Curled in the Bed of Love (5 page)

I bang on the window, but they don't even register the noise. I turn the key in the ignition so I can put down the automatic window and holler at him. If that doesn't scare him off, I can get the dispatcher on the radio and have her dial 911.

I yell once I get the window open—I don't even know what words come out of my mouth—and she's distracted by the sound just long enough for him to take advantage and slam her in the chest with his thick forearm. Her knees buckle, but she hits him back, glancing her fist off his jaw, almost losing her balance. Her stringy shoelaces are undone, and it seems like the cruelest thing that this handicap should be added to the disadvantage of her smaller weight and size.

Words tumble from my mouth, and now I know what they are. “Stop! Stop it!”

It's his turn to flick his antennae in the direction of another possible threat.

He gives her just enough time to crouch, grab something from
the pavement, and smack it against the curb. When she lifts her hand, I see she holds a broken beer bottle by the neck, its circumference transformed into a curved blade.

I'm yelling, fumbling for the goddamn radio mike and dropping it beneath the seat. I shout at her to run, but now he leads the wary dance, afraid to turn from her, afraid not to mirror her every movement. She slashes, and he shapes himself into an S-curve as he jumps back from her. They're close enough to the limo that I can hear the raggedy caw of their heavy breathing.

Her determination to cut him makes her careless. She swings wildly, and he takes advantage of her momentum to smash her down onto the pavement again. She slashes at him even as she struggles to her feet.

I'm screaming now. I open the door and get out of the car, wishing I kept a baseball bat under the seat, something I could use on him. He turns in my direction, and she tackles him, knocking him aside so she can come straight at me.

She charges past me to fumble at the latch on the back door, and I feel this stupid reflexive shame that I didn't get the door for her. She scrambles into the backseat and slams the door behind her, and then she screams at me. “Go! Go!”

I fold myself into the car and slam the door and thank God I have the engine running. The guy charges at the car, pounding on the smoked glass of the window, and for a moment I imagine that his fierce assault makes the car shudder and jerk as I try to maneuver it. But it's me, my fear, my suddenly slippery hands that prolong the agonizing seconds before I've steered out of the parking spot and can step on the gas. He slips from the car and falls back onto his butt, and she lets out a short gust of air, almost a laugh.

Out of habit, I slow gradually for the stop sign at the corner and accelerate gently through the intersection. I feel remote from the calm practice of my body, and I can't tell the difference between
the wretched sound coming from her and the rattling in my own throat.

I have to struggle to speak. “There's a radio mike somewhere back there on the floor. See if you can find it, and I'll get the dispatcher to call 911.”

She curls into a ball on the backseat, arms wrapped around her chest, and goes on struggling for air. I try to dig for the radio mike on the floor, but I can't do that and drive at the same time. I pull over so I can search properly.

“No,” she pants. “Don't call the police.” She sits upright. “Don't do that.”

“You can have him arrested.”

She laughs, but it must hurt, because she stops abruptly. “Unh-huh. Now you gonna pop out the phone number of some women's shelter, I know that.”

“I'll be your witness that he attacked you,” I promise.

“I can believe that. You show up out of nowhere to fetch me in a limousine. I can believe anything.”

“At least let me drive you to an emergency room.” I know this city like the back of my hand, but I have no idea where the nearest hospital is.

She crawls forward jerkily, as if the car is still moving, and leans over the front seat to look into the rearview mirror. We both look at her reflected face. She must have hit the curb face first when she fell. Already her right cheek is swelling, closing up her eye, and her lip is split, seamed by a darkline of blood.

“What I'm supposed to do in some emergency room,” she says. “Sit holding a towel to my face till they get around to me. They find out you got no insurance, they tell you you don't need no X ray anyway.”

“I'll come in with you,” I tell her. “I'll make them look after you.”

She leans her forehead on the back of the seat, and by the way her shoulders shake, I think she's crying. But she's laughing. She
looks up at me and grins, which must cost her a lot with that lip. “Who you think you are?” she says. “Fucking Mother Teresa.”

This time I turn around to face her instead of meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. With the swelling it's hard to tell what sort of face she really has. Nice eyes, brows drawn sharp and clean above them. A line grooves her cheek on the side of her face that isn't swollen, the kind you get from smiling a lot, or from bitterness. Her shellacked hair is pulled back from her face in a pompom of a ponytail. And I can smell her. A body's actual smells are usually banished in here—the customers sit too far back, and I douse myself with aftershave and men's cologne. She just smells like skin, warm skin that would be fragrant if not for the slick overlay of sweat, fear. She still has the broken bottle in her fist. I remember how expertly she wielded it, pursuing the fight when she could have run.

She looks where I am looking. “You scared?” She pretends she's not interested in watching my face for a reaction. But I'm too familiar with this kind of pleasure to mistake it for indifference. One too many times I've understood that for the people screwing in the backseat or snorting coke from a compact mirror, I'm necessary to the fun, present yet as invisible as Jesus H. Christ.

She sets the bottle down carefully on the carpeted floor where it will make no sound if it rolls, then looks back at the rearview mirror.

“I got to take care of my face,” she says.

She inches back along the carpet, eases herself slowly and painfully onto the backseat, and fishes around in the mini-fridge. She pulls out a bottle of Evian water and holds it to her cheek, closing her eyes and sighing with pleasure.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask her.

Her eyes flicker open, then shut again. “That motherfucker got a car. Whyn't you drive me out this place? That's what you do, drive, so do it.”

“Where?”

“Whyn't you just drive me—I don't know, all around.”

“I'm going to stop somewhere and get some ice to put on that eye.” I pull away from the curb. “Are you going to tell me your name?”

She takes her time deciding. “Mary.”

Her name's not Mary. “My name's Pat.”

She leans back, the bottle pressed to her cheek. “How you doing, Pat?”

“If you're hungry, there are snacks in the fridge.”

I have to find a McDonald's or a 7-Eleven where I can get ice. At least I've driven to those places before. With prom parties or people out drinking. When I next look in the mirror, she's pouring scotch into a glass. She has to wince to sip it with that cracked lip, but she works at it steadily.

“What do people pay for this?” she says.

“Drinks are compliments of the driver.”

“No. I mean, what they pay to ride in a limousine?”

“It depends. About fifty dollars for the first hour, less after that.”

“And what for?” I think at first that she wants information from me, but she goes on talking. “I bet most of them can't afford it. But they so almighty in love with money they want to look fat even if it's only for a few hours. I bet they work you too, don't they? Fetch me this and fetch me that. Gotta squeeze all the privilege they can from their dollar. That's the only rights people got in this country. The ‘I'm paying for it' rights.” She meets my eyes in the mirror. “Stop looking at me like I'm a talking monkey. Just 'cause you folks can't see me don't mean I can't see you.”

I'm not thinking what she thinks I'm thinking, but trying to prove it would amount to trying to prove I'm not a racist. Like that guy in Flannery O'Connor's story. I'm thinking that she talks like Linnie when Linnie's on the rampage, cursing out the bosses of this world for their subtle, tricky ways. Even the expression on her face right now makes me think of Linnie, who's so soft underneath it all, whose face can collapse into such tiredness.

“I don't know,” I say. “Everybody wants a little comfort if they can have it.”

“Yeah, right.”

I pull into the parking lot of a McDonald's, and Mary asks me to get her french fries while we're here. When I get out of the car, the ground feels like a sea beneath me, roiling waves. That's how I know I'm still scared.

When I return and present Mary with the greasy bag and a paper cup of ice, she laughs. “Now I'm seeing why folks like this all right.”

I could sit back there with her, but I have never sat in the back of the car, not even when I didn't have a customer. So I sit in front with the door open, watching her. She eats with slow, patient refinement, holding one french fry at a time between two fingers, dipping the fry into her scotch, and then gingerly taking it between her swollen lips.

She wipes grease from her fingers onto the leather seat, and worrying about the stain reminds me that I've forgotten the Lessers for the second time today.

“I gotta get back to work,” I say. “I stranded a couple of tourists at Ghirardelli Square.”

“I can get out here,” she says. “I guess I oughta thank you.”

“I can drop you at the police station.”

“Whyn't you just wave your magic wand and make my problems disappear?”

The limp french fry flutters in her trembling hand. Her face is closed, as if to protect what I'll never see, a stale-smelling kitchen, maybe a kid crying in another room, that man rubbing her sore feet at the end of the day, that man's fury or hers flaring to life like a struck match, all the hard practice they've had passing along pain to a final resting place in each other's real flesh.

“What else am I going to do with you?” I say. “Drop you back at his door so you can take another crack at each other?”

“Get me some ketchup,” she says. She rubs at the side of her
face that isn't swollen, deepening the crease in her cheek till it branches like a crack in dry earth.

“Please,” she says. “Then I won't bother you no more.”

I never said she was bothering me. I get out to fetch the ketchup, and when I come back to the car, the backdoor is open and Mary has gone. She's left the broken bottle behind, staked its sharp edges into the plump leather of the backseat. When I pull the bottle out, a semicircle of leather peels up in its wake, a tiny mouth spitting fluffy bits of stuffing.

She shouldn't have taken off on me. I
did
rescue her. That blazing moment when she jumped into the car should have claimed us both. She's cheated me of the chance to see her through to safety, or at least relief. I get the Dust Buster and my housekeeping kit from the trunk so I can clean up after her. Worse than being late again for the Lessers would be inviting them into a car still reeking of McDonald's, and I've chauffeured enough kids on prom night to be prepared for any emergency.

I squirt orange-scented air freshener, use the Dust Buster, and then tape up the torn seat. Running my hands over the leather, I can still feel tiny grains of salt from her french fries, like the briny remnants of some ancient sea, the crystals of what should have been the cleansing wash of her tears.

It's my fault. I had this one real chance, and I let her down.

I wonder if the Lessers are still waiting hopefully for me to return. I sit down for just a minute. Sinking into the overstuffed seat feels like settling onto the ample lap of a giant. I pull the door shut, and I'm truly cocooned in the lush silence of the car. I think I'll tell Linnie the truth after all. Maybe she'll be
OK
with it. I stroke the leather seat. Smooth as warm skin. Skin so thin a sheath between us.

Hannah sings to herself without even knowing she's doing it, sings in the bathtub, sings when she comes home from school and dumps her backpack on the floor, sings now as she loads the dinner dishes into the dishwasher. Sometimes she makes up the words as she goes along; other times she sings fragments of familiar songs slapped together haphazardly. In the faint wash of that trilling sound, I tug the clothes from the dryer in the basement. Any moment now, when her father brings her older brother home from his friend's house, she'll stop singing, shy of witnesses.

Once upon a time I would have taken advantage of Jay's ten-minute absence to drink down here by the washing machine, slugging down wine so fast that it would congeal in my belly to emanate heat like fuel. Even after two years, when these would-have-been opportunities arise, I feel unbalanced, lacking the counter-weight of that guilty haste and deceitfulness, that snatched triumph.

I come up the stairs with the laundry basket in my arms to stand in the kitchen doorway and admire my daughter, who is racking dishes with the tiniest, most delicate hands. At ten she's still so small she has to stand on tiptoe to reach into the sink.

“Oh, I do, I do so want to dance with you,” she sings to the plates.

“You know what I love about you?” I say.

She gives me a sly look. “Everything?”

The trouble with our kids is that they've become jaded.
Love
is a word that gets a workout in this house, a word that's spawned a host of pseudonyms and endearments to catch the overflow. Hannah has so many names by now I can't remember them all or even their etymology—Peewee Jones, Miss Miss, Princess of the World, Mistress Mouse. Nathan isn't far behind—Little Guy, Baby Boy, T.T., Cuddlemenschen.