That’s also when I learned that the kid collected things related to Spiderman. He loved Spiderman, apparently, and kept anything related to the superhero. One of his gifts — the one he loved the most, as it turned out — was a teddy bear from the Build-A-Bear Workshop wearing a Spiderman costume. After his birthday, he took a photograph of the bear on the guest bedroom bed that was supposedly his. It was surrounded by his various other Spiderman-related dolls and toys.
How could the cop want this child, this moron who collected cartoon memorabilia the same way my favorite hooker had collected all things Tweety Bird-related? What did they want from these pretend characters anyway? However much I watched, however closely I paid attention, I couldn’t figure out which parts of the kid I should adopt to make the cop love me. Did I have to abandon all rational thought?
I decided to send the cop a birthday gift, against Malcolm’s pleading counsel. Despite his objections, I knew I had to somehow remain at the fore of the cop’s mind. The cruise for which I had secured my expensive passport was only weeks away.
I knew better than to send anything serious. Along with a peppy greeting card, the box contained only a beach towel with a chalk outline of a person on it, in the style of a crime scene. It seemed like an ideal fit — he loved the beach and was an actual crime fighter. I could imagine the two of us using the towel on the cruise, and the way that, years later, we’d acknowledge that, though the towel was threadbare and stained, we hated throwing it away because of its sentimental value.
I knew how the gift landed before I heard from the cop. It enraged the kid, who emailed in all caps that I had ruined their special day entirely. He requested permission to destroy the towel and the card, and the cop said he didn’t care one way or the other. The kid did it while the cop was at work that evening, then sent a photo of the tattered remains at the bottom of a trashcan. The subject of the email was “Done.”
Later that evening, the cop called to say thanks for the towel and the card but that it would be better if I didn’t send presents.
“Oh, I understand,” I told him. “Absolutely. I just thought you might like it, that’s all.”
I picked up the phone to call Malcolm, but he had warned me against sending it, and he wouldn’t want to talk about it any more. I sat in my apartment smoking cigarettes and wondering what to do next.
71
MR. GRATE AND BENCH REPEATED HOW MUCH HE HATED the thought of getting my hopes up.
“Who knows what’ll happen?” he said.
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” I told him. “I know how it goes. I’m not counting on anything.”
He showed up for his next reservation, thank God. It didn’t occur to me until the date had almost arrived that he might not show up again, and I’d end up paying for that room too.
When he appeared, a guest was yelling at me about her toilet being clogged. She wanted me to know that this was her fourth stay at the motel, and three of those times her toilet had become stopped up.
“Sometimes people put more paper into the commode than the system can handle,” I said.
“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I don’t use any more here than I do at my house, and the toilets at my house practically never get clogged.”
“This is a really old property,” I said. “Maybe our plumbing can’t handle as much as you’re used to.”
I tried not to look at Mr. Grate and Bench, who had entered the lobby shortly after the woman did. He stood behind the woman, waiting patiently, playing with his phone.
“Could you just try flushing more often?” I said.
“Not that that’s any of your business, but I don’t particularly enjoy the sensation of flushing while I’m sitting on the pot,” she said.
At that, I accidentally made eye contact with Mr. Grate, and the two of us instantly smiled so broadly that neither of us could contain a short burst of laughter.
The woman whipped around to look at him, then glared at me.
“I’m going to dinner,” she said. “My toilet had better be unclogged by the time I get back. And don’t drip toilet water on the seat.”
“Absolutely. Sorry for the trouble. Have a nice night.”
Mr. Grate and Bench held the door for her, and then laughed and shook his head at me when she was gone. “Hope she eats light,” he said, “for your sake.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I bet you wouldn’t miss that kind of thing if you came to work for me.”
“If she comes back, I might quit this job and come volunteer for you, whether your pregnant rep leaves or not.”
“Haha. Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
We talked for a few minutes about the job, and he said that if it ever looked like the position was actually going to open up we would have a real sit down over lunch one day and he’d tell me what it was all about.
When he was gone, I locked up and went to the woman’s room where the toilet was so close to overflowing that shit and water splashed on my shoes while I plunged it. The diarrhea smell mixed with the smell of her hairspray and powdery deodorant was so strong I thought I might throw up, topping off the already-flooded bowl.
I imagined all the traveling Mr. Grate and Bench did and wondered for a minute if he might have been playing the same game with clerks across the country, following the narrative of their rising hopes.
72
I RAN INTO A STRAIGHT COUPLE AT THE ARCADE, A RARE sight. They were looking at videos, and the woman was giggling quietly, as they often do in porn stores, unable to believe what they’re seeing, the monuments men have built to vaginas and to the very notion of sex. In my experience women seldom grasped the being-private-in-public basics of porn browsing. Years before she was married and with-child, I took my friend Joan to a porn shop without first explaining what I assumed were the self-evident fundamentals of porn store etiquette. I was looking through the videos piled on the discount table when I heard her call my name. I looked up and saw her next to a man looking at pregnancy porn. “Check this out,” she yelled, holding a video aloft. “Pregnant nuns! What the fuck, right?” The man was gone in a flash, the bell on the door tinkling behind him.
The straight couple I saw at the arcade was discreet enough, whispering and flipping through DVDs. But they muddied the vibe out there just by their presence. I found myself watching them. Once in a while, the husband looked up at me and then said something to his wife, who would look up at me and reply to her husband. Then she would giggle again. I couldn’t tell if they were quietly ridiculing me, or if she was just laughing at the whole scene. Or if they were flirting.
I crossed the store and went down the smoking hallway just to see how they’d react if I passed close to them. We all looked at one another, and a moment later, I heard them following behind me.
“Psst!” the man said.
I stopped and looked back at him. He was drunk and cheery, smiling and holding his wife’s hand. She looked drunk too, the redness in her cheeks visible even in the darkened hallway. She was pretty and blonde and in her early forties, her husband a few years older.
“Hey,” I whispered. “What are you guys up to?”
“Do you want to come with us?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Take his hand, honey.”
She took my hand, so we were all three in a line together. I pointed to a door a couple of feet away with my free hand and we all went inside and locked the door.