The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (158 page)

“Your bed narrow or wide?” I asked, and, quietly, Dean said, “Narrow.”

“I think that I want to see you in these jeans, all faded, with cowboy boots coming out from the bottom of them,” I said. “I want to lie on your bed and see you standing there with no shirt, just those jeans down low on your hips and cowboy boots. Just looking at me. Okay?”

Eyes forward, Dean swallowed and nodded. I kissed his ear.

“I think you’d look great like that,” I said.

I woke up the next morning to see a guy with white-blond hair and camouflage pants walking around, stepping over the tangled pile of my shirt, bra, and skirt. He had a mole on his left cheek the size and color of a BB.

Dean and I had fallen asleep back to front, my spine cushioned against his chest and stomach, my hair in his face and mouth.

“Dean?” the stranger called, looking at me. “You up?”

“Hey, Hunt,” Dean said into the back of my neck.

“Who’s the girl?”

“This is Julie. Julie, this is Hunt. My roommate.”

“Hey,” I said.

Hunt the roommate didn’t answer, so we looked at each other some more. He had a long cleft in the middle of his chin, another miniature cleft at the tip of his nose, and a deep furrow
between his eyes. It looked like someone had made markings in preparation to cleave his face in half, but had never got around to finishing up.

Under the scratchy green army blanket, Dean slid his hand flat between my thighs. He let it rest there, cool and immobile but full of possibilities.

“Where’d you sleep last night, Hunt?” he asked.

“TV lounge.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“You didn’t have to do that, man.” Dean moved his hand up higher between my legs.

Hunt grinned, but only on one side of his face, like a stroke victim. “I came by ’round three this morning,” he said, “and I heard you two rockin’, so I didn’t come knockin’.”

Dean laughed. I turned over in the bed, careful to keep myself covered, and faced him.

“I’m not crazy about your roommate,” I whispered in his ear, and he laughed harder.

“Julie don’t like you, Hunt,” he said.

“I just seen that Madonna video,” Hunt said, unmoved by Dean’s remark. “You know that one where she’s in that man’s suit, grabbing her twat like Michael Jackson does?”

“Yeah, I know it,” Dean said.

“She’s hot, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

I tried to get my head comfortable on Dean’s chest, somewhere away from his collarbone, and traced the silky thin track of hair under his belly button with my finger.

“I’m gone watch some more TV,” Hunt told us. “Maybe they’ll show it again. They been playing it a lot.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean said.

“If I come back, y’all want me to knock?”

“Up to you, man.”

As soon as Hunt was out the door, Dean was on top of me, pulling my thighs up around his hips. I locked my fingers behind his head.

“Oh, baby,” Dean said, “I’m so glad we’re awake again.”

“So, you don’t like my roommate?” Dean asked. We were parked in his truck at the far end of Baker’s Beach, drinking beer, watching the only two people in the water toss a Frisbee back and forth.

“When they drown, we can have the beach to ourselves,” I said.

Dean’s truck smelled like the burgers we’d just finished.

“They can have the beach,” Dean said. “Too damn cold to swim, anyhow. I’m happy we got the parking lot.” He stuck his little finger into the neck of his beer bottle and swung it slowly in front of his face, as if trying to hypnotize himself. “I got my finger stuck one time doing this.”

“That’s a pretty smart thing to do, then, isn’t it?”

He pulled his finger out with a pop and held it up. I leaned over and bit it.

“Taste like beer?” he asked.

“Not really.”

Dean pulled me close and ran his tongue across my lips, lightly. “I like the way you taste.”

I kissed him, then sat back against the seat. “No, I don’t like your roommate,” I said. I put my feet up on the dashboard and looked between them at the swimmers. “Where’s he from, anyhow? Alabama?”

“West Virginia.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t like him. He reminds me of guys from my town. I know what he’s all about.”

“That right?”

“Uh-huh.” I combed the hairs on Dean’s leg back the wrong way with my fingertips and smoothed them down again. He
was wearing shorts, no shirt. Cowboy boots. “Hunt’s got a truck with six-foot wheels, I bet,” I said. “Got a belt buckle that says ‘The South Will Rise Again.’ Someday he’ll get a girl pregnant, maybe his cousin, and they’ll have more kids just like him. Bunch of kids running around with ringworm, eating mud pies.”

Dean laughed. “So what kind of guy do you like?” He balanced his beer bottle on the palm of his hand.

“College boys,” I said. “Lawyers. You know.”

Dean nodded, interested. “Let me ask you something. You hooked up with a lot of guys like that since you left home?”

I looked at him evenly. “All I said is that’s the kind of guy I’m attracted to.”

He nodded again. “So you aren’t attracted to guys like me?”

“No, I’m not.”

Dean set his bottle on the dashboard and gently pushed me down so that I was lying on my back, flat on the seat.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, and slid my underwear out from under my skirt, past my ankles, off. He pushed my skirt up around my waist, put his head between my legs, and started to kiss the insides of my thighs.

“I really fucking love that,” I said after a few minutes, and Dean looked up.

“You got some mouth for a girl supposed to be from the country.”

“You’ve got some mouth yourself,” I said.

It was midnight at the International House of Pancakes.

“Happy anniversary,” Dean said, and toasted me with his milk shake. “We been together a whole day.”

“These waitresses aren’t so great,” I said, and lifted my water glass, not for a toast, but for a refill. “I’ve been sucking on this ice for a half-hour now.”

“Ten minutes,” Dean corrected me.

“Well, anyhow. A waitress should look after stuff like that. A good waitress.”

“When you smile, the bottom part of your eyes look like this.” Dean dipped his finger into his milk shake and drew a half-moon shape on the tabletop. “I like that.”

The skin around my mouth felt sore and raw from Dean’s stubble, and it hurt to sit down from all the sex. Dean leaned his head against the turquoise vinyl seat and shut his eyes.

“You worn out yet?” I asked, and he smiled and shook his head without opening his eyes to the fluorescent lights.

“No, sir. I’m all set for another round.”

“Liar. I saw you walking like a cowboy before.”

“It’s the cowboy boots make me walk like that.”

The waitress filled my water glass and we didn’t speak for a while. Then I drank the water in one swallow, cleared my throat, and said, “Well . . . it’s sure been nice knowing you, Dean.”

He lifted his head from the back of the seat and looked at me with eyes the amber color of whiskey aging at the bottom of a barrel.

“You going somewhere?” he asked.

“Not really. Or, maybe yes. I may stay in San Francisco, but I could leave soon, too. I don’t like staying anywhere too long, you know?”

Dean didn’t answer, waited.

“Or maybe I’ll head down to L.A.,” I continued, shifting my eyes from Dean’s face to study first the dessert case, then the restroom doors. “I’ve also been thinking about going up to Seattle, or maybe Portland.”

“You planning on leaving tomorrow or something?” Dean looked puzzled. I rolled my eyes.

“Look, I don’t want to fight about this.”

“Nobody’s fighting nobody. I just wondered what you meant about ‘nice knowing you.’”

“Dean, you’re a nice guy and everything, okay? But I’m not looking for any kind of relationship. I don’t want to see you getting attached to me or anything.”

“What?”

“That’s not what I came all the way out here for.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I reached for a bottle of maple syrup. I turned it upside down and watched the brown fluid move inside, slow as lava.

“You and me don’t have anything in common, Dean. You’re going to finish with the army, then head back to Tennessee, probably. That’s fine; that’s great for you. But that’s not for me. I’m not going to end up married in Tennessee.”

“I don’t remember asking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

I reached across the table for his hand, and he let me take it, the way you let a waitress take an empty plate.

“Dean,” I said, “listen. Two thousand miles is a long way to go for something you can get next door. Okay?”

He didn’t answer right away. His voice was not accusing when he finally said, “Plenty of guys at the Pierce Street Bar got what you’re looking for, Julie. If that’s what you want, what’d you sit next to me for?”

I took my hand off his and put it in my lap. I looked down at my sleeve, dirty from the floor of Dean’s room.

“I know what you’re all about . . .” I started to say, wanting to sound as level as Dean, but trailing off.

“No, you don’t, Julie. You don’t half know me.”

“Well. I think I do.”

“You’re making a mistake to think that,” he said. “You don’t know me at all, hardly, and you’re making a mistake to think otherwise.”

We looked at each other across the table. Dean’s face was
even and open. I didn’t come all the way out to California for this, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

I watched as a waitress at the dessert case sliced a tall white cake and slid a wedge carefully onto a plate. She glanced behind her, then licked a smear of frosting off her thumb. Another waitress was scrubbing the inside of the large coffee urn with what appeared to be a toilet brush.

“What’re you doing?” Dean asked after some time.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Watching.”

He smiled slightly.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” Dean’s smile widened. “It’s just that I don’t see you jumping up and running off.”

“You think I won’t?”

Dean shrugged. “I’m just waiting, is all.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

The waitresses moved through the restaurant, seating customers, serving food, sliding tips into their apron pockets. Someone came out of the kitchen with a mop to clean up a spill. The manager worked on a crossword puzzle and sipped from a tall glass of milk. I watched them, and Dean sat quietly across the table, waiting.

I thought, How long is this guy going to sit here?

But Dean did not get up to leave, and neither did I.

M
ARGIE AND PEG
were arrested after they got drunk on the chef’s cooking wine and went into the parking lot and rubbed butter on the windshield of every car parked there. It was late at night. It was also late in September, and long past the end of the tourist season. There had been very few customers that evening, in the restaurant where Margie and Peg worked, and there were very few cars in the parking lot. As it happened, though, one of the cars that Margie and Peg buttered turned out to be the police car of a Delaware state patrolman. They hadn’t noticed that it was a police car. They hadn’t really been paying attention. The Delaware state patrolman came out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, where he handily caught the girls in the act of vandalism.

Peg started to run when she saw him, but Margie shouted, “Don’t run, Peg! He’ll gun you down like a dog!”

Which Peg believed, although the Delaware state patrolman had done nothing more threatening than bark, “Hey!”

The patrolman held Peg and Margie in the parking lot and radioed for a town cop to come and deal with the situation.
“Come and fetch these stupid kids,” he told the town cop over the radio.

The Delaware state patrolman stood in the parking lot with Margie and Peg, waiting for the town cop. It rained and rained on them. The patrolman was wearing a practical raincoat, but the girls were soaked in their waitress uniforms.

“I wonder if we might be allowed to go
inside
the restaurant while waiting for the other policeman to arrive,” Margie requested. “I wonder if it might not be more pleasant
not
to stand in the rain as we await the arrival of that gentleman. No?”

Margie had a habit (newly developed that summer) of speaking in such an aristocratic and refined manner. A very new habit. A very new affectation, which was not enjoyed by every individual she encountered. On this night in particular, Margie sounded as if she were coming very close to calling the Delaware state patrolman “my good fellow.” The Delaware state patrolman looked at Margie, in her wet waitress uniform, talking so archly. Margie was clearly drunk. Margie had one eyebrow raised inquisitively. She had one finger pressed coyly against her chin.

“You can stand outside in the rain all night, for all I care, Little Miss Du Pont,” the Delaware state patrolman said.

“That’s very funny,” Peg told him.

“Thank you,” he said.

The town cop showed up. He looked bored. He was so bored, in fact, that he charged Margie and Peg with public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and vandalism.