He watched her eat. The grainy meat stuck in her throat, it made her gag. She finished her martini and asked for another. By the third round Daughtry stopped watching so closely and the alcohol at least blunted the surface of the siren, letting the churn continue deeper down. She waited until Daughtry got up for the men’s room and slid the rest of her steak into her napkin. In the small opening created by the martinis, she tried to grasp at the pink adobe house as a way to breathe. She tried to think reasonably about a house again, to think about it in a way she had not yet: she could go there with Daughtry. It might not be so bad, she told herself. To learn to make fish soups, to embroider festive blouses and arrange tropical flowers in vases. (She had no other vision of what she would do in the house.) Maybe she had been wrong about marriage. Perhaps this had been the answer all along — never the banks, never the checks. But as she told herself this, the siren drilled violently through the alcohol to the top of her skull. She seized the edge of the table, knocking over her martini. Gin dribbled onto the green dress. Somewhere inside the violent tilting, she knew it would not matter if it was Daughtry or the Boston almost-fiancé or the university man or the developer and Sherry. It would not matter who was in the pink adobe house with her, she did not want to live in it with any of them. She did not want to make fish soups. She did not want to be taken care of or to fix her hair. She wanted only to get away, to start over, to undo something that seemed to bind her. She wanted only to find a calm quiet place to breathe. The landscape of her daydreams, the blue-white featureless expanse.
Daughtry came back from the bathroom and slid beside her, nibbled her neck. His aftershave and sweat and meaty breath only vaguely penetrating the careening. Her fingertips were bloodless from gripping. She pressed herself against his chest and palmed his lapel pocket.
He snatched her hand. “What d’you need those for, huh? Don’t you have enough here?” He leaned her back and wiped at the green dress with a napkin. “What d’you need those for right now?”
She sat immobile as he wiped her. “Get me out of here,” she whispered. Daughtry downed the rest of his martini, unfurled the new bills on the table and led her out by the elbow.
He made a point of locking the checks in the trunk of the Mustang, and in the motel room he dragged the mattress from the bed and shoved it against the door. “You’re beat. We both need a good night’s sleep without getting up drunk and having an accident.” She lay down on the mattress and closed her eyes, as if this might have any effect on the siren. Daughtry held her to him. “The last thing I need — Christ, the very last thing — is kids. I see you worrying, and you don’t have to. Not with me.” He kissed her cheek.
He had never asked her how there could be no scar. No mark from the invented hysterectomy. He did not, she knew, really want to know.
“Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips. “Let’s just sleep.” From her lock in his arms, she watched the shaft of yellow porch light through the curtains. She kept her eyes on the shaft of light for as long as she could.
32
The next morning she had not slept. The siren had quieted but the spinning continued, the unnameable dread had grown with each hour. Daughtry had woken early while she’d pretended to be asleep to delay having to speak. He had gone out and brought back coffee and somehow acquired nail polish remover and a tortoiseshell plastic headband.
He insisted on another shower. Before she got in he wiped the ragged pink polish off nail by nail. “Better to have none than to look chipped. We can get you to one of those nail places later.” Then he found a file in her travel bag (she was surprised to remember she owned such a thing) and cleaned out and filed her nails one by one.
She stood silent as he worked the plastic tortoiseshell into her hair. “To add class,” he said. He stood back to admire her. She was aware beyond the spinning and fatigue that the itching and burning in her crotch had returned. The sex with Daughtry had brought it back, like a chronic affliction.
“I need cranberry juice.”
“Sure, baby,” Daughtry said, but he was adjusting the headband in the mirror and not listening.
At breakfast, he made her eat half a doughnut and a few bites of egg, all of which choked in her throat. The restaurant had no cranberry juice.
She tried to steady herself by focusing on the Formica table. But the gold flecks jittered around like a frantic cosmos. “So this time try for a little more,” Daughtry was saying. “You’re looking good. You’re looking like a living doll, you want to know the truth. They won’t peg you. And the sooner we’re done, the sooner we split.”
Daughtry went on lauding their prospects. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and absently touched the knife.
Inside the bank, she noted the two security cameras first and looked into each as if to acknowledge them. Then she made a check out to herself for $10,000.
The attractive brunette with hair teased into a bouffant smiled widely at B. “I’ll just have to approve this with my manager,” she said in a cheery voice.
B. nodded robotically. She did feel like a living doll, made up and ready.
A large man in a red tie and a sea-blue suit walked back with the teller. “Have you checked this with anyone, ma’am? I wouldn’t want you to overdraw the account.” He stared at her from his plump face, quivering at the jowls.
“It’s ‘miss.’ No, there’s no one to check it with.”
The man’s doughy eyes did not move from her.
“It’s a large amount,” he said.
“It’s what I want.”
He coughed. The brunette teller stood at his side, smiling, pressing at a bobby pin in her hair, apparently unaware what was holding up the transaction.
“Excuse us for a moment,” the manager said. He walked away. The teller remained a beat, still smiling, then followed him.
B. saw him talk to another man in a tie. She saw a security guard watch the two men talking, then watch her.
Something warm entered her then. It puzzled her at first. She felt it spread. Starting inside the spinning and moving through her entire body. A pleasurable, liquid sensation. A warm analgesia, but emanating from the carsickness. As if the nausea and whirling had beaten so violently inside her they’d mealed the element that still fought them into a warm, pliant pulp. Like alcohol in her veins.
It was wonderful.
She waited to see if this blanketing would continue. It did. In this sensation, she began to discern something. She saw it finally: the carsickness was the truth. A warmth and clarity pouring through her, to guide and protect her. Now making the light more clear, the air purer, the path illuminated.
She saw it all clearly now. Her view of the circumstances sharpened. The banks were done. She no longer needed them. The carsickness was the thing to keep, to stay inside of. She pitied the teller who did not have this understanding. Who would go on fixing her hair and painting her nails and smiling confusedly, without the carsickness to bring her the truth.
The truth that the dissonances were, in fact, irreconcilable.
She felt suddenly as if nothing could touch her. Like lying in Daughtry’s balmy ocean, warm and sedated and enveloped tenderly. Lifted from every shard and cutting pebble below. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and grabbed hold of the knife.
When the manager and teller returned, her voice was steady and direct.
“I have a friend outside with a gun. If you don’t give me the money, he’ll come inside and shoot you. If he sees you signal the guard or pick up the phone, he’ll kill you.”