Five was an unusual number of motel units. Unit three, rented to a wan-faced Norwegian couple who could barely even pantomime English, was the largest, Kunal had told Hughes, when he asked. It had been formed from half of room number four, the rest of which had been converted into closet space. In the afternoon the closet door was often open and the owner’s six-year-old daughter, of whom he had joint custody, could be seen doing her almost alarmingly good paintings of trees and the pool area across from the motel units, sitting at a little easel, listening to music through her own earbuds (She liked xx). She, Lark, had told them that her mother was “a burned-out hippie.” She’d been surprised when they laughed. “What’s funny?” she’d said, frowning. Hughes had quickly said something to spare her sensitive feelings. “We just don’t remember that there were hippies, ourselves, most days, so that took us aback,” he’d said. Why did he think he’d be such a bad father? He wouldn’t. But she accepted that there was no way to change his mind.
She answered a call from her mother as she was undressing to take a shower, sweaty and itchy from the suntan lotion that felt like wet moss when it was applied. A white glob of wet moss. They were really going to have to buy a better brand. “Mom!” she said. “How goes?”
Her mother was at a spa, getting a pedicure. It was a lovely place, not one of those dubious Korean scrub joints, where the women looked off into space and chattered as they exfoliated your heels. Every now and then she and her mother made a day of it, ate lunch at the fabulous Thai restaurant, then had some wonderful treatment, followed by a neck massage. It had been a while, though. Her mother had been preoccupied with insurance problems Will had somehow caused by checking himself out of rehab midprogram and being gone for twenty-four hours before being readmitted. It was June, and her mother had not yet been able to pay their taxes, though she and Larry (her accountant) had filed for an extension.
“Are you at the Nevada Sunset motel, is that what you told me?” her mother asked.
“Yeah. About to step into the shower. And I’m not just making that up. Why?” she said.
“Because today I heard about two places — I wrote both of the names down, because one sounded so familiar. Have you heard of Hope’s Cottages, in Healdsburg?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, Larry’s wife came with me to the spa, and their son is interning for some protégé of Roman Polanski’s, and that young man is going to be doing a film at two places, and one of them is the motel you’re staying at, and the other one is the cottages place. I forget — some famous musician lives in Healdsburg, who’s doing the sound track. You’d know the name if I could remember it.”
“When’s this happening? You think they might need extras?”
“Oh, I remember when you did want to be an actress, and then when you sang and played guitar with your brother and you two harmonized with those sweet voices, and his singing was almost as high as yours. He became a tenor, which amazes me. He loves to sing again, did I tell you that? They’ve formed a band with some sarcastic name. Last week he called in the middle of the afternoon to apologize to me for all the trouble he’d caused. I know they make them do that.”
“They can’t make them.”
“Then they said they’d double their meds and give them no ice cream, or something. I don’t know. It’s not that pleasant to get calls like that in the middle of the afternoon. I was having a quiet moment, and suddenly there was your brother’s voice, all choked up. He went into the whole thing about the skirmish last year when he got back to my car and it had been booted. I had to live through that again, his punching the policeman. What a traumatic day.”
“I love you and I’m happy to hear from you, but I’m naked and greasy with suntan lotion, so can I call back?”
“Don’t bother. But you do know there’s a storm coming? Maybe they’ll be checking in to make a horror movie, or one of those vampire things that I’m not supposed to call ‘horror movies.’ Larry’s daughter has written a script for one of those at UCLA. He wanted me to read it, as though I could differentiate one from another. You’re not going to do anything stupid, like break up Hughes’s relationship with Elizabeth, are you? It kills me that I have to know you’re at a motel with a friend’s daughter’s boyfriend.”
“Anorexic bitch,” Moira said.
“I’m not going to respond to that,” her mother said. “You remember that if Hughes cheats on her with you, he’ll cheat on you with someone else. But I really only called to say I love you no matter what you do and because of the strange coincidence of the Polanski thing. Well, it’s a small world. Not that he can move around it freely. Anyway, Daddy sends love. He’s doing great today. He loves the new afternoon attendant. They go to a park and listen to birdcalls together. Your father has two pairs of binoculars that would allow anyone living here to see into Buckingham Palace. Love you. Bye.”
“Bye,” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Hughes had, as usual, forgotten his key? (Real keys! So cool.) She wrapped the towel around her and said, “Yes?” at the door.
“I have free drink coupons for a new bar that opened a few nights ago. We would like you to have them,” Kunal said.
“Thank you, Kunal. Can you just push them under the door? No. I guess you can’t. Can I get them from you when I get out of the shower? I was just—”
“Extremely sorry,” Kunal said. “Hughes said to please give them to you. He said he loses everything.”
She opened the door a crack and reached out. Two pieces of paper were put in her hand. “Thanks so much,” she said, to Kunal’s embarrassed, trailed off “Sorry to interrupt.”
In the distance she could hear the wind rustling the trees. It was great they didn’t need air-conditioning. She heard faint music she knew was not Kunal’s, so maybe it was wind chimes. The towel was nice, thick enough, neither limp nor stiff. She’d brought her own favorite soap with her. Kunal had liked it so much, she’d given him the other bar (lemon verbena and sage). Every day, they left a note for Kunal saying simply, “Thank you,” and a ten-dollar bill. They’d found a vase of ivy near the book on the night table, with one white daisy plunked in the center of the real glass vase. Now, there were free drink coupons.
She stepped into the shower. Her mother was right about Hughes cheating. But what if they had a few good years? Or what if the cheating was somehow, miraculously, kept secret? What if she cheated? That wouldn’t be impossible, would it? As she began to smell like an herb garden, she thought: Elizabeth, with your smell of roses, just find someone else. You’d never lighten up enough to have a drink at a bar, even if it was free, would you? You could just disappear, Elizabeth, like a strand of hair going down the drain. After every shower, she herself had to dab up any hair that might have fallen with a crumpled Kleenex. It was gross, but Hughes thought finding hair in the drain was grosser. When she turned the water off, she realized she’d forgotten to wind the towel around her hair and it was damp. How preoccupied with that woman am I? she wondered. Then she stepped out onto the bath rug that even Hughes agreed was totally clean and began to towel off, first blotting her stomach, then gathering the towel together to rub it over her pubic hair. She had the legs of a young girl, athletic and unmarred. She’d inherited them from her mother, though her mother had also been responsible for her not very pretty mouth. She resisted looking in the mirror.