I met the man I married at a wedding I attended in Cape Neddick, Maine, in December (the bridesmaids carried white rabbit-fur muffs), though it took us eight years to get around to marrying. First I wasn’t sure about leaving New York City. Then I decided on medical school, but I wasn’t accepted anywhere in New York, so the decision about leaving was made for me. If you were in New York in the eighties, you wonder, now, where everybody went, and then you remind yourself that quite a few of them owned their property and dug in their heels, and eventually they — the people who made up a neighborhood — died. Some died of AIDS. Young people moved to Brooklyn. Or to the West, or to Atlanta. After 9/11, quite a lot of young people made an exodus from New York City to Portland, Maine, with its big waterfront buildings already being turned into artists’ studios and condos and ground-floor boutiques. Cool Portland, with its summertime tourists boarding boats and hoping to see a seal as they cruise out to one of the islands. Back on land, its time-warp hippies cross paths with people who live in brownstones and don’t have to think about money. There’s street art, and folding chairs are set up in music clubs. Used bookstores are still in business. If you’re a certain age, Portland more or less exists in ironic quotation marks (though of course no hipster would dare scratch them in the air).
Recently, on Airbnb, I saw my old apartment. There was even a picture taken out the window, where someone had pulled down enough of the vine to allow a view. They’d created a kitchen out of part of the hallway and what used to be the coat closet. It looked like the floor had been painted black, with an Oriental rug placed on it. The photographs were taken with a fish-eye lens because it was only a small apartment under the pitch of the roof, so you couldn’t even stand up beyond where the bed sat in the bedroom. But it’s all deception, right? You understand that the picture shows more space than exists. You fall for the vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand that in real life probably has the circumference of a pie pan. You know the neighborhood’s hip without reading the specifics: Galleries! Bookstores! Chelsea Piers!
A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that will be picked up and whisked away after the shot, as the curtains are pulled together against the daylight that will fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travelers, light it up again.
Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor.
ROAD MOVIE
Rose petals blew off the trellis, and the small pots of lantana outside each of the five motel rooms fell over in unison, like Lego pieces swiped by some kid’s hand. Moira picked up a clump of dirt near her door and put it back in the pot, but she was on vacation, she didn’t have to clean, she didn’t want to ruin her manicure. She kicked aside a bit of what remained with the toe of her sneaker.
June in California was great, and the motel was amazing: the Nevada Sunset, in the Russian River Valley. She’d found it on the app that showed hotels discounted that day and managed to get the same rate for the rest of the week. It was Wednesday. She and Hughes wouldn’t have to check out until Saturday at eleven. She knew at least one time when they’d be having sex: at ten forty-five Saturday morning. He loved to have sex before checking out of a motel. He just loved it.
Also (as he’d made clear) he loved his longtime girlfriend who had never thrown him over, never had a problem with alcohol, didn’t want children. This paragon, Elizabeth, was also conveniently allergic to pets and didn’t eat red meat. Her negative traits were that she worked all the time and took calls from her colleagues up until midnight; she was borderline anorexic; she woke him up when she had nightmares about rabid animals; her mother, a psychiatrist, was always hovering. Most shocking of all, Elizabeth chewed cinnamon gum.
Moira herself had drawn up a list of pluses and minuses, half kidding, half hoping he’d see that he should break off his relationship with neurotic Elizabeth and make a commitment to her, instead. Drinking weak margaritas at the swimming pool wasn’t helping her cause, though. (She was doing it because her impacted molar hurt. She didn’t look forward to the surgery she was going to have in September to dig out this remaining molar. The other extraction had caused her a lot of problems and pain. Right now she was taking two or three more Advil Liqui-Gels at a time than the label suggested and trying not to think about fall.)
“It doesn’t suggest. It tells you the correct daily dose,” he’d said the night before, tossing the bottle of Advil aside, watching Louis C.K. on his iPad mini. She’d only been having a ginger ale at that point, from the vending machine at the end of the row of motel rooms. Like everyone, she’d brought The Goldfinch on vacation. He’d read two or three pages and not fought her over it. He was, at the moment, reading The Economist poolside.
Kunal, the nice young cleaning person with perfect posture, had been mobilized by the wind. He suddenly appeared with a broom, also pulling a wagon behind him carrying the ceramic planters he and the motel owner no doubt wished they’d gotten the plants into before the wind blew up. “More tonight, maybe no electricity, so there will later be flashlights, ma’am,” Kunal said. “One time, no storm at all, squirrels did an acrobatic act on those power lines. See up there? No power for a day and a half. Some people came to play cards by the light of the oil lamp. I like the owner, who is very adaptable, as people often are in their second careers. He won at cards himself! He said, ‘If I were Ben Affleck, and you were the casino owners, I’d be turned out of my own house!’ Then later in the night he lost what he had won and some more. I’ve never seen him gamble before or after. Let me tell you, this job is so much better than driving a taxicab. Every morning he squeezes fresh orange juice for us. He says, ‘Here’s to whatever’s going on in Silicon Valley,’ and we clink rims.” Kunal talked over his shoulder, going past all the doors, lowering the plants into the blue and green striped ceramic pots. “Okay, I think the Dustbuster is fine for this slight problem,” he said to himself. Earphones were draped around his neck. He listened to what he called “native music” but was embarrassed if anyone asked to hear. “He’s probably listening to porn tapes” had been Hughes’s opinion, when it turned out both he and Moira had asked about what music was playing and Kunal had demurred both times. Usually you could hear a bit of sound leaking out, but neither had.
A storm. How dramatic. It would be another occasion to have sex. After sex, it might be another occasion to bring up their future, long term. Though to be honest, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure she thought being with Hughes was a good idea. He was sort of a tyrant about personal cleanliness and watching one’s weight and he even — this was unbelievable — wanted her to put on a hairnet when she prepared food. This, from someone who enjoyed the kind of sex he liked?