She felt strange waiting here. Not really like who she was, the little agent from Nowhereburg, Connecticut—specialist in starter homes and rehabbed condos. Daughter. Wife. Holder of an associate’s degree in retail from an accredited community college. In a way, though, this guy was exactly right for her, as wrong as he was. Aren’t you always yourself? Is anybody you want ever wrong for you? She did desire him, especially after all the drinking. It was like her father had said. And anyway, why not want him? Life was sometimes a matter of ridding yourself of this or that urge, after which the rest got easier.
And adultery — she liked it when her thoughts connected up well — adultery was the act that rid, erased, even erased itself once the performance was over. Sometimes, she imagined, it must erase more than itself. And sometimes, surely, it erased everything around it. It was a remedy for ills you couldn’t get cured any other way, but it was a danger you needed to be cautious with. In any case, she felt grateful for it tonight. And because she thought all of this, she knew she had to be right.
Howard strolled out of the motel office flipping a room key back and forth, and smirking. She wondered how often he’d done this. It seemed so natural to him, not that she gave a shit. She never had, and yet it felt perfectly familiar to do it, as if she’d been doing it forever.
“Drive down to the last teepee,” Howard said, leaning in, hands on his bare knees. “And if you want to hit the casino, Big Chief Poker Face in there gave me two drinks coupons.”
“I just want to get fucked, is all.” She looked out the other window. “I don’t like to play slot machines.”
His eyes narrowed, the corners of his large unintelligent mouth turned almost imperceptibly upward. He wasn’t handsome, his hair buzzed and his ears and mouth way too big. He was clownish. Though that probably made his little wife ecstatic: a husband no one else much wanted, but who could work wonders.
Howard again put his big hand, adopting a cupping motion, in through the window, and up under one of her breasts. He didn’t seem to have a purpose. Just a pointless act of uncaring familiarity. “Back this baby over across the lot and we’ll do it in the car,” he said in a husky, theatrical voice. His small eyes twitched to the far edge of the gravel. “Nobody’ll see.” He sniffed a little humorless laugh.
“I’ll wait.”
“That’ll work, then,” he said, standing up, sniffing again.
“Good,” she said. “I’m ready for something to.” She turned the key in the ignition and began backing up.
She knew exactly what he liked. He liked her eyes to be on him. He liked for her to slip his cock into her mouth and, just as she did it, to raise her eyes to his. “I’ll do this to you now,” was what that meant. Like a cheap betrothal. Otherwise he liked her voice. With her voice, with whatever she chose to say when she was whispering to him, she could make him ejaculate. Just like that. Even her breathing could do it. So she had to be careful. Though coming wasn’t what he wanted. He was smart. He wanted to stay in it with her, move her where she needed to be moved around the bed, have it go and go and go until coming was just a way to end it, when they weren’t interested anymore. Strange, to be so intelligent in bed, and other times not at all. It was her doing, she thought; she’d invented him, turned him into someone she had a use for. His real intelligence was not to resist.
Only, in the cramped airless teepee, with the rayon portiere across the doorway and beetles crawling on the floor and the air heavy with bug dope, he wanted to take her too fast too violently — suddenly, vociferously — as if he meant to rid her of whatever had its grips into her, all by himself. As if it was his duty. Pounding, pounding. Like that. No time to work him with her voice, or bring him along and ease him in and out of it. Just the hard way, until it was over. And again — so odd that this man should be aware of her; knowing that something was wrong and setting out to fix it the way he knew how. That was intimacy. Of a certain kind. Yes.
Though possibly, of course — as she lay in the grainy darkness with Howard instantly, infinitely asleep beside her — possibly, she’d expressed herself perfectly in the car, and he’d just done what she’d told him. “I just want to get fucked.” That’s what she’d said. Anyone could understand what that meant. She had orchestrated things then, not him. She just hadn’t been aware of it. He’d simply let her employ him — that was the word — become the implement for what she wanted fixed, emptied, ended, ridded — whatever. Really, they didn’t know each other so well. She’d been mistaken about intimacy.
In the parking lot she heard men’s voices, talking and laughing, followed by car doors closing and engines starting and tires rolling over gravel. Farther away there was a sudden blare of country music, as if a door had been thrown open. Then the music was muffled, so that she realized she’d been hearing it for a while without knowing it. Someone shouted, “Oooo-weee,” and a car roared away. She’d brought in the bottle of gin from the car, and she reached it off the bedside table, unscrewed the cap and took a tiny sip — just to kill the stale-paper-bug-dope taste. And then she couldn’t help wondering, idly, she knew: does this really come to an end now? Couldn’t this go on a little longer after tonight, without the need of a fixed destination? There was a small good side to it. They both understood something. People ended things too soon, lacked patience when they could go on. If they truly erased themselves with each other, they could go on indefinitely. She could, anyway. And Howard wouldn’t resist, she assumed. This was a view she was glad to have, something more than she’d expected from this night. A surprise found in the dark.
On the concrete stoop of their teepee lay the littered brown husks of two hundred beetles killed by the bug dope somebody’d squirted around the door after they were asleep. Unpleasant to step on them. An Indian woman was sweeping them off the other teepee steps, using a broom and a plastic dustpan. A young Indian man with a ponytail was standing beside her watching and talking softly. The only other car in the lot was a dented black Camaro with yellow flames painted on its side and a spare-tire doughnut on the back.
The morning sun was warm, though a cool autumn breeze shifted the dust across the hardtop toward the casino, where there were still some cars and trucks in front. It was eight. A small neon rectangle, previously invisible on the STRIKE IT RICH sign was illuminated to say BREAKFAST NOW BEING SERVED. The blue police lights were turned off.