I sit next to him on a barstool and he orders his usuaclass="underline" a Budweiser and a shot of Jameson. I order a gin martini, dirty. The olives are pierced with a long wooden stick, dangerous, and I eat them carefully, one at a time, and remember that there are pleasures in life; sometimes they’re so small they shouldn’t compensate for all of the shit, but they do. They really do. Once the olives are gone, I look up hotel reviews on my phone even though I know where I want to stay: the Hard Rock. There are young, good-looking people there and they let people bring their dogs.
“Hey, babe,” he says. “Hey, love.” I don’t look at him. Other women may do their best to be nice and accommodating, but I try to be as unlikable as possible, test men too soon and expect them to love me for it. The right one will, I imagine, though I’ve been through enough to know that the right one doesn’t exist, this perfect man who will be whole yet malleable, who will allow me to be as ugly as I want.
Twenty minutes later, I’m in a hotel room by myself: two beds, a large bathroom with an array of soaps and lotions, everything perfectly beige. It’s on the fourteenth floor overlooking the Gulf and I stand in the window and try to make out the barrier islands: Cat Island, Ship, Horn, some other one I forget. In ’69, Camille split Ship Island in two: east and west. I used to go to West Ship with another of my exes.
It’s not the first time I’ve waited for Jimmy in a hotel room. I’ve given up so much to be with him and some of these things are for the best. He has taught me sex without love, a Buddhist’s degree of unattachment. He’s taught me that I can only rely on myself and it’s a good lesson, one I needed to learn. He also taught me to drive a stick shift and put cream cheese on sandwiches, an appreciation of Westerns. Everyone leaves something behind; there are so many things I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had all of them, every one.
I know Jimmy’ll show up in the morning when it’s time to check out and it’ll be done: the picture taken, cash in hand, an inexplicably large amount unaccounted for. I call room service and order a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a vanilla milkshake and eat everything including most of the condiments in their fat little jars. Then I lie in bed and watch the most boring thing I can find on TV — old women selling garish jewelry and elastic-waist pantsuits — and the longer I watch, the more I begin to imagine a world in which these things might appeal to me.
I call my mother; I can’t help it. She always answers, even if she’s with her priest or in the movie theater.
“Hello?” she says. “Who’s this?”
“Mom? Are you there?”
“I was asleep,” she says. “I fell asleep. What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock.” I don’t know why I called her but I do it constantly, against my will. More often even than she calls me. I call her because she is there, because she loves me, and because one day she’ll die and I won’t know how to live in a world without her in it. I don’t even know how to live in this one.
When we hang up, I look at my phone: three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. It seemed like so much longer.
Sometime during the night, he comes in. I pretend to sleep as he takes off his clothes and gets into bed. He puts a cold hand under my shirt, pinches my nipple.
“Tell me,” I say, swatting his hand. “What happened?”
“I got it.”
“Where’s my camera?”
“On the dresser.”
“What’d you do?”
“It was nothing,” he says. “It was easy.”
“Okay, but what’d you do? What happened?” I ask, knowing I’ll never know what happened. I’ll never know what he does when I’m not with him. When I’m alone I don’t do anything the least bit interesting. He tugs at my panties and I help him, kick them to the end of the bed. I run my hand over his prickly head because it’s what I like best about him. But once I’m safe inside my apartment, I won’t answer his calls or listen to his voice mails. I’ll watch him through the peephole until he goes away and if he acts crazy I’ll document his behavior and get a restraining order. I’ll tell Farrell, the apartment manager, to keep a lookout and she’ll be happy to be given this assignment — she loves a purpose, someone she might yell at as she hobbles around the parking lot on her crutches. I’ll even move if I have to, to Texas or North Carolina, somewhere far enough away that he won’t bother to find me unless a bad man calls and offers him money, and he’s the only bad man I can say for sure I know because this is not my life. It isn’t the one, I tell myself, as I wrap my legs around him as tightly as possible.
Boy and Girl Games Like Coupling
by Jamie Paige
Lauderdale County
Glen meets me at the overpass over Pine Forest Road, just after sunset. She’s wearing a pink tank top and a pair of jeans. I’m sitting on top of a cinder block by the guardrail. There’s one for her too. She puts her handbag down and sits next to me.
We’ve been together for six months. I didn’t know we were together, but she says so, and it’s too much trouble to fuss. I had known of Glen since second grade, but we had never talked. Then one day she and her boyfriend Terry got into a fight in homeroom. I watched the whole thing from my desk in the back of the room. Glen broke up with Terry and spent the rest of the day crying. That afternoon, I saw her walking home from school, about a mile from her parents’ house. I knew that Terry usually drove her home, so I pulled my truck next to her on the shoulder and rolled down the window. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was panting.
“Want a ride?” I said to her. She spent a minute looking me over like she was trying to place me, then she opened the door and climbed in.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I could have run you over just as easy,” I said.
She laughed.
Things are pretty good most of the time. Fucking? Oh yeah. And she brings me food home from her job. Sometimes she gives me money for weed, but she doesn’t know it. She really needs to be more careful with her purse.
Lately she’s been acting strange, talking about wanting me to meet her family, wondering why I spend so much time here at the overpass. It was her idea to come along. We’re way up high. I stand and look over the rail. I’m straining through the dark for something, anything. Glen is talking about her family again, and I can’t think.
“When you meet Mama, you’ll understand,” she says. “I’m not saying I want you to hate her, but I don’t see how you couldn’t at first. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to like everyone if you can, but I can’t see how.”
The wind is cold. I put my jacket around Glen’s shoulders. I’m shivering and leaning closer against the rail now. The rail is still warm from the evening sun. I grit my teeth.
“You don’t have to meet them all at once,” she’s saying. “I know how you are about people.”
We’re quiet for a while. I’m glad. Glen knows everything, and she’s always telling you about it.
“I just don’t understand why you like it up here so much,” she says. “It’s so lonely.”
“It’s peaceful,” I say. “Usually.”
“Don’t you wish you were doing something else?”
“Nothing else to do.”
“You could call me,” she says.
She calls me at all hours of the night. I hold the phone up to my ear and let her talk. She goes on for hours. “I get so lonely sometimes,” she told me once. “I feel like I don’t have nobody at all sometimes, except you. Why don’t you ever call me?”
I never liked phones. And knowing Glen is like falling into the middle of something all the time.