Читать книгу West Virginia - Joe Halstead - Страница 12

6

AFTER LEAVING LAURA’S APARTMENT, he was sort of drunk and knew he should’ve gone home, gone somewhere, maybe back to the fashion design student’s apartment, or maybe to work on work stuff (he was supposed to write three more scripts—one for a baby stroller ad, one for a lobster mac-and-cheese segment for FoodNetwork.com, and one for how to decorate a child’s room for About.com), but he didn’t want to. He walked in the middle of the sidewalk, looking at the New Yorkers as he made them zigzag through their indomitable purpose. They were young. Wearing black, thin. Walking around like they were supposed to be there. Like they could go anywhere they wanted. At some point he turned and walked down Fourteenth Street toward Union Square and he went inside Trader Joe’s and bought a deli sandwich with the rest of his cash. He was cold and he ate the sandwich outside and looked up to see stars but there weren’t any. He walked toward the 6 train station, half a block away, and suddenly had a problem with the constricted space, with people standing too close to him, with tight landscapes, with too much open space, too. It had to do with the sky-to-skyscraper ratio, with space. He swiped his MetroCard at the turnstile and got on the 6 train and it started moving through the tunnel. The train was full for that hour—there was only one empty seat—and he held on to the pole. He didn’t know where he was going. The train made a couple of stops and then he got off at Forty-Second Street and went inside Grand Central and stared up at the decorated ceiling, at the constellations arching high overhead, at Orion, shield raised, sticking to it year after year, never changing, always knowing exactly where he’s going, and the jazz music playing somewhere above as background noise had a meta effect on Jamie and he went back to his apartment.

It was two A.M. He couldn’t get to sleep and then he took Valium and thought about his father and got about two hours of sleep before he woke up, seeing his father dead on the woodpile. He tried to go back to sleep and was able to forget the scene for a while and then the whole cycle of nightmares started again. Sometimes they were of the woodpile. The worst ones were of his father parking his truck and standing on the New River Gorge Bridge.

He was lying in bed and believed he was dreaming when he saw a shadow crossing the window in the kitchen. When he became aware he wasn’t sleeping, he heard a noise and knew it wasn’t his roommate because his roommate had gone to Texas for a week, so he moved to grab a braid of copper wire wrapped in pink rubber that he kept near the door and he walked down the hallway toward the living room, the braid clenched tightly in his fists.

“I’ll fucking kill you,” he said. He sliced wildly and slammed the intruder against the wall, causing her to shout, “Ow, fuck, ow,” and then he realized it was Sara. His grip on the braid loosened and he backed away in the opposite direction of where she now stood.

“What the fuck, Sara? How the fuck did you get in?”

“Ow,” she said, “you fucking hurt me. Jesus, what the fuck is that thing?”

He told her it was a braid of copper wire wrapped in pink rubber from his father that he kept near the door for times when crazy people broke in. Moonlight was streaming through the window and now he could see more clearly. She was wearing a black V-neck T-shirt and tight zebra-print pants and was smoking a clove cigarette that contrasted with the rouge on her lips.

“You are fucked up. You are fuckin’ absurd—I’m callin’ the cops.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Look, look,” she said.

She pointed and Jamie looked and saw his leather jacket draped neatly over the back of the futon. He didn’t know what to say after that. Just paused and smiled.

“Thank you,” he said. “I really appreciate you bringing this back.”

“I had to see you again,” she said. “I woke up this morning and ate a handful of cereal because I was high. It sounded like a good idea but that was the worst decision of my life—because I was high—and then I wanted the entire box because all I really wanted was you.”

She took a step toward him and was looking at him through a filter of love and pity. He thought she looked like a Cranberries song that was too beautiful to be written. He was confused and felt wretched but was unable to pull away.

“Well, uh,” he said, “I really enjoyed the other night and—”

“I fucking enjoy you. I love your corniness. I want to play in your fields of corn and germinate your corn. I forget what that term is. Thrashing, I think?”

He already had a medium hard-on. “Thrashing, yeah.”

She came close and he was unable to resist her. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he reached out to grab it—a gesture that widened her smile. He made the effort to stop kissing her, but it was, he thought, like when you see those burned-in patches on the backs of your eyelids after you’ve stared at a light for too long, and the longer you stare at the patches the more they seem to spell out something, as if there’s a secret message hidden in them, some code being spelled out, and you want to learn it. She slid her hand under his waistband and grazed his cock and his skin shivered and she bit his lip. He took her tongue deep in his mouth and she had a metal piercing that clunked on the back of his teeth.

They went down to the floor and he tore her top off and kissed her neck and nipples and down her stomach, and she arched herself up until her back was a parentheses as he pulled off her pants and then spread her legs and he kissed her thighs and her breaths were coming in short clips and he never felt so good with anyone and then he licked her and she hit her head on the coffee table. She grabbed the coffee table with her right hand and his head with her left. She bucked against his mouth, pressing hard against him as she pulled him by his hair. When she was about to come, she ripped down his pants and he thrusted inside her and he came and she screamed loud enough he worried someone would hear.

Later that night, she slept with her head in his lap and he stared at the black TV screen longer than he should have. He touched the top of her head and felt two knots just above her forehead. His face was cold and wet and he felt the hypnotic rumble of the refrigerator’s compressor vibrating the floor, and he looked at Sara and thought that a succubus might as well feed on someone else’s blood and that he needed to remember that. Once she was good and asleep he got restless and started wondering where his arrowhead was, and then he went to his jacket and reached a hand into the pockets and brought out nothing but lint and fistfuls of old receipts. The arrowhead was gone. He became more and more anxious about the whole thing, even angry; he paced around by the window and then stared at his reflection in the dark glass and noticed his hair was turning white in places and his skin looked dehydrated. He thought about his family in the abstract—people without faces—and thought about how he didn’t hate them, how he just found them frustrating, or so he told himself.