She is in the bathroom. She has been in the bathroom for nearly an hour. On the door one towel hangs for her hair and another for her body. She likes the water hot enough to turn her skin pink. She presses fingers to flesh to see the pale mark it leaves. She applies an array of lotions and creams to various parts of her body. When she washes her hair she tears knotted clumps from her head and sticks them on the wall. The clumps look like spiders. Once he tried to kill one with a sandal.
The two people here met at a bookstore. She was the assistant manager and he was ripping the clear plastic cover off a men’s magazine. She was the one to catch him.
She said, I can’t tell if this is childish or perverted behavior.
He said, Probably both.
She grew up an only child but always thought the phrase was lonely child. She said it out loud once, to a guidance counselor, and was laughed at. She would go to playgrounds by herself and climb the monkey bars and slide down the sliding pond and swing on the swings, always looking at the un-lonely children as if they were aliens.
His own childhood was uneventful. Most of the other children were afraid of him so he rarely socialized. There was the time he and his cousin played naked war upstairs at his cousin’s house. Running from room to room and hurling balled up sock grenades he sported a gorilla’s erection. Whenever he disrobed he would spring to life, like it was a reflex. He worried this was a permanent condition that would prevent him from a normal life. Clearly, that was something one had control over, or one should have control over. He was sure there was a meeting he missed in school where this information was covered.
Other than that he learned to shave against the grain and sign as many as twenty words.
She eats microwaveable lean cuisine meals standing up, usually while doing something else, talking on the phone, straightening things in the kitchen. She likes living alone in her own apartment without the hassle of a roommate constantly under foot. She holds her independence close to her, wears it like a vest.
She opens the car door and sticks her right leg out of it.
Would you stop it please, he says.
I’ll walk, just remember that, she says.
How is it I sound like Gertrude Stein? he asks.
Fuck Gertrude Stein, this has nothing to do with Gertrude Stein, she says.
I’m confused, he says.
You are a grown man, she says.
Grown men get confused, he says.
That is not what I mean, she says.
He reaches across her to retrieve the black notebook. The black notebook is kept in the glove box and he will reach across her to retrieve it from time to time. He will never let her see what he’s writing. The way he holds the pen between his middle and ring fingers reminds her of an illiterate making his mark.
Will you close the door, it’s cold, he says.
You are a child, she says.
He continues to write. She tries not to look at him. She fidgets with the buttons on her blouse. She takes her left foot out of its shoe and stretches her toes. There are no other cars in the parking lot. She slams the door shut. He is angry when she slams the door but says nothing. Her floor-length coat gets caught so that part of it is hanging outside the car, but she doesn’t realize it and neither does he.
The day before:
He can’t remember if he’s taken his allergy medication. Sometimes he loses track. The prescription says take once a day on the bottle but he takes it every other day for two reasons. One is he cannot afford to spend money on allergy medication. The other reason he got from an underground newspaper article concerning the Food and Drug Administration. When he doesn’t take his allergy medication he can feel his throat closing. He thinks he might quit smoking.
She comes out of the shower with one towel wrapped round her body and another around her head. She smells clean, a mixture of fruits and oils. She looks over to him reclining on the bed closest to the door. He is reading a newspaper, which is spread out over an ugly floral bedspread. She considers asking him a question and then reconsiders.
He does not look up when she comes out of the bathroom. He knows she wants him to look up so he keeps on reading. One story has a teacher sexually abusing students and another has three kids being killed by a drunk driver. The story about the teacher has him thinking about high school. He can hardly recall the names of any teachers, although he wants to think of one that could be a sexual abuser. He can think of several candidates. The trouble is nothing like that ever happened in his high school. It was like the statistics they’d always recite: this percentage of people are gay, this many teenagers get pregnant, etc. There weren’t any gays in his high school and no one ever got pregnant.
The two people here drive used cars and don’t vote in any election. His, a vintage Volkswagen Karmann Ghia he spent thousands of dollars on restoring, hers is a rusted Nissan Sentra, reliable and utilitarian. She has an antique settee and odd-looking thumbs. They are half the size of normal thumbs and are dwarfed by her other fingers. Sometimes she wears pants or skirts with pockets so she can hide her thumbs. He has a beer gut and only two pairs of pants. She called it a leaky gut once and he cursed her. She is a staunch believer in the American way of government. He once vomited bile after a four-day binge during a pilgrimage to Mexico in an attempt to find the exact place where they killed Trotsky.
This is the first relationship she’s had with a stranger, something she has always wanted to try. His ideal mate is someone who is smart but not smarter than him, attractive, but not someone who would illicit remarks from strange men in bars.
As she settles into the seat her floor-length coat swings open revealing her legs. She leaves herself like that. He has finished writing. The black notebook is resting on the dash. His hands return to the lower part of the steering wheel. He drums his fingers like he is typing. There is no music playing. The car is not running.
Your epidermis is showing, he says.
Does it bother you? she asks.
You have sexy legs, he says.
Everyone says that, she says.
Everyone, he says.
You said it, she says.
Who says that about your legs? he asks.
You don’t want to know, believe me, she says.
Perhaps not, he says.
What is it about my legs that make them sexy? she asks.
Under the floor-length coat she is wearing a skirt that stops several inches before her knees. She rubs her thighs.
This isn’t a good idea, he says.
It’s worked before, she says. She hikes her skirt up almost to the hip.
I can’t do this, I’m sorry, he says. He reaches over and pulls her skirt down as far as it will go. When he feels her body start to slide down the seat he stops.
I don’t understand, she says.
Are you working tomorrow? he asks.
What is wrong with you, she says .
The day before:
Now it is his turn to shower. He always lets her shower first as he thinks it gentlemanly.
He hangs a mirror around the showerhead and shaves his face. He is careful to leave his goatee even. One of the first things she said to him was about his goatee, that it was crooked. Before finishing the shave he cuts the skin between his goatee and lip. He waits for the bleeding to stop but it doesn’t. He tears the complimentary soap out of its package. He is careful to keep the lip away from the water stream while soaping his upper torso. After scrubbing his legs he drops the soap and while bending to retrieve it the stream strikes his lip. He curses. He shuts the water off and snatches the towel from the rack. He dries himself inside the shower stall because it is steamy and it facilitates decongestion. Sometimes he will masturbate to ease congestion but he doesn’t this time. He is always congested and will do anything to decongest. He presses the towel to his face leaving a drop of blood in its center.