The Night Gwen Stacy Died (12 page)

She woke to the sound of him stumbling around the room looking for his clothes. He
had already pulled his jeans on but his shirt was lost, somewhere under the sheets,
under the other things in the room. Peter was on his hands and knees near the foot
of every piece of furniture, trying to keep quiet, and he looked so earnest in his
search, she watched him for several more seconds, admiring his arms, his back, the
backs of his hands pressed out on the floor, before it occurred to Sheila that the
reason that he was looking for his shirt was because he was going to leave. She bit
her bottom lip to stifle something rising. Of course this is why you were never supposed
to have sex with someone on the first night; this is what the poets, with their falling-out
hearts, always failed to consider. All the poets were men—those idiots!—and there
was something else that complicated it all to feel these same things as a woman, she
was remembering now, something mothers said about cows and the price of milk, but
she couldn’t recall if the girl was the cow or the milk or what, and anyway, what
was the difference! Peter had found his shirt now and already he had his hand on the
chain of the door.

“Wait!” She was sitting up in the bed now, the sheets tucked around her chest. Peter
turned.

“What time is it?” Sheila asked. It was difficult to say with the shades drawn, but
it didn’t matter. She needed to say something. She tried to stay confident, to stay
calm, to ignore the red digits on the bedside clock and on the clock above the television
across the room that had already answered her question: 9:45
A.M.

Peter retreated from the doorway and sat on the end of the bed. He looked at her cautiously
as if she were a rabbit or a finch or something that had just appeared in the bed
and addressed him in his own language.

“Hi,” he said. He inched closer slowly.

“Where are you going?” Sheila said.

“They take away the breakfast stuff in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I thought I’d try
to find us something to eat.”

She studied him to see if this was true.

He said, “I left you a note.”

She turned to the bedside table and held the piece of paper up to her face. It said:

Free breakfast ends at 10. I’m not sure what you usually eat in the morning so I will
just try to bring up a few of everything and you can pick what you like from it. You
look pretty tired, I don’t think I should wake you up, but if you wake up in the next
15 come meet me in the lobby kid.

Peter

She looked up from the hotel stationery and met his gaze. He was smiling at her, but
only with his eyes. Sheila leaned closer to the end of the bed, where he was waiting.
She said, “Quit calling me kid.”

He leaned over her now, balancing on his forearms so that only the sheet was between
them. “What do you want me to call you?” he asked.

She looked at him. She wanted to say,
What about that name that you called me last night when we left?
But she was afraid to say it aloud, as if there were some spell, some understanding,
some balance between them that she didn’t want to upset by talking away the mystery
of the thing.

Peter didn’t wait for her to say anything. He let his forearms drop and his weight
rested on her. When she went to kiss him, she could feel him tense and relax against
her as if every muscle were concentrated on a reply, and when she asked him if it
would be okay if they just got breakfast somewhere else later, he didn’t bother responding
anyway and already he was working at her neck and her shoulders with his mouth.

That afternoon Peter went to see about a place for them to stay that wouldn’t cut
as deeply into their funds. He knew of a guy in Humboldt Park who owned a building.
Sheila was alone in the hotel for most of the afternoon. At three, she picked up a
pay phone and dialed her sister’s number. It rang five or six times and then Donny
answered. Sheila hung up. She called back in an hour. This time Andrea answered right
away.

“Andy, it’s me.”

“Jesus Christ, where are you?”

At the sound of her sister’s voice, Sheila faltered. She hadn’t counted on that. She
had to catch her breath and speak slowly.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m okay.”

“Okay? Well, where are you?”

“I’m not close by,” said Sheila.

“Sheila, don’t fuck around. There’ll be a missing person report filed on you with
the cops by the end of the night. The Sinclair station’s all over the news. Dad’s
about had an ulcer.”

“I don’t want you to worry.”

“Tell me where you are.”

The thought occurred to her then to tell her sister that boys
don’t
always like it when you make a lot of noise. Some boys cover your mouth in their
hands, she wanted to say to Andrea. Here, on the telephone, Sheila felt the strange
impulse to confess to what she had done with Peter. Andrea’s voice on the other end
of the line sounded more like home than she’d anticipated. She could hear the worry,
the phone calls, the prayers, the neighbors’ casseroles, the police visits, the aimless
car rides up and down the Coralville strip.

“It’s okay,” Andrea said. “You can tell me.”

Sheila swallowed. “I’m,” she said. Like that, the entire thing could be over. Peter
had given her an out.
You could say you were kidnapped if you wanted to bail on me
. She was terrified for an instant then, and she wanted her sister to tell her it
was okay. And here Andrea was making it easy for her. But she hadn’t been kidnapped.
She had asked Peter to take her with him. Don’t be a baby, she thought. Don’t be a
flirt.

“Honey, where are you?” Andrea said again.

Maybe that was the difference between a flirt and cock-tease, Sheila thought then.
A flirt was a woman who moved between this and that without any real sense of direction,
of decision. A cock-tease pretended she knew what she wanted. She put her hand firmly
around the thing and said, this is it, but then she got scared and faltered; she got
scared and ran away from what she had started.

“I’m not in Iowa,” Sheila said into the telephone. She fit the phone neatly back into
its cradle, and promised herself she would call back soon, as soon as she figured
out what she was going to do.

Sheila went for a walk. She found a diner at the other end of the street where she
bought herself a slice of pizza for an early dinner. An Italian man with a receding
hairline worked the register. She ordered a slice with sausage and green peppers.

“American girls,
allora
!” he said. “Chicago girls! They are never afraid of a little sausage, no?”

“No,” said Sheila.

“And I can see that you practice sports,” he said. “Tell me, which sport do you practice?”

“I don’t practice sports,” said Sheila, fitting her tongue around his awkward English
in reply.

“But you are so thin!” exclaimed the cashier.

In Iowa, it was easy to cut male advances short. Sheila had learned a couple of handy
phrases: “Please go piss up a rope,” and “I don’t trust you any farther than I could
spit you.” She could immediately see that such phrases were not useful here. She had
started learning idioms in her French workbook, and that’s exactly what her little
phrases were. The further you moved from home the less sense they made. It was good
that she was not going to France. Just how had she expected to communicate! Sheila
fumbled nervously with her wallet to pay the Italian, counting out her spare change
as quickly as possible. She thought of Ned with his piles of pennies, and she felt,
suddenly, that she had somehow betrayed him.

She found a small convenience store in a strip mall on the same block as their hotel.
The little plaza was tucked beyond the sidewalk on Clybourn Avenue. The Sinclair station
had been surrounded by similar architecture. There were few stores that survived as
self-contained structures even in Iowa. But here, there wasn’t the land between them.
The space felt cramped, threatening to spill over, barricaded as it was by rows of
metered parking on either side of the moving lanes of traffic.

Sheila walked in and asked the boy behind the counter for a pack of Peter’s cigarettes.
“I said straights,” said Sheila, when the boy pulled down filtered, and Sheila saw
how it would be to be Peter, having to repeat that same thing all the time. It was
only when the boy—who was clearly younger than Sheila by a few years at least—asked
for her ID, that Sheila noticed that the name on her driver’s license was different.
Her smiling picture was the same. Under the picture it said her name was Gwendolyn
Stacy.

When Sheila returned home that evening, Peter was asleep on the bed. It was just starting
to get dark in the room. She threw her purse down and sat on the foot of the bed.
She had come home with the ID clutched in her hand, ready to confront him. Now she
only watched him. Peter slept like a child, deeply, oblivious to her presence, as
if he expended so much energy during the day that once a certain hour hit he had no
choice but to give himself over to sleep. Sometimes his breathing went syncopated,
worrying over some uneven thread of a dream she imagined. Sheila looked from Peter
to the driver’s license in her hand. Whoever had done it had done an expert job. It
was nothing like the fake IDs she had seen at her high school. The name Gwendolyn
Stacy was so seamlessly merged with her personal data: eye color, hair color, height,
weight, etc., it looked like it would be difficult for an authority figure to question.
She felt a twitching in the muscles of her stomach as the thought took root that maybe
Peter had nothing to do with the ID. It was too good to be a fake. “Baby,” Peter asked
from the other side of the bed. “Is that you?”

“I’m here,” Sheila said, shifting her weight closer to him. Then she pulled off her
clothes, fit her body in the crook of his arm, and went to sleep beside him.

In the morning, Sheila woke to the sound of pages rustling by her head. Peter was
flipping through the brochures that were kept in the drawer of the nightstand.
Chicago’s Most Popular River Cruise
, said one. Another said,
Experience the Adventure of Navy Pier!

“A river cruise?” said Sheila. She wrinkled her nose. “What’s this?”

“Just an idea,” said Peter. “I thought we might do something like this today.”

“Isn’t that kind of a tourist thing?” asked Sheila.

Peter shrugged. “We’re not from here. We’re like tourists.”

“I guess,” said Sheila, but she didn’t like considering herself as such. In Iowa,
there was a distinct delineation between those who lived in the town year-round and
those who filtered in and out by semester schedules to attend the college. These boarders,
renters and deserters, were treated not exactly with disdain, but there was a general
sense that they were temporary fixtures—bathmats, hairpins—evaporated from town before
you bothered to learn their names.

The river cruise was an architecture tour, winding by some of the city’s most significant
buildings, and the boat held fifty people in plastic folding chairs on its deck. Their
guide was a lifelong Chicago resident with a hot pink visor and a megaphone. She looked
to be about seventy-five, and though very knowledgeable about the city’s architectural
history, she seemed most eager to dispense information about ordinances ruling land
on both sides of the river public property, owned by the city. When coasting by luxury
condos, the guide would assert, “Bring a picnic back to the yard here if you like—this
is public property!” or “The employees that work in this building never use their
riverfront property. But you can—this is city-owned, anyone’s free to use it!”

It seemed strange to be so emphatic, the small swaths of riverfront grass being least
exciting beside all the stainless steel edifices rising up from either side of the
riverbank like giant dominoes. But Peter was similarly taken with the idea.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered excitedly to her. “Public land.”

Sheila smiled, but she said nothing.

Peter slipped his hand into hers. “We could come back at night with a blanket. Look
at the stars.”

They had just driven three hundred miles away from a place where open land was everywhere
and the night sky was so pockmarked by light, you could read by its glow. “We’re in
the middle of the city,” Sheila said. “There are no stars.”

“Shhh,” Peter said, and he covered her mouth in his hand again, as if he didn’t want
the others to hear her pronouncement. “Come on,” he said. He removed his hand from
her mouth and brushed her bangs off to the side of her face. It was difficult to say
whether he was joking or he was suggesting that the stars were the same here as anywhere,
and it was she who needed to make an effort.

The tour guide carried on with her megaphone as the boat snaked along the river.
Public land this! Mies van der Rohe that!
Sheila had stopped listening, but Peter nodded along to the tour guide’s recommendations
as if they were essential, necessary for their shared survival. Sheila decided then
she would do what he asked of her. She would feign sight of entire constellations
if that much were necessary.

But in the middle of the night, her mind began to race again. She could choose what
to believe, but she wanted more information on which to base her choices. While Peter
slept, Sheila tiptoed from the bed beside him and silently pulled his duffle bag into
the bathroom. The gun was on top, and she pulled it out and placed it in her own purse.
It felt lighter in her hand than she thought a gun would feel. It made little difference
in the weight of her purse. Sheila stuck her hand back into the duffle bag. In his
wallet, she found the ID that said his name was Peter Parker. Behind it, she thought
she would find her own ID, but in its place were two old laminated cards belonging
to two men who looked vaguely like the man she was sharing a bed with. In both of
the laminated cards, the names had been gouged out through the plastic, rendered illegible.