Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (17 page)

“How can you even think of not coming tomorrow? I cannot go one more day without my own clothes!” It is Glenda—manic, psychotic, paranoid, and generally unpleasant—she arrived a few days ago. And has been a one-woman show ever since.

By the time Glenda was brought in—tiny, wild-haired, raving mad—she hadn’t eaten or slept in weeks. Her skin was almost translucent except for the deep gray moons under her eyes. Any normal human would have been half dead with exhaustion, but Glenda had an energy that was like watching gasoline burn. And despite all the drugs, she has not settled down. She is like watching Twyla Tharp interpret a six-car pileup.

Her mother sits next to her knitting, not even blinking as Glenda screams at the top of her lungs.

“I am completely dissatisfied! I am unimpressed with your church! I hope you die cleaning their kitchen like the slave cunt that you are!”

“I am going to pray for you,” Glenda’s mother says quietly without looking at her daughter.

“You are an old woman and you don’t know anything! You are ignorant and uneducated! I don’t need you to pray for me! I need my fucking clothes!”

At this point Glenda begins to yank off her hospital top, revealing a lacy lavender bra.

Her mother continues to knit, silently absorbing the vitriol.

At this point, there is no show I would rather be watching. Unfortunately, Glenda catches me. “What are you staring at, you fucking pervert?”

“You,” I answer. “Because you’re undressing in public, you fucking pervert.”

Glenda stands and screams again as she upends the flimsy Formica table she and her mother have been sitting at. I’m guessing Glenda is somewhere in her late thirties. Her mother, in her late fifties. I wonder how many times they’ve played this scene on this set before. Glenda’s mother continues to sit there knitting as two or three orderlies come running.

“I don’t need you in my life, you bitch!” Glenda screams as she is being restrained. But Glenda is stronger than she looks and reinforcements, in the form of the two New York City policemen whose job it is to protect the fancy hospital and its mostly white doctors and patients from the surrounding immigrant neighborhood, enter through the double-locked doors. It’s not the first time the staff has summoned the men in blue since Glenda arrived here. As she is being escorted to the Quiet Room, she looks over her shoulder at me.

“You see how I treat my mother? Don’t even think about messing with me. It’ll be a thousand times worse.”

Nurse Frankie pats me on the back.

“She’ll be fine when her meds kick in. She’s actually very sweet.”

That’s too bad, I think, she’s so much fun just the way she is.

EIGHTH

What if this is the end? What if this time I don’t come back?

Maybe I’d deserve that. Maybe not. Regardless, I will have brought it on myself. That much is clear. I can’t argue—though I have tried to on countless occasions with an impressive array of doctors, law enforcement officials, and more women than I can count—that my behavior over the last ten years has been to varying degrees … inappropriate
.

So maybe it would be justice, I think, the panic slowly rising as I go under. Maybe this is karma coming around to vindicate the victims of my bad behavior. Karma coming around to bite me in the ass
.

Santiago, 1991
. I tell lies. Everywhere I go, I am someone else. Every country, every day, every woman, a different lie. There is a speedy thrill to it—losing track of myself. But I’m starting to get bored. Twitchy. I roll over in this king-size bed with its massive head- and footboards made out of trees ripped from the local rainforests and stare at Miren, the lovely young woman I have been fucking and pretending to care about for the past two weeks.

She has round hips and a substantial ass and big, heavy breasts. But what I like best about Miren is the enormous black thatch of ungroomed pubic hair between her legs and the little tufts under her arms to match. My passion for female armpit hair is a relatively recent development. I might have come to it sooner if I’d had the opportunity, but you don’t see a lot of fuzzy pits coming down the red carpet or signaling for the check at the Ivy. If only those women knew what a huge turn-on it is to wander the sidewalks and markets here and to feel as if every woman who hails a cab or opens an umbrella is flashing me, allowing me to steal a glimpse of her little pocket-sized vagina.

After we fucked for the first time, I told Miren the women where I come from shave or wax most of their pubic hair off.

“And you think it look nice, these womens with the little baby cunts?” She made a thoroughly disgusted face. “And the mens, they rip the hairs off their balls too?”

“No, the mens get to keep their pubic hair,” I told her.

“Dats fucked up,” she said.

And cultural differences aside, I couldn’t disagree. Miren is Basque, twenty-three, and was traveling through South America with friends when we met at a bar nowhere near my five-star hotel. I watched her in the bar for a long time before I approached her. I’ve learned by now that watching them, deciding what I like about them, helps me decide who I am. What lies I will tell.

With Miren there was a lot to like. I liked how she pounded her fist on the bar after every shot she drank. How she lifted her thick, dark curls off her neck and fanned herself. And I liked how she held her girlfriend’s hips from behind and swayed with her on the dance floor. And most of all, I liked how her wide, deep laugh reverberated in me. How it bounced around in my empty spaces. I liked the kind of man she made me. By the time I bought Miren her first drink, we were already intimate.

Five days ago, Miren sent her traveling companions—three girlfriends from university and a couple of charmless, unwashed German boys—ahead, choosing instead to stay here with me in Santiago. This trip is supposed to be Miren’s last bit of frivolous fun before she starts working as an au pair for a family in Greenwich, Connecticut.

If Miren has made any assumptions, they are her own. I did not encourage nor discourage her choices. I never do. Despite that, she’s angry when I tell her I’m leaving. When Lee tells her. Lee Majors, hotel security specialist.

“East Africa, Lee!” Miren yells over the noise of the shower. “Why don’t you just put a gun in your head? Do you know what’s happening in there? AIDS, civil war?”

The doors of the enormous three-headed shower are completely transparent, so the only buffer I have between me and this irritating whining is the water and whatever steam I’m generating (which isn’t much since Miren has the annoying habit of leaving the bathroom door open). Still, I refuse to engage.

“Got to go where the jobs are, babe,” I call out cheerfully, making sure to keep my back to her. Rules of nonengagement. Rules to live by. I know she is standing out there yelling at me completely naked, probably with her hands on her full, fleshy hips. Miren is completely unselfconscious.

“That’s bullshit, Lee. No tourist with any brains is going to go in there now.”

I turn off the water, and as I step out of the shower Miren chucks a towel at me.

“Thanks.”

I dry off absentmindedly as I walk past her into the dressing room, dropping my towel on the thick vanilla-colored carpet and pulling one of the hotel’s three-hundred-dollar terry-cloth robes out of the closet. As I slide into it, I think how very nice it would be to be alone right now. I look across my deluxe suite at the clock and wonder how quickly I can get rid of Miren. I feel the need rise in me like dirty flood water—murky, violent, impure.

She has followed me out of the bathroom and I can feel her standing behind me—stiff, angry, lips pinched. “Goddammit, don’t just walk away.”

I ignore her, fill a glass with bottled water from the minibar, and stand in front of the mirror drinking it down while she stares at me, fuming. I am buying time. Because what I’d really like to do is turn around and slap her. Hard enough to make her shut her fucking mouth. I see my hand pull back to gain momentum, watch it fly through the air toward her face, and feel a sharp, painful sting as I make contact.

Miren gasps. “My God, Lee. You are fucking crazy.”

Like a dog’s electric collar, the pain reminds me of my boundaries. I would never do that. The drops of blood on the carpet are mine—a shard from the glass I slammed onto the marble counter is stuck in my palm. I would never hit a woman. That would show a lack of control. An unseemly weakness. And Lee Majors is not that kind of man.

“Hey, Miren, sweetheart?” I say with great tenderness.

“Yes, Lee?” She looks at me expectantly.

“I could pretend to appreciate your concern but I really don’t give a shit what you think, so let’s just skip to the end, okay?”

Her mouth falls open and experience tells me I have less than forty-five seconds before she picks up something and throws it at me. The ubiquitous hotel Bible is a popular choice.

“Just what the fuck do you think you can be doing?” she spits at me.

I move to the in-room safe and spin the combination while I talk to her over my shoulder.

“What I mean is … you are a smart, funny, sexy woman. And you are going to do great things in life.”

“That is not an answer. Answer me, you
kabroi hori
.”

I am standing beside myself. Watching this scene. Enjoying the comic absurdity of the hysterical, chubby naked girl with the full bush screaming at the cruel, unfeeling bastard.

Twenty, maybe twenty-five seconds left on the clock.

Her eyes are darting around the room. I grab the envelope from inside the safe where I’ve kept it since I made my purchase yesterday. “I have something for you.” And before she can make a move, I put it in her hands. She is wary but carefully tears it open and peeks inside.

“You are paying my ticket to JFK?” she says, stunned.

I look into her eyes and gently caress her cheek. “I think you’re a good investment,” I say softly and know I’ve just closed the deal.

She throws her arms around my neck and I can almost hear the door closing behind her.

“Thank you, Lee,” she whispers in my ear. “I never forget this. Or these weeks we spend. Or you.” She kisses me, and without bothering to put on underwear, throws on her clothes, grabs her backpack, and bolts. Just like I knew she would. Because she doesn’t want me to find out what I already knew when I bought her $875 coach ticket—that her Greenwich employers sent her a plane ticket when they hired her. And that she’s rushing out to cash in the one I gave her for U.S. dollars.

I straighten the sheets, lie down on the bed, and aim the remote at the TV, speeding through the Spanish-speaking channels on my way to the universal language of porn. I sigh with relief. I am alone. Lee is alone. Lee is alone. Lee …

I try to concentrate on the girl-on-girl action, but a disturbing feeling of weightlessness has begun in my ankles and is creeping up toward my colon. I’m aware of my heart picking up speed in my chest. I get up and walk slowly to the hotel safe, hoping maybe I won’t realize I’ve begun to panic. The safe is still open. I take out my old passport and examine it carefully. Surname: Todd. Given name: Greyson Harold. Date of birth: 4 August 1945. I take my wallet out of the safe and dump the contents on the bed, examining the defunct credit cards, expired driver’s license, ancient AAA membership. I recheck the passport. Todd, Greyson Harold. I check the picture against my image in the mirror. Close enough.

The panic recedes and I climb back into bed. I call room service, order a bottle of Ketel One, and go back to the porn. Relieved. Greyson is alone. Greyson is alone.

And then—I am staring at a blank screen. I wait. For something. For some synapse to fire. For neurotransmitters to distill into pixels which will consolidate into interpretable images. But for what seems like the longest time, there is nothing. I have the impulse to get up—to walk across the room and bang on the top of the TV. But I can’t move. So I lie there waiting to reboot. When I do, I have no idea how much time has passed. All I know is, it is all wrong. The picture is clear enough. I am more or less where I left off. Santiago. Hotel bathroom. The shower. Water running. And yet it is all wrong. Because the editing has been botched
.

The poor bastard in the shower is not me. And at the same time, in some other space, he is—a black-and-white image set against an otherwise Technicolor memory. He is fifteen years old, soaking wet and dressed in the tux I wore to my first Oscar ceremony. He stares out of the shower at me, lost, terrified. He is a memory, out of his depth, drowning, clearly yanked from some black-and-white montage I had stashed away somewhere in my temporal lobe, where he was minding his own business
.

I realize, as I have dozens of times in my career, that it’s all in the editing. Even now. Someone, I think, should put this kid out of his misery before he gets where he is going. Before he ends up in this hotel room. In this shower. In color. Before he ends up on this table. Watching this. Like me
.

How great, I wonder, is the divide between fate and memory? Between playing the game and Monday morning quarterbacking? Being old enough to know better and being a better man? Does choice exist or is fate biologically predetermined? The question becomes an association, followed by an image which quickly morphs into montage. And in the flutter of an eyelid the scenery has changed
.

Beverly Hills, 1961
. When I woke up, I found Pop sitting in the La-Z-Boy, legs bouncing, hair greasy, standing up in the back, still wearing the short-sleeved sport shirt and wrinkle-resistant slacks he’d put on two mornings ago. He hadn’t been to bed in nearly three days; he’d been up scribbling ideas for a new business venture.

There was an empty liquor bottle under the coffee table and another more than half-empty on top. When he got like this, though, even the booze didn’t slow him down. Nothing did. He didn’t even seem to notice when there was another person in the room.