The knock at the window felt like a physical blow, and she fell across the front seat, curled up in a fetal position, her breath gone.
“Janie!”
She tried to open her eyes, but they were covered, she was surprised to find, by her own hands. She lowered them, sat up, and pressed her palms against her chest to keep her heart from hammering out and flying against the steering wheel.
Dan made a cranking motion with his hand. “The window.” And she breathed in at last, sniffling and glad for the air. She rubbed the tears from her eyes and cheeks and watched Dan keep winding with his hand as if windows still worked like that. She put her finger on the silver tab and pushed down. It whirred, and the window slowly made its way open, so she let go of the switch and cried with new zest. She could barely understand herself when she tried to talk between the sobs, “new move, Dan, new move.”
She had a vague sense of him opening the door, telling her to scoot over, mumbling about driving, and that at least the car had facial tissue. He handed her one then drove, drove while she put her head back against the passenger seat, tilted her face to the window, and drowned one ear with the kind of crying she’d never done before.
The buildings blurred by. She guessed they were buildings, the colors ran like all things did in the rain. The greens smeared near the bottom of her window, then grays and browns and sometimes the unusual warmth of reddish orange or yellow, and near the top of her little square of view she thought she saw blue.
The car clicked along like a train, fast but with a deep sway that slowly, slowly helped sleep overtake her.
A room’s light didn’t seep through eyelids like sunrise did, but Mara sensed the dim yellow of a lamp as she came to, and for the first time since she’d driven to Canada, being alone seemed like a terrible thing. She sent out a wish that somehow she didn’t have to face herself but could get lost in someone else. Anyone. She’d take the mangy alley cat Celia had soaked with a hose.
She opened her eyes, focused on Dan, and felt a surge of relief. He lounged in a tweedy brown chair, a newspaper cracked open, his feet on the end of the bed, trying, she supposed, to make hotel furniture comfortable, to make himself feel at home. The paper rustled as he turned to another page, his lean fingers curving around the outside of the print as he read with absorption. But what? Hockey? Curling? What did he find engaging in Canadian sports?
“Dan.”
His face appeared over the top of the newsprint, so familiar, a little V forming between his eyebrows. A V of concern that was so sweet to her, she had to will herself not to cry again. Instead she half sat up, felt the crinkle of the thick foam backed bedspread. And since getting upright felt like all she could manage, she just held out her hand. Asking for something, something she knew she couldn’t name and didn’t know if he could even give.
She waited, felt his hesitation. He didn’t understand any more than she did. His wife had taken a vacation from her life, and he was living out of a hotel room, playing pick-up basketball, and following Canadian sports. She nearly cried again when he set the paper down in the chair and she saw a photo of a man swinging a hockey stick frozen in mid-action as if the minute anyone looked away, he was going to whack the puck. Shoot and score.
Dan took the couple of steps between the two beds, a narrow aisle barely wider than his body and sat down beside her, a familiar weight that dented the mattress in his favor. She felt her hip roll closer to his and turned so she could put her arms around his neck and cling, closer when she felt his hands at her waist.
She kissed him under his chin, breathed in the smell of hotel soap foreign there, and felt his grip tighten around her until they were body to body. She raised her face, and he lowered his with a kiss that had force, like there was a desperate hunger between them, like they were strangers with no time behind them and none ahead, just a minute in a hotel room they’d better make count and hit the finish line before check-out.
She felt his hands move up her back, take a rough jump around to her breasts and fill his hands with them, rubbing and tugging. She heard herself moan, muffled by the ferocity of their kissing. She freed an arm from the embrace and tried to shrug out of her shirt, but lost her focus when one of Dan’s hands shot down her skirt to the top of her panties, his fingers trying to reach lower but stopped by the lack of give in her skirt’s waistband.
She sucked her breath in, hoping to give him enough room to navigate those beautiful long fingers lower. Lower. She felt him waving around inside the fabric, and she remembered how skirts worked.
He mumbled something, two hands now feverishly attempting to find her inside the unforgiving clothing.
She struggled to pull on his arm. “Bottom.”
“I’m trying, baby.” He made a growling sound in the back of his throat, the male call of sexual frustration, and she pulled back as much as she could and her throbbing breasts would let her. She grabbed the bottom of her skirt hem, flipped the fabric up, and his hands shot out of the waistband and pulled her underwear down to her thighs as he simultaneously lunged for her mouth.
The launch off the bed wasn’t obvious for a second or two until the thud registered. Her hair skidded along the carpet with Dan heavy on top of her. He rolled off, seemingly aware that she’d been squished. She took in a deep breath with the pressure off her rib cage and got onto her hands and knees, crawling towards the bed to pull herself up. Then she felt his hand grab her ankle, and she stopped.
“Now that is a great view.” His voice sounded raspy behind her, and she felt herself blush then instantly catalog all the flaws, real and imagined, women fussed over as if men noticed. Because, like x-ray vision, men only picked up the critical structures and were blind to the odd dimple of cellulite, scar from a childhood swing set accident, or anything that didn’t pertain to their specific sight ability: breasts and vaginas. Vagina. Vaginas made it sound like Dan was admiring two of them, like she was a Siamese twin of female sexuality.
Female sexuality.
She actually liked the sound of that. She wiggled a little, enjoying both the female and the sexuality of it as she felt Dan’s hand spasm around her ankle.
In a heartbeat he flipped her over, and her head whacked on the carpet, but she felt nothing. Her breath caught as he stared down at her like he was dangerous, and she wasn’t getting out of there without every inch of her body touched. It sent a skitter of excitement up her probably bruised spine. He wasn’t looking at Janie. This wasn’t nice wife/dependable husband sex. He was there for Mara. He was lowering himself over her, and he was going to take her and take her good.
She lifted her head off the floor and kissed him hard. It was all he required. He rolled onto his back to kick off his pants and underwear in record time, then returned for her again. She felt his body lower, his forearms against the side of her head as he attacked her mouth. She gripped his waist, ran her nails down the tight slope of his newly minted ass and felt his growl in the back of her throat. Then he was inside her in a way he never had been. Mindless and intense, she forgot breathing and whether or not she was begging while she held on and let go at the same time.
At some point when the breathing had begun again, she turned onto her side. Dan’s chest and thighs warmed her backside, his arm heavy around her waist. She sighed and opened her eyes, inches away from the wooden base of the bed. Someone had finally possessed the foresight to put hotel beds on platforms after hundreds of years of paid lodging. No longer could the lone sock, shoe, occasional shirt, or book be swallowed up in the gap. How many things had been lost beneath beds before some engineer had thought the frame up? Maybe it hadn’t been an engineer at all. Maybe a maid, sick of hauling another bag of flotsam to the front desk for a lost and found nobody ever came to claim, saw the solution and watched an executive implement it, take credit, and solve the traveler’s problem.
Listening to Dan’s recovery breathing, she felt safe. There’d been danger, danger in going so far that she couldn’t go back, but Dan had come with her after all. He understood the need to change, to look at life with new eyes. He’d been another man when they’d rolled off the bed, and he had that newness in him, not to start again, but to go back altered.
She ran her hand along the wood frame. Nothing was lost. Nothing could be lost if things were done right.
“I’m starving.” His voice rasped in her ear.
She laughed, surprised at how happy she was just to hear his voice. A new night deserved something different. “Let’s eat out of the vending machine.”
“Potato chips and soda in bed.”
Pleased, she laughed again. “That’s exactly it.” He was exactly it and couldn’t they keep growing forward together?
“When I can see straight, I’m going to keep us on the bed and try again.”
“A bed?” She wiggled her back against him, “I don’t know if a bed can handle us.”
Cheese chips, pretzels, two bags of miniature cookies with ant-sized chocolate chips, a cola, and a bag of gumdrops. They’d never had a dinner like that before. She admired the spread. It was a buffet fit for a child, and she felt younger. There was nothing like cookie crumbs between your breasts to drop some years off your age.
Dan, naked beside her with the sheet covering his lap more as a tablecloth than clothing, reached for the remote, and she cringed. A basketball game would break the spell, take her back to a place she didn’t want to go. But Dan clicked right past two baseball games and a golf tournament in addition to the usual skip-overs of home shopping, sit-coms, and crime shows.
She watched the channels roll by like a roulette wheel. Where would the little ball land? Click. He put the remote on the night stand and colors appeared across the screen, reds and blues mostly, washed with grays and lots of brown, the sepia tones of an ancient cartoon. The three big-eyed kittens teased the droopy-eyed dog named Rover, which in the forties might have been an unusual thing to name your pet. The kittens sang like a USO trio from World War II, but the dog just barked. Musical talent didn’t seem to extend to the entire animal kingdom. “Ever notice…” she swallowed a mouthful of cookies because it had taken six to make a regular bite, “that singing in the old movies sounds like they’re doing it into a can?”
He took a slug of soda, made her laugh when he spoke into the small aluminum opening. “I think they were.”
She could picture the big rectangular microphones she’d seen before. They were the size of a book but three times as thick, and sound probably got lost in there and rolled around until it came out sounding necessarily tinny. “The music’s good though.” The orchestra played throughout the fight the kittens were winning against the dog. There were trombones for funny distress, lots of drum and cymbal for drama and action, and the clarinets… “The music always had lots of clarinets, didn’t it?”
She watched Dan studying the kittens, licking his fingers to get off the orange that had come courtesy of the artificially flavored and colored chips. He was the same and yet new to her, and she wanted him all over again.
“There must have been a lot of work for those guys.”
“What guys?” She tried to follow what they’d been talking about before she’d been distracted by her husband of fifteen years. It was like a miracle to have that happen again.
“The ones who played clarinets for cartoons.”
She pictured the dozens of young men in tweedy caps and suits, holding the black and silver instruments. “Do you think guidance counselors might have advised picking up the clarinet like they tell kids now to get an MBA?”
“They told us to major in computer science, remember? All our classmates longing for work as a clarinetist became computer programmers. Are they
clarinetists
?”
“Don’t know.” She considered it. Clarineters couldn’t be it. Clarinistas, too South American. “Gotta be.”
He pointed to the screen, “a Dutch girl going to the Fair with a penny.” His voice changed to gravelly old guy. “That’s what’s missing on TV today. Not enough
Fair
going. Not enough
respect
for money. When I was a kid you could buy a
house
with a
penny
.”
She laughed, closed her eyes at the memory of Grandpa Mulligan. She’d always thought his life had naturally been black and white but maybe that was just the way he’d chosen to live it.
Dan made a throat clearing sound that made her jump, until she remembered that about his grandpa too. His voice boomed. “A penny meant something back then. Man didn’t walk by them on the sidewalk. He wasn’t above
bendin’
down and
pickin’
one up. It was
worth
something.”
“Your Grandpa was great. That throat thing nearly made me sick, but the yelling at random words made up for it.” She pictured him, visiting Dan at college. They’d gone to a diner where he’d insisted she could order anything on the menu. She’d gone with the grilled cheese and coffee, and he’d later told Dan he approved. If she’d ordered something fancy like a Monte Cristo would Grandpa have told Dan to break it off? If she hadn’t been good old reasonable Janie would they be married at all?
Dan set down his soda, turned his full attention on her. She felt the full part, and knew it, because she’d not experienced it maybe since the dorm ice cream social. He leaned in to kiss her, sweet mouths, salty lips. It was delicious. He tipped his head back, eyes full of fun, a lightheartedness she’d not ever seen in him.
He pressed his lips to the side of her neck, and she felt his gravelly grandpa voice against her skin as much as heard it. “Back in my day a man would…” he eased her down onto the pillow and leaned above her. He kissed his way from her neck up her face, a warm, soft trail. “Bend down and pick up a woman. A woman…” he kissed her hard on the mouth, and she slid her fingers in his hair and pulled him even harder against her.
He raised his head back just enough to look her in the eyes, see her, really see her. “A woman in my day was,” he boomed, “
worth something
!”