Adam watched the taillights straddle the center line as they headed for the main road, probably on their way to the motel in Echo Lake that had sand in the sheets (if you were lucky).
He shuddered. He would never take a woman there, would probably not be able to perform in such a place.
The truck’s taillights disappeared and he wondered if they’d make it to the sandy-sheet motel before a trooper picked them up for DWI. Driving While Intoxicated killed more people up here than myocardial infarction. The rate probably rivaled that of northern Sweden or Siberia, though winter in upstate New York wasn’t that bad; the sun didn’t disappear in November and not show up again until March. But it was bad enough; it hit thirty below last January, and the cold found apertures in the doors and windows of his house and came right through the walls. He could stand dead atop the heating grate, practically frying his feet, and the rest of him would be cold. But it was beautiful too. The lakes froze solid; weasels, cars, and trucks with chains drove across them and there was a constant crackle in the air. The conifers looked like two-dimensional cutouts against the white sky, and maples, oaks, and beeches like line drawings of dead trees. Hard to believe they’d ever leaf out again, yet they were budding now and the snow that had come up to the windowsills on his first floor was gone except for a few blue patches deep under the spruces.
It was spring and warm and he was going to get laid. Really laid this time, not like last month when he’d tried to rush the season. Remembering still made him blush. He couldn’t take the girl home or go to her house or to a motel. So they’d tried the car on a night when it was fifteen degrees and the full moon had looked like a circle of shaved ice; it had been a total bust.
But tonight he wouldn’t need the heater; tonight would be perfect.
He’d told his shrink, Terence Bunner, about the fiasco with the last woman, because he knew Bunny would listen with total neutrality, under which Adam sensed partisanship.
Bunny was on his side.
“She was young,” he’d told Bunny. “Even had a few residual zits.
I like ’em young,” he’d stammered. “But I couldn’t do anything, maybe because she was wired, Bunny. Wired to the fucking teeth on coke, or crack, or God knows.”
“Why’d you pick her then?” Bunny had asked.
Good question, and he’d searched for the right answer. He tried to lie to Bunny as little as possible.
“I guess maybe because she was wired, and I figured I could get her to do... things...”
“What things?”
“You know,” he’d said, “and then she’d let me... you know.”
“I guess I do.” Then Bunny had laughed, bless him, and said, “I guess you wanted something besides the missionary position, right, Sport?”
Bunny had given him the first nickname he’d ever had and he liked it.
“Yeah, I guess,” he’d said.
“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
He shook his head, and Bunny had said, “Yes you do, Sport. Just think about it a second.”
He’d thought, then said slowly, “That it’s like falling off a horse and I should get right back on.”
“Or words to that effect,” Bunny had said, smiling at him.
But he had to wait for warm weather and the moon.
Of course, Bunny would never have given him the old falling-off-the-horse advice if he’d known about the aftermath of Adam’s lovemaking.
He opened the roadhouse door and was hit by a positive wall of that mindless, repetitious, cacophonous crap people called music. You couldn’t listen to it; it wasn’t meant to be listened to, it was music to work yourself into a frenzy by. It assaulted him and tore at his nerve endings and he wondered why they never played Bach or Handel in places like this. Fireworks Music was much sexier than this bilge, but then people tended to confuse sex and frenzy. They were wrong. Sex should be slow, deliberate, infinitely gentle. Nothing like the raucous screech coming through the roadhouse speakers.
It ended abruptly and, in the few beats of blessed silence before the next piece of atrocious shit started, he saw the one he wanted.
He was surprised because she wasn’t young, and he usually liked them young. This one was in her late thirties or early forties, and the lines around her eyes and mouth showed up even in the rose-gel-covered lights of the place. She wore slacks and a pullover sweater with a crisp button-down blouse under it. Her dark hair had some gray in it and was soft and smooth, not moussed into those snakes around her head that made half the women in the place look like they’d just grabbed live electric cable. Her eyes weren’t sunk in blue greasy gunk, her lips were just lip-color, not purple or brown or shimmering as if they’d been wrapped in foil. She was just a neat-looking, almost middle-aged woman with a light of intelligence (and maybe humor) in her dark eyes and she was drinking beer and a shot, not a Kyrrh or Lillet or some other faggy concoction. She felt him watching her, looked up, and smiled at him. It wasn’t a coy or perfunctorily sexy smile. It was normal and direct, the smile of one adult making eye contact with another, and she was alone. With his heart pounding pleasantly with anticipation, he started around the crowded U-shaped bar toward her.
Everyone was too involved in themselves and their mating rituals even to look at him. But if they did, they’d notice the polyester knit jacket, cheap plaid shirt, patterned sweater (nylon), and the blond wig (also nylon). Even if someone more observant noticed and remembered his face, he was not unusual-looking. There were probably twenty men in the place who fit his description.
Eve passed the Albany tolls, negotiated the Northway interchange, and saw the first sign for Saratoga, where she meant to spend the night. But it was barely nine, she wasn’t tired, and she was only an hour and a half or two hours from Raven Lake... and Sam. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to put off seeing him just so she could sleep, and she decided to keep going. But her back ached, she needed coffee and something to eat, and the car needed gas. There were no service areas on the Northway, but a sign told her she could get gas, food, and a phone at the next exit. She took it, drove down a ramp to a two-lane road and a lit-up island of gas pumps with a diner next door.
She pulled up to the self-service pumps. Frances disapproved of pumping your own gas, but Eve enjoyed doing it, and when the lever on the nozzle popped, she goosed it up to fifteen dollars even like a pro, then went to the glassed-in booth to pay. A kid sat at a high desk with a girlie magazine opened flat to a beaver shot of a gorgeous blond. Eve cleared her throat, the kid saw her, blushed purple, and slapped the magazine shut.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
Another time she’d have blushed and stammered like the kid, thrown the money at him, and run away. But he looked so achingly young and upset, and she was only two hours from Sam and feeling better than she had in months.
She grinned at him. “Stuff like that’ll ruin you for the real world.”
“Tell me about it,” he groaned and they laughed in sudden camaraderie. Then she asked him how the food next door was.
“Rad,” he said.
She looked blank.
“As in very good,” he said gently.