I grabbed the wheel so hard my knuckles whitened and a pain shot into my palm. I accelerated, mesmerized by the red taillights. I understood in an atavistic way the idea of murder, how frustration, fury and pain could be catharted momentarily by doing something horrible. I turned my signal on, eased into the middle lane, the tick and blink hypnotized me. I wondered if I was going to L.A. to kill Kevin.
I felt his long fingers reaching into my skull. The equation went like this: Bell + Kevin and Jesse + Bell = Jesse vs. Kevin. To think of him leaning toward me, that first deep smell of his body. I imagined him slipping away from his reception to meet me at a hotel, a champagne bottle under his tux jacket, a piece of his wedding cake stuffed into my mouth. As he pulled down my panties he'd say he liked the idea of betraying his wife on their wedding day, that it was poignant and true. I tried to think of when Kevin and Bell were together in Chinatown for the new year: lanterns, the long paper dragon zigzagging over the street, the firecrackers. Bell told me that afterward they'd gone for a drink to a gay bar. He'd brushed his hand against Kevin's cock, both of them laughing and flushed like children.
The road narrowed past Half Moon Bay, and the regularity of houses diminished. The sea was black and the mountains blue in the moonlight. Occasionally I'd see a low California-style ranch, dark except for the glow of a blue TV. America is America, I thought, because of the things we do together. The road soothed me, the water gently shifting, like someone stroking my hair. I turned on the radio but all I could find were men talking about the probability of war and a religious talk show. A man and a woman talked about AIDS education, how the literature was a how-to manual for homosexuality, how celibacy was the only answer now.
I thought of the Pacific, of the crabs and fish that lived underneath the surface. The Atlantic seemed dirty, even scrawny in comparison. When I first came to California, it seemed a clichéd utopia where people took endless vitamins, spoke with gurus, spiritual healers, herbalists, accepted karma as a reality. I resented their spiritual superiority and didn't care much whether Nostradamus was right and that an earthquake might send the hippies, surfers, movie stars, right-wingers toppling into the sea. I imagined the wreckage washed up on the Nevada coast: crocheted hats, tie-dye, skateboards, love beads. But out here, closer to the land, I realized how the West Coast balanced the East.
JUST BEFORE MONTEREY MY HEADLIGHTS ILLUMINATED A GIRL walking quickly down the soft shoulder. She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt and was rubbing her hands over her bare arms. She was so young, I wondered why she was out so late. I slowed but she didn't look up. She seemed upset, like after a fight with a boyfriend. There were headlights in my rearview mirror so I sped ahead. Her short hair and sullen sexy walk reminded me of the girls I'd admired in high school, the ones who did everything first. In the rearview mirror I watched the car stop, the driver was an older man. When she got in there was a pouting curve to her hips that told me he was not her father. They passed me easily. She leaned into him, her hair caught in the wind.
The highway into Monterey degenerated into a strip. It was too late for anything to be open. On the main stretch were gift shops, the slightly upscale kind, that sold driftwood art and watercolor paintings. Down the road was the aquarium, and all that was left of Cannery Row. There were lots of T-shirt places, a few antique stores, a place that sold kites, one for wind chimes. There was a McDonald's and a Taco Bell and a restaurant called the Grapes of Wrath. . like everywhere else in America that was special, it had been spoiled by gentrification.
Just outside the village it started to rain, so I decided to stop at a little hotel I saw on the bluff to my left. I drove up, parked my car beside a VW van — the only other car in the lot. The rain was harder now, beating on the pavement and on me as I dashed into the office. The fluorescent lights buzzed and the muted sound of rain was cozy, made me glad I'd stopped. The place had the intimate aroma of sweat and curry and was shabby, with cracked leather couches and a bucket near the desk catching a melody of drips from the stained ceiling. There was a noise in the back room and simultaneously an Indian man pulled back the beaded curtains that separated the back room from this one. He looked sleepy and his shiny hair stuck up in the back like a bird. He was barefoot and his brown pants and white T-shirt were wrinkled. I saw his wife in the slit of the curtain, curled on the bed, her long hair spread out over the pillow. She wore a red dot on her forehead and I imagined her in a golden sari, on a blue California day, straining leaves with a long pole from the pool outside. The man pointed at a handwritten sign under the glass of the counter. I handed him twenty dollars and he gave me a room key.
Outside, I stood under the awning, the clouds gave the sky a grayish purple tone and rain blew across my face. It was chilly and I walked toward my room. The curtain of Room 8 was slightly parted and the TV was on. I could see a man and a woman in one of the two double beds. A pattern of light and shadow showed the woman's head nuzzled into the man's hair, his arm thrown back to touch her waist. The curtain of my room was closed, but I could see through that the TV was on. This scared me and I started back toward the office, but the light was off and I knew the man was back in bed with his wife.
I opened my door quickly, checked under each bed and behind the shower curtain. The linoleum in the bathroom was rolling up in the corners and the tub had a greasy film. The carpet in the main room was bright red and riddled with a constellation of cigarette burns. There was no window in the back, just an old air conditioner jutting from the paneled walls. There were paintings over the beds of ghost ships, and near the TV was a pressed-wood table and a dresser that matched. The sound was off on the TV. The place reminded me of a porno movie with the red bed and creepy light. The anxious face of the TV announcer spoke emphatically, then the picture switched to footage of a mother helping her children put on gas masks. I flung myself down on the bed, and with my fingertips rubbed at the tense muscles in my neck. The woman on TV sealed the door shut with electrical tape and put a plastic cover over her baby's crib. The announcer spoke silently and then they showed the enemy capital, bombs bursting over its domes and onion-shaped towers. I made myself imagine the people there who were dying, the way their bodies would be twisted, the sounds in the streets. The horror. The TV flashed black planes and white missiles and grainy footage of a bomb hitting its target like a video game. A cat outside started to cry. I closed my eyes, but all I could see were the headlights from my rearview mirror. I pulled the bedspread back, pulled off my shirt, unlatched my bra, but left my pants on, and pulled the covers over me. I kissed my pillow and pulled it into my chest like a lover.
I couldn't sleep and ended up thinking back on all my men. I hadn't been a nice girl, but it didn't have anything to do with sex, more to do with lying. With each man I acted identically, like a ritual. I started by alluding to our life a few years ahead, then ten, then twenty. I'd joke about our children's names, tell him what a feisty old guy he'd be at eighty. It would escalate, we'd speak of buying houses together, joining bank accounts. When I got pregnant once, I'd kept it secret, then aborted. Sometimes someone new would lead me to break it off so quickly and absolutely the guy would be dazed, even shocked, as if I were insane. One man broke into my apartment and read my journals, ripped the crotch out of all my panties. Another followed me across the country, appeared with flowers and a new car begging me to run away. But I had already started up with someone new, was telling him my sad childhood stories. Saying, We wouldn't raise our baby that way. For me a relationship has never been possible unless it was going to end in marriage and children and forever. My heart beat furiously, I cupped my tit, pressed my fingers against my breastbone so I could feel my heart heaving up into my palm. The woman in the next room was talking and I imagined myself snuggled between the lovers in that spot between his warm belly and her smooth back, the lattice of her spine. It was so comfortable there that I soon fell asleep.