“Oh,” she had said, “isn’t that a delightful picture of the sea.”
I slump a little on the wall. The red-haired man is back, asleep in his chair. Vet says, “I feel like I’m a prison guard or something with all this lethal-injection stuff.”
And then the man says something about how he worked in a prison once and he saw a lethal injection once and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen and I perk up then, rejuvenated, because that’s all I need to know; I figure now if he worked in a prison then he has sympathy with people who are trapped or bad and just like that my plan is set.
So I smile at both of them as I move away from the wall in a silvery wave and he notices me then, how can he not, and he nods and khaki vet is off talking again and I interrupt and say, “I have to do something,” and the vet is surprised that I can talk and gives me a snotty look down her I-never-got-past-my-childhood-dream nose, and I say, to him only, “Hey, if I’m not back here in a couple minutes, will you check on me?”
He nods, unsure what I mean. She slivers her eyes at me. I open mine wide back, because eye slivering is for old hags. I’m not sure about the details of my plan yet but I step past Adam who is still talking to that unfuckable woman with no ass and I go into the bedroom. I’m planning on stealing something, but I’m not sure what to steal that would make him come find me. I survey the bed. I could steal all the wallets but it seems too unoriginal and detailed so I decide to do the thing I wanted to do with the red-haired man and that is to steal all the coats. I lean over and scoop them together, wool ones and tweed ones and velvet ones and cotton ones, and pick them up in a huge stack, my arms a belt, so heavy they make me stagger, and I go inside the bedroom closet with them and shut the door until I am smothered with coats. It’s hot in here, and it smells like shoe polish. I arrange myself underneath the billion coats and then I wait for either the black-haired man to remember to hunt for me or someone else to get ready to leave the party. After just a few minutes, there are footsteps in the bedroom and it’s two people and they’re ready to bundle up for outdoors and go back to where they live and of course they cannot find their coats and it’s winter and they are certain they brought coats. So they leave the room and return to the host and I can hear her quizzical voice going up. “Coats? Bedroom.” Her tone is always so sincere. In high school her mother wouldn’t let her shop at certain stores because they were too expensive and too slutty and so I would take her shopping and buy her a blue leather miniskirt or a sheer black slip and she would try them on at my house in the ultra-mirrored bathroom and model and pose. She refused to wear them out. She just wore them for me. She has this compact body and looked sporty in everything and I told her compliment after compliment and we never touched but she still always blushed like crazy. There was this one dress of white feathers and she looked like a whole different genre of person inside it. It would’ve made my entire high school worthwhile if she’d worn that to her prom but she could hardly leave the bathroom and her face was bright red so that between her and the dress I was reminded of a peppermint. I never took those outfits back to the store; I kept them for a few of her visits and when she seemed bored of them or started to guilt-trip me and ask how much they cost, I gave them to Goodwill. Goodwill, for good reason, loved me. And my head is leaning back on a soft coat of lamb’s wool and I can hear the talking outside getting louder and I’m thinking that the reason I kept going out with Adam in the first place was because when I showed him my painting of the ocean in my living room, on our second date, when I was wearing peach velvet, long sleeves, super plunging low neck, he looked at it for about one second and said, “Lady, you are screwed UP.” And even though I was a little bit insulted, I was also ridiculous with gratitude and I took off my clothes right there, in one smooth movement, unzipped that peach velvet to show a different kind of peach, a different kind of velvet. Within seconds he was kissing my shoulders and my side and the inside of my knee and he told me to stay standing for a while then and I felt like the tallest person ever born. And by now the couple is back in the bedroom and the party is filtering into the bedroom because they know something is wrong and they are all wondering where all the coats are and someone is getting upset, someone with an expensive coat and I reach out my hand and grope around until I find it. Cashmere. It smells like a woman, like expensive perfume, but not as rich as me; me, I buy perfume so expensive it doesn’t smell like anything but skin. And they are panicking and someone is saying how the pocket of her coat has her keys in it and she’s asking, “Who is missing? Who took the coats?” and I am touching the pocket with the keys, it’s near my foot, and I hear Adam call my name and I am quiet but he is thinking, It’s her, she is somewhere hiding with coats, and he excuses himself from flat butt but I don’t want to see him ever again, I want the black-haired man to find me so I can kiss him and get home already. I close my eyes, hoping that when he opens the closet he will find me sleeping and I’ll wake, disoriented; I’ll tell him in a delightfully raspy voice that I was cold and needed a blanket and he will think I’m a nut or drunk but also he will be moved somehow and we’ll start kissing in the bottom of the closet and he will have intuitive knowledge about my mouth, and I am hearing footsteps approach the closet, heavy ones, male ones, nearby, someone is approaching the closet and it’s opening a crack and then it’s open but I can’t see who’s there because my eyes are closed and then it’s the black-haired man, it is, I can tell because he says “Oh,” and I recognize his deep voice. I reach up a hand because I want to drag him in here-I am stuck, I am bad, it’s jail, it’s just like you like-but instead, he calls out, “Hey! I Found The Coats!” really loud, and then I pretend to wake up and say “Oh, hi, what? I was just cold,” and the host comes by and when she sees me it’s like I’m her troublesome dog-pet and she says “I’m so sorry,” and the black-haired man points me out and says, “Here You Are, Miss,” like he’s a bellhop locating luggage and I explain how I was cold and the coat couple reach in the closet as if I’m not even in it and fuss around and retrieve their coats and then they’re off and everyone else is taking their coats really fast in case I’m somehow going to eat them and it’s a time-limit thing and coat after coat is picked up until I’m coatless and just myself in my dress and I feel truly cold now and bare and small and then Adam is standing there in the crowd, and he says, “I’ll take it from here,” and I think that’s so fatherly of him it makes me feel sort of sick also because it makes me feel sort of good and the host asks what I was doing, and for the third or fourth time I say I was cold, I just thought I’d be warmer with all these coats. I make my eyes blurry. And she buys it. She thinks I’m that plain drunk from her affordable-yet-delicious wine. And the black-haired man buys it too and nods but then turns around and goes back to the other room to talk to the vet. He leaves the drunk crazy lady behind and returns to the conservative animal lover. And it’s just Adam there now, standing with his familiar face, who knows I wasn’t cold or drunk, standing there as everyone clears out and he tells me to get up and pulls me when I don’t and sits me on the bed. We stare at the wall together. And I’m thinking how I didn’t reach my goal and that the whole strawberry/vanilla/chocolate trio isn’t nearly as good with just two flavors, and he is sitting there thinking something else, I have no idea what, and he isn’t touching me but I can hear him breathing. In the other room, people are leaving. The hidden coats scared them and they took it as some kind of cue that the party was over. Everyone is trickling out and thanking the host and whispering about me and she continues to be ultra-sincere, even when some complainer says something about a wrinkle in her coat, in a mad voice. Oops, I think. Sorry. I stare at the wall directly ahead. There’s a painting of a desert hung up. It’s in a simple wood frame and in it there’s just a row of cacti and then the sun setting in the distance and who needs weapons when they’re cacti. That’s all I’m looking at when Adam takes my hand.