Читать книгу Twentynine Palms - Daniel Pyne - Страница 13

five

There is the bleed of far-flung televisions, and that specific TV blue that ghosts the walls flutters across the queen-sized beds and half-shadowed faces above machine-quilted polyester bedspreads; a dream shared, or dreams, overlapping, felt truly but later forgotten, like a dog-eared copy of the CliffsNotes on Jack’s Life Until Now. His thoughts grind, unruly. Stop, he tells himself. Just stop. One of his hands is interlocked with hers, and in that Fuzzy Warm Aftermath it would be hard for him to say where his body ends and Mona’s begins. There is her hair across the side of his face. There is the soft compression of her happily worn-out breathing.

“Oh. My. Goodness.”

Jack’s feet have socks on them, Mona’s are wagging, double-time. Their hands untangle. Bedsprings creak.

“Oh, hey, whoa, don’t, no no no no, shit, don’t, don’t drop that on the carpet, okay?” Mona props herself up on one arm, peering in at Jack through the open bathroom doorway as he stands drilling urine into the backwater of the toilet bowl. “They leave these spots that’re all hell to clean,” she explains.

“You have some experience in that area, too?” Jack shakes and returns.

“I work here.” She lets his surprise register, while Jack, being the actor, tries unsuccessfully to conceal it. “Yeah. I bet you had me figured for some lonely local who goes to the Roundup Room hoping romance will make a road stop.”

At the foot of the bed, Jack stands, looking down at her. That is pretty much what he had figured.

Mona gropes for Jack’s cigarettes, which she finds practically crushed underneath her. “Also, I live here. Room one-twenty-four, on the end.” She looks up at him. “My mom owns this place.”

Jack’s mind empties. Any plans he had of choreographing the rest of this weekend sift through his fingers.

“Your mom?”

Mona taps out a deformed cigarette. “Want to meet her? See what I’m going to look like in about thirty years?”

Jack fumbles the lighter from the bed stand onto the bed. Why would she say that? Mona fishes for it in the swirl of sheets, lights her own cigarette. She’s still smiling, and Jack is unnerved.

“You’re not such a nice guy, are you, Jack?”

“I could be.”

“Ah.”

“Look, Mona—”

“Relax. Mom’s gone to La Costa for the week, to troll for guys who run hedge funds and pop Viagra like breath mints.” Mona touches him lightly, on the arm. “Don’t wig out on me, Jack. I’m a grown woman. Or a big girl, to borrow your quaint worldview. Either way? I do what I want.” She puffs on the cigarette somewhat awkwardly, like someone who never really learned, then puts it between Jack’s lips, glancing at the silver lighter, where there’s an engraved inscription that reads simply: MAD ABOUT THE BOY. Mona frowns at it.

“I’m fine,” Jack says dryly.

“Fine.” She looks up at him.

“Yes.”

“I just thought I should tell you. I didn’t have to.”

“Tell me what?”

“About Mom.”

“No. You didn’t.” Jack’s wondering why she did tell him, now, what it implies if it implies anything, mistrusting any of the well-honed instincts that have guided him to this moment. He wants to run, and yet he wants to stay, for once, to find out why he would want to run.

“You don’t have a sister, do you? I mean, a real one.”

“No.” She waits. He tries to think of something else to offer her in the way of personal detail. “I was an only child.”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t have kids, I’m not married.”

“Really? No kidding.”

An uncertain smile crawls across Jack’s features. Was that sarcasm? He’s off the map of his flat world. Over the edge, into unknown territories where medieval cartographers wrote: Here be dragons. “What?” he says defensively. “You don’t think I could be married, or have kids?”

“Oh, you could definitely have kids, given the, well, enthusiasm and determination you apply to the task. And I bet there’s a landfill of broken hearts who hoped or mistakenly believed you might want to marry them.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Harsh nothing. Statement of fact. Want to dance?”

“What?”

“Dance.”

“I can’t.”

“Bullshit.”

“You think I’m an asshole, but you still want to dance with me?”

“I know. However, (a): I didn’t say you were an asshole, you did, and (b): I just hooked up with you, Jack, and I don’t fuck assholes—but, since you brought it up, okay, well, it has been my experience that assholes can be great dancers.”

“I don’t—”

“C’mon.”

Jack says stubbornly, “I can’t dance. I’m sorry.” He adds, somewhat more artificially: “I can’t dance, I doubt there’s a God, and I don’t make decisions without knowing what all the options are.”

Mona rolls her eyes. She’s already off the bed, and pulling Jack’s shirt over her head and throwing his jeans at him, offering only, “That is so weak.”

The Roundup Room is dark. Chairs on the tables, stools up on the bar. Mona unlocks the door and pulls Jack inside. He has no shirt, because Mona’s wearing it, no shoes because she wouldn’t let him take the time to put on his boots. Mona’s small body barely curves the cotton of Jack’s shirt as she goes behind the bar to light a couple of votive candles and turn on the stereo. Samba music. The snap of the surdo, the pandeiro shivers its reply.

“My granddad built this place in 1951 for a woman who was not his wife.”

“Dorotea?”

Mona pours reposado into shot glasses. “Dorotea Elana Maria Bustos Pacheco, a Peruvian nightclub singer my granddad met in Denver. He was already married then—I think my mom was about two or three—but he was an accountant for a resort chain and they used to send him out to do the country club audits. Señorita Pacheco was playing the Blue Spruce Room at Cherry Hills Country Club. She was one of those big-boned women with the little tiny waists. There’s some pictures of her over the motel office—dark hair, dark eyes, big wide mackerel mouth smeared with dark, wicked-witch lipstick.

“Well, Granddad had never experienced oral sex of any kind, and she, by all accounts, could suck-start a Harley, and so before you could say adios, he and ’Tea were headed west to California in his berry-red Buick ragtop. It broke down in Victorville, crawled here and died. They built this motel so she’d have someplace to sing. Between blow jobs. Built it with money he’d neatly disappeared from his employer’s development fund.”

“They come after him?”

“Never went after him. Or after my grandmother, who, for no apparent reason, subsequently became a Mormon. I think Granddad Malloy knew how hard the resort chain’s books were cooked, since he’d done a lot of the culinary heavy lifting, so they just wrote down the loss and left him alone.

“My mom ran away from home when she was fifteen and hitchhiked out here to Two-nine Palms to be with her dad.

“Then ’Tea got pregnant by Granddad’s best friend Norbert Willams, and then she died in childbirth—she was so small through the middle and the baby got itself hung up in there—subsequently Granddad wigged out. He started smoking reefer and hanging with would-be gold prospectors and land speculators and professional lowlifes in Yucca Valley.”

Mona comes out from behind the bar. Hands Jack a shot glass. “He either got killed in a head-on collision outside of Blythe or ran off to San Francisco, my mom is kind of unclear about it. But, hey, she’s been running this place by herself since she was twenty”—Mona raises her shot glass—“survived me and the desert and has no regrets.”

They drink. Then Mona takes his glass, and puts it with hers, side-by-side, on the bar.

“I think the trouble with choices, Jack, is there’s too many of them. You can’t ever know them all.”

“That’s why I never make decisions,” Jack says.

“You do. You will.” Mona moves close to him, kisses him hard. “Mad about the boy.”

“Yes.” Jack starts to put his arms around her, but she catches them, pulls him into position and starts to move her hips. “Wait—”

“Dancing is about trust.”

“Yeah, well, and maybe rhythm, which I don’t have.”

“Come on.”

“I’m serious, Mona. I can’t dance.”

“You have to, Jack. Sooner or later.” She stares into his eyes. He knows she can see the difference. The grey one, with its overcast cornea and fixed pupil, looks but doesn’t see. Jack can feel her question even if she doesn’t ask it, and for a moment they are only movement. “Nice guys dance,” Mona says finally.

Jack is awful, no matter how hard he concentrates. His feet never find the rhythm. Mona, however, doesn’t appear to care.

Later, Jack sits cross-legged on the bed back in his motel room, quartering a lime with a carving knife borrowed from the Roundup Room bar. The half-empty bottle of tequila waits on the bed stand, with more whole limes in a bowl, and a salt-shaker alongside Jack’s signature cigarette, smoldering, vertical, end up.

Mona flicks Jack’s lighter, and the flame licks out. Extinguishes it with the cap. Flicks it on again. Extinguishes it.

“You’ve lived out here how long?”

“All my life, except for a few intermissions. Scout camp in Ensenada. Disney World. And this other thing that happened.” Mona sits up. Flick, flick, flick.

Jack wonders: other thing?

“I understand the desert,” she says finally. “All the emptiness.”

Jack puts the knife on the bed stand, gives Mona a wedge of lime and the bottle. “Where’s your dad?”

“Mom claims he’s a Hollywood movie star who came out here and broke her heart. She swears she only slept with him twice.” Mona stares at him, swigs tequila, sucks on the lime, salts her tongue. “And she made it a cautionary tale, you know, about sex and pregnancy. Was that the right order?”

“Yes. Sex, then pregnancy.”

“No, with the limes and—”

“To be truthful, I don’t think there is a right order.” Jack tosses tequila, jams his lime wedge against his teeth and eschews the salt. The liquor kicks, doesn’t go down right, burns hot in his chest.

“I personally think Dad was a fall-down drunken gyrene grunt Mom used as a sperm donor because she was thirty-six and figured she’d never get the chance again.”

Jack swallows hard a second time, his eyes watering as Mona crawls back on top of him. She’s got the lighter. “Somebody give you this?”

“Yeah.”

“Wife?”

“Old girlfriend.”

“How old?”

He pictures Hannah, only hours ago, in her snowy swirl of down. “History.” It seems so long ago. Jillian, lithe and elusive. Others (so many?) blur together like photos in a high school annual, heads cocked, smiles frozen, eyes inert. Done and gone.

“Mad. About the boy.”

Now Mona waits. Jack doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. “It’s a line from a movie.”

Mona frowns. “I don’t mean this as criticism, or being judgmental, or anything,” she says, “but it sounds gay.”

“Sunset Boulevard.”

“What?”

“Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson, William Holden?” Mona’s face is expressionless. “You know it?”

“No.”

“You’ve never seen Sunset Boulevard?”

“No.”

“Famous movie.”

“If you were gay, it’d be okay with me, just a little, well, confusing.”

“And then it was a musical.”

“Okay. Yeah, guess I missed it.”

For some reason Jack thinks: good.

“I’m not that interested in movies.”

“Oh.”

“Or musicals. I’m more a television gal.” She adds, “You do have a kind of metrosexual thing going on, though.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

An awkward moment passes. Mona puts the lighter on the bed stand. Takes the cigarette from vertical, taps the ashes into the lime bowl, and takes a deep, last drag. “So why’d you come out here, Jack? You come all the way out here to fuck me and break my heart?”

“No.”

“What do you do? Do I even want to know? Let me guess. Not management, Hughes Aircraft or something, buying parts. No. You’re way, way too sketchy for the real world.” She stares at him. “Something creative. Art? No, art requires commitment. Web design or something.”

“Not even close.” Jack indulges himself with what he believes to be a suitable pause before he says, “I am an actor.”

“No way.” Mona giggles.

Jack shrugs. “Way.”

“No.”

“Way.”

“Get out. What have you been in?”

“Nothing. Well, a lot of nothing. TV. I’m the guy who plays the parts you don’t remember. Wildwood, couple times.”

“What?”

“Wildwood.”

“I loved that show. Who were you?”

“I thought you didn’t like—”

“I love television.”

“It’s not—”

“—I should know who you—”

“—Michael’s shy and sensitive second cousin. Chastity has erotic dreams about me. Then finds out I’m gay. Or what passes for gay in 1799.”

“Oh. A pattern developing.”

“It was a role. It was a part I played.”

“I don’t remember a cousin.”

“Five scenes. Two episodes. Twenty-eight lines.”

“Terry?”

“Tom.”

“I’m not wrong, though—actor? In touch with your feminine side? Emotional, overcompensating on the machismo even, but—”

“Can we talk about something else?”

Mona’s eyes shine. “Do Tom for me.”

“No.”

“Just one line.”

“No.”

“You can’t remember one line?”

“It’s been awhile.”

“You can too. I’ll bet you remember every line.”

It’s weird, but Jack does.

“Or make one up.” He won’t do it. Mona seems genuinely disappointed. Jack wets his finger with his tongue, uses it to kill the cigarette. Carefully, he tries to replace it end-up on the nightstand, but misjudges the distance and it falls onto the floor and neither Jack nor Mona sees it go.

“Your turn,” Jack says. “If you’re so paranoid about it, why did you let me come out here and fuck you?”

“Low self-esteem?”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?” She makes a thinking face. “Seriously. Well, I’m not all that complicated, Jack. You’re cute, you’re funny, you’ve got a great ass. I like your smile, your phony, cocksure, manly man routine winds my clock, I can’t explain it.” She puts her hand on his face, gently. Her unapologetic vulnerability takes his breath away, but not like the first time he saw her, because now he knows her. And now it troubles him. “I don’t know, could be the best answer. What can I say? I just did. I just wanted to and I did.”

“And your heart?”

“Is the dumb guy. Lousy memory, always the optimist.”

Jack doesn’t know what to say next.

“It doesn’t happen all that often,” Mona adds softly.

“I come out here to get away from the city,” Jack tells her, to break the silence. “All the artificial stuff that goes on back there.”

“As opposed to . . . here?”

“You know.”

“No. Our In-and-Out is more ‘real’ than yours? Our mini-malls have some essential truth you can’t find back in L.A.? Explain this to me.”

“It’s just, it’s like you can get so caught up in it. The spin, the swirl, you start swirling, too,” Jack hears himself saying. “I’m not a movie star, I’m not part of the scene. I do what I do and go home, like anybody else. Except, in L.A., you can’t escape it.”

“Caught up in . . . the artificial stuff.”

“Yes.”

“Like, Astroturf and plastic flowers and—”

Jack is determined to make his point. “No, like, plastic surgery, okay? Fake tits, surgical smiles, the culture of celebrity, martinis at the Skybar. Designer dogs.”

“Oh no, you’re one of those guys who says tits.”

“What?”

Mona is laughing, delighted. “And? Finish your thought.” Jack’s mind double clutches. And?

Coyotes cackle crazily in the distant creosote flats and Jack tries one more time, stubborn, deadpan. “I come out here to look at the desert and, I know, I know, okay, it sounds stupid, but I come out here and get in touch with myself. What’s real, what’s not. What’s important.” He can’t finish because Mona’s laughing. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry.” She can’t stop laughing, though. “I’m sorry. The coyotes.”

“No it’s not.”

“No it’s not, but—”

“You think I’m full of shit?”

“I don’t.” Mona’s tone is sweet and caring and delighted. “No. It’s. Well, maybe a little. Yes. Yes I do. But then no, not totally.”

“I am. I’m full of shit.”

She touches him. “Don’t say that. You’re not,” she says, eyes smiling, “but I bet, sometimes? You tell people what you think they want you to say, or maybe just what you think sounds like it might be true, and maybe that works with most people but not me, for a whole variety of reasons you don’t need to know, Jack.”

“That sounds like someone who’s full of shit.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

The silence is Jack’s.

“I’m sorry. Truly. It doesn’t matter. I’m just so happy. You can see that, can’t you? I don’t know why, and I don’t know why I started to laugh, something about you talking and the coyotes barking was funny, I laughed, and I couldn’t stop. I don’t know why.”

Jack’s not angry. “But you think I’m sort of full of shit.”

“No.” Mona kisses him, giggling again. “Yes. No”—her arms around him—“no I don’t. Eventually I won’t.” She fills his arms, warm, alive, and everything, and Jack is happy and won’t start worrying what she means by eventually until much later.