She laughed. “I guess so.”
“Why don’t I pull over,” he said.
She laughed again. “No, let’s find a room.”
They stopped at a Comfort Inn that had lost its franchise and now called itself the Comfort Valley Lodge. The night clerk was obese and her computer was down. She manually registered Chip with the labored breathing of someone lately stranded by a systems malfunction. Chip put his hand on Melissa’s belly and was about to reach into her pants when it occurred to him that fingering a woman in public was inappropriate and might cause trouble. For similar, purely rational reasons he suppressed the impulse to pull his dick out of his pants and show it to the wheezing, perspiring clerk. But he did think the clerk would be interested in seeing it.
He took Melissa down on the cigarette-divoted carpeting of Room 23 without even shutting the door.
“It is so much better like this!” Melissa said, kicking the door shut. She yanked her pants down and practically wailed with delight, “This is so much better!”
He didn’t dress all weekend. The towel he was wearing when he took delivery of a pizza fell open before the delivery man could turn away. “Hey, love, it’s me,” Melissa said into her cell phone while Chip lay down behind her and went at her. She kept her phone arm free and made supportive filial noises. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Sure, sure No, that’s hard, Mom … No, you’re right, that is hard … Sure … Sure … Uh-huh … Sure… That’s really, really hard,” she said, with a twinkle in her voice, as Chip sought leverage for an extra sweet half inch of penetration while he shot. On Monday and Tuesday he dictated large chunks of a term paper on Carol Gilligan which Melissa was too annoyed with Vendla O’Fallon to write by herself. His near-photographic recall of Gilligan’s arguments, his total mastery of theory, got him so excited that he began to tease Melissa’s hair with his erection. He ran the head of it up and down the keyboard of her computer and applied a gleaming smudge to the liquid-crystal screen. “Darling,” she said, “don’t come on my computer.” He nudged her cheeks and ears and tickled her armpits and finally backed her up against the bathroom door while she bathed him in her cherry-red smile.
Each night around dinnertime, for four nights running, she went to her luggage and got two more golden caplets. Then on Wednesday Chip took her to a cineplex and they sneaked into an extra movie and a half for the price of the original matinee bargain. Back at the Comfort Valley Lodge, after a late pancake dinner, Melissa called her mother and spoke at such length that Chip fell asleep without swallowing a caplet.
He awoke on Thanksgiving in the gray light of his undrugged self. For a while, as he lay listening to the sparse holiday traffic on Route 2, he couldn’t place what was different. Something about the body beside him was making him uneasy. He considered turning and burying his face in Melissa’s back, but it seemed to him she must be sick of him. He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using.
In a matter of seconds, like a market inundated by a wave of panic selling, he was plunged into shame and self-consciousness. He couldn’t bear to stay in bed a moment longer. He pulled on his shorts and snagged Melissa’s toiletries kit and locked himself in the bathroom.
His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done. And his body, its chemists, had a clear instinctive understanding of what he had to do to make this burning wish go away. He had to swallow another Mexican A.
He searched the toiletries kit exhaustively. He wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel dependent on a drug with no hedonic kick, a drug that on the evening of his fifth and final dose he hadn’t even craved. He uncapped Melissa’s lipsticks and removed twin tampons from their pink plastic holder and probed with a bobby pin down through her jar of skin cleanser. Nothing.
He took the kit back out to the main room, which was fully light now, and whispered Melissa’s name. Receiving no answer, he dropped to his knees and rifled her canvas travel bag. Paddled his fingers in the empty cups of bras. Squeezed her sock balls. Touched the various private pouches and compartments of the bag. This new and different violation of Melissa was sensationally painful to him. In the orange light of his shame he felt as if he were abusing her internal organs. He felt like a surgeon atrociously fondling her youthful lungs, defiling her kidneys, sticking his finger in her perfect, tender pancreas. The sweetness of her little socks, and the thought of the even littler socks of her all too proximate girlhood, and the image of a hopeful bright romantic sophomore packing clothes for a trip with her esteemed professor — each sentimental association added fuel to his shame, each image recalled him to the unfunny raw comedy of what he’d done to her. The jismic grunting butt-oink. The jiggling frantic nut-swing.
By now his shame was boiling so furiously it felt liable to burst things in his brain. Nevertheless, while keeping a close eye on Melissa’s sleeping form, he managed to paw her clothing a second time. Only after he’d resqueezed and rehandled each piece of it did he conclude that the Mexican A was in the big zippered outer pocket of her bag. This zipper he eased open tooth by tooth, clenching his own teeth to survive the noise of it. He’d worked the pocket open just far enough to push his hand through it (and the stress of this latest of his penetrations released fresh gusts of flammable memory; he felt mortified by each of the manual liberties he’d taken with Melissa here in Room 23, by the insatiable lewd avidity of his fingers; he wished he could have left her alone) when the cell phone on the nightstand tinkled and with a groan she came awake.
He snatched his hand from the forbidden place, ran to the bathroom, and took a long shower. By the time he came out, Melissa was dressed and had repacked her bag. She looked utterly uncarnal in the morning light. She was whistling a happy tune.
“Darling, a change of plans,” she said. “My father, who really is a lovely man, is coming out to Westport for the day. I want to go be with them.”
Chip wished he could fail to feel the shame that she was failing to feel; but to beg for another pill was acutely embarrassing. “What about our dinner?” he said.
“I’m sorry. It’s just really important that I be there.”
“So it’s not enough to be on the phone with them for a couple of hours every day.”
“Chip, I’m sorry. But we’re talking about my best friends.”
Chip had never liked the sound of Tom Paquette: a dilettante rocker and trust-fund baby who ditched his family for a roller blader. And in the last few days Clair’s boundless capacity to yak about herself while Melissa listened had turned Chip against her, too.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll take you to Westport.”
Melissa flipped her hair so that it fanned across her back. “Darling? Don’t be mad.”
“If you don’t want to go to the Cape, you don’t want to go to the Cape. I’ll take you to Westport.”
“Good. Are you going to get dressed?”
“It’s just that, Melissa, you know, there’s something a little sick about being so close to your parents.”
She seemed not to have heard him. She went to the mirror and applied mascara. She put on lipstick. Chip stood in the middle of the room with a towel around his waist. He felt warty and egregious. He felt that Melissa was right to be disgusted by him. And yet he wanted to be clear.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Darling. Chip.” She pressed her painted lips together. “Get dressed.”