The Nakeds (2 page)

At first he avoided sitting directly across from the window and instead sat on one of the couches to the left where he could still see Christy out of his peripheral vision but didn’t feel as obvious. He’d stand up and walk to the wall, where he’d pull a parenting magazine from the rack, then sit back down with a huff, glancing up at her. She shuffled papers. She typed something up. She discreetly ate noodles from a Styrofoam bowl. She answered the phone. She ran her fingers through her hair. She was polite and concerned, dealing with the other pregnant women and their husbands. Sometimes she reached through the window and touched a woman’s belly, but never Nina’s.

One day he looked up at Christy and was surprised to find her looking right at him. He smiled and she smiled back. The next time, he was bold, steering Nina to the couch directly in front of the window. When his wife’s name was called, he helped her up off the couch, but had to stop himself from giving Nina a little shove toward the door. As she walked away—struggling in her sixth month with swollen ankles and a hand against her back—he smiled and waved at Christy before his wife was even gone.

When Nina was seven months along, he knew he’d have to make a move, so he stood at that magazine rack an extra few minutes, causing Christy to look over and notice him. He smiled at her, waved
and
said hello.

At eight months, he added,
How are you?

And at nine months, two days from his wife’s due date, Asher said, finally,
It’s good to see you, Christy. It’s always so good to see you. I want to see you.

Now the receipts he pulled from his wallet were new, the information crisp and perfectly legible, black ink on yellow paper. Each one had a memory attached to it. Bentley’s Bright Eyes Café: French toast, hazelnut coffee, and Christy’s understandable insistence that he make up his mind.
It’s been nearly seven years, Ash. I’m almost thirty,
she had said. Market Seafood and Ale: clams and garlic butter, white wine, her foot on his foot under the table. The La Jolla Inn: Christy’s thin, tiny-breasted body reclining in the bathtub, the lemon soap he lathered on her back. Thinking about that bathtub and Christy in it made him hard and he adjusted himself before heading downstairs to start the coffee.

Asher believed he could go on forever like he’d been going on for all these years, with the fake business trips and long workdays, the nights out with the guys or other dentists in the office down the hall or those buddies from work who didn’t exist, but he was tired of his imaginary friends and it took effort describing cities he’d never seen. He’d told Nina and Hannah about Monterey and Sacramento and San Clemente, researching landmarks and restaurants, bringing home souvenirs, silly trinkets purchased from the pharmacy around the corner.

And more, he loved Christy and wanted to marry her—he wanted to spend days with her on the beach and improve his surfing, he wanted to keep the surfboard he’d been hiding in Christy’s garage in his own garage, right there next to the washer and dryer, and he wanted to wax the board on weekends or whenever he felt like it, and he wanted to wear a Hawaiian shirt out to a restaurant with a woman who wouldn’t ridicule his taste, but share it.

He wanted to switch gods, goddamn it, and move to Orange County.

NINA TELLER
was a woman who had known, on some level, that her husband had been stepping out on her from the beginning, but had been able to deny it—to her friends back East, who said they had a feeling; to her brother, who said he had a feeling too, repeatedly harping that Asher’s many business trips didn’t add up; to her mother, who had also said she had a feeling, and echoed Nina’s brother, saying,
What dentist travels so much? Don’t people come to him? Don’t they bring their mouths and sit in a chair? Where does a man like that have to go?
And Nina had denied it to all of them, especially her mother, who never liked Asher despite the fact that he was a Jewish boy from a good Jewish home.

Nina herself had all sorts of feelings but had been able to stuff them down inside of her until they were barely recognizable as feelings and surfaced instead as unjustified, irrational bad moods or minor physical ailments: headaches for which she swallowed double the recommended dosage of aspirin, stomachaches for which she sipped hot tea and nibbled on dry toast. There were long naps that she needed after teaching high school English all day, so that by the time she woke up from one of them, dusk would be making its way through the curtains and it was almost time to say a real good night.

The obvious clues had been warnings from women’s magazines and
The Phil Donahue Show,
the most common being a lack of interest in sex with one’s spouse combined with a new attention to grooming or getting in shape. With Asher, who’d always been in shape, there was the unexplained tan, manicured nails, and the many nights he yawned dramatically, loud and obvious, before turning off the light. The way he said
I’m beat
or
Sleep well
before Nina had a chance to even kiss his cheek.

Asher had been acquiring new clothes for years, but what struck her lately was a whole immature style, which had been evolving since Hannah’s birth, that Nina had mistakenly attributed to ambivalence about fatherhood or fear of aging. On his side of the closet was a mound of flip-flops on the floor that especially irked her, a rainbow mountain of rubber shoes. Hanging up, a ridiculous assortment of juvenile T-shirts with band names printed across the front and Hawaiian shirts—garish, bright-colored fabrics with flowers and palm trees and coconuts and hula girls in grass skirts that insulted her own sense of style.

One morning she’d found him at the closet taking his Beach Boys T-shirt from a hanger. “Maybe that shirt’s a little young,” she’d said.

“I’m thirty-four—I’m not ninety.” He scowled at her, pulled the shirt over his head. He popped his hands and arms through the short sleeves, smoothed the sides down with more force than was necessary, and avoided her eyes.

Occasionally she’d find a
Surfer
magazine on his nightstand or on the bathroom counter.

“Do you want new hobbies? Is that what this is about? I’ll go to the beach with you. Hannah and I will both go,” she said.

“I’m not going to the beach,” he said. “Who’s going to the beach?”

“You’re tan, Asher. How come you’re so tan?”

“This is California,” he said. “I sit outside on my lunch break and eat a sandwich. I point my face toward the sun—it’s a good feeling.”

“It’s your chest that’s tan,” she said.

He was adamant in his denial, claiming only a mild interest in what he called
California culture
. “It’s good to know what’s going on. We’re not in Philly anymore. We need to acclimate.”

He said that his interest had to do with work, that many of his young patients who needed fillings or root canals were surfers, and that he wanted to be able to talk to them, distract them from the pain he was about to inflict with his knowledge of waves and barrels and slabs, paddling out, taking off, and
the ride
. He said it was important that he know the difference between long boards and short boards, the waves that broke in Huntington Beach versus the waves that broke in Newport or Laguna, before he came at a nervous surfer with his needle or noisy drill.

But then there was sand, and sand was harder to deny, each bit a tiny but very tangible thing left behind. Grainy in their bed, in their sheets, visible in his hair, wet, gray puddles of sand in the shower, and, she was sure, itchy sand in the crack of his ass.

And now, just an hour before her unconscious daughter, Hannah, would ride in an ambulance to the nearest hospital emergency room, Nina’s denial smacked her in the face—there, on the dresser, the receipts Asher purposefully left out for her, among them one from a new restaurant in San Diego she had heard was good and told him she wanted to try, suggesting a weekend in La Jolla for the three of them, and another from a Huntington Beach Surf Shop, where he’d purchased for his girlfriend an expensive board, a year’s worth of surf wax, and a fancy pink leash. This was how Nina became a woman who knew, a woman reaching into the sink and snatching the glass streaked with cranberry juice and throwing it at a philanderer’s cheek—the gesture, the glass itself, as much about collision and breaking apart as the car that hit her daughter.

BEHIND THE
wheel of his now dented Chevy Nova, Martin Kettle hollered and sobbed. Too afraid to come out and see what had become of the girl, he frantically locked the car doors, as if she were capable of rising from the street to give him a beating, as if she were not an injured girl at all but a monster with great strength.

He leaned over the stick shift, the seatbelt cutting into him, and stretched his fingers to reach the passenger-side lock. Clumsily, he tried to unclasp the belt, unsuccessful the first time and then finally getting it, cursing himself, and then turned around, flopped between the two bucket seats like a man without bones, and stretched to the back locks. Finally he situated himself again in the front seat and pounded on the lock closest to him. He wanted to die. He wished he’d run into one of the fat trees that lined the street and only hurt himself. He put his hands over his ears, his face to the steering wheel, and made his decision.

A year ago, on this very street, Martin hit a cat. He remembered the smack, the animal in the air and then landing on its feet very much alive. He remembered the cat had hissed at the car before limping off. And six months later he’d hit a dog. It was after midnight and the dog was a big puppy, a lanky Great Dane. After Martin hit him, he pulled over to the curb while having a panic attack, which he believed to be an actual heart attack—and a young man dying inside a car had every excuse to stay right where he was, in the front seat, tearing at his shirt’s collar. There was little he could do for the puppy anyway, who probably would have taken a chunk out of his hand had Martin been a mentally healthier young man, a young man who might have been able to open the car door and soothe the animal during his last moments. Instead Martin sat in the car, wide-eyed and gasping. And the puppy barked and squealed and whimpered until he was quiet.

Unlike the cat, the dog and the girl felt similar at impact—something weighty pushing against something weightier, the shock of something where nothing should have been, a horrible resistance where just air and space and wind should have allowed the car through.

Martin thought that the girl he hit might be dead and if she was, he planned to kill himself when he got home. There were only so many accidental acts of violence a guy could commit before he committed one purposely on himself, he was thinking. He wondered about pills or blades or driving off a cliff and played out the gruesome scenarios in his head, the logistics, the pros and cons: sleep, the ease of access, stomachaches, blood, twisted metal, and the open blue sky.

He wondered if it was possible to get enough pills from his friend Tony Vancelli, whose dad was a pharmacist and whose medicine cabinet was always stocked with colorful capsules and tablets that he handed out like bubblegum.

Up until the point when he hit the girl, Martin had been drunk, and the hours right before the accident were lost to him. Still, the impact itself was more than clear: the punch, the blow, the pressure, the sound, a body in the air, then falling to the asphalt like a doll.

He remembered going for a taco run with Tony just after midnight and talking to his friend about quitting drinking and maybe starting junior college in the fall. He remembered Tony snickering and handing him a green and white capsule that Martin gratefully accepted and swallowed dry. He remembered Tony telling him that painting houses wasn’t so bad, that it wasn’t what he thought he’d be doing four years out of high school but it wasn’t jail either. “It’s not fucking prison. At least I’m outside,” Tony had said.

“I’m starting to feel that pill,” Martin said.

“My mom still thinks I’m going to be a pharmacist, but fuck that,” Tony said.

“Maybe you already are.”

Tony laughed.

“At least you’d have access.”

“I have access now.”

Martin remembered the pile of tacos wrapped in paper in his lap as he headed back to Tony’s place, the skill it took to unwrap and eat a taco one-handed while driving, the mushy meat and orange grease, how quickly they went down, how his lips tingled from the hot sauce. He remembered focusing, navigating the road, and Tony begging him to pull over so he could throw up in the gutter. When his friend stumbled back to the car and sat down, his stained shirt smelled sour. Martin was surprised when Tony leaned toward him, reached over the emergency brake, and snatched a taco from his crotch. “Hey man, that’s mine,” Martin said, but he let his buddy have it.

What Martin didn’t remember were the hours in between. He didn’t remember that Tony got a second wind and that the two of them listened to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and drank more beer—one bottle after another, until they were tripping over bottles. They smoked pot out of a bong Tony had fashioned out of a toilet paper roll. They played air guitar, air drums. Tony was dancing, having air sex with an air girl. Martin laughed until his stomach hurt and his eyes watered. Tony was singing into his fist one moment and then sleeping in a chair the next.

While his friend slept, Martin sat on the floor with his back against the couch and tried to read one of Tony’s girlfriends’ magazines, but he was too fucked up to focus; he looked at the pictures instead. Pages and pages of foxy chicks—one chick in a bikini, one in a red silky dress that might have been a nightgown, he wasn’t sure, one in bell-bottom jeans and just a black bra. Then he got to what they called
instructional pages
, and maybe it was one of those same girls getting her eyebrows plucked. It was weird to see a set of eyes that close up and the tweezers coming toward them—but not nearly as sexy as seeing her in that silky nightgown-thing.

He closed the magazine and put it aside.