In the furniture department, he led her to his favorite model room with the big green velour couch and the matching leather wingback chairs. The lamp shades were printed with tiny British manor houses and there were paintings on the walls of men in red riding jackets atop horses, chasing foxes, leaping over stone walls. Books bound in leather, their pages epoxied shut, sat on wooden shelves and near the green plastic plant was a photo book on the history of Kensington Palace. There were a slew of other knickknacks, a faux brass trumpet, horse figurines, one of a man with bagpipes and a kilt. There was a crest paperweight, not any specific family, just the generic kind women wore on T-shirts and middle-aged men on the pockets of their cotton sweaters. The place was dressed up for role-playing, all part of the same crazy Disneyland idea, suburban bathrooms transmuted into rural country stores and living rooms, like this one, into exclusive British men's clubs. Still, she liked the smell of all this new stuff, as intoxicating as gasoline fumes or pot smoke.
“You can hang out here and watch television, while I do my security guard thing,” he said.
The idea didn't really appeal to her, but she nodded just the same. He wouldn't have to leave for an hour and maybe by then she'd get used to the room, could think of this place like a house put together in a dream, where you walk from your childhood bedroom into your father's office to the rec room where you lost your virginity Ted turned on the televison and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. They watched a late-night mystery show where little girls ran backward because they saw angels. Their mother said one of them had levitated out of her bed and the other suddenly spoke perfect Latin. The second half told how a man tape-recorded the voice of his dead daughter threaded around the barking of a stray dog. The dog was white with pink eyes and sat regally on a dirty twin-size mattress in a trash-filled lot in Puerto Rico.
“Maybe that's why I always feel so weird and not really like myself,” he motioned to the TV.
“What do you mean?” Ginger asked. He was always talking about mystical shit, but if you didn't rein him in a little, Ted sometimes satellited out around the farthest planet and headed for deep space.
“It's like that night,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything was totally fucked up. You know the feeling; we've talked about it before. Somehow you sense that you're already dead.” He shifted in his chair. “I was drinking beers, making macaroni and cheese, but I turned up the heat too high and fried the fuck out of it. I burnt my hand on the pan's handle and got pissed off, felt myself building into a rage, so I took a ride in the car to chill out. Just started driving around, kind of cruising different spots, the way we did in high school, over to Pizza Hut, past the mall, down to the dump, out to the lake, back to the high-school parking lot, then around again. I started to get this feeling like I didn't exist, like I was invisible, so I drove back to the apartment. Steve was at work and it seemed like nobody lived there. The place looked all empty and shit, just a bunch of junk pushed against the walls. I went into Steve's room and got his gun from under the mattress. The weight in my lap steadied me. I drove into the 7-Eleven parking lot and sat for a long time, watching people go in and out, watching the fat guy working the cash register. I realized I was thinking about robbing the place so I started the car and got back on the highway. My hands were shaking. It was fucking cold and all I had was my jean jacket. Eventually I pulled off the highway onto that gravel road that leads down to the railroad yard and just sat there with the gun on the seat beside me. Then all of a sudden I felt good, sort of light-headed and thrilled, and I knew what I was going to do. I was going to end it all and so I put the gun to my cheek and even then it seemed like a joke, and I remembered I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror and then pulled the trigger. There was a great shatter of glass and next thing I knew, warm stuff was all over my neck and I felt really muzzy, but it was nice, really really high like I was weightless and my head was filled with light and I was floating, thinking how this time I'd really fucked up, then wondering who this poor guy was with blood on his shirt. Then I ran my tongue along my cheek and I felt the hole, the open air on the other side. I looked at the dark houses spread over the hills and I felt cold; my breath was thick as smoke, and that's when I passed out.”
“Sounds like you were almost dead.”
“Yeah,” Ted said, taking Ginger's hand, kissing her fingers, thin skin of his lips sticking to the ovals of her fingertips. “It was like a demon had a hold of me and I had to shoot myself to get him out.”
She slipped her body under Ted's arm and put her head on his chest. He'd made it back. She admired that. His heartbeat and warm skin lulled her and she thought she might sleep.
“Gin,” he said, moving her hair off her forehead, “I've been thinking about getting married.”
Ginger kept her eyes closed and laughed, “Not to me.”
Immediately his ribs came out of his chest like iron bars and he was Mr. Skeleton. She moved to the other side of the couch and he stood up looking down at her. “What's so funny about it?”
“Nothing,” Ginger said. “I just thought you were kidding.”
“I didn't realize you considered me so beneath you,” he said grimacing, turning an awkward second toward the light of the TV.
“You know I'm totally into you,” Ginger said.
“I don't need this patronizing bullshit.” He walked toward the doorway that led into a girl's model bedroom.
“Ted!” she reached for his hand. “Don't be like this.”
He shrugged her off and walked toward the canopy bed. The room was pink and white and delicate as a wedding cake. The carpet seashell pink and the wallpaper a mosaic of rosebuds, all the furniture was white, and on the dresser sat a silver jewelry tray and a tiny ceramic box with a doe-eyed figure of a shy little girl standing on top.
“I can't stand this shit,” he motioned first to the room they were in, the white shelves filled with Nancy Drew books and pink ceramic kittens and angels with yellow hair and tiny glittering wings. Then he swung his arm up, to include the corkboard ceiling and all the other model rooms in a maze around them. “All this,” he waved his arm showing he meant the whole store, “the mall, the highway, all the shitty stores along it, this whole fucking town and everyone in it. Fuck all of you,” he screamed. Then with both hands he grabbed the lamp with the lacy shade and smashed it against the foot post of the canopy, Bits of bulb glass flew out like ice chips, and she covered her head; Ted pulled the wall mirror down, so it shattered, shards falling onto the bed.
“Ted, don't do this,” she said. “I'm sorry, okay.”
“Yeah, right, you're sorry. Fuck you!” he said as he kicked down the shelves, so the books tumbled and the cheap pressboard cracked. Then pausing, swaying like a drunk, breathing heavily, he unzipped his pants, pulled his cock out, and pissed on the princess bed with the thick pink comforter and the satin pillows with pastel floral prints. She staggered into the next room away from the flat wet sound, toward a zebra-skin bedspread and the plastic jade plant, and scanned the ceiling for shadows of the red exit sign. Through the next doorway, she ran by a chrome-framed poster of Michael Jordan, team logos all over the little-boy bed. Behind her Ted broke kittens and angels, one after another the smack of hollow ceramics turning instantaneously to gray dust. Out of the labyrinth onto the department-store floor, Ginger passed a wall of dead TVs and a wire basket full of soccer balls, then the long hallway, beating back the bathrooms, the employee lounge; she threw all her weight against the exit door and flew down the cement stairwell, till she was finally outside, running now across the asphalt parking lot.