GINGHAM BLINDFOLD
by
Eric Rohr
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Eric Rohr on Smashwords
Gingham Blindfold
Copyright © 2009 by Eric Rohr
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, publications and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint lyrics from:
“The Model” (Martin/Murdoch/Colburn/Cooke/Geddes/Jackson/Campbell)
© 2000 Sony/ATV Music Publishing UK Ltd.
All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC,
8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
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* * * * *
For Lara
* * * * *
And if you think you see with just your eyes you’re mad
’Cause Lisa learned a lot from putting on a blindfold
When she knew she had been bad
She met another blind kid at a fancy dress
It was the best sex she ever had
The Model, Belle and Sebastian
* * * * *
GINGHAM BLINDFOLD
* * * * *
1
There was a wire report about the masturbation rate of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States that ran as a front-page story in the student newspaper where I worked in college. It stated that, every twenty seconds, someone in my age group masturbated.
We received several letters to the editor after the story ran. Some chastised us for putting it on the front page. Others were more jocular, poking fun at the report, saying the number sounded low. A Women’s Studies major (all letter writers were required to disclose their major for publication) pointed out the discrepancy between males and females in the survey—males obviously masturbating more than females, as stated in the report. She directed readers to a certain feminist author who encouraged young women to embrace their essence and buy a dildo.
My girlfriend, Kristen, was the only journalism student to argue against running the masturbation story. She didn’t think it was informative or funny or a First Amendment thing. She said it was disgusting. It was inappropriate. At the time, I thought it was possible Kristen had never masturbated.
I still wonder that.
As the paper’s editor, I wrote a column in the wake of the report’s publication. I mused about how someone might do the deed with privacy, since everyone my age had a roommate, whether they lived in a dorm or an apartment or their parents’ basement.
And forget seedy adult bookstores, I wrote. The booths in those things? It was doubtful anyone my age would go near one. Too embarrassing, too degrading. Never mind cleanliness.
There was also a question about the source material. I declared that adult magazines had outgrown their usefulness, given the availability of free porn on the Internet. I backed my thesis with the declining circulation numbers of the more mainstream publications, which I had found in Editor & Publisher.
At the end of the column, I concluded that the report’s data couldn’t possibly be accurate. After all, wasn’t this the age when we started getting laid? I pledged to conduct a survey of my own, cheerfully inviting readers to write in with their own experiences.
I had that column on my mind as Kristen was kicking me out. I thought about how much trouble it had caused me when I wrote it, how much trouble it caused me even now, ever since I’d found Indira.
* * * * *
Kristen stormed into the bedroom, where I had been sleeping, and flipped on the lights. “What is this?” she shouted. She was full of rage. “How could you do this to me?”
“Do what?” I asked groggily.
Kristen held up the picture of Indira, the top of which was crumpled in her hand. I heard the washing machine running in the background, and knew she had found it while doing the laundry. She always checked my pockets first.
“It’s no big deal,” I said calmly, hoping to prevent an escalation. I pulled the sheets over my lap. “It’s nothing.”
“Then why was it in your pocket? Where did you even get this?” She examined the advertisement on the other side of the page. “This is disgusting.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just a picture, Kristen.”
“Just a picture?” Her grip on Indira tightened. All I could do was watch nervously. I certainly couldn’t ask for it back. “Yes, clearly this is just a picture.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Am I? It’s bad enough that you look at this stuff online, Ethan. And I know you do.”
Backed into a corner, I used the same defense I shoehorned into every argument I had with Kristen since we had moved to California.
“I followed you out here,” I argued, the volume of my voice rising. “So cut me some slack.”
“I’ve been cutting you slack. And where has it gotten me? This is where.” She looked at the ad again. She flipped over the page. And then she was quiet.
“Kristen?”
“You need to get out,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she began, a tremble in her voice, “this is over. I want you to move out. I’m sick of this. So sick of it.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked breathlessly.
“I don’t care.”
I threw off the covers and grabbed my jeans off the floor.
“Fine,” I snapped, “just cut me a check for my half of the security deposit and I’ll be on my way.” It was meant to antagonize her, and it did. I had no right to demand it. She’d been spotting me money, it seemed, every day since we’d moved out to California. I owed her more than a security deposit.
“Here’s your deposit.” She tore the page into pieces and dropped them to the floor. Then she wiped her hands, burst into tears and ran out of the bedroom. There was a hasty gathering of purse and keys, followed by a slam of the front door.
I studied the pieces of paper on the floor, the pieces of tacky typeface, breasts and mouths and erections from the advertisement. The rest of the pieces revealed the damage Indira had sustained. Her right leg was torn and her stomach was ripped at a forty-five degree angle through the middle. Her head was severed from her body. On my way to lock the front door, I stepped over the torn paper like it was a chalk outline at a crime scene.
* * * * *
Running the masturbation story may have angered the newspaper’s publishing board—a few old-timers, industry professionals and faculty members—but my column really got them worked up. Even though the university was in Laramie, the liberal bastion of Wyoming, public discussion of masturbation and vibrators and ejaculation still caused a stir.
In fact, there was a movement among the board to fire me. I thought that was great. Here was a chance to show my mettle as a journalist, someone unwilling to sacrifice principles for a paycheck.
I thought I was pretty hot stuff.
After all, I had been an intern the previous summer at Record Shelves, the largest music magazine in the country. I didn’t need or, for that matter, want, to be editor of the student newspaper.
But the editor of The Laramie Daily Democrat, one of the last family-owned papers in the country, felt differently. The editor was my dad. He hoped I might follow in his footsteps some day, just like he had done with his father before him. He thought that the Record Shelves internship would rid me of any wanderlust. When he found that it hadn’t, Dad made sure I became student editor. He was nearing retirement age and needed me to be ready to take the reins when they were handed to me. I needed to be ready, whether I wanted them or not.
When the board emerged from the decisive meeting, Dad patted me on the shoulder, smiled smugly and told me that my job was safe. The Daily Democrat printed the student newspaper at a substantial discount, and I’m told contract renewal was discussed.
* * * * *
Had Kristen not insisted I take out the trash that evening, I never would have found Indira.
“Ethan,” Kristen called from the kitchen for the second time, “come on.” She was in a hurry to finish the dishes before the start of “Desperate Housewives.”
“In a minute,” I replied, my eyes fixed on the computer screen at our shared desk in the dining room. I was surfing the same sites I hit every day at the newspaper, a small daily in Southern California. We had moved there when Kristen accepted a junior position at a public relations firm in San Diego a week after graduation. I packed only what would fit in an oversized equipment bag a friend gave me when he stopped playing hockey. I turned in the keys to the tiny basement apartment I’d had since freshman year, hauled my second-hand furniture to the dump and sold the worn-down Subaru wagon that was once my dad’s.
The day before I left, Dad walked me through the newspaper one last time, maybe for sentimental reasons, more likely for guilt. He was trying to show me it was something I would miss, that I couldn’t write about rock stars forever. After the farewell tour, he took me to lunch at a greasy spoon around the corner where the newspaper’s staff had been eating for years. We ate in silence.
But Dad needn’t have worried about my aspirations. After two months without a single freelance record review or rock star profile, I was broke. I reluctantly accepted a position as a copy editor at a small daily. Copyediting was entry-level work. At The Daily Democrat, we had high school interns to do the job. But Kristen was no longer willing to cover my half of the rent, and I had to do something.
“Ethan, come on.”
“I did it last time,” I snapped, not meaning to protest so much as to merely set the record straight. We’d been sniping at each other more often, probably because we hardly saw each other anymore. I worked nights. Kristen worked days. She was always asleep when I came home, leaving me with nothing else to do but drink beer and stare at online porno all night like a statistic in one of my columns. Kristen and I shared a single day off together. And on this particular day, Kristen wanted to stay in. After all, it was a work night for her.
I backed the rolling chair out from the computer desk and laced my sneakers. She stood at the door, waiting for me to unload the rubber trashcan in her hands.
“That’s a good boy,” she said as I took it.
“Funny,” I replied. “But I wouldn’t have to take out the trash if we just would have gone out.”
“Yes, because it would have just emptied itself while we were having Thai.”
“Maybe,” I said, sauntering to the door. “Coconut milk has mystical powers.”
“It makes you gassy.”
“Again, funny.” It was our habit to diffuse an argument with gentle sarcasm, and though I was still angry with her, easing the tension was certainly better than being stuck at home and in a fight.
I carried the trash down the cement-block stairs and around the corner of our unit. We lived in a high-density complex called Rancho Margarita. They weren’t the greatest apartments, but we signed the lease on the recommendation of the newspaper’s columnist, Jasper Markum. Jasper was something of a fixture at Rancho Margarita, a divorcé who was always practicing Spanish with the groundskeepers or watering the potted succulents that lined the sidewalk to his door. As it turned out, Jasper received a discount on his rent for every new tenant he helped to sign. I never told Kristen that he bragged about it one day at work because I figured it would only make matters worse. As it was, she hated that our apartment was so far from the beach, that rap music could be heard at any hour of the day, that our neighbors could probably hear us talking, because we could certainly hear them. But it fit my budget, and we could still smell the floral, salty air wafting from the ocean. Everywhere we looked, there were palm trees. It wasn’t so terrible.
I moved down the winding sidewalk that cut through the complex, keeping an eye out for a garbage bin that was a little less full than the rest. I stepped out onto the main street of the complex and in front of an oncoming car, a modified Honda with large chrome rims, primer-gray hood and deafening bass line blasting from its subwoofers. The windows were darkened, and there was something written in an indecipherable Old English script along the top of windshield. The car stopped just in front of me. I stepped backward onto the curb and stood still, clutching the trashcan in my hands. Then, the car slowly moved past me, the dual exhaust meeting the pavement as it rose over a speed bump before suddenly speeding away, a noxious cloud of exhaust and burnt rubber left in its wake.
I continued across the street to the nearest stucco garbage enclosure. I set the can down to tie off the plastic liner, and a to-go box Kristen had forced on top spilled to the ground. I hoisted the bag over the mound of garbage and then knelt down to clean up the mess. As I gathered the wilted lettuce, the tomato slices and the pickles, I saw a magazine under the bin. I wiped my hands on my jeans and reached for it. It was an adult magazine. A porno called Tight Horizons.
Finding something like Tight Horizons, randomly, and without having to wander shamefully into an adult bookstore or ask the pimply clerk at the gas station made me like I was fifteen and pilfering the Victoria’s Secret catalog from the mailbox before Dad got home. I shut the enclosure doors behind me and crouched in the dark behind the enclosure wall. The smell of cantaloupe rinds and soiled diapers ripened the air. I flipped through the pages anxiously. It was difficult to see in the darkness behind the bin, but I could still distinguish the shadowy shapes in the pictures. They were elbows and thighs and breasts. I examined the pages systematically and thoroughly, as though I were trying to memorize each picture to later illuminate in my mind.
I turned the page.
And another.
And then another. And there she was.
I noticed her body first. I can’t pretend otherwise. Her breasts were fleshy and round, the edges of her pink nipples blended into her baby-smooth skin. She wore gingham panties. They were red, the kind with white lace around the waist. She was reclined on thick, emerald grass. The feathery ends of her blond hair, reddened by the looming sunset behind her, hung over her shoulders. Her mouth was slightly opened and nearly formed into a smile. She didn’t look directly at the camera, but off to the side, to the horizon. Carefully, and repeatedly, I studied her eyes, the arches of her cheekbones and the crinkles on her forehead, the thin creases extending from her eyelids, the color of her skin. I learned her name from the blurb that interrupted the tranquil scene: “Drive your tractor through Indira’s barn doors!”
I turned the page for more, but only found an advertisement for “The Rocket,” a name that adequately spelled out his talents.
I flipped back to Indira. Immediately, my mind wandered back to the editor’s chair at the student paper, pondering in a column the motivations and intentions of anybody who did anything. Indira was such a strange stage name—and surely it was that, because otherwise it would be Michelle or Carla or Samantha. I wondered what drove a woman as beautiful as Indira to put herself in such a position. I figured drugs or poverty or an abusive upbringing, but when I looked into Indira’s printed eyes, I saw something else. She seemed at peace with what she did, maybe even happy about it, never mind that it was beneath her.
I didn’t know if it was the possibility of rescuing her or touching those breasts, but I wanted to find Indira and tell her she could do better. I was going to help Indira. I was going to help myself.
* * * * *
2
“Ethan, are you out here?” Kristen shouted, her flip flops smacking the pavement as she stormed the grounds of the complex.
I peeked through the crevice of the garbage enclosure doors and saw her carving a path down the middle of the street. Watching Kristen, I was reminded of what I liked best about her. I marveled at the definition of her muscular thighs and the shape of her calves, which were like hot air balloons, her tiny ankles the wicker baskets suspended underneath. Her hair was tied up in a bun, the same way she did it before a shower. She wore my old polka dot boxers and a shrunken pink t-shirt. In college, Kristen preferred tight-fitting jeans or chinos; now that she was a PR flack, she opted for expensive silk suits and bejeweled chains. But at the end of the day, she always wore a skimpy t-shirt and those boxers. She called it her “loungewear.”
“Actually, Kristen, it’s my loungewear,” I would tell her, “you’re just living in it.”
The boxers were once my favorite pair. It seemed like years had passed since she’d commandeered them, but it was only the end of junior year. We’d been flirting at the student paper the way two journalism majors would flirt, mocking each other’s ledes, opening each other’s story files and deleting the bylines, changing “its” to “it’s” and “theirs” to “there’s.” One night after the paper had been shipped, the staff darted to a bar across the street to relieve some deadline stress. Hours later, everyone was hammered, most of all our flamboyant entertainment editor. He was dancing on the table, his shirt lifted to show off his round belly, which he smacked to the beat of “Dancing Queen.” Kristen and I both feigned disgust and both rose from the table at the same time, presumably to use the toilet. Within seconds, we were in a dark corner of the bar, kissing.
The next morning, I woke to find Kristen digging through the underwear drawer of the dresser next to my bed. I might have protested had I not been so distracted by the way her bikini panties fit snuggly around her cheeks. Kristen took care of herself, at least more than any other girl I had ever been with. She ran compulsively, at least three miles a day, and as a result, her legs were lean and toned. Her skin was light brown from weekly visits to the tanning bed. She used nice lotions that smelled like peaches and honey.
I reached for her rear, but she turned around before I made contact.
“Here,” she said, holding my boxers in the air, stretching the waistband taut with both hands. “These will do nicely.”
I rarely wore those boxers, saving them for dates or public occasions such as locker rooms or the doctor’s office. Had I known a Tuesday night at the paper would end in a make-out session with Kristen, I might have worn them instead of the pinstriped pair with a hole in the crotch that were bunched on the floor along with the rest of the previous night’s clothing.
“Why do you need boxers,” I asked, sneaking a finger under her panty line, “when you already have briefs?” This time, I successfully snapped the elastic against her thigh. She playfully slapped my hand.
“I hate getting dressed first thing in the morning. I’d rather hang out in my jammies.”
“Jammies, huh? What are you, eight?”
She slipped the boxers over her underwear and threw on one of my t-shirts.
“What would you prefer I call them?” she asked, slinking back into bed. She nestled into my arms. “How about loungewear? That wouldn’t offend your sleepwear sensibilities, would it?”
“I think loungewear is lovely,” I said. “Now take it off.”
* * * * *
Kristen neared the garbage enclosure, her keychain pepper spray dangling from her fingers. She probably worried that the way she was dressed would attract unwanted attention.
I folded the picture of Indira—The Rocket ad faced outward—and quietly slipped it into my back pocket. When I was a kid, I used to flatten the colorful boxes my toys came in and hang them over my bed. In high school, I tore out pictures of rock stars from old editions of Record Shelves and affixed them to the inside of my locker. I recalled each cherished picture that I had stuck to a wall or a door with just a little Scotch tape or thumbtacks or Blu Tak. Maybe I would mount Indira on an old piece of cardboard, tape her up some place hidden, where only I could see.
I rolled the magazine tightly and shoved it through a space in the garbage heap. It fell to the bottom of the bin with a dull thud, and I waited to see if the noise alerted Kristen. But she kept walking, either oblivious to the strange sounds coming from behind closed doors or just voluntarily ignorant. I stepped out of the enclosure and crept behind her.
“Hey, baby,” I whispered in a dark, disturbing voice I used to annoy her when she was on deadline at the student paper, “you easy?”
Startled, Kristen spun around with the pepper spray pointed at my face. I ducked just before she unleashed a stream of pepper spray, which sent me stumbling backwards onto the ground. When Kristen realized I wasn’t a mugger, she burst into laughter. I picked myself up off the ground, rubbed my eyes and checked my skin.
“I’m so sorry!” Kristen tried to stifle her laughter. She pouted her lip and held out the pepper spray like a battered wife who was turning over a gun to the police after shooting her abusive husband. I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze.
“No, it’s a good thing you had it. You shouldn’t be out here by yourself at night,” I said, covertly checking my pocket. “There’s nothing but a bunch of freaks.”
* * * * *
I carried the torn pieces to the kitchen table and carefully pieced together Indira, mending the sections with clear tape, making sure to match each and every paper fiber. The pattern of her gingham panties gave me fits, but after several minutes of meticulous repair, Indira was whole again.
I carried her into the bathroom and loosened my pants, my ears on alert for the sound of Kristen returning to the apartment.
When I finished, I cleaned up with a couple of facial tissues that I then flushed down the toilet. I nudged the page away from the sink to a corner of the counter with my elbow so it wouldn’t get wet. I washed my hands and dried them thoroughly before I picked up the page. The light magazine stock was sturdier now that I had patched together the pieces of the page, tape strips spread over it like arteries and veins. I folded the page in half and then in fourths, making new creases over the patchwork tape, and stuck it in my pocket, where it felt like a wallet thick with crisp new bills. It was worth as much to me.
I looked for fresh clothes, but everything I usually wore was soaking wet in the washing machine. I reached into Kristen’s closet and dug through a box of old clothes meant for charity. I put on threadbare boxers, a pair of jeans and my old Record Shelves t-shirt, the only compensation I had received as an intern. I began to pack. I grabbed my wet clothes out of the washer and stuffed them inside my old hockey bag. Some of Kristen’s socks and underwear fell to the ground, but I left them. I walked back inside the apartment and shoved shelves of CDs on top of the wet clothes, followed by pictures of Kristen and me that I ripped from the refrigerator door. I tore down ticket stubs of concerts and movies we’d seen from a corkboard on a wall in the bedroom, tacks flying onto the mattress like shrapnel. I searched under the bed for any refugees: a sock, a favorite pen, a Wet-Nap from the Thai restaurant. Spare change in between the couch cushions went into my pockets. Sticky notes went into the bag. Food went into my stomach. This wasn’t about me forgetting somebody. This was about me being forgotten. I was erasing my existence, stealing from Kristen any opportunity for our memories to linger in her brain. It felt violent. It felt like war.
I reached under the bed for my tattered shoebox of clips, where I kept copies of the masturbation column. I sealed the box with packing tape and forced it on top of the pile in the bag. I zipped it shut, flung it over my shoulder and carried it outside.
After I locked the deadbolt, I stuck the key in an envelope stolen from the stash Kristen used to pay bills and write letters, and shoved it under the door. It skidded across the vinyl floor and bumped against the edge of the carpet runner.
I heaved the bag over my shoulder, and a corner of the clip box dug into my skin. But I carried it just the same. I had a long way to go, and the pain wasn’t unbearable. I had felt worse.
* * * * *
3
There was another girl like Indira, but I hadn’t found her in an adult magazine.
Her name was Tabitha. We shared a class together during freshman year, “Intro to German.” There wasn’t anything breathtaking or exotic about Tabitha—in fact she may have been the opposite. Her ears weren’t pierced. She had a pug nose and jowly cheeks. Her hair was brown and cut medium length. She wore patterned summer blouses and chino skirts that crowned her stubby legs. The most noticeable thing about her was her bright orange backpack, which was covered with patches of European flags, slogans in foreign languages and a label from a Nutella jar.
I wondered what the slogans meant and where she had gotten the patches. Maybe she’d railed across Europe—something I’d always wanted to do—but it was hard to imagine this girl waiting for a train in Berlin with that backpack slung over her shoulder, standing out like a stray traffic cone on the Autobahn. And yet her language skills were excellent. When the teacher’s assistant called on Tabitha, she always earned his highest praise: “Sehr gut!”
A few weeks into the semester, I arrived late to class and found that everyone had broken into groups. Tardiness had become a habit of mine, the result of late nights spent press-checking The Daily Democrat. The T.A. warned that another tardy would result in my final grade dropping a full letter. Satisfied that I understood the severity of the situation, he told me to join any group with an odd number. I hurried over to the far corner of the classroom, where Tabitha was busily coaxing answers to the workbook’s banal questions about color preferences and telephone manners from others in the group. A few of them mumbled half-hearted attempts before turning their attention to the clock. The rest were discussing a recent fraternity party that the cops had busted the weekend before.
I grabbed a chair from an empty desk next to Tabitha, and the hardened rubber ends of the legs squeaked as I dragged it across the linoleum floor. I hurriedly dug through my bag, searching for my workbook. The kind of day I was having, of course I’d forgotten it.
“That’s OK,” Tabitha said, handing me hers.
“Vielen dank,” I replied. She seemed rather pleased that I had answered in German, as if it was a second language to me. But it was just a formal variation of “thank you” I had taken to saying because everybody knew “danke schoen,” and I thought it made me unique.
I scanned the open workbook, and Tabitha pointed to the middle of the page where the group had left off. I read and reread the question to myself before I made a public attempt.
“Wie ist mein Akzent?” I asked.
“Nicht so gut, es tut mir leid, zu sagen,” she replied.
I had no idea what she had said, but it sounded great. I asked her if she already spoke German, and when she nodded, I asked her why she didn’t just pay for the credits and test out of the class.
“If I’m paying for the credits, shouldn’t I get something out of it? Now, Bitte, wo ist die toilette?” Then, with a giggle, she whispered, “I don’t want to pee my pants.”
We took turns asking questions, and while she scribbled answers in her workbook, I watched the way she dotted her Is and Js with bubbles like she was a fifth-grader, that mousy brown hair swishing in front of her face. I listened intently to her answers and the way that she spoke. I imagined the two of us wandering through the German countryside, Tabitha strapped into her orange backpack, using her language skills to befriend the locals, confer with cab drivers and order our meals.
By mid-terms, I had worked up the nerve to ask her out. I lingered after class while Tabitha tucked the day’s worksheet neatly into her book.
“I’m Ethan Ames.” I held out my hand.
“I know, silly.” She had learned my name from group, of course, but I had no idea how to initiate a social conversation other than to robotically pretend this was our first encounter. “But it’s nice to meet you again, Ethan.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Florida.”
“That right? It’s warm there.” I might as well have been speaking German.
“Yes.” She paused. “I guess it is.”
“Why did you come to Wyoming?”
“I just wanted a change. I like spending time in different places,” she said sweetly. “I like to explore.”
“Right. I saw the patches.” I pointed to the bag. “You’ve been to Europe? I’d like to go some time.”
“You have to. I was an exchange student in high school. It’s lovely.”
“Maybe you could tell me about it some time. Maybe over coffee?”
“Klinkt prachtig.” Tabitha said as she put her book in her backpack.
“Is that German?”
“Time for you to hit the books, Ethan,” she teased. “That was Dutch.”
“Wow, how many languages do you know? I’ll need a tutor just to keep up,” I hinted.
“Klinkt prachtig,” she repeated.
“Yes?”
She hoisted her backpack over her shoulders.
“Klinkt prachtig—sounds wonderful.”
* * * * *
The first night Tabby tutored me, we only studied for an hour before we got bored and decided to make doughnuts and watch “The Simpsons.” From there we split our time evenly between homework and ditching class to play tag football or eat waffles at a crummy truck stop diner. She bought me a pot of herbs and a heat lamp because she thought I was a good cook. She tickled me on the nose and called me “The Music Man.” She knocked on my door early on the weekend to go running because she wanted me to kick my smoking habit.
I was pretty hooked.
Most nights, after we’d finished the requisite study hour, we ordered a pizza and discussed weekend plans. I suggested the football game or a day trip to Denver. Suddenly, Tabitha became very excited, and strangely, a little nervous. She asked if I wanted to attend a gathering of Christian students on campus. They had started meeting on Saturdays, she said, and she would like to go. This was the first time I’d heard Tabitha mention anything about religion, and I thought she was being sarcastic. I thought she meant it as a joke.
“That could be fun,” I said. “Those Suzie Sunshine hymns always crack me up. We could sing all bad and off-key or something to screw with them.”
Tabitha became sullen, and I quickly apologized. When I saw her bow her head before she grabbed a slice, just like she had when we went out for waffles, I started to get the idea.
That Saturday, we met at the small auditorium in the student union. It was packed. Tabby sought out a group standing in the back of the room and introduced me to a guy named Shag. He told me repeatedly how “awesome” it was that I came, and did I know how “awesome the Lord’s love is?” The tinny strumming of a twelve-string guitar projected through large speakers on either side of the stage. Everyone stopped talking. A buzz of a bass line came through a speaker behind me. A student clad in a low-cut dress and a headset walked on stage and sang “The Lord’s Prayer” in a pious soprano, and hundreds of hands reached into the air. I moved toward the doors and hid in the corner of the auditorium, smirking throughout the performance. Tabitha saw me. I made sure of it.
I wasn’t a stranger to church. Dad and I attended pretty regularly, in fact. In a small town, it was an editor’s job to be an upstanding member of the community, and my dad felt a public obligation to do those kinds of things. But we never talked about church at home. We didn’t read the Bible. I was sent to Sunday school with almost a wink and a nudge. Church was a pleasant experience, if a mix of mysticism, morality and wishful thinking. Maybe I couldn’t handle the Saturday night crowd, but church I could do.
“You don’t need to go,” Tabitha said over the phone as she was getting ready on a Sunday morning. She had not invited me.
“I will. If it will make you happy,” I said, “I’ll do it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Well, if you’re okay with it.”
“It’s fine, Ethan.”
Not long after that, she left for a week-long Bible study in the Big Horn Mountains. Tabitha didn’t call to say goodbye before she left, but she did call when she came back. I was at her door within minutes. I had missed her like crazy. I’d even read a bit of the Gospels while she was away, as if they would bring me closer to her.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said, grabbing my hand. I should have seen it coming, but I was oblivious. I thought we were just going for a stroll. I wanted to tell her about my recent reading.
There was a park nearby where we had spent so many early mornings stamping out my smoking habit, and we sat at a picnic table under an oak tree where we once ate orange slices after a jog. I thought maybe Tabitha would have fiddled with her fingers or stared silently at the bird crap on the table while she figured out what to say. But as soon as we sat down, she did it. She had no problem finding the words. She had known what to say for a while.
I didn’t give up on Tabitha, though. One night, I drunkenly sauntered to her dorm room and thumped on her door. Tabitha listened patiently as I preached about the depth of my feelings for her. I don’t remember much of it, but I woke up early that morning, snuggled in her arms, both of us fully clothed on top of the bed. During our time dating, we had never spent the night together, had hardly kissed. She could have kicked me out, but she didn’t. The gesture encouraged me, even though the following hours were awkward. I was hung over and she was distant.
Over the next two years, I kept tabs on Tabitha’s various boyfriends, chatted her up when I saw her at the student union and registered for religion courses I knew she’d take, hoping she’d be my study partner.
But at the start of senior year, the e-mails I sent to Tabitha’s address bounced back, and her phone number was disconnected. I didn’t see her at the union. Desperate, I went to her Saturday night church group and found Shag.
“Dude,” he said, grabbing my shoulder congenially, “she’s on a year-long mission.”
Tabitha never came back. The last I heard, she married a minor soccer player in Holland, had twin baby girls and spoke fluent Dutch.
Standing there in the middle of that room, listening to a contemporary Christian rock band search for salvation in the chords of a Pearl Jam song, I thought about waking up in Tabitha’s arms. Now I knew her embrace wasn’t a tender one. It wasn’t really even protective. It was patronizing.
“Hey, dude, are you going to mosh?” Shag asked me.
I looked at him blankly. My throat was clenched.
“It’s okay, we can mosh,” he said. “The Lord thinks moshing is awesome.”
“Awesome.”
* * * * *
4
There was a Motel 6 down the street from the apartment that I walked past every night on my way home from work. The number three on the motel’s sign that faced the highway was burned out, making it appear as though a single-bed room cost only nine dollars when it was actually thirty-nine. The sign had been that way since I’d come to Oceanside, and the motel’s reluctance to fix it would have driven my dad crazy. The Daily Democrat had a small illuminated sign on a xeriscaped mound in front of the building, and leaving one night after press check, we saw a dark spot behind the “Daily.” Dad would be back at the paper the next morning, but he refused to let it wait till then.
He went back inside the office for a package of light bulbs. Using a screwdriver pulled from the ice-encrusted trunk of our car, he unscrewed the bolts from the glass face and laid it gently on a fresh drift of snow while I complained about being tired and freezing. I was in high school and prone to the usual teenage mood swings and tantrums, so Dad spared me the lecture, or perhaps himself the headache. He simply spoke to himself as though he was a pastor delivering a sermon to an empty sanctuary. Every detail counted, every correctly spelled caption, every reader complaint heeded, every light bulb replaced. I rolled my eyes at the time, aching to get out of the cold and into my warm bed. And yet I couldn’t help but hear my dad’s voice as I walked across the street into the motel’s parking lot. What did that burned-out sign say about the motel? What other corners did they cut? Did they leave dirty sheets on the bed? Did the maids not wipe down the toilets or replace the water glasses?
There was a story that ran in the paper recently about the dirty habits of hotel maids. Captured on hidden camera around the country were maids rinsing used glasses in the bathroom sink, wiping them out with facial tissue and replacing them on the counter as if they were fresh from the dishwasher. They did all of this, of course, while wearing the same yellow rubber gloves they’d used while scrubbing the toilets. Though it had all been caught on tape (we ran a still from some of the footage), every single hotel owner denied that such housekeeping practices occurred on their premises. I think some of the hotel owners were sued, but I don’t remember what happened. Maybe they settled. Maybe they just fired the maids.
I walked into the front office. There were no other customers, only a clerk at the front desk. He was focused on something behind the counter, his arms moving side to side like he was on an assembly line.
“I’d like a room.”
“Just a minute, son,” he said, like I was a teenager asking the old man for a little money and the keys to the Olds. “New to Oceanside?”
“Mostly.”
He nodded, continuing with his activities behind the counter. He wore a faded blue Oxford, unbuttoned at the top, the dog tags chained around his neck buffered by the fluffy, silver hair on his chest. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows, exposing a green tattoo of a hula girl on one forearm and an anchor with some illegible writing on the other. His hair was cut in a buzz, with thick sideburns that extended to his earlobes. He looked like a retired Marine. There were dozens just like him everywhere you turned in Oceanside. They came to Camp Pendleton as young men, did their tours, dutifully obliged every base transfer, and then retired back on the coast. They knew a good thing when they saw it.
“There we go now.” He plopped a stack of white, hot pink and sea green letter-sized paper on the counter. “I apologize for the wait. You need a room? One night?”
I looked at the top sheet. “Missing” was written in large black type across the top. Below it was a grainy, photocopied picture of a pretty girl with round apple cheeks and pixie-like short hair. The text underneath said her name was Bethany. She was last seen in Southwest Riverside County. Her date of birth was a few months after mine.
“Is this someone you know?”
“Dean’s kid. He works here, Dean. I’m pulling a double so he can look for her. I thought these fliers might help.”
“Is it serious?”
“Sure, it’s serious.” He said it like someone’s pet goldfish had died. “Well, for my friend Dean, it’s serious. Bethany’s always been trouble.”
“I hope she’s OK.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think she’s gone too far.”
“You don’t?”
He cleared his throat. He’d said too much. “Well, now, no need to involve a customer in other folks’ problems.”
“But if you don’t think it’s that serious,” I said, “why did you make all of these?”
“Because Dean is my friend. How long will you be staying with us?”
“I guess indefinitely.”
“I’ll book you for tomorrow. Let us know if you change your mind. No refunds after four. This cash, credit, debit? We don’t take checks.”
I paused. “Credit.” I handed over my card.
“Now, if you were staying here tomorrow, you might just bump into Dean. I imagine he’ll be back by then.”
“Alright.”
“Alright. So I’d hate for you to tell him what I’ve told you.”
“I won’t tell him anything.”
“You’re saying I can trust you, then?” He hunched over the counter, squinting his eyes like he was scoping for Viet Cong. “I’ve got your word, then?”
“You have my word.” I added a “Sir” as though we were speaking in some military code.
“You know what I think,” he read my credit card, “Ethan Ames?”
I shook my head, suddenly wishing I hadn’t handed it over to him.
“I think the little bitch went to L.A. to flash her tits in some skin flick.”
* * * * *
Chuck didn’t have anyone else to share his theory with. His wife’s been gone for twenty years. Died after breast cancer spread into her lungs. And forget the kids. They don’t talk to him anymore.
“They live like a bunch of goddamn hippies in the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”
Sometimes he talked to the guy at the corner gas station, the checkout girl at Ralphs. The paperboy. But Dean was the person he talked to most. Who else could he tell his story to, then?
Me, I guess. And his story was this:
Chuck went by coffee time, the way some people are able to set their internal alarm clocks or discern the time of day by the position of the sun. He actually wore a watch, an old silver timepiece with the flexible metal strap, but he never looked at it except with loving affection. The watch didn’t work anymore. But it was a gift from his late wife, and he’d just as soon stop wearing his wedding ring. There was no need for the watch to keep time anyway. He drank the same amount of coffee every day, at the same pace, at the same hours. Coffee time. A watch that worked would only be redundant.
When his third cup of coffee was half empty, the remnants gone cold, he knew it was time to count the register. Chuck tallied the credit card clips first, stacking them into a neat pile and fastening them with a paperclip. The next step was always more difficult. Chuck was dyslexic as a child. Counting a series of nearly identical ones, fives, tens and twenties was a challenge, and one that required his undivided attention. When he began the procedure, carefully matching receipts to the cash in the register, repeating the growing amount in his head after each bill he laid down on the counter, the door jingled. Chuck didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. He knew it was Dean. Chuck threw his hand in the air, a half-hearted wave that was his habit. “Three hundred twenty-seven,” Chuck whispered to himself.
Chuck almost lost count when a small hand slapped against his own in a raucous high five. Dean had never given him a high five before, only shook his hand, and his palms weren’t soft, either. He didn’t wear jewelry, and he didn’t smell like bubblegum and beach sweat.
“Whatcha doin’, Chuck?”
It was Bethany, dressed in a skimpy bikini top and cutoff Levi’s. Chuck could see the bottom of her butt hanging out of them in the reflection on the glass doors behind her. Bethany leaned over the counter, her tender cleavage begging him to stare. She’d grown up so fast, Chuck thought.
Bethany smacked her gum and told Chuck she needed a room.
“I don’t have time for games,” he told her. “I’m a little busy, and your daddy’s going to be here any second.” Chuck repeated “three hundred twenty seven” in his head, trying not to lose track of the drawer money. “Three hundred twenty, three hundred... shit, was it thirty?”
There was loud music coming from a black Dodge Ram parked in front of the office, the motor still running. The windows were rolled down. Two girls cavorted in the back seat of the cab, laughing and kicking the head rests with their bare feet. They were either drunk or high. Chuck sensed trouble.
“What do you need a room for? They with you?”
Bethany backed away from the counter. She chomped her bubble gum and grinned.
“Maybe. What are you gonna do about it?”
What was he going to do about it? What could he do?
“Those girls drinkin’?”
Motel rules gave Chuck the right to refuse a room to anyone who appeared intoxicated. Bethany was sober, though, even if she was making the choices of a drunken idiot.
She waved at the truck. “No sir!” She saluted him.
A good Marine, he couldn’t bend the rules. He took her cash, which was scrunched into several wads, and slipped a keycard into the paper holder, scribbling the room number on top. He wrote her name in the log as Betsy B. Good.
“I’m still tryin’ to figure out how I came up with such a funny name so damn quick,” Chuck told me.
Bethany took the keycard and leapt into the truck. Chuck had lost count of the drawer and was forced to start over. Carelessly but not uncaring, he hurried through his chore, so he could rush out the door when Dean arrived. This was not their habit, and Chuck would need to explain why he’d been so curt with his good friend. But he couldn’t think about it right then. When he got home, he guzzled a twelve of Pabst, smoked a pack of Kool Menthols and devoured a heaping turkey-and-pepper-jack sandwich that gave him heartburn the remainder of the night.
The next morning, Chuck set out for work on his Harley. The sun-soaked seat singed his crotch, intensifying his hangover. He shifted restlessly on the searing leather as he roared down the road to the motel. This was nothing, Chuck thought. His ass would hurt twice as bad when Dean kicked it. One less friend, Chuck thought. He never imagined old age would be so lonely.
Chuck parked his bike and removed his helmet. When he went inside the front office, Dean was waiting behind the counter, smiling wearily.
“Hey buddy,” Dean said. “You’re early. I might just get home for ‘Teletubbies.’”
Chuck laughed nervously. “Any problems last night, Dean-O?”
“Nah, pretty quiet.”
Relieved, Chuck rubbed the worry out of his face. It reminded him of a game he played with his kids. “Turn that frown,” he’d tell them, changing expressions as he moved his hand back and forth, “upside down!”
There was a fresh pot of coffee on the counter. Chuck poured some into a Styrofoam cup.
“Got a couple complaints about noises in 203. I called down there to tell ’em to shut up and some chick answered, all out of breath.” Dean licked his lips. “Like to get me some of that.”
Chuck didn’t say a word. He drank the entire cup at once, burning his throat and throwing off his schedule.
* * * * *
“You don’t want a piece of this, Dean-O,” Chuck whispered to himself, standing in the doorway of room 203 after the maids had called him down to show him the mess.
Beer cans, empty liquor bottles and Trojan wrappers littered the carpet. Chuck kicked empty film canisters as he walked into the bathroom. Spent condoms and tissue clogged the toilet. The chrome faucet on the counter outside of the bathroom was coated with greasy smears, and there were lipstick kisses on the mirrors. The place reeked of body odor and bad breath.
Chuck stepped outside for a breather. He had barely lit his cigarette when one of the maids called out in broken English.
“Christ, what is it now?”
She handed him a toiletry bag from under the vanity. Chuck couldn’t count the panicked calls he’d received from guests who were halfway to Arizona before realizing they’d left behind a purse, a piece of luggage, a toiletry bag. He looked inside. There was a package of disposable razors, strawberry-flavored lubricant, condoms and a glass dildo. There was also a stack of Polaroids. They were of Bethany, on the very bed Chuck was standing next to, her legs spread, the dildo in her mouth, the dildo rubbing against her face, the dildo inserted.
“Clean it up,” he told the maids, shoving the photos back into the bag. “Clean it up now.”
Chuck carried the bag to the dumpster, withdrew several trash bags and threw it inside. He replaced the bags and shut the dumpster lid.
“Dean don’t think she’s a saint,” Chuck told me at the end of his story, “believe me. But he don’t know how bad she is, either. Thing is, Ethan Ames,” he said, again reading my name on my credit card, “I don’t have the heart to tell him.”
He tapped it on the stack of fliers. “That’s why I’m making these for my friend Dean.”
I reached out for my card and key, and Chuck snapped to attention.
“Shoot, you don’t want to hear about other people’s problems. Here you go. Just do me a favor. Keep this between you and me.”
“I will.” I looked down at the keycard envelope. It was blank. “What room am I in?”
Chuck flashed a grin, sideburn to sideburn. “You’re in 203.”
* * * * *
I swiped the keycard through the door lock, waited for the blinking green light below the handle and stepped inside. There was the faintest smell of smoke, even though the room was designated non-smoking. I turned on the light, set my bag on a luggage rack in the closet and inspected my new surroundings. Permanent hangers were neatly tucked to one side of the coat rack. The top square of toilet paper on the rung was folded into a triangle. The soaps were nestled in their wrappers and placed at an angle along three arranged plastic-wrapped cups, which I found to be a relief. There weren’t chocolates on the pillows, but the room had an order to it and a superficial cleanliness, familiar and generic. It was a motel room, same as any other.
I removed the picture of Indira from the bulging hockey bag and laid it down on the sienna-colored comforter. Almost immediately, I became erect. The grotesque images on the back of the page no longer bothered me. I had chosen to ignore that side of her. I went quickly, eager for release.
* * * * *
5
When I walked into work the next day, my supervisor, Clark, was busy proofing an entertainment page. Clark was an old guy who’d been in the newspaper business a long time. He used to run a small daily in Montana that, he grumbled, was ruined after its purchase by a corporate chain. Unwilling to tolerate the hierarchy of corporate overlords, Clark uprooted his wife and teenage son to seek out warmer winters and better pay in California. Clark was a sharp newspaperman—he should have been more than just a night editor—but already near retirement age, he was too cynical for upward movement. I saw Clark, I saw my dad, and then I saw myself in twenty years, and wondered how anyone could expect me to follow in either of their footsteps.
I greeted Clark, who replied with a simple nod, and threw down my pack. The newsroom was quietly pulsing; all the city editors, beat reporters and clerks had weekend hangovers and were just grinding it out until the end of the day. I slipped into my swivel chair and turned on my Mac. The buzz of the computer coming to life drew the attention of a harried reporter on the other side of my cubicle, but he quickly returned to the story on his screen.
I checked my messages. There were a few mass e-mails from the executive editor in Escondido, one from Clark about leaving before I did a press check leftover from the weekend and some junk mail. Nothing from Kristen. We’d hardly ever gone for more than a day without speaking to each other, even if we’d just had a spat over the phone when she was out of town. I figured this latest bout was just another bit of theater, the kind we always acted out before reconciling with sex or a trip to the bar. Didn’t she wonder where I had gone? Apparently not. And for that, I was relieved. It was like we’d crossed a critical threshold that had defied us for so long. I grabbed a red pen and a proof out of the wire basket and got to work. Clark tapped me on the shoulder.
“Want to enter any of these headlines in the CAL Awards?” Clark asked in his ambling drawl, holding a handful of tear sheets. The CAL Awards were the biggest journalism competition in the state.
“Not especially.” I wasn’t proud of the pages. This was just copyediting, and I was a writer.
“Didn’t think so.” He reached over to his desk and exchanged the tear sheets with the day’s proofs. “Here’re your pages, dude.”
I set them aside and opened a story by Elizabeth Anderson Carlisle, the paper’s best reporter. Liz covered hospital board meetings, physician scandals and the latest anti-depressant trends in Los Angeles. Then she’d dig up stories on ruthless pimps or pen advocacy pieces about the need to supply junkies with clean needles. Liz had already won the CAL Award twice, for her reporting on strung-out prostitutes in Los Angeles and teenage pornography in San Diego. She was only a couple years older than me.
Judging by the initials in the editing column, the story had been read by several editors. But I was going to read it anyway. Everybody wanted to read Liz’s stuff. Some because it was easy—her copy was clean, so it was an easy way to get your initials on a story before a smoke break. Others wanted to read it because they had a hard on for Liz. I think I read her stories out of a competitive urge, but I don’t know where the competition was. Liz was in a league above me—a league above all of us, really.
“Are you in my story?” Liz asked, startling me. I was so engrossed, I hadn’t noticed her standing at my desk.
The story was about a husband who had cheated on his wife, contracted HIV and then knowingly passed it on to her. He was facing criminal charges, but the kicker of the story was that his wife didn’t want him prosecuted. After all, she was still sleeping with the guy. Liz quoted an Assemblyman who wanted to disregard the wife’s wishes, making a perpetrator like the husband automatically liable for passing on the disease to a spouse.