“A banker,” she said, “in a suit.”
“Is that bad?” he asked with complete earnestness. “I ask because I don’t know. It must seem odd, here in Los Angeles.”
He was very slender, nearly petite. He was not greatlooking, but handsome in an inoffensive, smooth-cheeked, high-school kind of way, nice-shaped face, sort of ridiculouspink cheeks and voluptuous mouth, all a bit disconcerting combined with the dark circles under the eyes. He was one of those guys who would go from looking twenty-five to forty-five overnight.
“Were you very popular in high school?” she asked.
“Well, high school was a long time ago,” he said.
“Yeah, you were. That’s okay. You really work for a bank. Sort of get up and go to work every day in a suit. How about that.” He looked at her oddly.
“I’m sorry, I’m bothering you,” he said, and his face was blank and sad.
“You’re not, Scott. Really not. I’m just talking. It’s my way, I’m sorry, I don’t mean anything I say,” Mina said. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m making fun of me.” He again looked at her oddly. She realized he was a bit struck, and it was amazingly attractive to Mina.
They sat quietly, mid-distance staring. Two people drinking in a dark bar while the sun burned brightly outside. He didn’t leave. They sipped their drinks. She leaned her head in close to him.
“Scott,” she said. He looked at her.
“Scott, I love the way a man’s mouth tastes after he’s been drinking scotch.
“Scott.” She put her hand on his sleeve. She touched his tie. “I’d like to undress you. Your tie and your cuff links.” Scott opened his mouth to speak and then closed it. When they had closed the door to his hotel room, he fastened the chain lock. After she took her clothes off, he touched her with reverent slowness, as if she might run out the door any second.
“I think you’re beautiful,” he said. She couldn’t wait to pull him on top of her. She didn’t want his dutiful body kisses. Shepulled him on top of her and, putting her hands on the backs of his thighs, she pulled him inside her. He came pretty quickly, and she did not even approach coming. But the thrusts, the long wet and the deep fast of them, made the world basic and elemental to her. She let him stroke her back for a long time afterward, and listened to him talk about his divorce and how his daughter didn’t seem familiar to him. She listened to him talk about the long hours he worked and she played with his cock until he wanted to have sex again, and she said to herself she liked it short and uncomplicated. When she left she agreed to meet him in the same place a month from then.
It had felt as though she were watching this unfold from somewhere else. That someone wrote all this down beforehand for them to recite.
That first time, when the dusk air hit her face on the street, a heat blast of tropical stillness, she felt invincible and lonely. But her loneliness was at a distance, something she could control and look at, specific and acute. It had a reason and a logic. She already longed for next month. Months slid by and she found these meetings (dates, trysts, assignations — what should she call them?) could go on indefinitely, isolated, contained, like a secret cigarette in some back-stairs room.
Max was not merely an escalation of this, not simply a revision. Max was the time bomb, the flash point of doomed relations, the Florence and Normandy of her Secret Life. Max was not contained and isolated. Max was her husband’s oldest and best friend.
Lorene ordered another drink. “A Lost Weekend,” she said. Mina looked at her.
“Another, Mina?” Ray asked.
“I’ll haveAn Affair to Remember.A double.” Ray obligedwith the club soda and the lime squeezes. She sipped her soda and watched Lorene smoke.
“Do you think if you are semi-involved with two people, or three, or four — let’s say twenty-five percent engagement with each. .”
“Yes?”
“Does that mean you are fully engaged? In the aggregate?”
“No.”
“Or is it just the same twenty-five percent over and over, and nothing ever even reaches thirty percent?”
“What?”
“Skip it.”
“Take the night off. Take a walk. Take care of David. I’ll cover things here,” Lorene said, smiling and patting her hand.The Metro section was spread open and out of order from when her husband, Mark, had thrown it at the refrigerator earlier in the morning. Lisa picked it up, smoothing its creases, just glancing at headlines but not getting too involved until she had her coffee and had set up Alex and Alisa with their shows and the saltines with grape jelly.
He had trouble with mornings.
Lisa rarely missed reading the paper. She read it, at least the front section and the Metro section, every day. She had to, it seemed. The Metro section covered the local human disasters from the hundreds of suburban-sprawl cities, Spanish named, all inter-paso-changeable. El- and Santa- and Del- and La- and Costa-named places. But the freeways too, lately, always there, impossible for Lisa to place precisely. Living in the city, you know the freeways you use, and to read of the others — whole other worlds right there, apparently — made her feel the hugevastness of the place, something so intangible when she went to the Safeway, or even the west side to clean houses. The Santa Ana, the San Diego, the San Gabriel, the Pomona — freeways named for their origins or destinations like rivers. But how could that be, a freeway ending? Wasn’t the very point that they became an endless, seamless circle? Or the names that seemed to promise things — Garden Grove Freeway, Artesia Freeway, Century Freeway. Harbor Freeway, Golden State Freeway.
He had a headache, of course. He had to do a lot of drinking to just unwind and get some sleep. And when Lisa woke at five, she paused for a second before she woke Mark up. She looked at him in bed next to her, watched him sleep. He had long brown hair, which he didn’t braid, as she suggested, so as he slept it tangled and knotted. He had a heavy, noisy man’s way of sleep-breathing, as if he managed to aggravate the air even unconsciously, a constant announcement or battle. A labor, that’s what they called it. His breathing labored, even in his sleep. And that word,labor,made Lisa feel sorry for him. She felt bad, actually, that he would now wake and have to go to the job site and labor — climb things and hammer things and do the things that made his hands swollen at the end of the day. He hated it so much. She, on the other hand, didn’t mind cleaning the house, or Lorene’s house, or any of the houses she did. Sometimes her back hurt and she couldn’t believe how much laundry and shopping and dishes still had to be done after she had done so much. But it kept her focused and she liked having things to do. Poor Mark, though, he really hated it.
Lisa started to read about local disappearances. There was the child found dead in a trash pail. The story about the one held captive in a basement. Found was harder to take, usually so tortured they may as well be dead, so horrendously damagedthey were. But what got Lisa were not the found victims but the missing children. The victims-to-be, certainly, awaiting their stories. The dopey school picture reprinted — Lisa scanned the awkward smiles with the new, still-jagged-edged adult teeth just grown in, the strange school picture with matte wash color backdrops, the ribbon at an innocent angle on the head. Couldn’t there be something in the faces that indicated the horrors to come? That they would be chosen for the worst, most horrific random disasters? But there was nothing in these faces that made them any different from any other kids. No different from Alex and Alisa, no predicting their victimhood.
He still had his trim, smooth-skinned athletic body. Sometimes, when he came to bed stoned and only a little drunk, she would rub his back, massage him, and it felt nice to touch the smooth, hard muscles. Watching him sleep, with one arm bent under the pillow under his head, she noticed how his bicep muscle swelled, distinct and strong, the angle making a sculpted furrow underneath the muscle and a pleasing curve on the top to his shoulder. How she used to ache to see it, how she liked to curl in there and feel surrounded by strong maleness, cared for. How amazingly hard and different from her own this man’s body felt. She was so certain this was what she needed and wanted. All this hard flesh around her. And she would stroke his muscles and feel girlish and safe. She grew ever softer and he grew ever harder.