Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 4

Grant recovered, grabbed at her, caught the neck of her T-s.h.i.+rt.

Sheila fought not to fall, then went with the overbalance, throwing her arms up and back. She knocked the mirror askew; her other hand struck Grant. Fearing another attack, he flinched-and Sheila slid down and out, leaving him holding the empty top. In a moment she was sprawled on the pavement. She scrambled up and walked quickly away from the car.

Breathing was hard, walking was hard. The air she sucked in got tangled in the dry cloth of her throat. Her legs twitched her along like panicky animals on leads. Straight ahead but blocks away rose the trestles of traffic lights and signs. Beyond them, elevated, cars flashed by on the highway. Sheila turned aside.

A lick of pain ran up the knuckles of her spine to where her bra clasped. She thought of going back-the skin of her bare shoul ders and belly p.r.i.c.kled as if chilled, not heated by exposure-but didn't. She made her way through the personal s.p.a.ces the s.h.i.+fting cars required, lightly touching the hot hoods and trunks as if they were tumbled boulders along a path she wished to remember and would later retrace. *

The noise of the AC and the radio racket were enough to block out the sound of laughter Grant had heard from the car next to his- laughter he knew was directed at him. Lost-his-wife-in-a-parking lot laughter. But they were gone now, and Sheila was out there in her bra and shorts. He flicked the fan down a notch and something snappy breezed from the cream-colored recessed speaker screens.

Sheila's T-s.h.i.+rt lay on the seat as if she had casually dropped it there, and he took it in his fingers to feel the shapeless innocence of cloth without a body. Then he put his face into the s.h.i.+rt to get the scent of her. *

Sheila crossed a rectangle of browned gra.s.s, then walked along the perimeter fence until she came to a rip. Pressing aside the broken fingers of wire, she pushed through to a discarded lot of scabbed asphalt empty of all but a single car parked near the fence in a patch of shade. A young man got out of the car. He held up a can of beer as if he were about to endorse it and said, "Hey." Three other boys were sitting one-two-three, pupils on a bench, all laughing, in the car's back seat. In the pa.s.senger seat, a young woman with red hair knotted at her crown to fountain up and then spill over, brushed the falling hair aside to see Sheila better. Her mouth opened. *

There was an afternoon-a year ago, when he and Sheila had been fixing dinner together, drinking Mexican beer and laughing about something. They were both high from the day, the beer-whatever.

He had kissed the nape of her neck while she was slicing peppers- the little kisses she liked. The knife clattered into the sink as she turned in his arms. She took his hand and led him to the bedroom, and then she flicked this same T-s.h.i.+rt over her head and let it fall.

I was sitting on the bed. Waiting for whatever she wanted, wanting to do nothing but what she wanted. She moved between my legs and put her hands, still wet and cool from the vegetables, on the back of his head and pressed her fingers against my neck and pulled my face to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. *

"Hey, dolly." The driver of the car smiled at Sheila. "Do you want a ride or anything?" He gestured toward the car as if to say, My char iot awaits. His reversed ball cap, fitted to the eyebrows, produced a bleakly humorous impression of r.e.t.a.r.dation. The boys in the back seat laughed again and shouted. The female pa.s.senger took her eyes off Sheila and reached over the seat and slapped at the boys, who held up their hands and laughed harder. "Let me out! Out! Let me the f.u.c.k out!" One by one they shouted.

Sheila walked to the car and took the can of beer from the boy.

The little that was left tasted vile, was sulphurously warm, but soak ing. A boy de-coc.o.o.ned through a window, came up behind Sheila and put his hands around her middle. "Is that good?" he asked.

"Yes," the driver said. "It's great." Sheila pulled the boy's fingers from her skin and the hands, as if released from gravity, floated. "Okay,"

he said, but the hands, contrite and duplicitous, settled again on her bare stomach.

"Wild baby," the driver said. "Baby doll, baby, I bet your t.i.tties are fine."

The three kids still in the car had all gotten out. The female pas senger lit a cigarette, leaned her lower arms on the car's roof and instantly flinched back. "Hoo!-hot!"

Sheila felt hands on her a.s.s and a mumble of fingers along the waistband of her shorts. The rapt, attentive boys moved with her when she moved and she moved with the slow sliding of their bod ies through the chutes of a bloodless slaughterhouse. She pushed against them, felt the part.i.tions of muscle and bone relent, give way, rea.s.sert. They were at her as at a window, looking in where she boiled like a kettle of snow, where she looked out at something she had once wanted, something planted in her as deeply as a tongue is rooted in the dark. One boy's suppressed erection was against her thigh like a knot. Another boy's hands cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. This is my body.

The driver pumped his hands in a cop's slow-down gesture and said, "Let's get dolly into the car." *

Grant watched the miniature traffic surge through the heat rolling up off the access road. The main lot was deserted but for two or three dingy cars, each sitting alone, as if someone had wanted to prevent them influencing one another.

His face was no longer bleeding. He had looked in the rearview mirror once after Sheila left and now he looked again. Just scratch es, really, but eager bleeders all the same. Seeing them scared the s.h.i.+t out of him.

She'd got him-no mistake.

He lay his hand on the slope of the dashboard-nothing like the metal dashboards in his father's cars, the kind kids dashed their brains out on back before some genius figured out that bodies con tinue to move forward when a car slams to a stop. Was restraint such a hard lesson to learn?

"I don't have time for this," he said. "I don't have time for this or any other lesson. I can't wait any longer." *

"Not in my car," the fountain-haired girl said. She glared at the driv- er, who opened his arms wide as if to say, You're crucifying me.

The boys ceased stroking Sheila. They waited. A boy said, "Aw, man." The girl flicked her lips tenderly with a tendril of red hair and regarded Sheila. "Why don't you take a walk, chick, unless you just want to get f.u.c.ked."

Sheila considered. Did she want to get f.u.c.ked by four boys in the back seat of a car? Hadn't she seen that happen in a movie? A queue of men at the open back door of a car and a man inside, pumping away between a woman's legs, his romping white a.s.s-that which is always behind us-absurdly comical? Last Exit to Brooklyn. Nearly the last scene. The woman had pulled off her blouse in a bar in a gesture of drunken defiance or madness that ignited the room's haze of latent carnality. She pulled the white blouse open and screamed, "Take a look at these!" and the men swamped her. In the next shot, she was on her back and the men were lined up. Quiet, like now- sober, you could say. Solid. Ready. Waiting for a turn.

Why had she done it? What did she want?

"I have to go, now," Sheila said.

The driver touched Sheila's jaw, let his fingers slide to her lips.

Sheila opened her mouth, sucked in an inch of his sticky f.u.c.k-you finger, and bit it to the bone. The boy screamed. The other boys fell away from her, and she ran away. *

"And talking to yourself again," he said. "That's f.u.c.ked up, Grant.

That's what crazy people do. I've seen them-everybody has. Do they ever shut up? In their rooms, or wherever they live, do they ever quiet down and just . . ." Grant put his hands on the wheel, rocked it slightly back and forth. "And just sit there, think about things, make phone calls? Do their wives run off in a parking lot in the middle of the motherf.u.c.king day?"

There was no one left in the parking lot. He was the last. "No, they don't," he said. "Those people don't have wives."

"I'm the last one," he said. "I'm the last person out here." *

The houses in the neighborhood beyond the shadow of the ball park were dingy, sun-bleached with age, and small. Sheila knocked at the door of the first house she came to, waited, then jogged to the next one, then the next. It's California, no one's home. At the fourth house a woman peered at Sheila through a small pane of yellow- tinted gla.s.s and withdrew. The door opened.

"Yes? What is it?" Her speech had a drowsy southern dip. A heavy woman, past middle age. Sheila realized, irrelevantly, that she didn't know which years were supposed to define middle age now. The woman looked old to her-looked her mother's age-with that gen eration's comforting roundness, its Depression-era quality of having been irrevocably shaped to please and fated to serve.

"Yes?"

"I need a s.h.i.+rt or something. Even a T-s.h.i.+rt. Please."

After a moment, the woman stepped back and Sheila walked in.

A table lamp burned intensely-a yellow hole in the gray air so I know it's not dark, it's my eyes. The languid air she had felt flowing around her ankles at the door now enveloped and calmed her. The house was blissfully cool. When the woman shut the door, Sheila heard, in the cessation of the freeway noise, the rustle of an air conditioner.

Her whole situation suddenly became clear to her. The penny-bitter taste of the boy driver's beer and blood, the seared white skin of her shoulders. "My husband's waiting for me," she said, and turning to the woman, she blundered into her arms and wept loudly. *

Grant lit a cigarette and smoked it hard, letting the smoke fill up the car. In his mind, he was sitting in a room, talking to himself. "That'll be the day," he said out loud. "That will be the f.u.c.king day, boy."

But still, the room was in a city, and this had to be faced. An eastern or midwestern city, New York or Cleveland, Detroit, someplace dark-yes? Winter. Burned-out urban arroyos, where the pores of the living exhaled poverty and ruin into air that poured it back into their lungs. There were rich people and middle-cla.s.s people in those cities, too, but he didn't know them. His people, the room people, were the ones he knew. Every time he slowed down, they were there, waiting. They were not evil or repulsive, but they were inevitable, they were his people, and that was far worse.

"My people." Grant dumped Sheila's purse upside down on the seat. Sunlight riffled the keys and plastic surfaces of her things.

Lighter things fell and bounced: a pencil, a little book, matches, a comb. A whiff of sulphur from the matchbook, the greasy sweet ness of a lipstick when he held it to his nose. Tissues, some bearing lip-prints. A tube of eyeliner. "She loves her beauty stuff," he said.

"You really love your beauty stuff, don't you?"

He opened the little book. On its cover: Memo. Notes to her- self. Shopping. Things that she needed to do. Scribbles, then some twenty blank pages at the end.

Grant flipped through them. Empty.

Days that had not yet happened-these would need notes, di rection, reason.

Blanks. Starting today.

Waiting for a mark, a sign. Empty.

White.

G.o.d d.a.m.n it. G.o.d d.a.m.n it. *

The woman, whose name was Eleanor, brought her rattletrap car to a stop in front of Grant and Sheila's house. Sheila was wearing one of Eleanor's blouses, and in spite of the heat she felt cool inside the older woman's large size.

Eleanor had brought out the blouse for Sheila, then taken her to the bathroom to clean and dress her back. She gave her gla.s.s es of water. She insisted on taking her home-if she wanted to go home.

"I do." Sheila let her head drop forward and pressed her eyes into the heels of her hands. They were sitting in Eleanor's kitchen. El eanor's husband had come home and been intercepted, then dis patched to another part of the house.

"You're welcome to stay till you're sure."

"I'm sure-I guess I am. Oh, s.h.i.+t, I don't know what I am." She had told Eleanor about everything except the boys.

"I'll give you my number-here." Eleanor pulled the note from the pad. "You can just call me, any time, you know. Doesn't have to be for a special reason."

Now Sheila got out of the car and looked back in and thanked El eanor again and said, "Okay, then"-she felt she'd put on Eleanor's lazy dialect as well-"Well, I will call you."

"You should!"

"I love this s.h.i.+rt," Sheila said, and blushed to feel such unashamed love. *

Grant swept the keys and cosmetics violently off the seat. A small object ricocheted, striking him in the face, and he vaulted out of the car, slamming the door so hard that something came loose inside it and fell, tinkling. He kicked the door to ensure that it was really shut, really broken-and to break it further, to f.u.c.k it up.

Then he tried to open the door-but it wouldn't open. He went around to the pa.s.senger side and found that one locked.

"Well, you are really and truly screwed now, boy" he said. The car idled complacently.

Grant began to kick the car, which remained sealed. He jogged over to one of the deserted cars, set himself, kicked off its driver's side mirror, and took it back to his car. He was winding up to smash the mirror through the window when something moved in the pe riphery of his vision. He turned his head.

Two policemen were getting out of their vehicle. One had a ser vice pistol in his hand. The other held up a hand in warning. "Don't move, sir," he said, "just stand right there and be real, real still, nice and still and nice, and quiet," the men moving away from the patrol car now and coming together and then letting their paths diverge as they walked toward Grant, whose thoughts simply seized up as he understood that the worst had truly happened. He could rest now because-well, not only am I about to be shot for breaking into my own car? but-things were so simple, really. When they unraveled and unwound and broke and fell apart and stopped moving and cracked open, things became understandable. No-bearable. Bearable, and unbearably whole in my broken, f.u.c.ked-up-ness. They caught up with you, and then they had you, and they put you in a room. And then you could never get away. *

Sheila walked up the driveway and around to the back of the house and found the key they kept hidden where no one but a burglar would find it. She let herself in and walked unhurriedly through the house to the bedroom to pick up the telephone she had heard ringing when she opened the back door.

"Sheila?"

Grant! She could hear background noises but couldn't make out if they were bar noises or what.

"Sheila? It's me. I'm-Sheila, I'm in jail."

Sheila waited.

"Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"I'm being held. I'm at-" His voice became small and went, Where am I? He came back. "I'm in custody. Downtown."

The background noise of telephones, voices, a man's deep laugh ter, chatter, suggested a happy day at the station-inconsequence came down the line. There was Grant's breathing, then sipping sounds. He is in jail and having a cup of coffee. She liked the idea of his being detained-and it occurred to her that she might remember the last time she had liked him: who he was, his ideas, his terrible manners, his bad dreams, the way his bare legs felt against hers, his urgency, his sudden shrinking. The way he could talk to a child in a natural way but not want one of his own. Of their own. His refusal to wear sunblock, her beating on his locked heart. His wanting to get ahead. His fear of falling behind. Her fear of falling with him.

"I'll call you back," she said, and hung up.

She walked through the house, turning on lights, then searched the back of a drawer that concealed her stash of cigarettes-she had "quit" months ago and had been sneaking them for months. She made coffee and took a cup into the bedroom and sat on the bed and smoked the cigarette and drank coffee, then lit another ciga rette and lay back and smoked it.

Sheila picked up the telephone and punched in numbers.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. "Eleanor?" *

When Sheila arrived at the police station she found Grant sitting, not in a cell, but on a plastic chair in a room. She could not catch his eye as she approached because he was leaning forward, face to the floor, elbows in his thighs. She took the chair next to his.

"Hey," she said. She didn't touch him because she was afraid that, if she did, he would not say what he might've been about to say- a touch could throw a man off the beam-and she wanted to hear whatever he might say, more than she wanted to touch him.

Grant wiped his face with his hands in long, slow strokes, as if was.h.i.+ng.

"When you hung up, I was afraid you might not come. I mean, they told me I could go, you know, they don't even know who owns the car I vandalized, they just think I'm out of my f.u.c.king mind. But I had to get in touch with you first and make sure it was all right. I mean"-and now he looked up at her and she saw the bandage un der his eye-"I know it isn't all right. Nothing is all right. I've got to go up in front of a judge. I broke-"

Abruptly he raised his head. Face clenched like a fist. "I broke the law. I broke a mirror off somebody's car. The car-our car- was running but I was locked out and I wanted to get back in and then the cops came and pulled a gun on me, a f.u.c.king gun, Sheila.

Oh, G.o.d."

He cried briefly in a sound so primitive it seemed to issue not from his throat but to be claw-hammered out of his chest, nails out of old clapboards, and she thought, Why do they hold it in till it's this bad?

"They impounded the car." After crying, his voice was raw. "I locked myself out of the car, Sheila. That was stupid."

"I had a cigarette," she said.

"What? I know. I mean-I didn't know today. I found them, so I knew. I was looking for something and-well, surprise. I didn't know whether to say anything or not. I wanted to say something."

"It was wonderful," she said.

Grant looked at her and his face clenched again, but he did not yield. "Oh, yeah? That's great. I mean, I guess it is. I guess I don't know what to make of it. We were going to quit together, weren't we?"

Sheila took his wounded face in her hands.

"Let's do that."

"Sheila, I don't know what to make of it. I don't know where the h.e.l.l I'm going," he said. "I know I'm going, but I don't know where."

"You can go with me," she replied. "I have a car waiting."

House of Prayer.