“So what happens now?” I asked.
“A taxi pulls up. He’ll emerge from the room with half his clothes, sometimes his shirt balled in his hands or without his socks. And then he’ll limp away in the taxi. Probably back to Stuckey’s where he’ll get into his truck, drive off to who knows where. Hannah leaves in the morning.”
“How do you know?”
“Charles usually stays the whole time.”
I didn’t especially want to ask any more questions, so the three of us lapsed into silence again, a quiet that went on even after Jade moved the car closer so we could make out the 22, the safari leaf pattern on the pulled curtains and the dent in Hannah’s car. It was strange, the wartime effect of the parking lot. We were stationed somewhere, oceans from home, afraid of things unseen. Leulah was shell-shocked, back straight as a flagpole, her eyes magnetized to the door. Jade was the senior officer, crabby, worn-out and perfectly aware nothing she said could comfort us so she only reclined her seat, turned on the radio and shoved potato chips into her mouth. I sort of Vietnamed too. I was the cowardly homesick one who ends up dying unheroically from a wound he accidently inflicts upon himself that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun. I would’ve given my left hand to be away from this place. My Pie in the Sky was to be next to Dad again, wearing cloud flannel pajamas and grading a few of his student research papers, even the awful ones by the slacker who employed a huge bold font in order to reach Dad’s minimum requirement of twenty to twenty-five pages.
I remembered what Dad said when I was seven at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus in Choke, Indiana, after we’d taken the House of Horrors ride and I’d been so terrified I’d ridden the thing with my fingers nailed to my eyes — never peeking, never once glimpsing a single horror. After I pried my hands off my face, rather than chastising my cowardice, Dad had looked down at me and nodded thoughtfully, as if I’d just revealed startling new insights on revolutionizing welfare. “Yes,” he’d said. “Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging — not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself — it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only eyewitnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees.”
“Promise I won’t ever do this,” Lu said suddenly in a mousey voice.
“What,” said Jade in a monotone, her eyes papercuts.
“When I’m old.” Her voice was something frail you could tear right through. “Promise me I’ll be married with kids. Or famous. That…”
There wasn’t an end to her sentence. It just stopped, a grenade that’d been thrown but hadn’t exploded.
None of us said anything more, and at 4:03 A.M. someone turned off the lights in Room 22. We watched the man emerge, fully clothed (though his heels, I noticed, were not fully inside his shoes) and he drove away in the rusty Blue Bird Taxicab (1-800-BLU-BIRD), purring as it waited for him by the Registration Office.
It was just as Dad said (if he’d been in the car with us he would have tipped up his chin, just a little, raised an eyebrow, his gesture for both Never Doubt Me and I Told You So) because the only eyewitnesses should have been the neon sign shuddering VACANCY, and the thin asthmatic trees seductively trailing their branches down the spine of the roof, and the sky, a big purple bruise fading too slowly over our heads.
We drove home.
PART 2
Moby-Dick
Two weeks after the night we spied on Hannah (“Observed,” Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry clarified in The Conceit of a Unicorn [Lavelle, 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-four-hour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro).
It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.
“I think we should go,” Nigel announced that Friday at Jade’s.
“Me too,” said Leulah.
“You can’t,” Charles said. “She didn’t invite you.”
“A minor detail,” Nigel said.
In spite of Charles’ words of warning, the following Sunday, halfway through dinner, Nigel removed the invitation from his back pocket and brazenly placed it next to the platter of veal chops, without saying a word.
In that instant, the dining room became nail-bitingly unbearable (see Midday Face-Off at Sioux Falls: A Mohave Dan Western, Lone Star Publishers, Bendley, 1992). Dinners had already become a teensy bit unbearable since I’d gone to Cottonwood. I found it impossible to look at Hannah’s face, to smile gaily, to shoot the breeze about schoolwork or term papers or Mr. Moats’ penchant for textured shirts without envisioning Doc and his accordion legs, his wrinkled face like wood once infested with termites, not to mention the horror of their Hollywood Kiss, which, granted, had taken place offscreen, but was still scary. (It was two different movies crudely edited together—Gilda with Cocoon.)
Of course, when I considered Jade, Lu, and the handicapped stall, I also felt queasy; but with Hannah it was worse. As Dad said, the difference between a dynamic and a wasted uprising depends upon the point at which it occurs within a country’s historic timeline (see Van Meer, “The Fantasy of Industrialization,” Federal Forum, Vol. 23, Issue 9). Jade and Lu were still developing nations. And thus, while it wasn’t fantastic, it also wasn’t too terrible for them to have a backward infrastructure and a poor human development index. But Hannah — she was much further along. She should have already established a robust economy, peacefulness, free trade — and as these things weren’t yet assured, frankly, it wasn’t looking good for her democracy. She could very well struggle forever, with “corruption and scandal perpetually undermining [her] credibility as a self-ruled state.”
Milton had opened a window. A puppyish draft tore around the dining room, causing my paper napkin to fly off my lap, the flames to dance violently atop the candles like lunatic ballerinas. I couldn’t believe what Nigel had done, acted like a jealous husband presenting his wife with an incriminating cufflink.
And yet, Hannah gave no reaction.
She didn’t even seem to notice the invitation, concentrating instead on her veal chop, cutting it into identically sized pieces with an elegant handbag of a smile on her face. Her blouse, satin and sea-green (one of her few articles of clothing that didn’t carry itself like a refugee), clung to her as a languid, iridescent skin, moving when she moved, breathing when she breathed.
This uneasiness continued for what felt like an hour. I toyed with the idea of stretching my arms over my veal chop in the direction of the sautéed spinach, grabbing the thing, stealthily slipping it under my leg, but, to be honest, I didn’t have the moral aplomb to perform such things as The Sir Thomas More or The Jeanne d’Arc. Nigel was sitting in his chair staring at Hannah, and the way his eyes were buried behind his glasses, reflecting the candles, until he turned his head and they emerged for a moment like beetles in sand, the way he sat so straight, so small yet so substantial, he looked like Napoleon, especially the unappealing oil rendering of the diminutive French Emperor on the cover of Dad’s foundational seminar textbook, Mastering Mankind (Howards & Path, 1994). (He looked as if he could perform a coup d’état in his sleep and had no qualms being at war with every major European power.)