Other Resort Cities (12 page)

What really ended it, Terry knew, had nothing to do with him being the responsible one in the relationship. What
ended it was that Polly liked to fuck other men and that Terry let her. It wasn’t an explicit agreement, of course, merely a decision made to practice avoidance. Terry understood that they’d married far too young, that their lives had somehow devolved into a Bruce Springsteen song, but that they had Seth to think about, and that meant Terry needed to let Polly do the things she needed to do. He was confident that after she spent some time fucking men who rode motorcycles, or who fixed motorcycles, or who simply dressed like they did either, she’d come back to him and their love would be stronger. He even considered buying a motorcycle at one point. He imagined showing up at the kindergarten she taught at wearing leather chaps, a studded vest, and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache, and she’d just hop on the back and they’d ride off, her co-workers lining the street to clap, whoop, and holler. Instead, he told Polly that he thought it would be great fun to spend the evening reading aloud to each other from
The Lord of the Rings
, figuring it would take a very long time for them to complete the trilogy and that, by the end, they’d feel like they’d accomplished something together and, maybe, Polly would stop fucking guys who rode motorcycles.

“You’re right,” Terry said.

“Well, anyway,” Polly said. “The next girl might appreciate it, Terry. But spontaneity is good. Adventure is good. There’s no reason you shouldn’t get married again. I’m still very fond of you, if it’s any consolation.”

“I guess it will have to be,” Terry said.

“Have you been dating?”

“Polly,” Terry said, “this isn’t something I want to talk about with you.” The fact was he’d been out on a few dates
recently, mostly with women he met on sales or service calls. He was a hero when he showed up in his suit and tie to fix the copy machine; yanking accordioned paper jams out from the broiling hot center, his hands covered in black ink. The women would rush to get him a glass of water or a wet towel to clean up with, and he’d be polite and thank them and smile. In an office, heroism is replacing toner and fixing the collator, but in real life, at the bar or restaurant or bedroom, when your life boils down to the fact that you are an expert at fixing a machine that merely replicates someone else’s creativity, the insignificance can paralyze you. It can stop you from performing even the most mundane task. It can make people not call you back. Or not stay the night. Or just roll off of you midway through, remembering an appointment at 3:00 AM on a Wednesday.

Every Hewlett Packard copier he sold had the equivalent of an airplane’s black box in the center of it, tracking each and every movement of the machine. If need be, Terry could plug his laptop into it and replay weeks’ worth of activity, every single copy that had been created, every jam, every nuance of the machine. With one keystroke, he could reset the machine to the moment before trouble had started, erasing all the activity, clearing the memory, restoring the machine’s settings to what he thought of as the Nirvana Moment, when all things inside and out worked in perfect synchronicity.

His personal Nirvana Moment came a few weeks after Polly had given birth to Liza. Polly caught a vicious cold, and, for the sake of the baby, she went and stayed at her mother’s house, leaving Terry at home alone with both children. He
knew then that Liza wasn’t his, but she was Polly’s and that more than sufficed. For nearly a week it was just the three of them, and though at the time it seemed like just a small fraction of life, just an increment of existence, no more than maybe half a sheet of paper if life came in reams of five hundred sheets, Terry latched onto it and kept it apart from Polly. Whenever he felt at a loss for who he was, or about the dissolution of his marriage, or whatever failings he had as a father, he simply performed a system restore on his mind and returned to that week alone.

“You know what,” Terry said. “I could take the kids for the whole weekend if you like. It would be no trouble.”

“Really, Terry?” Polly said. “That would be so great. Landon’s been bugging me for the last month about going to some B&B in Napa, but I didn’t know how to ask you.”

“Go,” Terry said. “Have a great time.”

“You are sweet,” she said. “You know that, Terry, right? You were always sweet.”

When Terry hung up, he wasn’t precisely sure where he was going to take the kids, or even why he felt so strongly that it was the only way to save them from a life of replication, or even if he was actually going to take them anywhere at all. He’d have two days of lead time to make sense of it, and by then he was confident it would become clear. And if it didn’t, well, he could just keep clicking that button in his mind, restoring things to a point more favorable.

 

Terry opens his eyes and checks his watch. It’s 6:15 AM, exactly one hour since the last time he opened his eyes and checked his watch, and the only noise in the house is the faint hum of
electricity. In the last month, Terry has begun to notice how much noise electricity makes. Minus major appliances and air-conditioning, most houses just have a faint, haunting din caused by plugged-in lamps and televisions, not even a sound so much as it is feeling, a magnetism not unlike the sensation Terry gets when he knows someone has just departed a room he’s recently entered. During the first night Terry and the kids spent in a model home—a 1,900-square-foot two-story in a development called Manor Creek just east of Reno—he was constantly checking over his shoulder for other people, certain he felt someone staring at him, positive that he’d caught a whiff of cologne or perfume. He even went so far as to look inside the kitchen cabinets in case a child had found a cubby, but no one builds cabinets with that kind of depth anymore. Eventually, even the kids began to notice how different the empty houses sounded, so when he could, Terry would plug in the refrigerator, dishwasher, and the washing machine just for the electrical comfort they seemed to give the children.

This morning, though, the silence feels encouraging, especially in light of the fuck-up the previous morning in Las Vegas. They’d spent the night in a beautiful golf course home at a country club with three names—The Lakes at The Resort at Summerlin Commons—which Terry felt was the kind of home he’d live in after he retired. He could see himself playing gin rummy with the boys at the clubhouse, could see Seth and Liza and
their
spouses and
their
children sitting poolside, sipping drinks, tanning themselves. He’d fallen asleep that night on the plush leather sofa in the home’s library and only woke up when he realized someone was shaking him. It was Seth.

“What’s wrong?” Terry asked without opening his eyes.

“I can’t find Liza,” Seth said.

Terry spent the next three hours frantically searching the house and the surrounding golf course and vast grounds, sure that Liza had simply wandered off as small children sometimes do, but he was also equally plagued by the very real fear that she’d been kidnapped by some wacko pederast and was only moments from certain death. The country club was gated, so he was sure she couldn’t have gone far, but a gate doesn’t stop a psychopath from moving in.

Calling the police was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, but that just wasn’t possible. How do you explain to the police that the child you kidnapped has been kidnapped?

Terry finally determined that the best thing to do was to simply sit with Seth in the living room of the home they’d spent the night in, just like anyone who was considering the home might, and see if Liza came wandering back through.

It was 9:30 at this point, and already prospective homeowners were piling through the six models named after famous golfers—Terry and the kids had spent the night in the Nicklaus without even considering the Trevino and Snead—and after giving Seth two big swigs of the codeine cough syrup to calm him down, Terry tried to relax by watching the touring families and imagining who they were, what they did for jobs, what their private secrets were; except that there weren’t any families, just older couples who arrived in their Mercedes Benzes and Lexuses, and younger couples in Escalades. To each new couple, Terry said the same thing: “We don’t come with the house.”

No one laughed, which surprised Terry, until he realized how disconcerting it must be to walk into your future, only to find someone already inhabiting it.

As minute after minute passed, Terry began to grasp how little of his own future had been realized. What had he wanted as a child? What had he wanted most? His therapist told him that what he really wanted was a stable family, but Terry thought that was just the hourly rate talking, a good starting point to spend days and days dealing with his obvious Freudian anger. All Terry was certain of was that, at one time or another, he’d wanted to be
more.
More of
what
he did not know, but he was sure, sitting there with Seth snoring quietly across his lap, that he knew why humans were the only animals to keep pets: the opportunity to have both dominion and love without tangible responsibility. If you lose a dog it’s a shame, but it’s not a crime.

He imagined what Liza would be like in twenty years if he and Seth just picked up and left in ten minutes. Then in five minutes. And two minutes. Would her life be more? Would she achieve beyond what, Terry realized, was likely to be a prolonged descent into white trash servitude? If you get abducted by your own father—or at least the man who decided he was your father—what are the odds that you’ll end up lecturing at Harvard on molecular biology versus the odds you’ll end up stripping at a “gentlemen’s club” in Portland, Oregon, the spit of some drunk trucker drying on your ass?

By the time he’d carried Seth out to the Explorer and set him in the front seat, Terry Green had decided that the long coil of Liza’s life would be better held in someone else’s hand, someone who wouldn’t just let her disappear, or, worse, take her in the first place. And when he saw her there asleep in the backseat, still in the previous day’s clothes, and realized
he hadn’t even bothered to bring her inside the night before, he couldn’t decide if he felt relieved or disappointed.

 

Terry wakes Seth and Liza up at 7:00 with a handful of candy he’s stolen from the sales office. He’s already filled up the Explorer with the three pallets of bottled water he found in the garage of their overnight home, as well as a stack of frozen Lean Cuisines from the icebox inside the sales office, three Styrofoam take-out boxes from someplace called Thai Smile that smelled relatively fresh, as well as the office’s small microwave. He’s spent another ten minutes with a bottle of Windex wiping down the surfaces he and the kids touched in the model, but Terry knows this is probably overkill, especially since at least a hundred people have walked through the house over the course of the previous day. Still, Terry thinks, a decent person cleans up his own mess.

“Where are we going today?” Seth asks after he gobbles down a handful of M&Ms.

“California,” Terry says. “Maybe New Mexico. Maybe Utah. Let’s just get on the road and see where it ends.” Terry is trying to sound cheery and fun, but he’s aware that a weariness has crept into his voice, and he understands that eventually time and tide will catch up to him and neither will sweep him away. By now, Terry thinks, he must be national news. Liza and Seth are adorable. He is relatively handsome. There are photos of him and Seth in matching Little League uniforms. Liza even appeared in one of those baby beauty pageants. Christ. What were he and Polly thinking? It was long after that whole JonBenet shit, and yet they still did it, dressing her up like a fucking princess and taking her down to the Airport Marriott
in Oakland so that she could lip synch to “I Will Always Love You.” She didn’t even place. What was she then? Three? He imagines Nancy Grace doing shows all about him. He imagines that alien-looking Greta Van Susteren interviewing his mother, his friends, his co-workers, the women he didn’t sleep with.

“Can we go home?” Liza asks.

“No, no,” Terry says. “We’re still on vacation. Aren’t you having fun on vacation? Isn’t this neat?”

“I miss Mommy,” Liza says.

“Me, too,” Seth says.

Me three, Terry wants to say, though in fact he doesn’t miss Polly as much as he misses some memory of Polly, though he can’t say which one specifically. The weird thing, he knows, is that when he really presses for a concrete moment of their lives together, he normally ends up conjuring the baby powder smell of her deodorant, or the feeling her palm left on his back when she would absently place it there while they walked through Target looking for hand soap and his dandruff shampoo, or the strange ebullience he felt when her name popped up in his email in-box even after their divorce.

“Why don’t we call Mommy when we get to the next city?” Terry says. “Maybe she and Landon are finally home. Would you like that? Maybe we’ll do that.”

 

In Quartzsite, just ahead of the Arizona border with California, Terry stops at the massive Flying J truck stop and pays an attendant twenty-five bucks to let the kids shower in the “trucker’s only” shower stalls while Terry stands guard. After the kids get out, he’ll plop them down inside the arcade for a few minutes while he looks for an Explorer whose license plate
he can steal. He figures it will take them another eight hours to get back to the Bay Area. And then? You spend an entire lifetime thinking about who you’re about to become, and then one day you realize who you are and nothing seems to line up exactly. Terry understands this to be true now, understands that if he wants to fight fires he’ll have to beg to be placed in one of those programs where convicts get to fight the most dangerous, life threatening fires; understands that if he could find the little black box inside his head, he’d try to restore the system back to about 1989. Three days after graduation from high school and he and Polly and the entire just-graduated senior class of Northgate High School were on a cruise ship bound for Mexico. It was an absurd choice, this cruise, as Terry had never felt like he really fit in with the other kids. Oh, he’d had plenty of friends, had even been somewhat popular, had played varsity baseball, had been active in student council, had been one of the guys everyone liked, though it was clear he wasn’t admired as such. Which was fine. But this cruise—a seven day affair—would be his undoing, he knew. Could he be trapped on this floating city of other people’s lives without, just once, trying to slip into another room? It was all about proximity and opportunity, Terry understood, and he’d been able to quell his sneaking need around the neighborhood by simply getting to know his neighbors over the course of eighteen years. After having found reasons to enter all of the homes on his cul-de-sac—a cup of sugar for cookies was a general suburban need not even the childless neighbors could deny, he found—the allure had abated some. More and more often, however, entire city blocks began to spike his interest. What was going on in all those homes? What were the people
he could see only as shadows against blinds saying to each other? What did their furniture look like? Were the beds against the wall or under the window? Who still had a black-and-white television that they actually used? Who used liquid detergent and who used powder? Who still used a wooden cutting board? Did the dogs get to sleep on the beds of the children? Did all the clocks have the same time on them? Did their VCRs blink 12:00? Would they even notice he was there? Could he live inside an inhabited house and never be found? Could he will himself invisible?