Dirty Love (6 page)

“You two snuck in.” The waitress is a warm, fleshy face surrounded by gray hair, her hands gathering up the dirty plates, breadbasket, and half-empty glass. “Cocktails?”

“Bloody Mary for me.”

“Two,” Mark says.

Lisa Schena is still smiling at him, and he can see she’s older than he thought, maybe ten years older than his daughter, closer to forty. This is good, but her smile is making him shy and he glances out the tinted window at the beach traffic, the white sand on the other side, the deep blue rim of ocean beyond that.

“You’re a mess, aren’t you?”

He looks back at her. “Probably. You?”

“Just with what I told you last night.”

He nods his head. His face grows warm, and he glances down at her tanned shoulders and upper arms.

“You don’t remember shit, do you?”

“I know we kissed.”

“Yeah we did, but that was your idea.”

“It was?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all right?”

“Hey, I called you, didn’t I?”

Mark looks back at the bar. The bearded man is gone, and on the TV above the listless fish, a woman is holding a bottle of floor cleaner, smiling earnestly into the camera. It’s the brand Laura has always used. He sees himself kneeling on the kitchen floor with a hammer. He’ll have to break the tiles completely before he can fix them.

“I was talking about my son.”

Words come back to Mark now, Lisa Schena’s voice from last night in his head. She was leaning against her Chevy sedan, her ankles and tanned thighs touching one another, that faded denim skirt and the way she crossed one arm under her breasts while she smoked. Wants to live with his fucking father.

“He wants to live with his dad.”

“Correct.”

A busboy begins to wipe down their table, then set it. He is tall and slight. On the wrist of his left hand are the tattooed initials
A.R
. He disappears just as the waitress sets the Bloody Marys down in front of them, each with a stalk of celery too short for the glass, their ends just barely rising out of the vodka and tomato juice.

“Oh shoot, you don’t have menus.”

Then two bound menus are on the table between them, but Mark Welch and Lisa Schena leave them where they are. Without a toast they lift their glasses and drink, the vodka going into Mark like a mildly dangerous thought he ignores, and she begins to talk about her son. His name is Adam and he’s always been a difficult kid. “Never listened, always had to have time-outs and then I’d have to physically hold him to his little Fisher Price chair because he could never stay still. His father never did anything, and he’s just as bad anyway, can’t concentrate, can’t ever sit in one place unless it’s in front of a computer. He can’t hold a job now either, and he still has split custody but Adam wants to live with him full-time because there are no rules over there, or at least no boundaries, no expectations or respect for anyone else’s space, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve . . .”

Mark sips and nods and listens. She is clearly a talker. It’s what she did the night before too, talked and talked and talked while he smoked her cigarettes and stared at her in the bruised neon from the bar, drunk and trying not to glance too much at the soft swell of her breasts or her tanned belly or that denim skirt he wanted to unzip and pull down over her hips, half-drunk but grateful for what was happening to him, this old blood descending to his groin where its gathering heaviness left him feeling slightly new again, or at least not dead yet. Nearly three months of nothing, not even in the mornings, and if it weren’t for his life floating away from him, Laura continuing to do all that she does, he might have begun to worry, he might have begun to think of his prostate and sicknesses that were not uncommon in men his age, but again, this was something happening to a body he merely existed inside and any maintenance beyond breathing and eating and drinking seemed to be someone else’s problem, and last night, when that gathering heaviness turned hard, it was as if a crack of daylight and fresh air had entered him somewhere and so he’d stepped toward Lisa Schena against her car and kissed her, something he wants to do now, too. Shut her up with a kiss, though she isn’t boring him, not in the least.

She’s telling a story about her ex, how she came home one day from work—an animal hospital where she’s an assistant to the veterinarian, an old, sweet lesbian named Carol—and found him and Adam playing some kind of video game where men blew each other’s heads off. “And they’d been doing it since I’d left that
morning
and it was a
school
day.”

Mark shakes his head, then nods in sympathy, his eyes on her washed-out blues. Strange this ability for his face and head to do the right things. In the tinted sunlight from the window, he is looking at her more clearly now. Her short hair is a dazed blond, treated with chemicals so many times over the years it has no definable color at all. Her teeth are stained with coffee and tobacco, and just beneath her slightly pocked left cheek is a pink scar that directs one’s attention to her weak chin and upper arms which have no tone and jiggle slightly as she talks, making points with her hands in the air above her still-full drink. She is absolutely nothing like his wife in any way, and is that why he is reaching across the table now and taking her small hand, squeezing it once softly and saying, “We should eat.”

“Oh shit, I’m talking way too much.”

“No you’re not.”

“Decided?” The waitress is standing there with her pad and pen. Lisa Schena looks up at her as if she’s just been exposed in some way, a dark splotch spreading across her throat.

“Just a salad with chicken on it for me.”

“Dressing?”

“Creamy Italian, please.”

“And you, sir?”

“Same.” Though he does not like creamy Italian dressing, but food now, as hungry as he was earlier, seems entirely beside the point. “And two more of these, please.”

They are alone again. She is smiling at him. “You drank that one pretty fast.”

“Hair of the dog.”

“Tell me about it. We had to put down three yesterday.” She leans to her straw and takes it between her lips and sucks, swallowing twice. Her eyes are on the table but not on the table.

“What’s your job when you have to do that?”

“I hold them down in a three-point restraint, then Carol administers the shot. Fun, huh?”

“That must be hard.”

“What’s hard are their fucking owners. We had to put down a perfectly healthy retriever just because the new wife didn’t like dogs.”

“You couldn’t find it a home?”

“People want puppies. It’s like that with kids, too. You know how many teenagers will never get out of foster care till they’re grown? Just about all of them. People don’t like to pick up where other people left off. People like to buy
new
.” She shakes her head and glances out the window, one finger tapping the end of her straw. He wants to lean forward and touch her lightly scarred cheek.

She looks back at him. “Tell me about your ex.”

“
My
ex?”

“You don’t remember that either?”

Again, this warmth in his face that does not simply come from his body, but him—it seems to come from
him
. “No, I don’t.”

“And I thought I was drunk.”

“We both were.”

She points at his left hand, her eyes on his ring finger. “You were telling me why you still wear that, remember? I said, ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ And you said, ‘No, not really.’ And I asked you why you wear that ring, and you told me.”

The vodka is a small grass fire spreading in his chest, and he knows he doesn’t care where it goes or what it burns.
Vow
. His own voice in his head, the tissue memory of it leaving his vocal cords from the night before in the neon lot behind The Tap standing close to this woman sitting across from him now. “I told you I’d made a vow.”

“Yep. Then you kissed me.” Lisa laughs and shakes her head, and it’s as if she’s told a very old joke and the waitress arrives with their salads and Lisa Schena orders another round, her faded blue eyes on his, a smile in them that is no longer on her lips.

A
FTER HER PROMISES TO HIM,
that night of the detective’s DVD, Laura had gone to bed early and Mark had followed her. Talking seemed to be finished. If she knew he was only five or six feet behind her, she did not acknowledge it, or him, and she moved into their bedroom, then closed the bathroom door behind her and there was the running of the faucet.

In Mark’s side pants pocket was her cell phone, her laptop computer still in its case in the front hallway where she sometimes left it for days. He moved across the room and lifted folded laundry off the wingback chair in the corner. It’s where Laura put his clean clothes. Always folded, always in that chair. That night there was a pair of jeans, three T-shirts, and two pair of dress socks, matched and balled together. He placed all this in his bureau and he sat in the chair in the corner and he waited.

There came the flushing of the toilet, then again, the running of the faucet. She kept her cotton nightgown on a hook on the inside bathroom door so it wasn’t unusual that she would enter the bathroom dressed, then emerge in her nightgown, her clothes under her arm she would drop into the hamper near the closet door. But that night, it was the first time Mark had ever really thought about this transformation. Sitting in the chair in the corner near the window to the street, he saw this as dirt rubbed into the hole she’d put in his chest, for he suspected she did not do this with Frank Harrison Jr. He was almost certain she did not close doors to
him
.

She dropped her sweat suit into the hamper. When she turned toward the bed, her eyes on something far, far from this room, she saw him and jerked slightly.

“I didn’t see you.”

“Now you do.”

“I know, Mark. I do.”

She climbed under the covers on her side of the bed. She lay her head on its pillow. She turned her face toward him. “Are you coming to bed?”

“Maybe.”

She nodded. She stared at the ceiling. He could feel her cell phone in his pocket, and he knew that when she was asleep he would check its call history—its sent messages and those she’d received.

“Mark?”

He did not answer. Let her lie there in his quiet for a while.

“Mark?”

He crossed one leg over the other. He stared at her. In the lamplight, he could see she’d removed whatever makeup she’d worn earlier, maybe the third touch-up of the day, it occurred to him—the first for work, the second probably right before the gym for Harrison, the third to hide Harrison from her husband. Now it was off, and the bags beneath her eyes were easier to see, as was the loose flesh beneath her chin, the nearly brittle thinness of her hair. It all looked grotesque to him now. For years there’d been her desire for solitude, all those hours she needed to run and be alone. There’d been her sloppiness in constantly paying the bills late. Her quiet at dinner parties that bordered on rude. There was Mary Ann as a teenager when she and her mother hardly spoke to one another or else screamed and cried and he had to step in as if he had two sixteen-year-old daughters and not one. There was Laura’s polite coldness to his mother, the way she’d never quite embraced taking her in once she turned eighty. There was Laura’s constantly getting his orders wrong at the grocery store; they’d be hosting a cookout, and he’d tell her to buy eight pounds of ground beef, but she’d come back with five because she never really fucking
listened
to him and he’d have to drop everything and drive to the store himself. There was her bad breath between meals. There was her nightly television habit of watching banal crime dramas, her eyes fixed to the screen as unquestioningly as a child’s. There was her mediocre cooking, her preference for frozen vegetables, a lot of salt, and bland dishes she wasn’t ashamed to serve with ketchup. And now she’d lied and cheated and adulterated. She’d shifted their home off its very foundation and shoved shards of hot glass into Mark Welch’s blood and brain and heart: and this searing ache was for what? For
her
? Look at her; what was he
losing
anyway?

But this was a question that died before he could even fully think it, for he loved her. He did. He had since that first afternoon twenty-five years ago when she led him from one empty home to another.

“Mark? Honey, you’re not going to do anything foolish, are you?”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

She stared at him a moment. He had misstepped and knew it, for in her eyes was a hardening, some sort of decision being made about him, or them. Or her and Harrison. Or all three. She turned her back to him. She did not reach over to switch off her lamp.

“Laura?”

“What?”

“You need to take a personal day tomorrow.”

“Why?” She kept her back to him. She didn’t move.

“Because you’re going to write him a letter, and then you’re going to show it to me.”

Mark recognized the tone of his voice. It was the same he used when ordering a poorly motivated team member to do one thing or another. And so he was ordering his wife—for she was, by definition, a member of his team, wasn’t she?—to stay home. He could not have her out of the house and away from him where she could so easily call or meet up with Harrison. He did not even want her in the company of the other women at the realty office—gray-eyed Barb Thompson and her endless supply of cardigan sweaters, the fearful and forever dieting Kathy Ann, Lexus-driving Linda Brown—for he knew women instinctively looked after one another, even when one of their own was wrong, and in fact, had just badly hurt another woman. In their feminine presence, quiet Laura may very well begin to cry, then talk. There would be tissues handed to her, consoling hugs given, and soon Mark Welch, her cuckolded husband, would be on the outside of this womb of solidarity, and because he was on the outside, he would necessarily be in the wrong.

“Laura? Did you hear me?”

“Yes.” Her voice was thick with the sleep that was already coming, her breathing shallow and steady. This did not surprise him. She had always fallen asleep when she most needed to: when she hadn’t sold a property in months; when she and he had had a bad fight over a bill she’d paid late; when her husband was an ineffective PM and feared losing his job and the house. He’d lie in bed, his hands beneath his skull, and he’d picture the foreclosure, watch the humiliation of the moving van backing to their front door. As they lay side by side, he’d told Laura his very real fears, but she’d only nodded her head as if he were recounting a TV football game, and then she was asleep. It’s where she went when there was trouble of any kind, to her dream world or to wherever she went in her head when she ran mile after mile down a long road away from what anyone else would call her life.