Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (26 page)

“We’re in Virginia,” I shouted. “Go to bed if you have to.”

When we got back in the car, Henry said, “Kitty’s at the library now, but her roommate says they’ll leave the door propped open with a knee sock. Fucking hell. This is what my sex life has come down to,” he said. “A knee sock.” He started up the Supra and swung it out of the station with a jerk. “The things you go through for poontang.”

I laughed. I’d seen a picture of Kitty, and “poontang” was not a word she brought to mind. In the photograph, she was standing primly in a mint green evening gown with silk gloves pulled to her elbows and her head turned demurely to one side. It was hard to imagine Henry going out with her. At this particular moment, he was wearing a shredded “Adam Ant” T-shirt and combat boots.

Henry was an only child, and sometimes when I looked at him, I could see in his face his parents battling for his soul. One day, he’d walk around unshaven and flinty-eyed in cowboy boots. The next, he’d be foppish, almost fussy, in an antique silk vest and ascot. He’d dress preppie for a football game, then put on eyeliner and hair gel to go clubbing. For the trip down to Durham, he had on his Road Warrior costume, replete with a leather jacket and safety pins.

We drove for a while in silence, trapezoids of silver light sliding across our faces from time to time from the oncoming traffic, which was thinning out considerably. I followed along on the map as we passed turn-offs for Manassas, Richmond, Norfolk, green exit signs pointing off into a void. We were hurtling deeper and deeper into the South. Except for a school trip to D.C., this was the farthest I’d actually ever been from home. And yet it was all the same: a repeat of shrubbery, guardrails, wind-tossed trees, the dark road sliding beneath us as if the car were devouring it. Then Henry steered the Supra down an access ramp and into an industrial parking lot. He cut the engine quickly, stopping us with a jerk. “VoilÀ,” he said.

Around us were nothing but abandoned rigs, enormous, ghostly eighteen-wheeler trucks, and huge metal shipping containers in what looked like a graveyard for cargo. Sodium lights overhead bathed everything in ghastly orange fumes. In the distance was a squat concrete building with steam billowing out behind it. You could hear the hiss and rasp of its ventilation ducts. It seemed to throb like a heart, like the centralized nervous system of some alien organism. It was well past midnight. Except for an occasional vehicle tearing past on the freeway, there was no evidence of life. Even the saplings at the far edge of the lot looked skeletal.

“C’mon,” Henry said, unfolding himself from behind the steering wheel.

“Where are we?” I climbed out of the car awkwardly and tugged at my silver skirt, which was beginning to look more and more like an accordionized gum wrapper. It was misty outside. The air was leaden with the smell of wet soil and gasoline. A thin film of moisture coated everything.

“You wanted to see the South,” Henry said, starting across the lot.

I squinted at the structure ahead. “What’s that? A substation?”

“No. The Jarratt, Virginia, truck stop. C’mon. Coffee time.”

I had to trot to keep up with him, and as we drew closer to the building, I noticed a small neon sign reading “FOOD, DRINKS” sputtering in the window. Every other second it hissed and crackled, then half the letters blinked dark, so that it spelled out “FOO, DRI” instead. The building was massive, much bigger than it had looked from the parking lot, and eerily windowless. Though it would make a fine morgue or secret munitions plant, it didn’t look like any place you would ever want to eat.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Henry swung the door open and grinned. “After you, Ms. Noo Yawk,” he said. Ever since Maryland, I noticed, his Southern accent had grown more pronounced, ripening with languor. “Well, thank yew ma’am,” he said to the toll booth attendant. “Y’all have a good evening.”

Inside the entrance a small boutique had been set up. Instead of selling the usual for-the-road mints, cigarettes, and plastic flashlights, it had racks upon racks of ornate cowboy boots. Stetsons hung from the ceiling, twirling lazily like mobiles. Finely crewled leather belts hung down the walls. In a corner by the cash register, a walrussy-looking man sat on a stool beneath a sign that said “O-K Corral Apparel. Custom Made.” He was chewing gum absentmindedly and staring out at the parking lot. In one hand he had a pair of bright green dice that he kept shaking and releasing out on the countertop without once glancing to see what he’d rolled.

Henry led me through two fire doors and suddenly we were in an enormous room blazing with artificial light. It was the kind of light you find in casinos, designed to simulate daylight and sterilize time.

We were in a cafeteria the size of an airplane hangar. A countertop snaked through the room, and hundreds of truckers sat along it on orange vinyl stools, hunched over cups of coffee and tucking into plates heaped with pancakes and sausages. At every bend of the counter stood waitresses in peppermint-striped uniforms and harsh makeup, with hairdos that seemed to have been whipped up out of a frozen custard machine. Toward the back of the room was what looked like a glass-enclosed deejay booth displaying a splashy sign: “WQJR: Travis, Conway, and Wayne Every A.M.!” Beneath it, a makeshift photography studio had been set up. A man who looked like a televangelist stood rod-still in front of a white backdrop while a blonde in a red polyester suit and stilettos patted his face with a powder puff. A photographer in suspenders paced back and forth between two light stands, smoking and flicking his ashes on the floor and looking generally irritated. The room hummed with activity, and yet everyone seemed oblivious to what was going on around them. The truckers chewed blearily. The waitresses refilled coffee cups mechanically. The man being groomed for his close-up looked embalmed. In New York, I was used to all kinds of bizarreness. But this was surreal.

“Henry, let’s go,” I said.

“Whatchew tawkin’ ‘bout, woman? This here place is right homey,” Henry announced, his drawl now in full bloom. “Yew jes’ sit yerself down and order me some coffee. Ah need a piss.”

With that, he turned and sauntered into the men’s room. I stood there, alone in the unforgiving light. A trucker whose forearms were scrolled with tattoos glanced casually over in my direction and nudged his buddy.

In addition to my silver miniskirt, I had on little pointy black elfin boots and a black rip-necked sweatshirt pulled seductively off one shoulder
Flashdance
-style. With my fingerless lace gloves and one enormous rhinestone earring, I’d felt pretty proud of myself fourteen hours earlier, preening in the mirror back at college, convinced that I looked like a star in my own MTV video. Now, standing in the middle of what was, essentially, the National Trucker Convention, it suddenly occurred to me what a mother lode of bad judgment this had been.

I slipped past the truckers as coolly as possible, then hoisted myself onto a stool. “Hey, sugar,” a waitress drawled. “What kin ah git fer yew?”

Hearing her address me like that made me utterly tongue-tied. Surely the moment I opened my mouth, the entire room would realize I was a Yankee and elect to string me from a tree.

“Two coffees to go puleese,” I said with a slight inflection. I didn’t know who I thought I was kidding.

Henry seemed to be taking his sweet time in the men’s room. Casually, I surveyed the cafeteria and tried to pretend that I was perfectly used to hanging around truck stops at two in the morning dressed like a prostitute.

Back in New York, I’d spent countless afternoons with a notebook, spying on various people and inventing stories about their lives. On any given Saturday in Central Park, the city pretty much spoon-fed characters to you. A fat woman in a purple caftan would shuffle by with a cat on a leash, followed by two Hispanic men in identical white leather pants. It was easy to divine characters from people who on some level, I realized, saw themselves as characters already, who put themselves on display in the hopes that they’d be someday immortalized. But the truckers in Jarratt, Virginia, were of an entirely different ilk. Their faces were like no faces I’d ever seen. They were like furrowed fields and scorched earth, full of turbulence and erosion. I could not begin to imagine who they were or what their lives were like. Watching them, I suddenly felt a very long way from home. There was a whole, vast, unknowable world out there that could swallow me instantly. I was completely out of my league.

Henry sauntered out of the men’s room just as the waitress handed me the coffees.

“You okay?” he asked. “You don’t look too good.”

“Just don’t leave me like that again,” I said in a low voice, motioning toward the door. “Can we just get out of here now, please?”

“Why? You uncomfortable?” he said with some concern.

I nodded.

“Well, goddamn it,” he bellowed in his Texas twang, loud enough for an entire group of truckers to hear. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d reckon someone’d put
semen
in those dispensers instead of liquid soap. It sure as hell looks like it, and it sure as hell smells like it. Here, you’re from New York. You’re the expert. Smell my finger,” Henry boomed, thrusting his hand in my face. “Sniff. That’s semen, iddin’t it?”

Out in the parking lot, he couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh my Lord. I wish I’d brought a movie camera. The look on your face. I’ve never seen you so freaked out in my life.”

“That wasn’t funny,” I hissed, though it was, in fact, funny.

Henry cackled and shook his head. “
Henry, get me out of here. Henry, stop it right now.
Oh man. That was priceless. What’s wrong, Ms. Noo Yawk?” he laughed delightedly. “Southern hospitality too much for you neurotic Yankees to handle?
Neurotic.
That is what y’all say in the North, isn’t it?”

“Okay,” I said. “TouchÉ.”

After that, we were pretty much played out. It was ridiculously late. Even Henry was sick of his tapes, so we drove on in silence. I was ready to be at Duke already, ready to tiptoe into Jeremy’s room and slide in beside him.

Jeremy had been two years ahead of me in high school, where he’d been a Frisbee champion as well as captain of the track team. In one of the school musicals, he’d played Tarzan leaping around the stage hammily in a loincloth while girls in the audience screamed ecstatically. He was silly, but he knew it, which only made him more adorable. Playful, good-looking, and up for anything, he was hard not to like. Every time he came home from college, he’d called me up as if he’d only seen me yesterday. “So what do think, Susie-Q? Margaritas and a make-out session on Friday?” I was secretly amazed he went out with me.

By the time Henry and I arrived in Durham, it was 4:30
A.M.
The sky had downgraded from black to inky blue, and it was raining slightly as we pulled up outside Jeremy’s fraternity house. Henry got my bag out of the trunk, carried it up the steps to the porch, then waited while I felt around under the mat for the key.

“Do I look okay?” I asked him. “Not too exhausted or puffy?”

“Nuh-uh. You look great. What about me?” He adjusted his jacket, squared his shoulders. “Not too psycho?”

“No. Totally cool. Kitty’s going to love the flowers and the song.”

Henry had brought his guitar along. He’d written a song for Kitty, which he’d sung for me a cappella on the ride down. It was actually pretty good.

We glanced at each other on the darkened porch. We’d been together almost seventeen hours straight, but it seemed like much longer. Just the morning before, we’d been sitting before our typewriters in the student lounge, but recalling it now was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe you want to get together for dinner in a couple of nights? The four of us?”

“Sure. That would be good,” said Henry. “Well. Okay.”

He turned and hurried down the steps.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” I called after him.

“Well, that leaves me plenty of options,” he teased. Then he swung down into his car and was gone.

Inside the darkened fraternity house, Jeremy had left a piece of paper taped to the banister: “Susie—Up. 1st Door Right.” The house was an old Victorian, and I could tell it hadn’t been kept up. Every step creaked underfoot, and paint flaked beneath my hand on the banister. Before entering Jeremy’s room, I felt in my bag for a brush and ran it vigorously through my hair. Then I eased the door open slowly. As soon as I stepped inside, I nearly banged into a ladder. I hadn’t realized Jeremy had a loft bed. When I’d envisioned arriving, I somehow imagined him sprawled on a king-sized mattress and pulling back the covers seductively, with a flourish. Now there was a shifting and thumping overhead. Jeremy leaned over the edge of the loft sleepily, his hair standing straight up with static, his eyes barely open. “Hey,” he croaked faintly. “You made it.”

“Uh huh,” I said hoarsely. I was suddenly overwhelmed with exhaustion. “I’ll be up in one minute, lover,” I whispered. Then I set my bag on the sofa beneath his loft, plunked down beside it, and proceeded to fall asleep.

Later that morning, Jeremy nudged me awake. He stood over me fully dressed with a knapsack slung over his shoulder and an apple in one hand, clearly on his way to class.

“I was going to let you sleep,” he said, “but you’ve got a phone call.”

He helped me off the sofa and led me across the landing to the common room. One of his fraternity brothers stood by a wall phone, holding out a receiver.

“Chem test,” Jeremy whispered. “Back in an hour.” As he disappeared down the stairs, I took the receiver and put it to my ear. For some reason, I had a terrible headache.

“Hello?” I said groggily.

“Mornin’, princess.” It was Henry. “So,” he exhaled, “you about ready to go?”

“Go where?” I said.

“Back to Providence,” he said. “Kitty broke up with me.”

“What?”

“When I got to her dorm room this morning, there wasn’t any knee sock. She got out of bed and told me to sleep in the lounge. She said she didn’t want to see me anymore.” Henry gave the same helpless guffaw he had the day before, talking to his father. “My fucking luck,” he said.