a different kind of different. Didn’t like kissing. Didn’t like sleeping in the same bed. Didn’t like being serious. Didn’t like it when Lindsey was sad. Didn’t like living in a house. Didn’t like the way the water in the canal felt. Didn’t like this, didn’t like that. Didn’t like the Keys. Didn’t like the way people here looked at him. Didn’t stay. Elliot, Elliot, Elliot.

“My name’s Alberto,” the man said.

“Sorry,” she said. She and Elliot had always had fun in bed.

“He had a funny-looking penis,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Alberto said.

“Do you want something to drink?” she said.

“Actually, do you have a bathroom?”

“Down the hall,” she said. “First door.”