“All right, but I should warn you that I’m reading a lot of Russians. I’m much more serious now. In a few more months I’ll be
thinking
in Russian.”
“Sounds like we’re headed for an intellectual weekend. Is there hot chocolate in the room?”
“It’s free in the lobby. Coffee, too.”
“What will we eat? I’m hungry and I doubt this place has a restaurant.”
“No idea,” I said, gripping the railing on each side of her. “You look amazing. I don’t know why I’m so surprised, but you’re really beautiful.”
Emily covered her lips and smiled. We were staring at each other again, fully appreciating that we were now two postsecondary deadbeats on a romantic weekend at the Davenport Super 8. The clouds shifted, blocking whatever rays had broken through. Emily looked away, breaking from what was evolving into something like meditation.
“To be honest, George, I was starting to get the feeling we’d never talk again. I’m sort of shocked to even be here right now. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I acted at the funeral home and on the bridge, even how I kept so distant from you on the drive back from Colorado. I didn’t have to be so hard on you, and I started to worry that even if I hadn’t completely pushed you away, you’d never be able to see me the same way as you did in the beginning. But now I think maybe you’ve seen the worst of me and it will never get that bad again. It’s not so bad to think that the worst has already passed.”
I turned toward the road, where an old couple was shuffling down the sidewalk. I hoped she was right. I tried to believe the old adage that it gets easier after the first year, but even then I realized that we were only halfway there.
“The second I started to feel like myself again, I decided to leave school and come to see you.”
“Let’s go to the room,” I said.
Thirty-six
We spread out on the bed, listening to a silence episodically broken by branches tapping Morse code against the window. I tried to forget everything that had happened since the last time I’d seen her. Emily didn’t have much of a plan beyond driving back to Chicago in a few weeks to gather the rest of her things. Maybe she’d start up at Drake in the spring. One of her professors from a summer workshop had asked her to audition for his new play, but Emily wasn’t sure.
“I can’t concentrate,” she said, for the third or fourth time. “I’m all stuck where it counts the most. We do these silly exercises onstage, whooping and coughing and making all sorts of weird noises. It’s the only time that I feel comfortable. After that we play word games and partner up. We practice talking over each other without losing our train of thought. You have to keep going even if the person standing next to you is throwing out every line they can remember from
Julius Caesar
. One time we had a homework assignment to come up with a story that would make everyone cry. It could be real or made up, we didn’t even have to say afterward if it was true. I couldn’t do it. I skipped class for three weeks to avoid it. After that, everything I did was phony.”
“Sounds like torture for the sake of torture. I would’ve skipped, too.”
“I hope you wouldn’t have. I hope you would’ve just told the story as it happened. Played it perfectly straight. Everyone would’ve been bawling.”
“I don’t see the point,” I said.
“The point is that it’s a really hard thing to do and everyone knows you’re trying to make them cry, which makes it that much harder. Don’t you ever wish you were brave enough to do something like that?”
“I guess you could call it bravery. But to me it’s not that different from meeting someone who tells you all their life’s tragedies in the first five minutes. Maybe I should understand that they’re only asking for help, but whatever happened to keeping your private life private? I’d think you’d agree with that more than anyone. People who spill their guts like that creep me out. But, okay, what was I saying?”
“Something about bravery.”
“Right. I definitely wouldn’t be brave enough for an exercise like that. I get stage fright every chance I get.”
Emily thought about it for a few seconds, then sat up and slapped my chest with the back of her hand. “Man, did you freak out when you got crowned homecoming king. Ever tell your construction buddies about that?”
“I’m sure they’d be real impressed. You really think I don’t know you stuffed the ballot box?”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. Tino told me. He said you and the other girls wrote my name on a bunch of ballots and threw out all the extra ones because Peyton’s aunt worked in the office and she was going to make sure he won no matter what.”
“You should’ve seen your face!” she said, cackling and rolling onto her back again. “When the DJ called your name, you were
so serious
. Like you really thought you’d won some official post. Like you’d be stuck spending all your free time hosting meetings for the PTA!”
“I was confused, that’s all. We’d just had our picture together, and I was trying to figure out if that was the closest I’d ever get to you. I didn’t even vote that week.”
Emily squeezed the pillow to wipe her eyes. I brushed a few strands of hair off the side of her face as she released a final leftover chuckle. She picked a loose hair off the comforter.
“My stylist said that every once in a while I should wash it with beer. It’s supposed to be really healthy. You pour it on your head in the shower and when you come out, it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building.”
“I’ll bet it’s even healthier if you drink some of it.”
“I couldn’t argue with that,” she said. I pushed quietly out of bed, stepping toward the bathtub just as tenderly as we’d been speaking, practically tiptoeing. I flipped the light on to discover the bathtub fitted with a safety bar and antislip strips. I leaned against the doorway, facing Emily as she curled up in the bed.
“I don’t know how this sounds, but I figured out that when you’re in a really hot shower and you’ve got a cold beer, you can feel it go all the way down your throat and slide into your stomach. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. If you want to know what it feels like, I’ll go get some beer and we can take showers and drink some of it. You can wash with it, too.”
Emily sat up and tucked her hair behind her ears. I had no idea what she was thinking, but throughout the next twenty-four hours random confessions kept spurting forth, wedged between our regular bouts of nonsense on everything under the sun. It was like we were bobbing back and forth between two worlds, sometimes floating effortlessly and other times treading hard. In any case, we found a balance and managed to keep each other afloat. She looked up from the shaggy carpet and caught my eyes. “I’m sick of feeling bad,” she said, her voice quivering. “I don’t want to feel bad anymore.”
I nodded, trying to indicate my resolve to work things out no matter how long it took. But I was hardly sure of myself and wondered if in the long run it would be easier to cope on our own. This was a painful question to consider and I was growing impatient with pain. I grabbed my coat and walked back to the bed, leaning over to sniff along her neck. “I’ll go for the beer,” I said, kissing the top of her head.
It was a blustery ten-minute walk to the liquor store. By the time I arrived I’d already indulged fears of spotting Emily on the way back, marching swiftly along the opposite sidewalk with her gym bag under one arm and her black hair whipping in the wind. But when I returned to our room she was still there, smoking at the window ledge. She grabbed two beers and headed into the bathroom, instructing me to relax on the bed until she called. I drank by myself as the showerhead moaned and spat. When it was clear she was planning to torture me as long as she could, I undressed and banged twice and barged in. The bathroom was thick with soapy steam. Through the space between the curtain and the wall I spied an empty beer can and the back of a wet leg. I parted the curtain and stepped inside.
Emily was bright red from head to toe. With her back facing me and her chin propped on her right shoulder and her hair flat against her head and her eyes like planets and her eyelashes thick like the arms of starfish, I felt a heavy veil had been lifted and I was finally seeing her angelic face in full. She turned step by step in the spray and her naked body said everything it needed to about her personality and experience: her ears perked up and dripping, her arms crossed over her chest, gripping her shoulders; her hips jutting in and out; her thigh muscles flexing and unflexing; her knees locking and unlocking; the triangular fluff between her legs shimmering with radiant water beads like chandeliered crystals. She let go of her shoulders to expose her serious plum breasts and proud nipples that I could never imagine fitting anyone else. After wholly seizing her in my gaze I grabbed the beer can from the soap rack and poured it slowly over her head. “Kiss me,” she said, arching her back as the beer dripped onto her shoulders and streamed down the crevice of her spine. She wanted a kiss on the lips but I kissed her everywhere else, lowering myself up and down to reach her breasts and stomach, her inner thighs and shins and arms and cheeks. She finally stood me up by the ears, drawing me into a long, tough stare-down before snatching the beer can from me, reaching down to cup her hand beneath my testicles, and pouring. I shouted out and shivered and pressed against her. Emily laughed as she crouched down to plug the drain. It wasn’t long before we were sitting in a warm and shallow pool, clinking cans and covering our heads from the hard, limitless downpour. We left the beer cans in the shower, dried off, and crawled back into bed. My skin was chalky and numb and we were light as ghosts.
“Why didn’t you kiss me?” she whispered. “What are you waiting for?”
She didn’t give me time to reply. And that’s when I learned that the right girl can kiss a man as if he were a dying bear she’d nurtured all winter and made him strong again so that the forest would tremble in fear at his hungry rebirth. (My love for her was different then, and looking back I blame this change less on the new look than on her rambling stride, which I could still pick out a mile away. I’d already noticed it on our brief stroll across the parking lot, like a wandering promenade built for the velocity of her imagination. There was evidence of it even in her kiss.) We made love locked together in a hug still sweating from the bath. Emily wanted me to talk to her while we rocked back and forth, but I couldn’t. She moaned in a series alternately subtle and guttural, and then in one long sigh when her cheeks gushed and her legs locked around my back, holding me motionless until her whole body went limp. I fell back and she fell back with me, collapsing on my chest. We lay tangled up flesh to flesh while I wondered how long such a serene feeling could last, whether we’d have to continue drinking in order to make it work that well every time. A few minutes later Emily was rubbing her chest against my stomach, then straddling one thigh and grinding against it. Soon enough we were at it again, but this time she was so worked up and writhing that I had to grip her by the back of the arms just to stop her from slipping away.
Thirty-seven
Late that afternoon we arrived at the Machine Shed Steakhouse with famished stomachs even greedier than our eyes. We wolfed down steaks, potato pancakes, heaping salad bar salads, then rounded out the meal with cheesecake and a twenty-minute conversation on nonconformity as a necessary fuel of democracy.
5
After paying the bill Emily decided we’d better walk a while before returning to the motel. We ditched the car and headed for the snowplows hustling up and down Third Avenue, beeping and flashing emergency lights. When Third Avenue dead-ended at a rural highway we kept on going, soon passing an abandoned gas station and a chicken farm. The setting sun reflected kaleidoscopic off the crystal frost in the trees, the last rays of light so bright I swore summer was creeping in through the sparkles in the snow. In the roadside ditch heaps of snow slumped next to sheets of rippling mud. We must’ve walked a couple of miles around the country, yak-king on about electronic matchmaking, chatting, cyber dating, etc.
“Oh, the lovely Internet,” Emily said, stomping through a fresh mound of snow. “Can’t say that I mind the convenience, but I don’t know how many nights my roommate kept me up till three in the morning designing a webpage with her whole life story in photos. She’s got photos of babies in bathtubs, dogs in bathtubs, and profiles of pretty much everyone she’s ever met. I don’t even want to think what she’s writing about her whacko roommate.”
“I’m not gonna use the Internet. I can hardly type anyway.”
Emily hooted and patted my back. “Good luck with that, George.”
“Smitty’s getting into it. Apparently he’s making a website for some politician who’s lost his last three races for governor.”
“Can you call yourself a politician if you’ve never been elected?”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Don’t they have some kind of three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy? How can someone just keep going around losing like that? Does he even care about winning, or is he just in it to argue with some bigwigs on TV?”
“I don’t know, but I kind of like the guy, even if he is the most famous loser in the state. He’s an advocate for pesticide-free farming, which pisses everyone off, and apparently he wants to run the Iowa caucus out of the state until the federal government dumps the electoral college.”
“Interesting idea,” Emily said, seemingly impressed by my venture in politics. “Here’s another one. Let’s invite more politicians to the caucus and pesticide the whole bunch.”
“Even Slick Willie?”
“Slick Willie’s not
just
a politician. He’s an artist. An actor. A pretty good one, too.”
We held hands and took turns kicking a plastic bottle down the road. I thought about Clinton’s first love, what she looked like and where she ended up in life. “I hope after he leaves the White House, he finds a girl with a little more spark. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t do better than Hillary. Jesus, is she harsh.”