And the World Changed (42 page)

We stopped after seven hours of driving at a Best Western in Wyoming since Sully had run out of cigarettes.

“Separate rooms,” he told the desk clerk, a young woman with bushels of brown hair streaming stiffly from her nostrils.

I stood outside Sully's bedroom door for a minute, then entered mine.

We breakfast on burgers. According to Sully there is no other
way. He eats with a plastic knife and fork, dipping the bite-sized bun, meat, lettuce, and tomato into a puddle of ketchup in a cardboard tub.

I take a bite out of mine. Ketchup drips down my fingers. I lick the wedge between my thumb and index finger.

“That's very attractive,” Sully says. “Very sexy.”

He looks at me as if I were a morsel to chew and spit out, or swallow and eventually expel anyway.

“What's wrong? You're blushing.”

I cannot lean over and kiss this guy
this guy
because
dammit
dammit he makes me shy.

I call Erin from the restroom. This can hardly, she says, be love. Are you rolling your eyes, I ask. She says, why yes. I switch my cell phone off after that. I don't want her calling to make sure that I'm not falling.

Today Sully's behind the wheel. His slinky fingers sink into the steering covered in fur. Sunshine glints off the length of his fingernails. I twine my hands around the headrest, yawn, and stretch. He whistles, looking at my straining shirt and denim skirt riding up over the tan lines on my thighs.

“Hey,” I say whacking him on his upper arm, “what would your fiancée say!”

“That I'm engaged to her but not blind.”

I whack him again, this time on his forearm, another whack forward and I can grab those fingers in my short, chubby ones, the fingernails chewed to nubs, but he turns the key in the ignition and the grabbing moment is gone.

“My fiancée,” he says, adjusting the rearview mirror and backing out smoothly, “believes in dreams.” He glances at me. “I had a dream about the two of you last night.” He exits for the interstate. “You were both playing chess.”

“Who won?”

“No one. It was fucked up.”

He switches his tape on again. There's this one Pakistani song that sounds like Black Sabbath but it's not. It's a warning
to copycats, Sully says, and rather tongue in cheek since its music is hardly original itself. He begins to tell me tidbits about the band but I'm not interested and inquire instead, “Why do you like demure women?”

“I like women who know they're women,” he rocks his head to the music, “like you.”

“I'm demure?”

“What do you think?”

“Define demure.”

Another song comes on, he sings a few lyrics—he's got a terrible voice, but he's so confident—and says, “the opposite of bold.”

The opposite of bold. Why not? Why couldn't it be me? Hadn't I not knocked on Sully's door last night? I'd gotten up twice to go to his room, but hadn't I ended up in my own bed? Damn right, I was demure.

“How demure is your fiancée?”

“So demure I'm going to ravish her behind and she won't know why the hell she's not getting pregnant.”

“Sully!”

“What?”

But he's laughing and I laugh too, because of course he's joking, joking about demure being so important, and behinds, and all the U.S. girls, two a week if possible, he's going to have sunny side up. But between the laughter there's a savageness that supposes his fiancée may as well be blind and deaf, because what she can't see or isn't told never happened.

We're still laughing when we leave Wyoming and enter Utah. Still laughing when flatlands turn greener and greener and the bushes turn into trees. Laughing when we stop at a gas station where we use a unisex restroom, the seat piss-splattered and stinking. Laughing as we buy cheddar sandwiches, laughing coming out to the car surrounded by seagulls, five, ten, fifteen large creatures pecking the tarmac and others swooping so close they could land on my hair.

Not laughing I rush into the car, glad the windows are up and mouth to Sully, “The Birds,” and Sully says, “they just want to be fed.” He walks amidst them boldly. I think: How modest of me to retire to the car, how demure, is it feminine the fear I felt or just unique to me?

I open the car door, gingerly step out, again laughing. How simple explanations are—it's not a horror movie, it's hunger or greed if I go by the way the gulls are gulping our sandwiches as if they were meant for them all along.

We are still laughing when we get to Salt Lake City. Laughing as we drive on sprawling spider-leg flyovers and guessing which exit to take. Laughing when we take a wrong one and laughing when we take the right one and get to Holiday Inn.

We park, enter the lobby, there are rooms available, we get a room, go back to the parking lot, disengage the trailer, go back inside, decide to freshen up and then find a nice French restaurant because we want meat, meat, glorious meat—we are giddy over nothing in particular and everything in general—over demure and bold and everything in between, but when we get to the room the curtains are drawn and the bed beckons. For a second I feel bad for a fiancée baking chiffon cakes and then decide that she's not my problem, she's his, and that I can take her place and, because I won't be busy baking, will make sure no one takes mine—and we find ourselves naked on the bed, in it, off it, back on, and now he's on, I'm off, my knees pinned against the rough brown carpet and when I look up for a moment in the mirror adjacent to us, I see Sully's head cradled in his hands, eyes shut, mouth pursed, and I finish it off, swallow, swallow, he says and I do and then come up and say, “My turn” and sit up, brusquely, when he says, “No, no, I can't do that.”

And he doesn't. He just won't. I cajole at first. Then discuss. Then argue. Then yell. And finally say please, and when that doesn't work I hobble into my clothes, grab my bag, and storm out.

Clad in a towel he follows me into the elevator, seizes my arm, the elevator door shuts.

“I know it's not fair,” he says. “I know and I'm sorry.”

“Then why did you let me?” I press LOBBY.

He shrugs.

“What if your demure virgin of a wife expects you to?”

His shoulders are on the narrower side, there's a fat, flat red mole on the left one. His legs, I see now, are thinner than mine.

“If it comes down to this or her leaving me.”

He lets go of my arm and bangs a fist in a palm and this strong reaction over my leaving pleases me enough to return to the room.

I decide to show patience in this matter and lean over to kiss him and he rears back.

“What!”

“Umm . . . can you wash your mouth first? Please.”

“It's you in my mouth, you can't kiss me, but I'm expected to swallow.”

When I leave this time he doesn't follow.

Thursday. I don't know what Sully did for breakfast but I ate the donuts and black coffee provided in the lobby where he was waiting for me.

“Hello,” he said.

“Drop dead,” I said and again when he tried to help me hitch the trailer to the car.

We drove out of Utah with the radio on at the first audible frequency. The DJ was announcing a contest to win free Bette Midler concert tickets.

I drove upon a straight highway with a lake on both sides that increasingly became whiter and whiter until finally they were nothing but immense, vast stretches of salt. If I didn't know I'd swear it was snow.

“I'm sorry,” Sully said. His arms were crossed, his hands
tucked into his armpits. He looked tired. As if he hadn't slept.

“There's nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “You're an asshole and now I know.”

The radio station is coming on garbled. I turn it off. Sully turns on his tape. Today it's not sounding so hot. Fucking band copying Black Sabbath—who the hell did they think they were, third-world wannabes. I switch it off.

Sully turns toward his window and stares out and is still staring when Nevada comes upon us in the guise of huge billboards with women wearing frilly dresses, advertising casinos voted, by people whose tastes we don't know, for having the best food around.

I'm thinking dark thoughts about love and demureness and beginning to wonder if I'm an insensitive creature—the man finds genitals dirty, not just mine but, for God's sake his own, he couldn't even kiss me, all he did was ask me to rinse my mouth, and what had I done? acted like dirt was no issue at all. I want to apologize, but I can't. I just can't get over the hump of me on my knees and he not.

But when he finally speaks hours later, “I have to go to the restroom,” I'm ready to begin anew and so I stop.

The women's restroom at Ernie's Country Store in Oasis, Nevada, could do with a touch-up. When Sully emerges from the men's I ask him if there was any toilet paper in there.

He looks at me and I think it'll be him now who won't answer. “Plenty,” he says.

It's a relatively big store selling food and drinks and gifts like ponchos and glass dolphin wind chimes. There are a few video poker and Pilot Peak's slot machines by the entrance, all occupied.

Sully grabs some beef jerky. I get a Dr. Pepper. There's a long line at the checkout counter held up by a girl of four or five. She's hugging an armload of candy and screaming at her mother who is trying to yank the goods away from her.

The man emerges like a charging bull. I think he's crippled,
the way he's bouncing up and down, his thin, blond braid wafting like a wisp of smoke, then he begins to grunt, “ooo ooo aaa aaa ooo ooo.” He's scratching his armpits like a chimp and he is a chimp, a damn fine one too, because the little girl, enthralled by the monkeying of a grown man with a light brown full beard in Birkenstocks and khaki shorts, drops her candy to copy him and the mother swoops down, picks her up, nods a thanks, and hurries out, leaving everyone behind clapping as the man takes a bow.

When we leave the Oasis, minding the black beetles doddering through the sand, Sully shakes his head.

“What an idiot,” he says getting into the car. “How could he just do that without a care about looking like a complete fool?”

“Because he's bold and demure all at once and not pretending to be one or the other. Something some people just can't see or get. He's just a stupid American, I guess.”

Sully's breathing quickens but he doesn't say a word. In the car he turns on his tape. I don't switch it off. Pettiness brings no one closer. Nor does it create distance.

When we get to Reno I ask for separate rooms but it is Sully who shakes his head, says “Just wait,” and as soon as we enter the suite in La Quinta Inn, tumbles me onto the queen size bed.

“Are you sure?” I say, alarmed at the ferocity. “Are you sure?”

Without an answer he dives down; he's clueless. Twice he gags, but before I can say anything he takes a deep breath and is back at it.

I'm getting a bit sore. I wonder if helping him out would indeed be the complete opposite of demure. His fingers uselessly clutch the beige bedspread on either side of me. If this is how he performs do I want to be his wife?

I brush aside doubts because of course he'll get better. He's a novice and there is no such thing as a natural. But for now I faked and did a great job because he came up beaming, gasping for air, and I leaned over to kiss him, to let him know I
appreciated this done
for me
but he shoved me aside and hurtled into the bathroom and I could hear him gargling. He gargled for at least an hour, it seemed.

When he came out we shared a cigarette. I kept smiling and he kept saying, “What? What?” and not looking me in the eye. After the smoke I spread him out on the bed, longing to tell him that I loved him. I whispered, “I thought you were only going to do that with your wife.”

I'm sitting on top of him, stretching, triumphant, my fingers locked, arms thrown back, proud, arching my lower back, breasts and belly button—one smart, continuous treble clef.

“I was practicing,” he says.

It should not sting—practice—but it does. Cheap. Trashy. Whore. For. Someone. Who. Will. Marry. A. Virgin. And. Do. Her. Backside. Until. He. Decides. To. Flip. Her. Over.

I lower my arms, slide off him, grab a cigarette as nonchalantly as possible, trying to still my shaking fingers.

“Hey,” Sully says, sitting up on one elbow, “what's wrong?”

“Nothing.” I light it, take a puff, decide no aggravation is worth damaging my heart any further, and offer it to him.

I watch him suck on the cigarette butt, run his tongue over where my lips were a moment ago, and wish I'd just put it out.

“I'm taking a shower.”

I melt into the scalding water, which doesn't go deep enough into my ears to scour out hearing that I am a practice session—not the real thing—not that I want to be the real thing, of course not,
but what if I did
, so damn it don't point it out. I feel indignation for the land of “America.”