“Yeah,” the girl says.
“Do you want to order something?” I say. “Order anything you want.”
She leaves when it gets dark and I pull myself together, putting on rings and perfume and eyeshadow; the bathroom has a new foul smell and so I close it off and use the mirror over the dresser. At nine-thirty I try the double-wide again and hang up when his wife says hello. I lie on the bed in my jeans and fringed jacket and watch a special about ghost sightings in small Southern towns where Civil War battles are known to have taken place. “Were you here during the war?” an old lady with a tape recorder asks the air over the banks of a river in the middle of the night. Amid static and the rushing of water on the playback a faint moaning is amplified: “Mm mmm
mmm
mmmmm,” and a transcription runs across the bottom of the screen: “I was
in
the war ⦠I was
in
the war.”
At two or three I wake up rolling over, my boot heels knocking together, and reach for the phone, which hasn't rung. In the dark I listen again to Jeff Russell, Sally, and the librarian, and now a new one, a distant, familiar voice like an all-night DJ: “I don't know if you remember me, I met you back in California, back last winter in the desert with all those Indians, remember we had that lucky pink dauber at Bingo? I had the blue truck and the red motorcycle, gave you a ride a couple times, I was Jim ⦠Well, I'm back on the maritime coast of Maine and business is booming, weather's good, and sometimes I just start flipping through the old Rolodex and goddamn, whatever happened to everyone? I hope I have the right number here. I just wanted to touch base, you know, see what's up, see if you ever made it out there to that goddamned rotating bar. Man, goddamn
rotating bar! I remember one night I was just
poached
, Country Whiskey Shot Night, it was, and I was talking to a girl, talking her up, buying highballs, pretty girl, and then I go to the bathroom and when I come back she's gone! I started talking to her but when I looked a great big muley fucking
cowboy's
in her place. Turns out she's halfway around the room already, a hundred and goddamn eighty degrees away.
Goddamn
rotating bar! She was there one minute and then she was gone. Boy, what I put up with from women, all in the name of perfume! Nice girl, too. I always wondered what became of her ⦔
On and on he talks, and when the tape runs out, cutting him off, I punch my code and listen to it all again, hugging the phone to my head like a stuffed animal, and again, until I fall asleep, and wake up because a waiter is pounding on the door, the same pimply, red-haired waiter who brought me the wine yesterday, only now he's checking to make sure I'm okay, since the phone was off the hook so long. “Sorry to disturb you, miss, it's just policy,” he says, and I ask him for another carafe, but he says the bar isn't open yet, not until noon, but he can put my order in now if I want. “Oh, no need, that's okay,” I tell him, “I'm fine, thanks anyway.”
My face is swollen, my hair a sad tangle, my eyes swim in iridescent hollows of Revlon Indian Summer Dusk. It seems there is someone I should be calling, but it's Saturday, too late for Sally at Live Oak Office Supply, and I can't imagine calling the librarian, can't imagine that I ever spoke to him or would want to speak to him again, and Jim, Jim I would talk to but somehow in his whole message he never got around to saying his number, or maybe he said it after the tape ended and the number's still sitting out there in the air somewhere, floating somewhere between Maine and here, unreachable. I wish there were a way to phone the Round Bar, not to speak to anyone in particular but just to pass the time of day, as though you could just call up a place like it were a person and say, “Hey there,
how are you doing? You know I've been thinking about you a lot lately, you know you're never far from my thoughts.”
The girl arrives at ten in her suit but she doesn't want to go swimming. “It's too crowded,” she says. We step onto the balcony into the bright sun and gaze down at the pool, which I notice for the first time is the empty bean shape. The shallow end is crowded with little girls from some camp or club tossing Barbie heads to each other and singing
This is the song that never ends, it goes on and on, my friend
⦠“Last night I had the weirdest dream,” the girl says. “I was in
The Muppet Movie
, and I was in this relay race, only instead of a baton we were passing a towel. My friend Heather was wearing metal shorts that were really a pan, a lead pan. Do you, um, have any more wine?” she asks.
“I'm working on it,” I tell her.
She sits with one leg tucked under her on the unmade bed and watches herself in the mirror, assuming several uncertain postures. She has the pensive look again, the one she had in the pool. “I'm sorry if I made your bathroom smell,” she says finally.
“I didn't notice,” I say.
“See, I have polyps,” she says.
“That must hurt,” I say after a while.
“Yeah,” she says. “I had an operation when I was six, eight, nine, and last year on Columbus Day. It hurts when I get nervous.”
“What do you get nervous about?” I ask.
“Like, if I'm waiting for something to happen, or like, now talking about it, it hurts, but that's all in my head, I'm supposed to use mind over matter.” I stare at her stomach, smooth and shimmery under lycra and no bigger than an appetizer plate but hiding such treachery and dissent.
The only time I feel the pain, is in the sunshine and the rain
, I think. “Excuse me,” the girl says, with sudden tears, and runs to the bathroom.
I turn the TV on loud, Geraldo, and almost don't hear the knock. The singer is a pale Martian in the light of day, a strangely solid ghost. “Hello, my dear,” he says in his soft, lying voice.
I
love you
, I think, and say nothing. He steps inside, a short fat man in a tractor cap, and sits at the table, a stranger.
He talks about the tape I've asked him so many times to make for me, says he'll send it soon, his brother is moving to Nashville soon and when he does they're going to build a house, and in the basement will be a recording studio, and the sound will be perfect, it will all happen soon. “You do what you want to do,” I say. Sitting across from him I don't want him to touch me, but when he does, reaching over and laying his warm square palm on my cheek and holding it there, his bicep swelling under his rolled sleeve, I cannot pull away, it has been so long, something like my whole life, since anyone's touched me. “This isn't a good idea,” I say, and he says, “I've lost a lot of things in my life, but I regret nothing more than losing you,” and I think,
Your bullshit's getting in the way of your slow-moving dream
, but still I cannot pull away.
He moves me to the bed easily, matter-of-factly, like switching guitars between songs, and there does what he has always done, making me feel that there's something I'm forgetting, something important, something beautiful, but I can't quite get it, it's leaving me, leaving me like a dream. With my eyes closed against his shoulder I hear her voice, a soft echo in my head, as though she's hiding there and not in the bathroom.
Wait
, she says. “Wait,” I say, but my voice has no force and he doesn't wait, he goes on. He won't stay for long, I answer her silently; he has never stayed for long. And when he leaves he never says when he's coming back.
Goodbye, sweetheart
. Holding him, I can feel the words in him already, before they hit the air.
Please wait
, I plead with her in my head.
He is almost gone
.
She does not come out of the bathroom. When he's gone I sit naked where he's left me, feeling myself sweat, keeping my head turned away from the dresser mirror.
Look at yourself. Look at yourself. Not a very pretty picture, is it?
The bathroom is silent, the door blank and white. “Are you okay in there?” I call. There's no sound, not even water, not
even rustling. “Hello, are you all right? Hello, say something!” The doorknob is cold and I jiggle it hard, as though trying to revive it.
“No, don't come in!” she says.
“It's okay,” I tell her, speaking through the door. I sit down on the carpet there, pulling the corner of the sheet from the bed around myself and leaning my face against the cool white wall. “You can come out whenever you're ready, okay?” I tell her. “It's safe now, so just come out whenever you're ready. No one will hurt you, I promise.”
Helene is young, brown-haired, and intelligent, but not necessarily an attractive person. She knows that her expressions change too dramatically; she can't seem to hold her face still like people on TV, or even most people she meets in real life. She tends to take things personally, like the time she was sunning in her square of a front yard, feeling puffy in her new bikini, and she opened her eyes to the Goodyear blimp, humming serenely overhead. She dresses well, knows how to wear a suit, but she's also aware of how easy it is to put together a wrong ensemble. It tires her out, just thinking about it, or about how easy it is to say the wrong thing. She works hard at life, but believes herself to be lazy and obsessive; she knows she is not necessarily a pretty person.
She works downtown in the Loop, in the planning department of a firm that publishes astrology guides and pocket cookbooks. This involves phoning freelance artists and figuring out how many recipes or astrological forecasts will fit on a page. To
brighten her work space she tacks up photos of men who remind her of Joe, the man she is in love with. There's Jack Nicholson, a local talk show host, and an unidentified magician from an ad for vodka. It's not that she doesn't have photos of Joe himself, but there's something exciting, amazing even, about finding his likeness in someone else. Connection is implied, connection and fate. Her co-workers needle her about this; a divorced editor named Jan, in particular, takes issue with Helene in a smilingly sardonic way. “Do you actually
believe
this zodiac stuff?” she says.
“No,” Helene says quickly. “It's just exciting to think that there's a connection, however random ⦔
“But why can't it be just as exciting,” Jan says, “to think that there's no connection at all? That's what
I
call exciting.”
Helene has no answer for this, but on the whole she feels lucky to be part of the close, energetic crew of people at this company. Outside of work she feels a little unanchored. But at the office, for eight and a half hours each day, even though her mind starts to repeat itself as she labels, counts, and copies, she is secure in ritual.
Joe is twelve years older than Helene, between jobs but un-alarmed. He literally doesn't sweat over things. His body barely even has a scent of its own, beyond soap. Helene thinks this is because he refuses to move fast enough to perspire. It's a small rebellion of his; he seems exempt from the rush of city living, but really his spirit gets by, undiluted, sneaking around in his slow body. He still believes, in his late thirties, that he can get away with whatever he pleases. He lets his spine hang in a lazy posture of truth, for anyone who cares to notice, and of course Helene notices. Joe has a favorite, comical houseplant, a dimestore jade tree, that he claims reminds him of her. The plant fell apart once when he repotted it, but now it grows so rapidly it seems to stretch upward before his very eyes, with the same awkwardness Helene seems to suffer when she's over at his place, trying so hard to act offhand. He says he expects someday to catch her stumbling around in a pair of dress-up pumps three sizes too large.
They met at O'Hare International, in a cocktail lounge where a small crowd was waiting out a blizzard. It was just before Christmas, and the low-ceilinged room was dimly lit with strung bulbs. Everyone in the lounge was watching a news program on the wall television about a woman who'd been trapped under a piece of construction machinery for seven hours, but who'd lived and learned to walk again. People were turning to each other over their drinks to exclaim about this miracle. An airline worker wearing a weighty jumpsuit sat next to Helene. “I know of a club about a mile from here,” he said softly. “It only costs three bucks to get in and they got a pool that's hot as a bathtub.” Helene nodded and kept her eyes on the TV. The airline worker shrugged and started telling her about his father, who'd died recently in an auto wreck. “It's just plain hard,” he said. “You only get one father.”
Helene tried to think if anything this difficult had ever happened to her, but nothing had. Her parents were clever agnostics who didn't believe in sadness or the unknown. Her mother, for instance, could tell you what they'd be having for dinner three weeks from now. Helene imagined that when it was her parents' time to die they would manage to make a rational decision out of it somehow, just as they chose what vegetable went with pork chops or what color carpeting to put in Helene's old bedroom when she moved out. Unreasonable occurrences such as auto wrecks kept their distance from Helene's parents. On the other hand, so did miracles. For that matter, so did Helene. The airline worker was still watching her hopefully. She coughed and turned away, and there sat Joe on her other side, looking ageless and arch and familiar. He gazed at her as though he'd been gazing at her on and off for years.
“If you think that's bad,” he said finally, “listen to what happened to me. I went to buy a goldfish this morning and the bus I was on ran right over a cat. Broad daylight. Killed it.” Helene felt her face fall, out of her control. “But wait,” he said, “that's not all. I got to the aquarium store and it was all boarded up!
Apparently the old man who ran the place got
hit by a car
, running across the street for lunch. Can you believe it?
Helene shook her head. She couldn't tell if he was actually self-pitying or just trying to get her to talk. It seemed that he might be neither. “Well,” she said, “I was at the YMCA the other day and I overheard two little girls in the locker room, and one of them said, âYou look like a woman,' and the other one said, âI do?' and the first one said, âYeah.' It was wild.” Helene knew she was striving for non sequitur. Joe looked surprised and slightly touched. They exchanged names and she took note of his bad complexion and the precise way his lips came together. “Are you waiting for a plane?” she asked. Her own flight was grounded, not because of the blizzard, but mechanical trouble.