Dirty Love (12 page)

Mark’s cheeks burn. He squats and lifts the tub and carries it to his front door. He has not approached it since there was snow on the ground. He climbs the three concrete steps. His heart thumps softly in his chest, and he has to lift his leg and rest the tub on his thigh to grasp the brass knob that won’t turn. He is only vaguely surprised by this. His keys are in his pants pocket but he will have to put down the tub to get them. He reaches over it and knocks on his own door. His mother is surely in her kitchen cooking herself something, leaving a plate for her son. Or she might be out by the pool nursing a glass of white wine over a magazine, one eye out for Laura. Maybe the three of them could go out there together, all three adults, no hard feelings. They could sit by the water till the sun is down and through the trees come the soft lights of their neighbors. His mother would politely excuse herself, and Mark and Laura Welch would talk. He would tell her things. He would apologize. Maybe she would too, though he no longer needed that, and they would talk not about what had happened, only what had to happen next. They’d speak quietly. Calmly. Maybe they would reach over and touch. Maybe they would even kiss. Maybe Laura would stand and walk away as she had every right to do. Or she would softly squeeze his fingers and lead him back into their house and up to their room and into their bed and they would make love, no matter what each of them had done earlier or with whom, and it would be different this time. He would pay more attention, and he would let her do whatever she wanted, then and later, every day and every night and week and month she chose to stay with him, which she might not, this woman whose footsteps he now heard through the door, this woman he could hear moving through their entryway, his heart in his head once again for he did not know if he was even up for any of this, this change from change, the door swinging inward as he straightened, his wife’s face lovely and surprised and waiting.

S
OMETIMES AFTER DRESSING FOR WORK,
M
ARLA WOULD STAND
at the kitchen sink with the last of her coffee and feel as if her small apartment and everything in it were props for a movie she wasn’t even in, as if she were working for all this for somebody else. She was twenty-nine years old and had been a teller at Providential Bank for eight years. She owned a Honda two-door, and her bedroom closet was full of large tasteful outfits with shoes to match. In her carpeted living room was a high-definition TV and DVD player enclosed in an oak cabinet with glass doors, the bottom shelves filled with workout discs she never used beneath musicals from the forties she watched once or twice a month. Alone again on a Saturday night, she’d curl up on the couch with a bowl of buttered popcorn and watch two movies back to back. She’d listen to the orchestra’s manly horns and womanly strings and watch men who could sing and dance their leading ladies into a swoon under the stars over a glittering sea, and Marla would pull her cat Edna into her lap and stroke her head till she purred, and she’d try to pretend she wasn’t miserable, even with all she had.

On Thursday nights she’d go out with her friends from the bank, usually to Pedro Diego’s downtown because they had nine kinds of margaritas and they kept the place lit up in an aquamarine light. It made the tiled cocktail tables, the huge cacti in the corners, and the straw sombreros hanging on the wall all seem to be in an underwater tequila dream, and when she was a little drunk she always felt prettier, or maybe just more hopeful, or reckless, which occurred to her once might be the same thing. She’d borrow one or two cigarettes from Lisa’s pack of Marlboros and she’d suck her peach margarita through the straw, laugh at Nancy’s nasty jokes, listen to Nancy bitch about their supervisor, Dorothy, who was fifty-six years old and seemed to have married the bank twenty-five years earlier. But there was a sadness in Dorothy’s eyes, even when she was briskly handing you a memo making your job more tedious. If you looked past the hard lines of her face, her short, unstylish hair, you could see how dark and sad her eyes really were. Not pissed off the way the other girls saw her, but melancholy.
Lonely
, Marla was sure.

Nancy’s husband Carl was a computer salesman with a square, handsome face, blue eyes with nothing behind them, and the beginnings of a gut he didn’t bother working off anymore. He and Nancy had two teenage sons and lived in a five-bedroom on Whittier Lake north of town. Three or four times a year they would host a party for their favorite coworkers from his job and hers, and their place would be full of casually dressed husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, all sipping drinks, chatting and laughing and munching cheese sticks and buttery stuffed mushrooms, appetizers Marla was careful not to touch. Instead, she’d grab a carrot to chew on while she sipped from a glass of white wine. Soon many of the women would get around to talking about their young children, and something seemed to come into the air between them that wasn’t there just a few moments before; the light in their eyes became more genuine somehow, and they nodded their heads not out of habit or good manners, but because they really did know what the other was talking about. The air would be heavy with it. And often it left Marla feeling so excluded she’d refill her wineglass and walk out onto the deck.

She’d lean against the railing and look at the lawn sloping down to the stands of pines and birches at the water’s edge. There was a dock there and a boathouse Carl had built himself a few years earlier. Not long after he’d driven the last nail, Nancy had confessed to the girls at Pedro’s that she and her husband made love there while the boys slept up in the house.

“We just had to,” she’d said, then shook her head and laughed. “But I got two splinters in my butt and I made Carl pull them out with his teeth!”

Nancy had a small, lined face that was pretty even when she wore her glasses, and sometimes when she laughed they’d slip halfway down her nose, which made Lisa and Cheryl laugh even harder at this picture of Carl’s face buried in their friend’s rear. Marla had laughed too, though she didn’t think it was that funny; it was like being careless with a precious gift, talking that way—not about the boathouse or the marriage itself, but the lovemaking, what men and women who loved each other did when they were alone.

“You shouldn’t joke, Nancy.”

“Oh, lighten up, Marla,” Lisa said, coughing now, knocking a cigarette loose from her pack.

“Why shouldn’t I joke?” Nancy’s eyes were still bright and glistening with mischief.

“I don’t know—because it’s special, isn’t it?” Marla’s cheeks and throat felt hot and she wished she’d kept quiet. Her friends were giving her a look they seemed to give her more and more, their mouths smiling but their eyes still and careful. Cheryl, with her streaked hair and tiny waist she got from six mornings a week at the gym, nodded her head and said, “She’s right, Nancy; you’re a slut.”

“I didn’t
say
that.”

They’d all laughed, even Marla, but the rest of the night she felt that familiar drift away from her friends. She sipped her margarita and listened to them talk, and once again she began to feel sorry for herself; she was twenty-five years old at the time and still had never slept with a man—not just because she believed it was special, but because no boy or man had ever stopped to take much of an interest unless it was to be cruel; in middle school other kids teased her and called her Marla Marmalade, and in high school at parties she willed herself to go to, she was almost completely ignored. Once in a crowded house, a drunk boy had wedged her against the hall wall and pressed his hands into her breasts under her sweater. Junior year, a tall boy with thick glasses would sit with her at lunch sometimes and talk about how bad the food was or how “oblivious” the band teacher was to “reality.” But nothing ever happened, and Marla was never sure why he’d ever sat with her at all. For a while in her early twenties she would drink too much at parties and would sometimes end up with a man who drank too much too. There would be groping and fondling, and once she took a man into her mouth who gripped her hair like he wanted to yank it. But she never opened her legs, was never so drunk she completely lost that part of herself that still believed there was a man out there who would love her.

She started drinking more moderately and began to view her virginity as a gift she was keeping for herself to open with a man special enough to know it was a gift. She knew this was an outdated notion and sometimes wondered if she really believed it; if she were as attractive as her friends, would she think this way? And for a few years now, it had begun to feel less like a gift and more like a burden; she was turning into one of those rare women who had completely missed the train everyone else had gotten on. She began to be convinced something might be truly wrong with her, that she had a defect everyone could see but her.

Except for her weight, she did not consider herself all that unattractive; she had thick brown hair she never had to color, and it had natural waves in it her hairdresser said he’d kill for. Her eyes were small and set a little too deeply into her round face, but she had high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a symmetrical mouth full of fairly white teeth. Since high school she’d tried to lose the extra thirty-five pounds that seemed to gather mainly in her hips and thighs, but exercising felt to her like punishment for a crime she couldn’t remember having committed, and when she starved herself she felt as if she was living in a cruel and sadistic world and at three or four in the morning she’d be in her kitchen standing in the light of the refrigerator eating cheese or dipping French bread into a jar of mayonnaise. But still, she wasn’t that heavy, certainly no more than some of the wives and girlfriends she saw with men around town, some of the women so big you could see their thighs rub together when they walked.

Over the years, Nancy had suggested it was her personality that needed some attention, that Marla was too
honest
. The first time she said this was on a Monday morning before the bank opened its doors. Nancy had come in wearing a black rayon blouse that made her breasts look small and pointy, which then made her look somehow more middle-aged and inappropriately sexy. When she asked Marla if she liked it Marla had told her the truth. “Not really.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You asked me what I thought.”

“That doesn’t give you license to say what you really think, you know.
Jesus
.” Nancy set her cashbox loudly on the counter.

Marla’s face got hot and she stared at her keyboard.

“I mean, that’s just not how people make conversation, and, I’m sorry, but that’s why you never get asked out—you always say what you really think.”

Marla’s eyes began to fill and she had to reach for one of the tissues the bank left out for its customers. It was the start of another workweek and all she’d done over the weekend was call her parents down in Florida, gone grocery shopping, mopped her kitchen floor, and watched rented movies with Edna. She began to dab at the corners of her eyes, then heard Nancy let out a breath, felt her hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I know.”

“It’s just—you need to go with the flow more, okay? Make a little small talk.”

But no matter how much Nancy had suggested this over the years, Marla was not convinced; if a man was impressed with small talk, how big could he really be? When she was a girl, her own father only spoke when he had something to say, his feet up on the plaid hassock in front of the TV, and it’d be one or two words, a question whose answer he only seemed to half listen to. She’d feel invisible and say, “Daddy, you’re not
listening
.” But by the time she was out of high school and going to the business college in Boston, she had long since stopped waiting for him to respond more than he did. She’d sit on the couch next to his recliner at the end of a long afternoon of classes and he might reach over and pinch her knee. “Having fun? Learning anything?”

“I’m learning things.” That the world was a marketplace of numbers, nothing but numbers: debit columns and profit margins, mergers, acquisitions, charts, graphs, codes, leveraged buyouts, and bankruptcies; that she always did well on exams and ate lunch alone; that she began to see her mother as a woman, a truly unhappy one, who had always worried about money and could hardly let a day pass without mentioning how poorly the boxboard company had treated her husband. Marla began to notice how old her mother seemed to be getting, that after so many years working the switchboard at St. Mary’s Hospital she spoke to everyone with a slightly impatient edge, as if she still had the headset on and was getting ready to press a button and send whatever you were saying along to somebody else. Soon Marla became friends with another woman who ate alone too, a sweet big-nosed girl who worked part-time at a bank downtown. She said they were looking for somebody reliable to work a window, and just two days after their graduation, she introduced Marla to Dorothy, who never smiled but took her on anyway. Then Marla’s friend got married to Frank Harrison III, the son of one of the loan officers, and at the reception Marla had gotten tipsy with her new workmates. She’d danced with Nancy’s husband Carl, who had pressed his sweaty cheek to hers; she felt included and welcome, and the whole room seemed to be lit with the light of open doorways; Marla began to believe that her childhood was something she’d endured, and now that she was in the adult world things would get easier, better.

A
T THE BANK,
her tasks were repetitive and her days soon became predictable, yet there was a real comfort in dressing well and having people trust you to store their money with precision and honesty; sometimes Marla would see one of her customers on the street and get an almost shy but respectful wave, the kind she’d once given to her own gynecologist, the kind you give to the one you trust with the knowledge of what you have.

Marla began to hope for more, too; a real boyfriend, the loving company of someone other than her old cat, Edna. And Nancy was right. Over the years Marla had had conversations with men at house parties and bank barbecues, but she never could seem to keep things going; she could only talk about work, about interest rates and the convenience of online banking, her computer screen hurting her eyes at the end of the day. There was really little else she knew much about. Soon enough even the homeliest of men would smile politely, then drift away with their plate of food to either talk with somebody else, or just stand alone at the bar or buffet table. Marla would stay where she was and try to pretend she didn’t care. She knew she was dull company, and she also knew if she were slim and pretty, but just as dull, they wouldn’t drift away at all. Sometimes Nancy or one of the other girls would whisper to Marla to follow, to keep the conversation going no matter what. But Marla refused; if someone wasn’t interested in her, then he wasn’t interested in her.