Shelter in Place (4 page)

I'd never watched anyone so carefully in my life.

She returned to bed, to her place against my body, and slid her hand between my legs and found me hard.

“So,” she said wrapping her cool fingers around my cock.

I closed my eyes and moved so that my leg was between hers. She pushed against me.

“Joseph,” she whispered. “Alive again.”

I felt her tongue on my neck and over my nipples and then her teeth biting and her tongue again and I felt her hot cunt sliding over my knee, and down my shin. She drew my legs apart and then she had my cock in her mouth not gradually, but all at once. She didn't move, just held me there deep. Then bit by bit rose and fell, then the same thing again and again and then with a furious rush she was up and pressing her cunt to my mouth. With one hand she yanked my hair hard. She pressed the other flat against the wall above me, her knees hard against the headboard. She was loud. A low moan and her fingers pulling at me beyond the point of pain and I could taste her. Was swallowing her. She was without shame. She was the most powerful person I'd ever known. I gave everything I could until she slid onto my cock fast and easy. She kissed me and licked my lips clean, my chin, and then her palms were firm on my chest, her sharp nails digging into my skin. She moved with an abandon and violence I'd never known. I came and somewhere in the midst of it she called out and as I softened inside her we fell asleep.

There is so much of me here that wishes my life had stopped there.

For that morning to have gone on and on. The two of us at peace, fitted together, stream of cold air cooling our skin.

But there is no stopping time.

The room brightened. She stirred and the next thing began.

When I opened my eyes she was sitting up with her legs crossed and the sheet gathered around her waist watching me. I can see her as I sleep. Her lips slightly parted the way they are when she watches any object intently, as if she might speak to that thing. Animal or mineral.

“Good morning.”

She extended her hand, “Tess.”

Like that, all of the fragments brought together into a single syllable: Tess.

“It's nice to meet you,” I said. “I'm—”

“Yes, I know. Joe. Joey. Joseph. I know.”

We shook hands.

“Will you always call me by three names?”

“Always?” She smiled. “In our great future?”

“Yes. When we're old. When you're watching me die.”

“Even then. Especially then.” She smiled.

What did I learn of her that morning? That she'd just graduated from the University of Oregon. That she was sharing a house on the beach with her friends for the summer. That she was waiting tables at Bill's Tavern. Other things maybe. It doesn't much matter. Just that we began then, that I met Tess in this odd way, during that terrible summer.

Maybe some time went by. Maybe there was a night or two of her caution, or mine. A few days of that foolish game, but I don't remember it that way. We just leapt off the cliff without any hesitation. Or I did, anyway. I didn't play anything cool. She was all I wanted and pretending otherwise never occurred to me.

So either that very morning or a few days later, I said to her, “Come to London with me. Meet my sister. We'll go anywhere we want.”

“All right,” she said. “I'll do it. September. Don't change your mind, Joseph.”

“No,” I told her, “I will not.”

And that was that. The beginning. Out of thin air, the way nothing happens.

I worked out a deal to keep the room and pay by the month. I could have found something else, but I liked the idea of living in a motel. And I liked the idea of keeping our first bed. We knew the housekeepers, and the people who worked the front desk and they all took care of us. They cleaned for us and included breakfast. It made our life simple and I thought there was something romantic about it, something tough, too. I kept a bottle of Jim Beam on top of a Gideon's bible. I admired the tableau and believed I was something wild. I was an idiot then. What a fool, what a faker, but my God I was happy.

Tess is in one of my work shirts. She is running barefoot down the hall toward the ice machine with a white bucket in her hand, flowers embossed on the sides. She is laughing, growling at me, baring her teeth, ripping wrappers off plastic cups.

And then later, once we'd settled in, the two of us sitting on the floor drinking bourbon out of glass tumblers she'd stolen from the restaurant. Her fingers digging up cubes of ice and dropping them one by one into our drinks.

I found a job tending bar a couple times a week at Driftwood, a steakhouse down by the beach, and she kept on cocktailing at Bill's. She had her room in the house with her friends, but even still we were making so much more money than we were spending, we both felt rich. She worked out a budget. We paid for rent and gas and insurance for the truck. That was about it. We mostly drank for free and ate for free, so the rest of the money we kept in a pair of folded jeans at the bottom of a drawer and that money was for September. For plane tickets and trains and all the rest.

We had our friends from the bar, from the restaurant, her roommates. There were dinners on the deck of their cottage looking out over the sand. People coming and going. Everyone sleeping with everyone else, everyone separating, everyone changing partners, while Tess and I were inseparable, playing wise, watching it all happen before us as if it were a film, as if we knew better. And while we were taken care of at the motel, we came to take care of all the others—dispensing advice, pretending to know something of the world.

Even then Tess had no patience for girlish silliness.

She is in the living room of the cottage, furious with one of her friends—a person whose name and face I have lost. Tess is standing in front of the open glass doors, which led out to their grey deck above the sand. A dark figure against the daylight. I can't see her friend, can't find her in that room.

Tess saying, “Why do you pretend you're so stupid? Why do you do that? Why play the idiot for these fuckers?”

It was the first time I'd seen her angry. Arms high, fingers gripping the doorframe, leaning forward. She was mesmerizing. That kind of fire. That kind of intelligence. Her absolute intolerance for bullshit. Her friend had no chance. Tess saying, “You are not a little girl. What kind of man wants that shit anyway? Put your tits away and speak for fuck's sake.”

God, I can see her there. Coming off that frame with its peeling white paint, pacing the room. As if at any moment she would throw a punch.

Tess just seemed impossible. Her confidence appeared so true. Her constant and absolute belief in what was valuable and what was not. There was no tar in her, no bird, and nothing would stop her, whatever she was to do, whatever she would become.

Being near her made me happy. It was very simple. She made me believe I might too be constant. I thought perhaps she was an antidote. That I had been cured of whatever this strange thing was within me.

There may have been moments in those days when the weight would return, when some mornings I'd wake to find that bastard bird with its claws in my heart, but I don't remember them. In memory, we remove pain. I know this and I want to be truthful. I will try, but of those days, I recall only joy. All our friends were revolving around and around us. The beach and the fog at night and someone's dog running after a tennis ball and fires on the sand and the occasional storms coming in and Tess and her eyes and her naked body and the way she smelled and how everything I ate and drank tasted in some way of her. And how little else I wanted of my life. Just that. Just what we had. Our summer idyll.

M
y parents would call on the motel phone, whose clanging bell always terrified Tess.

She is falling over laughing and clutching her heart. She's on the floor, spread out against the dirty blue carpet smiling up at me. I hand the receiver to her and she speaks so easily with them.

“I can't wait to meet you too, Mrs. March. It's beautiful here. Is it beautiful there? He's taking very good care of me, yes. He
can
be quite selfish, yes. You're right about that.”

She is nodding. Grinning at me. She is so clear.

“What are you building, Mr. March? It sounds beautiful. Yes, I'd love to see your workshop one day.”

We talked to Claire. We'd see her in London. Plenty of space in their
flat
. A guest room just for us. She was living with the banker now. Henry. She'd sent us a photograph care of the motel. We kept it propped against the flaking mirror frame. My smiling, radiant sister, our mother's blue eyes, our father's sandy hair, arms around a man in suit and tie. He is unremarkably handsome, balding, a tired, serious face.

“In their
flat
,” Tess says jumping up and down on the bed. “A room
just
for us,
darling
,” she sings in a terrible English accent.

And I watched her then, as I watch her now.

“September,” she sang, her brown hair floating and falling.

I
t turned very cold here in the night and when I woke this morning I could see my breath. I always sleep with the windows open. It's a habit I learned from Tess. She loves a warm bed in a cool room.

I found the pair of thick green socks she gave me for my forty-first birthday. They're made of cashmere. The kind of thing I'd have never bought for myself. She left them on my bedside table with a note that read, “For our winters.”

It doesn't matter. They're just socks, but on a day like this they're a great luxury. I wear them with the ancient 501s she loves. The faded blue sweatshirt, once my father's. My uniform.

In the mornings after I get dressed, I like to look down on the clearing from our bedroom window. Today I watched a fox cut a neat black path through the frost.

These things still bring me some pleasure. Our warm bed, socks, my father's old sweatshirt, our animal neighbors.

I still open my eyes in the morning. I have not gone completely numb. I guess that's what I want to tell you. I wake up. I get out of bed. I get dressed. I look outside. I come downstairs and grind the coffee, and boil the water, and unfold the filter. I still make toast, cut up an apple. I still light the fire. Somehow it feels necessary to say it, to make clear to you that I also exist here in my present world.

A
t the beginning of August my mother called the motel in the evening.

Tess was reading a book in a chair with her feet on the windowsill.

She is watching me, head turned to the side, light from the street crossing her face.

“Joey Boy,” my mother said.

There was something wrong with her voice. I don't remember the conversation. Just the strangeness of it. I wanted to say, swallow, take a breath. She sounded thin. Incomplete. We talked for a while and then at the end:

“Are you all right?”

“Sure I am, sweetheart,” she said. “Why wouldn't I be?”

“No reason,” I said looking at Tess, who had closed her book. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

That was the end of it. I put the phone back on the cradle. Tess sat across from me on the bed and raised her eyebrows.

“She sounded strange.”

“Strange how?”

I shook my head. I let it stop there. I'd never told her about the bird. Never told her that I imagined sharing it with my mother. She knew sometimes I came up fast. And others I fell. In whatever way one person can know something like that about another.

“Like a lot of people,” I'd told her. “Good days, bad days.”

Maybe she believed it was that simple. Probably not. But we never talked about it then. And in those months we didn't need to.

“Maybe she wasn't feeling well.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that's all it is.”

M
y mother stands in the middle of the street. Her hair is blowing around her shoulders, across her face, twisting at her throat.

I am sitting on the curb. There is grass in my mouth, but I have forgotten it. I am no longer crying. I am watching her whipping hair, eyes wild and wide and the Carlson brothers in front of her, no older than ten, straddling their bikes.

She is screaming, “Look at me. Look at me, goddamn it.”

She is moving toward them. There is a car behind her now.

Chrome bumper.

“Look at me, goddamn it, you little shits.”

She is leaning forward.

“If you ever,” she says, “touch him again. Touch him again.”

She is bent at the waist, her hands on their handlebars—a red fist on each—the wind is blowing harder. It is fall. Her black hair is snapping at their pink cheeks.

“So help me God. You touch him again. You touch him again. You touch him again.”

Her eyes are unlike anything they've ever been. The driver blows his horn. Her hands come away from the bikes. She faces the car. The Carlson boys are pedaling hard now. They are gone and she is still standing in the street. The wind is at her back. Her hair is blowing toward the car. She does not speak. Only stares at the windshield, at whatever she can see through the shining leaves, the silver sky.

“Mom,” I say, “Mom.”

She turns and walks to me. The man rolls down his window.

“Crazy bitch,” he says as he drives past. “Crazy fucking bitch,” but it's as if she doesn't hear him, doesn't even flinch, and I know she is the stronger one.

She comes and lifts me from the curb and into her arms, even if I'm too old for it, too heavy for her. I don't want to be held. She draws her head back to get a better look at me. We're walking towards the house. I can see Claire so small on the front step watching as we pass.

“Joey,” she says, and pinches a blade of grass from my lip. “Joey,” she whispers as she carries me to the house. “Those little shits,” she whispers, “those little assholes.”