Watch Your Mouth (23 page)

bend her knees, no matter how sick she was. It meant nothing. I was the wrongest person who had ever been: colossally wrong, my enormous misdeed finally freed from the basement of my mind to lumber across the countryside in plain view. By day I ate little, and froze with paranoia whenever a patrolman drove by, his face inscrutable as clay. By night I’d pull the cheap blan- kets over my body and try to think of what to do next, now that I’d already asked the Higher Power to remove all defects of character but it had just walked away. I wasn’t dead. It wasn’t a dream. I dragged the armchair over to the door, slipping it underneath the doorknob like in a TV show, and whether it was to keep something out or to keep me in was anybody’s guess.

And then it came. Sometime during some night, some limb of mine had flicked the car radio to maximum volume, so the next bleary morning when I put the key in the ignition the voice spoke to me like God: “Lost?” the radio boomed, over a wind- and-sea sound effect. “Confused and adrift? Today’s young people can find the job market a hard place to navigate. Higher Power Employment Agency can be your lighthouse.” Now a fog- horn, a tugboat. Some sound-effects technician loved the meta- phor. “Come in for a free evaluation and information session about our counselling and placement services. Let Higher Power”—here the seagulls, the creaking of ropes—“guide you safely to your future career.” I pulled over to much impatient honking, riffling through the ashtray for pay phone money. I needed counselling and placement, and free was what I could af- ford. An English major for three years at a prestigious university and I’d been felled by a spelling mistake. It was H-I-R-E. Hire Power Employment Agency.

“A lot of people make that mistake,” Marc said cheerfully,

showing me into a tiny office dominated by a photograph of the open sea.
Expect the Unexpected,
the caption said, inexplicably; was there a giant squid lying in wait under the surface? “These people tell me, ‘It took me forever to find you in the phone book.’ ” His voice rose unpleasantly as he imitated
these people.
He was in his mid-forties with a terrifyingly fit body and wire- frame glasses. Marc was calling me Joe. I wasn’t calling him anything. I took a seat with quiet and simple faith and a Sty- rofoam cup of warm and weak coffee. I was comfortable.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I’d sworn to myself to tell the truth.

“Soooo,”
he said, heartily and at length. He opened up a file which contained a form I had filled out in a waiting room full of photographs and captions. “Mather College,” he said, ap- provingly.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t graduate.” “No. Or, not yet.”

He smiled in a way I could see he imagined as winning. I tried my hardest to be won. “That’s my boy. So why’d you leave?”

“Incest.”

“Just weren’t interested, huh? Well, it’s good you figured that out. You don’t want to be in college if you aren’t focused on it. Interest is important, Joe. Interest is important. So what have you been doing since then?”

“I worked at a summer camp in Pittsburgh,” I said. “A day camp. And then—well, skipping ahead, then I worked at a bookstore in Pitts—here in California. Through New Year’s. Didn’t I write this down?”

“Yeah, but I like to get a feel for things in person.”

“Me, too,” I said, looking down at my hands.
Keep your hands where I can see them.

“So that’s where your re´sume´ ends,” Marc said. “What have you been doing since then?”

I looked at the sea, at Marc, at the sea. “Not much,” I ad- mitted. “I’ve been sort of—driving.”

“What, pizza delivery or something? That’s nothing to be ashamed of.” His voice said:
Of course it is.

“No, just driving. You know, um.” I looked at the sea again and decided to go for the adventurer approach. “Just exploring. I wanted to see a little bit of this country of ours. The good old

U.S. of A.”

“A little bit?” His eyebrows raised. “For five months?” “I was sort of adrift.”

“And where’s your family?” “Smothered.”

“I’m sorry. Where’s your
mother?
”

I blinked, shifted in my chair. I started to say
elsewhere
. I looked at Marc and the sea again. I didn’t say anything. This wasn’t going well.

“I’m sorry,” Marc said, insincerely. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I have to tell you, Joe, this five- month gap is
not
going to look good to prospective employers. If you had a diploma,
maybe,
but this Jack what’s-his-face,
Ker- ouac
thing is
not
going to fly.”

“I
know
it doesn’t look good, but I was hoping,” I said hum- bly. “I was hoping that you could help me make up for all that time.” The seventh step:
I had humbly asked a Hire Power to remove my shortcomings.

“I don’t think we can help you,” he said briskly. “Quite frankly, Joe, we’re looking for people who are
ready
to face the challenges put in front of them. Not people who are looking for escape. You seem to me, if you don’t mind me saying so, stuck in ‘the past.’ ” He put two pairs of bunny ears around all my suffering. “We want people who are heading toward ‘the future.’ I don’t think we can help you.”

Marc stood up. His head floated in the lens-captured sea. I tried to think of something I could say that could stop him in his tracks, like a spell. “I don’t
think,
” he said again—

I put my faith in words I didn’t understand. “We
think,
” I

said, “much less than what we know.”

Marc blinked. “We
know,
” he said carefully, “much less than what we love.”

“We love much less than what there is.”

I had him. “And to this precise extent,” he said, pausing to sit back down. We said the rest together: “We are much less than what we are.”

Marc reached over his desk with both hands, knocking over the little sign which said M
ARC
. He took my hands in his. “No
wonder
you’re at sixes and sevens,” he said. “You should have
told
me you were a New Man. Don’t be ashamed of that. Ben Glass’s death has hit a lot of us
very hard,
Joe. No
wonder
you’re lost. Well, for a brother in courage and suffering I think we can find something.”

He opened a file cabinet which as far I was concerned was stuffed with faith and love, and pulled out a full-color brochure. “How would you feel about leaving the country?”

“Saved,” I said.

He chuckled. “The pay’s not much, and I don’t think you can

call the work challenging, but for someone a little at odds it might suit you. Have you heard of The Vast Resort?”

“No.”

“Terrific place,” he said, opening the brochure. Inside the folds some very tiny women were swimming. “The biggest self- contained luxury resort region in the Western Hemisphere. They’re looking for some temporary assistance in the service department. Folding up lounge chairs or something. Maybe a towel boy. I could make a phone call. What do you say?”

I looked at all the bright, bright blue they were selling: sky and swimming pools and beach umbrellas with the
V
in
Vast
scrawled across them in white. “I say
yes
. Where is this place?” “Some island somewhere,” he said, gesturing like it might be

in the potted plant in the corner. “Check in with me in a couple hours and I’ll give you the verdict.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thank
you,
” he said. “Thanks for reminding me what I should be doing for my fellow man, especially now that Ben’s gone.”

“Yes,” I said, uprighting the M
ARC
sign.

“Thanks,” he said, noticing. We stood up together. “Because a lot of people think that men are always perpetrators.”

“And never victims,” I said, nodding.

“Right,”
he said, and patted me on the shoulder. We were walking back out to the waiting room where I stopped and read the posters lining the walls: “
Speak, hands for me!”—William Shakespeare,
Macbeth, over a field of flowers. “
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”—Robert Frost,
Ode on a Grecian Urn, as a sun set over a forest.
“There is no benefit in the gifts of a bad man.”— Euripides,
Medea, below a kitten napping in a basket, and this

last one invigorated me most. I remembered what the rabbi, poor man, had said: “At the end, they ask her, Medea, what is left? Everything is destroyed, everything is gone. And you know what Medea says? She says, ‘What is left? There is me.’
There’s
a woman for you.” I strode out of Hire Power knowing that I needn’t be at sixes and sevens, now that I had reached and passed them and was heading toward Step 8. “ ‘What do you mean what’s left? Everything is left.
I
am left.’ ” I turned left out of the parking lot and put the radio on, peering out the grimy windows hoping to spot a mall. I’d spend the last of my money on clothes for hot weather. A Vast Resort was ahead of me and I wanted to be ready.

Step 8

The morning sun was shining like the best cellophane money could buy. You could see every wrinkle in the sheets of the bed, captured like a topographical map. I looked out the shiny, shiny window and saw for the first time a sun that looked just like a child’s drawing of a sun, each bright ray careening like a market- researched exclamation point in a brochure. It was
fantastic!
I
loved
it! I’d never seen sunshine like that, never been able to clean something as thoroughly as the pool’s faux-marble steps. They were cleaned so often that when they were my assignment there was scarcely any dirt to be found, just a slight lace of beige I could just pluck from the stairs with a Vast Resort rag bleached to toothpaste-white. I’d never seen a pool that circulated with a carefully-constructed tide, controlled by a machine locked in- side a shack hidden behind palm trees. This universe—I’m not lying here—was
perfect!

“How does that work, anyway?” I asked Allyson. She was

curled around the mattress like a bracket, looking for something under the bed. If we were children it would have been monsters, but we were all grown up and it was a book.

“How does what work?”

“The tide machine in the pool.”

She blinked at me absently for a moment, placing the tide machine, the pool, probably me. “They built a mechnical moon,” she said slowly, “which they control via satellite, to orbit around The Vast Resort for the convenience of our guests. I don’t
know,
Joe! Who am I, Einstein?”

Allyson wasn’t Einstein, but that was her last name so it was a joke. The moon thing, too; Allyson was pretty funny. And, funny-pretty: long, long arms and fingernails! Fireworks of blond hair! Freckles! Breasts so sharp they were like pieces of paper folded in half, two of them! She was some gorgeous joke book I got to read in bed. She was very tall but when you looked at her, in the shorts and sweatshirt they made you wear, you couldn’t tell
where;
I tried to find out by kissing my way down her body but she didn’t like oral sex. She’d never had an orgasm, or sushi. She liked things cooked. She’d pulled my head away, and up, until I was facing her face and we’d made love with me on top, the way she preferred, taking the condom off herself when we were done, tying it into a knot and tossing it behind her, without looking, into the shiny white basket I would later empty into a shiny white Dumpster.

Love, that book with the drippy soundtrack says, is never having to say you’re sorry, and we never did. We never were. They kept us pretty busy at the Vast, as the staff called it in casual conversations over the absurdly colorful fruit salad they’d serve us each morning at the Breakfast Meeting. Allyson had

worked there for three years, an Entertainment Coordinator, so she stood up front with sheafs of schedules bulging under the clip-grip of her clipboard. She spilled my coffee when she gave me my copy. She didn’t apologize, but smiled and said some- thing about the table being shaky. After the meeting we huddled beneath it and looked at the legs. We kissed there and else- where. Our lunch hours were our own. She’d make cheap En- tertainment Coordinator jokes, and, when I was promoted past the faux-marble to become her assistant, cheap debriefing jokes.

“Aren’t you supposed to be briefing me?” I asked.

“
De
-briefing,” she said, looking up from her book to slap my thigh. “And I did already.” See?

“Really,” I said. “I’m supposed to know what’s going on, Al.

If Mike finds out that all we’re doing is fucking—”

“Joe,”
she said. Despite the jokes she hated language like that. Allyson had the cleanest mouth I’d ever encountered. No oral sex will do that, I guess. “Watch your—”

“I was going to say fucking
around.
”
“—language! Joe!”

“I’m—” I would have said sorry if we said such things. “I just—I just want to do a good job.”

“You
are,
” she said, puzzled. “You’re doing a
great
job. Why

do you think you got to be my assistant after just a few weeks?” “I thought,” I said, gesturing to the bed.

“No,”
she said. “Don’t
think.
You’re doing an
excellent
job,

Joseph. That’s why Mike and I wanted you to work with
people
more, instead of, I don’t know, the garbage cans and the buffet table and everything. I think you can be a real asset at Vast.”

I felt myself blush. Mike was the boss, the real boss. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Can I mention the briefing, then?”

“Let me just finish this chapter,” she said, glancing at the Vast clock that perched on the wall in everyone’s room like a wide, white eye. “We still have a few.”

Minutes, she meant. I stared out at the tide. Allyson was reading the latest by an author she loved, a woman who had written about vampires and sold millions, written about other things and sold hundreds and then returned to vampires with a vengeance, a series about vampires, vampires everywhere, everybody sucking everybody else dry. Bindings had a card- board figure of the author, dressed as a vampire. I wasn’t reading anything. I was spending my time trying to make a list. Living on an island somewhere didn’t mean I was leaving behind the twelve steps, which were now as obvious and squeaky-clean as faux-marble.