The Possibilities: A Novel (21 page)

Chapter
18

I have Billy get me a seven-dollar chocolate bar from the gift shop and bring it up to my room. I’ve ordered a bottle of zin, why not. I open the drapes and walk onto the balcony. I look out at the fake lake and the fuckin’ swans. Then I hear the knock from room service and walk back into the room.

Everything is so floral here, everything so clean and chilled. I want to mess things up, then call someone to make up my room. I love hotel rooms—the empty drawers, our lives condensed and unfettered. Sometimes I think hotel maids have the best perspective on human nature, all the gunk we leave behind. I want to talk about this with Billy—the lives of maids, the decor in hotel rooms. I don’t want to talk about the things that make my heart hurt. I open the door to Billy and a room service waiter who’s wheeling in my single bottle of wine.

I’m taken aback for a moment at seeing these two men together, one scruffy, one polished as if by machine.
Couldn’t you dress better?
I want to ask one.
Do you really need a cart?
I want to ask the other.

“Come on in,” I say.

Billy makes an “after you” gesture to the waiter. He rolls in the wine reverentially. “Where would you like this?” he asks.

In my mouth.

“On the balcony,” I say. “So I can see the fake lake.”

Billy raises his eyebrows and walks in, kisses the top of my head, which feels natural and yet at the same time alarming.

“Take a moment,” he says.

We follow our server to the balcony. He picks up the bottle and shows it to me. I nod. He opens. He pours me a sip and then the waiter waits, one arm behind his back.

Billy does the honors. He swirls the wine, sticks his nose in the glass, then takes a hearty swallow. “Naughty,” he says. “Fruit forward. Rebellious. Want some?” he asks the waiter.

The waiter laughs, disproportionately relieved. “Nah, thank you, sir. Thanks.” His voice is different now, like it’s okay to be himself and not a guy who always wears a crisp white shirt, a black vest, and stands with an arm behind his back. I want to ask this man,
What would you do?
Or better yet,
What are your problems? Take me to them.

I walk back inside to let Billy deal with the waiter and the wine and the pouring and the thank-yous. I can’t do any of it right now. I go into the bathroom, which is like a retreat, and shut the door. More floral. A claw-foot tub. There’s a sweetness here that doesn’t match the topic. I hear them both laugh and I bet Billy got him to have a sip.

When I hear the cart roll by and the door close, I come out. Billy stands by the door of the balcony, holding a full glass of dark red wine.

“He didn’t really know about letting it breathe,” Billy says, “but I told him.”

“Did you get him to take a sip?”

“This glass was even fuller before.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Cheers.”

We clink our glasses together and I take a hearty gulp. Billy looks around the room and I do too, feeling a need to comment on something.

I pick up the apple next to the two plastic bottles of water. “I love it here.” Billy smirks, but I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic. “Everything I say sounds insincere,” I say. “Look at that mountain.” I take another swallow. “It’s so indifferent. What is happening here?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“I can’t stop thinking of him, but I’m thinking of him as a baby and . . . it was so wonderful, but it was all so hard and I want to, I want to do the right thing, but I’ve failed already and what if I can’t do it? If I’m not fit to . . . ”

He takes my glass, puts it back down on the desk, and gives me a hug that I give in to. “It’s all the right thing,” he says. “And you didn’t fail.”

As we separate he kisses the top of my head and I look up. We look at one another, bemused, and then we kiss on the mouth as I knew and I suppose he knew we would. His tongue is warm and sweet. He has eaten a piece of my chocolate. His hand on my back makes its way lower. It’s a slow, dizzying kiss. I experience that vertigo I always used to experience while kissing him. It’s a feeling from girlhood when you kissed and kissed and that was all, until it wasn’t.

But we’re not young and kissing doesn’t last long. I hook one hand onto the buckle of his jeans and pull him back toward the bed, but he takes charge, switching me so that he sits down first and pulls me to him, in between his legs.

“Wait,” I say, when he leans back and tries to bring me up onto his lap.

There’s no way I’m going to be on top; I can’t imagine it, straddled naked over him, bouncing, his hands thrusting me forward, it’s somehow too comical, too exposed. My face flushes. I am shy. He hasn’t seen me like this for twenty-two years. My body is good with clothes on, but my skin hangs a little where it hadn’t before. My breasts are in need of a refill. My stomach, my thighs, my ass are loosened. But he wouldn’t remember me as I was before. I don’t remember him. I recall a thin, strong frame like a cage, a natural, musk scent, a rogue patch of hair on his chest. What will he look like now? This emboldens me—instead of imagining your audience naked to bolster confidence, we should imagine their aged bodies. I unbuckle his buckle.

“You’re pretty,” he says.

We look at one another up close, my gaze drops down to his mouth.

“You want to have sex. Of course I’m pretty.” I laugh, but he looks at me as though he knows I’m saying one thing to couch something else, or he just feels sorry for me, like I can’t say and do what I mean.

He presses his mouth to mine because I suppose this is the easiest, most genuine thing we can do right now. I pull back, sense and caution seeping in, and shame—this is not a proper reaction to this dilemma—but he presses himself to me harder until my mouth softens and opens up and holds his like it’s starved. It’s one of those violent and desperate kisses you see in movies where the characters stand in the rain with their hands in each other’s hair, kissing as though a war’s about to start. I accidentally moan into his mouth and think,
Who am I?

The sound of my voice pulls me out of the spell a bit. “It’s so cold in here,” I say, wanting refuge from the light underneath the covers. The room is so prim and Victorian. I feel like we should copulate while speaking in British accents.

When we were a couple we’d hook up in his silver Bronco, or on his mattress at his A-frame house in Blue River. He had three other roommates, and if we had had enough to drink I wouldn’t muffle the sounds of my climax—I’d let it tear through the cabin. It was like ringing a bell, announcing we were united. I hadn’t had sex like that in college—and possibly haven’t since. Sometimes we’d have sex in the parking lot of Steak and Rib before his shift. I’d send him off with a smirk, feeling both dirty and wifely, then go home to wait for him to get off his shift. We’d head out at ten thirty to the bars—Pounders or the Gold Pan—sleep until one thirty or two. It was like a brief glitch in my life, like my bus broke down and I was forced to get off and ended up having a really good time. I got back on that bus, initially thinking I’d take what I learned and enjoyed with me.

And here we are again. I politely disembark and stand up so we can do a brief, sad striptease. The height of the moment seems scaled already, for me at least, but I know we have to do this. We started something and now we have to get it done. Now I feel a need to prove myself, to show myself as I once was. He takes off his shoes, then his pants but leaves on his white socks. One sock has a red line across the toes and one does not. He removes his boxers, then sits down, his strong thighs flayed. His desire is very apparent. Nothing Victorian about it. He is more filled out now, still trim, but no longer a cage. He has muscles, and a welcome sight of a small roll of belly. He’s hairier than he was before.

I take my jeans off, grateful I’m wearing underwear that isn’t large enough for two of me. I leave it on, as well as my socks and sweater, then try to get into the bed with some dignity. I end up performing a kind of pole-vaulting maneuver, something that started out silly and cute but ended up ungainly because I didn’t commit. It’s like switching
hi
to
hello
midsentence and coming out with “hilo.”

I get under the covers, kicking my legs to loosen the sheets that are forcing me to point my toes. I laugh even though nothing is funny. I could cry.

Billy lies down on top of me, kisses me, takes off my sweater, my tank top, my bra. I wrap a leg around him and he moves his hand down my body, stopping at my breasts. I think of him fondling one of those squishy stress balls and as soon as I think this I know I can’t reach between his legs without feeling a little ill. What has happened to my sexuality? It’s so strange being beneath this man who used to make me buck and tremble and now I’m forcing myself to arch my back, forcing myself to slurp his tongue, just trying to conjure something back—the Bronco, the A-frame, the proud orgasms like a yodel in the woods.

He keeps his hand going—down, down, in between. He pokes around with his finger, then stops, licks his hand, and resumes, expertly. How many women has he been with, how many dates, what was Rachel like? I realize I’m tensing my thighs and let them fall open, then I take him and put it in as one puts a cord into a socket. It won’t go all the way, so I pull at my skin around him and eventually we lather up enough moisture for it to work.

There. It’s working. We are working, and sex does its job of making me forget. It’s all sensation, focused sensation, so so so good—actually good, I’m good! And then I remember again, bits and pieces of my strange new world—Kit, Cully, even Morgan, the way they were as babies—the way red dots would appear on Cully’s forehead when he cried, the way he’d shake his head as he came in toward my breast to nurse.

I climax anyway, right when I’m remembering all the things I’m supposed to forget, and having an orgasm while thinking of pregnancy, babies, and your dead son feels awful and weird, and at the same time unremarkable and true. This is all life is anyway. Throw in some food and sleep.

Billy moves out and off, then lies back with his hands cupping his head. He turns his head to me, a big childish grin on his face, then his smile goes away as if he’s just remembered what sparked all this in the first place: desperation, an inability to think or speak, an urgent need to escape.

We stay still, looking at the ceiling.

“I read something interesting in my room,” Billy says.

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“I guess in the main mezzanine,” Billy says,“on the ceiling mural. There’s a male dancer with two right feet.”

I turn my head, but he just smiles and keeps looking up.

“Tell me this is weird for you too,” I say, watching his expression.

He blinks twice, pulls his earlobe. “This is weird for me too.”

“Tell me you don’t do this with Rachel.”

“Do what?”

“Go back to her after . . . ”

He doesn’t blink. “No. God, no. Why? Jealous?”

“No. I just don’t want to be part of a trend.”

“You are not part of a trend,” he says, turning his head to look at me. He’s just a head with a body of a sheet.

I look back up at the ceiling. I don’t know why I asked about Rachel, why I care about trends. Maybe I see this happening again. It’s easy. But then I reconsider: there are far easier things we could have done.

“God damn,” Billy says, and I smile, thinking he’s complimenting my skills, but I look over and he’s crying. “Cully,” he says, and chokes on his name. I curl into Billy, putting my face on his chest, which is heaving now. His hand on my lower back grips me like a ledge. “I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t say anything. I just let him weep. I cry along with him, just when I think I have no more left. There will always be grief, endless reserves to draw from, which is strangely comforting. It doesn’t last too long—this lament. It’s like a passing shower. After, we don’t say anything for a while and the silence is peaceful.

“I guess we should get up,” he says. “A lot to talk about.”

“Okay,” I say, though I’m far from being ready. I don’t know what to do, what I’m supposed to do, what I want. I imagine the dancer with his two right feet, waltzing in circles, the most memorable dancer, the painter’s mistake.

•   •   •

BILLY AND I
sit out on my room’s balcony. We wear the provided terrycloth robes.

“Look at us,” I say. “In dresses made out of towel.”

“Like newlyweds.”

I tilt my face to the late afternoon, imitating Billy’s angle. We do look like newlyweds, or people in a hotel brochure acting as them.

When I told him I was pregnant, he drove to Denver, found my dorm, and said, “We can do this. We can marry.” That’s how he said it: “We can marry,” which amuses me still. He was five years older than me, and yet right then he seemed like he could be my son. He was this young child, trying to do the right thing. I knew he was living with another girl then.

“I’m not going to get married,” I said then, and he looked so relieved.

His parents had come up from Durango when I moved back to my dad’s at seven months. His dad was tall, but then I realized he and Billy were the same height, his father was just more filled out. He looked like he could chop down trees for a living. His mother was short, fit yet round, with cropped brown hair and big earrings. I liked them immediately. They walked into our home, didn’t glance around, didn’t watch their step; they just looked at me as if I had accomplished something. They brought me flowers, then later, dinner plates and sets of silverware and wineglasses that I still own. They bought me a crib and a stroller, baby clothes and blankets. His mother’s voice and vocabulary harkened back to actresses in fifties films, a ring of wealth and sophistication. She called the brown crib sheets “russet ginger.” I think my dad felt bad. He hadn’t thought of doing any of these things.

“Do your parents have money?” I asked Billy after they had whirled in, then basically out of my life. I hadn’t really seen them much after that first year, which made me feel inexplicably (or explicably) discarded.