He lay there, supporting himself on his elbows, and felt the deep breath in her lower body meeting his own breath. Subtly, he felt her come to life. She lifted her head and said something; he heard his name. He kissed her on the lips. Her tongue touched his, gently, her sleeping hands woke. He held her and stroked her pale, beautiful face.
He got up in such a good mood that he slapped the guy coming in with the maple syrup a high five, something he thought was stupid and usually never did.
The next time he saw Patty was at a Foreigner concert in Minneapolis; he saw her holding hands with Pete Kopiekin.
Well, now she could probably be on a talk show about date rape. It was a confusing thing. She may have wanted to kiss him or to give Jack Spannos a blow job, but she probably didn’t want maple syrup poured on her. Really, though, if you were going to get blind drunk and let everybody fuck you, you had to expect some nasty stuff. On the talk shows they always said it was low self-esteem that made them do it. If he had low self-esteem, he sure wouldn’t try to cure it like that. His eyes rested on Lorraine’s hands; she was wadding the empty nut package and stuffing it in her empty plastic cup.
“Hey,” he said, “what did you mean when you said you kept trying to fit in and you couldn’t? When you were in Thorold?”
“Oh, you know.” She seemed impatient. “Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl.”
“When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?”
She started to smile, then caught his expression and gestured dismissively. “It was complicated.”
It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant, which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he’d read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.
The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.
She put down the magazine. “You’ve probably had the same experience yourself,” she said. Her face was curiously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood. “I mean doing stuff for other people’s expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you’re so convinced who you are isn’t right.”
“You mean low self-esteem?”
“Well, yeah, but more than that.” He sensed her inner tension and felt an empathic twitch.
“It’s just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who and what you’re supposed to be that if you don’t have a strong support system it’s hard to process it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that experience. I don’t know how you can’t have it when you’re young. There’s so much crap in the world.” He felt embarrassed, but he kept talking, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. “I’ve done lots of things I wish I hadn’t done, I’ve made mistakes. But you can’t let it rule your life.”
She smiled again, with her mouth only. “Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Anyway, it was really hard to say, because I don’t know from this vantage point what would’ve happened if I’d done otherwise in most situations. Finally, I came up with two things: my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewildered. He was expecting me to say “dropping out of college.’”
“You didn’t make a mistake dropping out of college.” The vehemence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. “That wasn’t a mistake,” he repeated.
“Well, yeah, I know.”
“Excuse me.” The silent business shark to their left rose in majestic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Fuck you, thought John.
“And about that relationship,” he went on. “That wasn’t your loss. It was his.” He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal confession. He reached out to gently pat her hand, to reassure her that he wasn’t a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. “If you want to talk about mistakes—shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.”
Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could smell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow. She was struggling to free her hand.
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t a real rape. It was what you were talking about—it was complicated.”
She wrenched her hand free and held it protectively close to her chest. “Don’t touch me again.” She turned tautly forward. He imagined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him, he hissed, “Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who started this crazy conversation.”
He felt her consider this. “It’s not the same thing,” she hissed back.
“But it wasn’t really a rape.” He struggled to say what it was. He recalled Patty that night at the Winners Circle, her neck arched and exposed, her feelings extended and flailing the air where she expected his feelings to be.
“You don’t understand,” he finished lamely.
She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn’t tell. He closed his eyes. He thought of Patty’s splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace, which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs, and windows that wouldn’t open. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
The pilot roused him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The woman at his side was sitting slightly hunched, with her hands resolutely clasped.
“God, I’ll be glad when we’re on the ground,” he said.
She sniffed in reply.
They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of baggage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head, and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down. Not being able to leave made him feel that he had to say something else. “Look, don’t be upset. What I said came out wrong.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
Neither do I, he thought. But he felt disoriented and depressed amid these shifting, lunging, grabbing people from all over the country, who had been in his life for hours and were now about to disappear, taking their personal items and habits with them.
“Excuse me.” She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round, vulnerable piece of her head move between the obstructions of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickled him. They burst from the plane and scattered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destination. He caught up with her as they entered the terminal. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.