The banker pouted. “Can I get your number?”
Odette shook her pretty little head. “You can have my permanence and the rest of this rotgut.” She handed him her glass and he drained it. There were enough napkins on the bar, but the banker pulled a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and wrote his number on Odette’s arm.
She watched the runny ink bleed between her skin cells. By the time she got home it would be unreadable. “Classy,” she slurred.
Odette did nothing that week. She thought, “I wish that asshole would have written his number on a goddamn napkin.” When the next weekend rolled around she went back to the 40 °Club, the banker already at the bar, talking to another girl. Odette walked up to him anyway.
The banker frowned at her. “You didn’t call me.” He looked over at his new companion as if to say, “So this is what has happened.”
Odette said, “The ruins were profound and formful, but totally unreadable.”
The banker nodded. “Nice to see you though.”
Odette walked away; some sentiments she understood.
She drank her whiskeys slowly and alone, eavesdropping for a while on a bottle blonde ranting at her companion about how they never went out for nice dinners anymore. She listened to more of the conversation and built her remaining suspicions carefully. This woman had found her meal ticket in a guy who was tall, well-built, attractive, but obviously lacked confidence for one reason or another. This man could do better than a bleach job with a hunger for fancy dinners and an allowance.
Odette spun on her stool to get a look at the man over the shoulder of the blonde, and before too long the man couldn’t hide his attentions and both he and his companion had turned to Odette.
“Can I help you with something?” the blonde asked Odette.
“Put your mask back on, sweetie.” Odette was ready for a fight.
The blonde said, “Excuse me?”
Odette shrugged and looked over to the blonde’s companion, raising her eyebrows. He smiled a little and then tried to take it back. The blonde kept looking back and forth between them, until she was disoriented and her anger carried her off.
“I needed that,” the man told Odette. “You saved me.”
Odette offered her arm. “Take me for a walk.”
The man was anxious not to lose his chance. “It’s raining out there, you know.”
“We’ll admire the light catching the umbrellas together.” The man looked a little stunned. He didn’t know the game of saying extraordinary things, but Odette thought, “I’ll teach him.”
This man was an engineer who didn’t engineer anymore. They strolled the wet streets and he began talking about how it was tomorrow already and how tomorrow, today, marked the anniversary of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
Odette thought, “This guy has a long way to go,” and so she said one of her extraordinary things. “Can you imagine the bodies trying to heal themselves? The contrast of their wet new skin to the cremains around them? The pattern of a dress burnt onto a woman in patches?”
The engineer who no longer engineered looked at her with the boned vision of envy and disgust. The engineer would not play the game and so Odette said she was heading home. He asked if he could give her a ride, but Odette refused and walked the miles carefully in her heels, hesitating and imaginative.
Odette returned to the restaurant to see the waitress the next night.
The waitress remembered her. “What is it you want from me?” the waitress asked.
Odette started, “Well, I believe in a slanted precision to all things…”
“No,” the waitress said. “What’s your order?”
Odette sighed. She ordered and said nothing as each course was delivered to her. Odette sat, eating and remembering how she sometimes forgot to pretend romance into situations. She thought about how she needed to stop the self-conscious bullshit and buy into a grand gesture or two.
The waitress returned, and Odette caught her arm. “I’ve spilled so many sing-alongs of what I knew I was supposed to say. I’m not doing that here.” Odette saw the startle turn to tears and knew her time was limited, so she played every card. “I’ve tried talking to other people, and you confuse me best. I want my memories to meet yours. I want to collapse beneath your complexities. I want to feel a million small surgeries knit us together. I don’t want to let myself down and I don’t want to avoid the hardest options. Come have a drink with me when your shift ends.”
The waitress lied and told the truth and said, “Yes,” figuring she’d change her mind later.
At the end of the night the waitress didn’t know where Odette had gone, and so she packed up and headed out. Odette sat smiling on a bench a couple blocks down “With so many events and so many memories, it’s easy to forget which is which.”
The waitress took Odette’s proffered arm and they headed down the street to the 40 °Club, where she apologized for not being dressed right. Odette said, “Get serious. Your face dresses you up.” Odette could tell the waitress was impressed, and then Odette wondered if she wanted a woman who could be impressed by this schmaltz.
The banker was alone, down the bar. He wandered closer and grinned, all sly and circular, at Odette and the waitress. “Didn’t I saw you in half once?” he asked and Odette turned to the waitress and shook her head. “What’s your friend’s name?”
Odette didn’t know her name, so she kept quiet. This problem was out of her hands, but Odette hoped it would grow less familiar. Odette looked into the waitress’s eyes and her wish came true: the waitress brought her lips right up to Odette’s ear and whispered her name, so only she would hear: Farrah. Odette was over the moon; she loved this name so much. She turned to the banker, and said, “This one’s mine,” and the banker took “no” for an answer.
Farrah began telling stories but never looked Odette in the eye. Closing time snuck up on them and they would need to exit into the hurrying air. Odette said nothing, just listened to Farrah tell it. Odette tuned in and out as she stared at this lovely girclass="underline" “My knife digs into apple upon apple…This god who had recently named his rivals…Three sisters sit in a dark room as their father walks through unaware of their presence and when he is out of earshot, they slap hands…Cicadas emerge like specters.” Here was a girl who knew the game without naming it.
Odette dropped Farrah at her apartment, kissed her cheek. “The things we say can crystallize our future in many ways.” And with that, Odette climbed back in the cab and Farrah remained standing on the stoop, trying to remember all of the things she’d said.
In the cab, sleep had made a fist of itself, and Odette was unsure she would make it the long ride home without being knocked out. But by the time the driver pulled up to her building she had caught a second wind and was laughing giddily at the unavoidability of death and taxis.
She didn’t fall into her bed, but instead filled her bathtub with water and clipped strand after strand of pearls until every pearl she owned rested on the bottom of the tub. She dunked her head underwater and rescued each pearl, sucking it into her mouth and then spitting it onto the fluffy bath mat. She experienced an abstract panic many times as she lost a pearl and found it again.
She trawled the bottom of the tub with her soft lips. Coming up empty, she found she’d rescued each pearl. She scooped the pearls into a soap dish, her lungs tired and her neck aching from the angles. She shed her clothes, loosened her body onto her big bed, and slept — mute, dreamless.
A Heaven Gone
Misery is an awful kinship. Windows of humor roll down low and whistle at our glorious legs and gawk at the stiff and enthronging death of accidents. The hump backed light of the moon is the funnel cloud of direction, sawn off and mighty. We smoke bouquets of tobacco and flex our thumbs like whales surfacing through the sunny thickness of the air. The bright edge of the sea is half a country away and we are dry and walking through muddy woodsmoke curtains that call themselves the great wide open. We drape our emptiness on the spiky pickets along the way, old plastic bags we’ve no use for. At night the caliginous demons of shadowy ditches beside us are full or not, and the violence of air passing us behind vehicles is cozy and cool. We watch some sort of bird fly up the sky in a frenzy and analyze the constellations of oak trees out at the edge of that field. We are a heaven gone from where we came from now and the filth of myths covers most of this journey. I am growing fat even now beneath this hunger and I am sorry. The humble pair of us just needs a ride to the other ocean, free of bullets and wrinkles. One of us is sure to die feeling all of this. We load our possessions into a truck and close our hands around them again too soon to throw them down to the dusty ground again. I start to think things are blowing up around me when nothing is happening, in entire moments of quiet. I descend even myself and lose hope but then there are pauses where I discover it again and this hope vamps until it becomes arrhythmic again and I lose the beat and the melody. Then it’s just the same used silences to try to fill me up. Our conversations resort to double entendres and factoids, and our imaginations begin to travel that impossible and outward journey where even we don’t know how long it’s been that the sun has been high or that a car hasn’t passed. Our consolation is that even dry land creates horizons and we are always standing at someone else’s. Our showy outsides, old and dirty as they are, lie and say there’s a jingling being right beneath all that dust. It keeps raining all the time for a while and then not. We find a barn and are tempted by it, but not enough. We imagine the horse in the middle of it, silhouetted by the slatted walls. We stop thinking and rely on the fossilization of opinions we made long ago. Our attraction to each other changes or at least wanders. We drink whiskey in a cab with a fragrant lion of a man. We try a train but those are filled with sorrows and stories of women. We feel certain of something and then it repeats itself so we lose certainty. We take it all too seriously and then don’t care. After it’d happened, they told us, “It will take time to heal, take a long walk home.” A factory of road rolls somewhere out of sight before us and creates the tarred surfaces for our feet to move upon. Some days, the way the ground moves, the distance we’ve traveled feels more like the zigzag of beads on an abacus than an arrow. We feel much like tumbleweeds rolling until a truck sweeps us up and pitches us out again. We examine each reliquary dashboard with its beliefs and statues. Estranged youth: that is what we are called again. People ask what we’re estranging ourselves from and we say spirits and rivers and hectic, exotic pistols and childhood and jobs and crime, just to keep it exciting. In each cab we shoulder ignorance and we keep our mouths shut when we can. When we can’t we descend the thickets of weeds beside the shoulder. We dance at the bulges of cannonball thunder. We don’t talk about it when the rain doesn’t come. “Gotta be kidding,” we say again and again. Occasionally nickels and dimes slap the ground at our feet. We flap around trying to gather the coins. It’s too many degrees, but we’re getting close. It is not beautiful. We are listening less and less. Birds of paper blow by again and again. Then, finally: a bay. Our feet travel us onto the solid land of a deck. Backwards like the lee of encouragement the water passes smears of history and the clustering eyeballs. Unrecoverable flotsam in the paint and thin ropes of bridges make up most of my collection. There is nothing solid out here but that on which we stand. We have barely begun, but already we are left alone by the land.