“Here, sit down,” she said, ashing her cigarette on the tile floor. “Let me get rid of this.” She gracefully swept the peanut shells and the beer cans into the trash can, patted the seat of the tin chair with a yellow cushion. “Sit.”
Since I’d walked in the door, Rebecca hadn’t looked me in the eye. I felt around on my face to make sure there wasn’t something unappetizing on it — a sudden blemish or a crust of sleep, a booger hanging from my nose. But there was nothing. I sat down. We were quiet and awkward, shy for a moment, Rebecca assessing the newly cleared table, flicking her cigarette nervously, me folding my gloves, unbuttoning and rebuttoning my coat. Finally I nodded toward the bottle of wine.
“I hope it’s a kind you like,” I began.
“Well, that’s just swell,” said Rebecca, turning confusedly toward the kitchen cupboards. “I probably don’t need much, so you drink up. Now let’s see where the corkscrew is hiding.” She opened a cabinet to reveal shelves of spices and a few cans of food, another of plates and saucers. She pulled out a rattling drawer then slammed it. “There must be one somewhere in all this mess, huh?” She tried another drawer and rifled through spoons and forks. Another drawer was completely empty. “Well, no luck. Hand me the bottle, we’ll do it this way.”
Rebecca’s rings clanked against the glass as she walked to the sink and hovered, hesitated, then grasped the bottle from the bottom and bashed the neck of it against the ledge of the counter. It made a loud cracking sound. “Almost.” She banged it again, and the neck broke off and fell, wine spilling across the dirty tile floor. “That’ll have to do,” she said, throwing a rag onto the red puddle and mopping it with her feet in those tall, leather boots. “I saw that done once without spilling. Maybe he used a hammer. I don’t know.”
“He?” I would have liked to have asked. “Very inventive,” was all I could think to say. I smiled, but inside I was disturbed by the dark unruliness of the house and Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly. She paced back and forth for a moment, licking her fingers. Something was on her mind, but I didn’t dare ask what. At last she looked me in the eyes and frowned.
“I’m a crummy hostess,” she sighed.
“Don’t be silly,” I told her. “You should see where I live.” The ceiling light was a mere bare bulb hanging from a wire. Through the kitchen window I spied a car covered in snow, and another behind it, Rebecca’s two-door, with just a dusting of white. It was all very odd. Was this her boyfriend’s house? I wondered. Had she shacked up with a local? It was possible, I guessed. Was I disappointed? Surely. I’d expected bone china, mahogany, beveled mirrors, damask, soft pillows, velvet, comfort and decadence, things from magazines. This was a poor person’s house. And more so, a poor person in a bad state. We’ve all seen homes like this, dingy and depressed, no life anywhere, no color, like a grainy black and white television screen. I’ve lived in countless such places throughout my adulthood, places I wouldn’t set foot in today. It’s remarkable what people become blind to when they’re in such darkness. The only comfort I found in that house was that all in all it was in even worse shape than mine.
I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I’d passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what’s wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn’t realized this until sitting at Rebecca’s kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.
A silly truism comes back to me, “If you loved me, you’d be blind to my flaws.” I’ve tried that line on many men in my life, and the response usually has been, “Then I guess I don’t love you.” Makes me laugh each time I remember it. I gave Rebecca the benefit of the doubt, tried to justify her grunginess the way I justified my own. The grime on her kitchen table meant she couldn’t be bothered to clean. Well, neither could I. And that made sense to me. Surely Rebecca could afford to pay someone to clean for her, and she just hadn’t gotten around to hiring anyone yet. She was new in town, after all. I thought she was wonderful. Her nervousness, her scraggly hair, her chapped lips, these quirks only made her more beautiful. I watched her turn and start opening and closing various cupboards and closets. Her bathrobe fell open around her shoulders like a fur stole. There was nothing that woman couldn’t get away with.
“Aha,” she exclaimed, setting down two cups. They were cheap coffee mugs like you’d find at a diner, chipped and stained brown on the inside. She poured the wine awkwardly from the broken bottle. “You like the music?” she asked, her long finger poking up into the air. She was jumpy. It’s possible she had taken something before I arrived, it occurred to me at the time. So many women took pills back then to keep their figures. It made them nervous, creepy. I don’t suppose Rebecca was above that. When I think back on her upright posture, her long wild hair, her strange monochromatic outfits, she seems incredibly vain.
“Sure,” I said, lifting my eyes as though the music could be seen floating in the air. “I love it.”
Rebecca pushed a bowl full of peanut shells toward me on the table. “You can use that as an ash tray,” she said. “Just be careful with the wine. There might be some broken glass in there.”
“Thanks,” I said, and peered into the dark liquid. It smelled much like the vomit from my car.
“Mmm,” Rebecca purred, tasting it. “This is just wonderful. I hope you haven’t spent too much on it. Cheers.” She approached me at the table and held out her mug. “To Jesus Christ, happy birthday.” We clinked. She laughed, seemed to relax a bit. “How has your Christmas Eve been so far, Miss Eileen?”
“Pretty good,” I answered. “I spent the morning with my father.” I hoped to sound well adjusted.
“Your father?” she said. “I didn’t know you had family here. Does he live in the area?”
“Not too far,” I answered. I could have told her the truth — that I’d been his willing slave until she came along, that he was a crazy drunk, and that I hated him so much I wished him dead sometimes — but the air was already heavy with woe. “He lives within walking distance from my place,” I told her. “That’s been nice since he’s retired. He gets lonely a lot.”
“That’s lovely,” Rebecca said. “That you spend time with him, not that he’s lonely, I mean,” she laughed.
I attempted a self-conscious chuckle, which fell flat. “Do you live here alone?” I asked, happy to switch the focus onto her.
“Oh sure,” she said, to my great relief. “I simply can’t have roommates. I like my own space. And I like to make a lot of noise. I can play my music as loud as I want.”
“Me too,” I lied. “I can’t stand roommates. In college I—”
“People are how they are and they do what they do, don’t they?” Rebecca interrupted me, leaning against the counter. She didn’t seem to be interested in a response. She stared intensely down at her wine, her lips already stained, her face a bit flushed. I really wondered about that bathrobe she wore. It was old and worn and discolored, hardly something a person would wear in the presence of company. Was I not worthy of anything better? “I don’t believe we do things we don’t want to do,” she said oddly, her voice now grave and restrained. “Not unless there’s a gun pointed at our heads. And even then, one has a choice. Still, nobody wants to admit they want to be bad, do bad things. People just love shame. This whole country’s hooked on it if you ask me. Let me ask you, Eileen,” she turned to me. I put down my mug — already nearly empty — and looked up at her, my eyes bright with expectation. “Are the boys in our prison bad people?” she asked.