In the delay created by his grandfather, Matty found some words. “I bought it from an older kid.”
“Which older kid?” Irene said. “Where? I want names!”
“I’ll find out while you’re gone,” Dad said. “Irene. Look at me. I’ll interrogate the boy to your satisfaction.”
She looked at her watch. If she didn’t leave now, she’d miss her plane.
She howled.
Eight hours later, she howled again, in a different key.
“Mmhmm,” Joshua said, from somewhere south of her navel.
Both of them wordless. That was what she needed, and what he gave her. Skin, and sweat, and the urgent action of bodies, free from the interruptions of a frontal lobe frantically turning experiences into nouns and verbs and adjectives. Labeling. She needed the pure thing, fire and not “fire,” heat and not “hot.” His body was enough for her. She loved the smell of him, the tang of his skin. She adored the damp at the back of his neck. His hard, bitable nipples. She even liked the friendly pooch of his belly. They’d spent three hours in this hotel room without exchanging more than a handful of sentences, and all she wanted now was to live the rest of her life in this primitive, nonverbal state.
But of course that was impossible. As they lay side by side in the gigantic bed, feet touching, holding hands, breathing, Irene let slip an appreciative, exhausted, “Fuck.”
“Past tense, honey,” Joshua said. “We shall fuck. We are fucking. We have fucked.”
That was the rub. She wanted him as well as his body: now, in person, not behind a screen, separated by satellites. But the only way to his mind was through a buzzing swarm of words. A more talented psychic could have reached straight in and grabbed the honey of his thoughts, but Irene had never been able to do that. Words, stupid words, were still required.
“Fucking is not an adequate name for what we just did there,” Irene said. “We need a better word. Something more festive.”
“Fucktivities?” he offered.
“Celebratio,” she said.
“Funnilingus!”
Even though they were in Tempe, only miles from his house, he’d agreed to meet in a hotel, just as they’d done every time he’d come through O’Hare. (The word “layover” never stopped amusing them.) In Chicago she hadn’t wanted to show him her house or introduce him to the family. And now that she’d traveled across the country to see him, she didn’t want to see his home, either. Not the furniture that was no doubt better than hers, nor the clothes in his closet, or the dishes in the sink. Not his daughter’s bedroom. If Irene saw how he lived, if she met his daughter, Jun, then there were only two possibilities: she would be repulsed and love him a little less, or she’d see herself in that house and want to move there. She couldn’t risk either of those outcomes, not yet. Their relationship had blossomed in the greenhouse of Hotel Land. Why complicate it?
Yet this trip was all about complications.
“Do you need to go shopping?” he asked her. “For, like, shoes. Or an outfit?”
“You think I need an outfit?”
“If you were interviewing me, you wouldn’t need any clothes at all.”
“Answer the question.”
He thought for a moment. “You did complain about your interview clothes being out of date.”
Good dodge, she thought. “I went to Talbots before I came here. In fact, I need to hang everything before it gets wrinkled.”
But still she didn’t leave the bed. She didn’t want to think about the interview. He’d set it up for her at his company, given her résumé to HR, and even made sure the interview could happen on Friday so they’d have the entire weekend after. This annoyed her, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was only trying to help. And why mention it, when it might turn out, after the hiring process had run its course, that these people wanted her on her own terms, and she wanted them? What trumped all intervening annoyances was her desperation to get out of her current life. Her father was toying with gangsters, her son was smoking pot, and she was flat broke and working a cash register for near–minimum wage.
She needed a game changer. She needed a home run. She needed the grand slam of all sports metaphors.
“I got something for you,” Joshua said. He hopped up from the bed, and she admired his muscular buttocks in motion. The man loved to be naked. He became as free as a toddler as soon as they unlocked the hotel room door, and that allowed her to shed her own self-consciousness. The natives of Hotel Land knew no shame.
He retrieved something from his roller bag, hiding it behind his back, and then held it out to her: a gift-wrapped box, a little bigger than a shirt box, tied in green ribbon. When she didn’t immediately take it, he swung his hips to waggle his penis at her, and she laughed.
It was this DNA-deep silliness that drew her to him, pushed her away, and drew her back again. She was a serious woman who’d grown up surrounded by frivolous men; by all rights she’d have no more truck with goofs, even gallant ones. Online he constantly poked at her, punned at her, and issued all-caps rants on her behalf that were directed at whoever had dared offend her that day. In person, where she had discouraged him from using words, he turned on the physical shtick.
“Nice bow,” she said. “You wrap this yourself?”
“Mr. Johnson held down the ribbon for me.”
She pulled off the shiny paper, opened the box. Inside was a portfolio, the brown leather glowing and buttery. Her initials were stitched into the front.
“You put your résumés in it,” he said. “And look: Yellow notepad! Pen loop!”
“All this, and rich, Corinthian leather,” she said. She pulled his face to hers, and was surprised to feel tears on her eyelashes. Tears, Irene? Really?
“I know you’re nervous,” he said. “But you’re going to knock ’em dead. You know that, right?”
She loved him when he thought he was telling the truth. But did she love him enough, all the other times? They’d known each other for only two months and already he wanted her to cross the continent to be with him, his Internet-order bride. He talked as if this was No Big Thing. A grand adventure. A lark. He had no idea how hard this was for her. Mostly because she hadn’t told him.
He grabbed her arm. “Come on. Up.”
“What are you doing?”
She held on to the portfolio as he pulled her to the big wall mirror. “Stand in front of me.” He placed his hand on her shoulders, put his cheek beside hers, and together they looked into the mirror.
“Repeat after me,” he said. “I, Irene Telemachus, will get this job.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“I, Irene…” he said.
“I will get this job,” she said.
“Not to me. Say it so you know it’s the truth.”
Irene looked at the naked woman in the mirror, clutching the portfolio as if it could protect her. “They’d be lucky to have me,” she said.
It was impossible to tell if Mirror Irene was lying. She gave nothing away.
Joshua slipped a hand under the portfolio and tweaked a nipple. “Damn straight.”
The interview started out well enough. Amber the HR rep, a twentysomething nymph constructed entirely of freckles and positive attitude, led her on a tour of the building, highlighting the open-plan office where Irene would sit if she took the job. Her desk would be surrounded by more windows than anyplace she’d ever worked except for a Burger King drive-thru. Everyone was smiling and pleasant, and Amber enthused about how friendly the working environment was and how laid-back and cool everyone was. The girl believed every word she spoke. And it was certainly true that the dress code was relaxed. Everyone wore southwestern casuaclass="underline" polos and khakis, sundresses, even shorts and sandals. Only upper management seemed to wear anything with buttons, and Irene felt like an eastern stiff, dour as a missionary.