Picturing Will (19 page)

But that was the way of the world. That was the way of the world. And Wayne suddenly felt quite … cosmopolitan. He touched 3 and the button lit up, and the two of them rose, side by side, to the floor where they would turn, stop in front of a door, put the key in, and then what? Images he had had at the desk tumbled like a jigsaw puzzle falling off a table, leaving big gaps everywhere: Kate’s soapy breasts, an image on the TV rolling and rolling, horizontal lines on the TV, the plaid bedspread, Kate jumping away, the mouse leading the cat on a deliberate chase.

She started the game—the flirtation—as he reached out to insert the key in the lock. She put her hand over his and stopped him from turning the key, puckering her lips so he would have to stop to kiss her. He could have turned the key anyway, but he let her have the kiss. Her lips were soft—he was feeling skin, not oily lipstick—and he was also feeling her nice breasts, or one of them anyway, pushing against his chest. He started to get hard. She put her hand on his hip, and curled her fingers into his pocket. He tried to kiss her again, but she wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t move and she giggled and wouldn’t let him. Then she wanted him to look into her eyes, and he did, and it seemed he was seeing through to something. A couple came out of their room, closed the door, and passed by, pretending not to notice them. The man had on a shirt patterned with starfish. The woman wore a halter dress. Her bare back made Wayne raise his hand to Kate’s back. His hand felt heavy. He moved his fingers to the side of her breast and pushed gently. She moved closer, and he turned, taking his hand off the key, and stood facing her, knowing she felt his erection. She reached back and turned the key.

Inside, he pinned her hands to her sides. He gave her one very long kiss, after which she reached behind her to close the door and they settled themselves on the floor. Their bodies locked together, fast, and, as he pulled down her panties and pushed inside her, surprised and panting, feeling as if he were sixteen again, he suddenly wanted to know whether she was going to be in Florida for a day or a week, what her last name was, where in New Jersey she lived. Her dress was raised over her hips, her panties tangled around one ankle, and he was still fully dressed, his snap unfastened, the fly of his jeans unzipped.

“Come on,” she said, wriggling out from under. “We’ll tell them the room is too close to the Coke machine, that we didn’t like it.”

“What?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“We’ll get a refund,” she said. “We’ll get a refund and tomorrow night we’ll do the same thing, somewhere else.”

“What do you mean?” he said, wiping the sweat from his face. “They’re not going to—”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You go sit in the car.” She smiled. He saw that his zipper had left a red welt on her thigh. “I hate hotels,” she said. “I know my way around desk clerks. Particularly wimpy kids like that.”

Wayne’s knees felt weak. She closed the door behind them, and they walked to the elevator. The elevator door opened. There were several people inside, so they did not talk again until the elevator descended to the lobby.

“Hyatt can afford to give us a quickie,” she said. “We didn’t even use the John.”

A couple was registering at the desk, and the clerk didn’t look up when Wayne passed through the lobby. It had all happened so fast that he thought he could still be where he had been just a moment ago, debating between returning to the bar or going home. She was going to get the money back! He was giddy, thinking about it. And the next night … What next night? Corky was already going to kill him. He decided that he didn’t care. He’d lie to her, and if she didn’t like it, tough. The next night. Somewhere else.

She came out as he was still getting his breath, smirking and holding out the wad of money. “It’s minus a ten-dollar tip,” she said. “He very nicely ripped up the record of renting the room.” Her smile faded. “Listen, I’ve got to go home,” she said. “I told my mother I was taking a walk. I’ve got to get back.”

“What about tomorrow?” he said, as they walked across the parking lot.

“You must know the hotels better than I do,” she said.

As he opened the car door, she smoothed her skirt underneath her. Smoothed it as if she were a modest lady, not someone who had just hiked it up to her waist to fuck on the floor. Her hand slightly brushing the bottom of her skirt made his cock tingle and start to go hard again. It was really like being sixteen. He could hardly wait for the next night: another hotel, another closed door. The next night they could skip the drinks. Let her tip
twenty
dollars—who cared? The money would last for nights.

As he started the ignition, Florida began to look different. Like a botanist to whom a field is not just a haze of green but a very particular, complex world, Wayne saw the hotels and motels lining the highway as loaded with hope and possibility: stage sets for fantasies he and Kate could repeatedly create.

When he got home that night the situation was better than he could have imagined. Corky had gone to Corinne’s house because the electricity had gone out. A miracle! No electricity! The note taped to the front door told him he should come get her.

He went in, flicked the light switch up and down—no electricity!
No electricity!
He washed his face and then went next door and knocked, telling Corky that he had been so worried until he had found her note, which had fallen down at the side of the steps. With his arm around her shoulder, he led her back to the house, and they found their way upstairs in the dark.

Everything he and Corky said was all talk about another world. Wayne was sixteen, and his life with Corky didn’t really exist, let alone his first marriage, and his marriage to Jody. There was no Will. The next night he and Kate would be in another hotel, behind a quickly closed door. He heard the door closing. Slamming, in fact, though the sound was inside his head: a pounding headache that had come from exhaustion, drinking, guilt, and from holding his breath so long, earlier that night, while his body exploded.

The door closed over and over, creaking.

“Do you think you could find your way into the bathroom to get me a couple of aspirin?” Wayne whispered from beneath the noise of the crashing door.

Corky slipped out of bed and slowly began to grope her way down the hallway in the dark.

SIXTEEN

T
he day of Will’s arrival Wayne was shoveling mulch around bushes planted on an incline—some rich person’s last-minute thought about landscaping the hillside on the north side of the pool. The lady of the house liked Wayne. If it weren’t for Kate, he might even have been interested. He was amused—giddy, almost—that after years of putting out signals and hardly getting a head to turn, he now had a lover who was almost a nymphomaniac.

Zeke, who worked with Wayne, was slender and pockmarked. This was his first job since getting out of the Army. As he was marching one day, his arches just collapsed, leaving him with flapjack feet and a set of discharge papers. His family wouldn’t take him back; for two nights, when he was between places to live, he had camped on Corky and Wayne’s sofabed. But recently Zeke was much happier: sharing a place with an other guy at Breezy Palms trailer park just off the highway, dating a waitress named Susan who was almost ten years older and had dyed black curls and an appetite for sex that drove Zeke mad. He had her picture—a photo-booth square, laminated—along with a small silver cross and a miniature rabbit’s foot, hung on a chain that was tucked under his shirt, the way he used to wear his dog tags. Wayne was amused that Zeke thought of him as a family man (even if Corky was his family), a stay-at-home who must envy Zeke his wild adventures.

Wayne made it a point never to drink on the job. Zeke took Wayne’s lead, always, so the two of them were drinking lemonade out of paper cups. The pitcher was on a metal table under a striped umbrella. The good life, minus the person who made the money to buy the good life—the big-bucks businessman husband who commuted to New York. This weekend his wife would join him up North, and she had offered Wayne the use of the pool. He thought that he would take her up on it. It would give him something to do with Will, though he wished that instead of being with Will he could be swimming with the beautiful nymph Kate.

“How many women have you been in love with?” Zeke asked Wayne.

“Seven,” Wayne said. He always answered automatically, though he rarely ever spoke seriously to Zeke. Zeke thought that Wayne was approachable and forthright.

“Seven,” Zeke said, thinking it over.

“Why did you ask?” Wayne said.

“You’re five up on me,” Zeke said. “I wanted to see what the older generation had on me.”

Wayne looked at Zeke. “Put your hat on,” he said. “They have to cut any more skin cancers, your nose is gonna look like a potato with all the eyes cut out.”

“Sun block,” Zeke said, tapping his nose. “Susan bought it for me.”

“Probably hoping for an exchange—a diamond ring,” Wayne said.

“Shit,” Zeke said, shaking his head. “You won’t even give her credit for giving me a good present.”

“I give her credit for knowing
you’re
a good present,” Wayne said. “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get hooked up with her.” Wayne wiped his forehead. “Why don’t you get the truck and back it up?” he said. “Put some of those wood chips around these bushes.”

Zeke did whatever Wayne told him to do. He left the shovel sticking in the ground and started toward the driveway,

How many times have I been in love? Wayne wondered. He had loved his first wife. Only after this many years could he admit, grudgingly, that he had also loved Jody before they were married and for about a year afterwards. Corky was like a salve. She was what most people would think of as ordinary, although her kindness was exceptional: an empathy that could etch circles below her eyes in your presence, a dogged kindness that made him feel protected. Rather than being in love with Kate, he was addicted to her; he had felt that way about women many times, and he had always fallen hard, then struggled to break the addiction, though each time he succeeded, the success assured that he would fall harder for the next woman. He had thought that marriage to Corky might break the pattern. Before he met Corky he had lived briefly with a woman who pitied herself so much he would sink in her sadness as if it were quicksand. When he was completely submerged some odd moment always transpired between them, as if they were two fish all alone at the bottom of the sea deciding to give each other a look. They would make love and, panting, dash for the surface. It turned out that she had been two-timing him with a scuba diver. When he met Corky—the day he pulled off the road to go to a garage sale to see if they had hubcaps he could use—he had felt something like a shock of recognition: Here was a woman with a liveliness in her eyes that he had forgotten. To exorcise his self-pitying former lover, he had slept with someone who was physically similar, but who was not her. He had decided, by the time he met Corky, that this time around he would put no premium on talk. No asking about her past, her regrets, or even how she felt right that minute. He would take it easy and see if she would respond in kind. He would take what he wanted in calm moments, instead of moments fraught with emotion, and see if she found that allowable. He would ask no questions and hope that she wouldn’t speak of problems she expected him to solve. Corky did not see herself as particularly put-upon. She could adapt to things—thank God for that, because she would certainly know better what to do with Will than he would. She was going to make cupcakes for his arrival and planned to take him to Bathing Beauties to let him play in the store, and at lunchtime she would take him to the rock store—rocks, or something like that—and introduce him to the owner and buy him some things. Wayne knew that Corky wanted to show him what a good mother she would be, and how manageable a child could be. The truth was, having a child made it harder to leave. He would have left Jody sooner for being such a ball-buster, telling him what to do with his life and disdaining him if he didn’t do it, if it hadn’t been for Will. Now it was difficult to remember what his scenario for staying might have been: him suffering her silent criticism, and Will shooting up, like fast-growing bamboo, until he was a stake that stabbed his father’s heart? If Jody thought the way he did things was so unimpressive, see if she didn’t give him credit for being able to inflict a little shock when she woke up and he was gone, no explanation, no “I’m sorry” that implied
she
should be sorry—just gone, and the next thing she got would be a telephone call, when he was good and ready to get in touch. In leaving he had scored his point. Though he had to concede that in coping—not even calling the police to report him missing—she had proved hers.

But beyond all this, there was Will. Will, who, when Wayne saw him, always seemed to be surrounded by Jody’s aura. Men cheating on their wives are advised to be careful that they do not carry home the smell of hairspray or perfume to betray them. What about the telltale signs of a mother on a child—those smells trailing memories of the mother’s scent, the child’s clothes selected in
her
favorite colors, the Mercurochrome on the scratch painted by her professional hand? Something was coming clear to Wayne: that the child was just a springboard for the mother, a launch pad from which her presence could shoot up to hover hugely over the scene. As long as Will existed, Jody would be larger than life. She had seeped under Will’s skin as surely as a ghost passing into the walls of a house. If she could not remain in Wayne’s heart herself, she would send an envoy to penetrate his world.

As if he could read Wayne’s mind, Zeke reappeared with a question about Will. “Your kid,” Zeke said. “What’s the deal about the pool? I’ll bring an inner tube, and what else do you want us to bring? I forget.”

Wayne rolled his eyes. “Us” meant he was going to have to endure a day of swimming with Susan.

“I just thought that if you had a tube, the kid might like to float around. I don’t think he swims.”