The Last Good Night (14 page)

“So, have any cute boys checked in?” Rosie asked.

That night, we made cottage cheese-and-jelly sandwiches and ate them sitting on the edge of the Breezeway's docks. A huge ship was visible off-shore, outlined in a string of white lights, and we both stared out at it as we spoke.

“Supposedly there's a pirate ship buried a mile from the shore,” I said. “This guy checked in last weekend with all this incredible diving equipment and he was telling us about it. He said the treasure was finders keepers. It could be millions of dollars in old gold coins and shit.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No.” I threw a crust of bread to a pelican and watched its prehistoric profile as it dove into the water. “But my mother does. Not that that's a recommendation.”

Rosie sighed. “God, it's so romantic here.”

We both lit cigarettes and smoked them with our hands cupped about the tips, shielding the red embers from view, an old habit when parents were in the vicinity, though really there was no need. Astrid and Garner were buried in the apartment and anyway, they wouldn't have cared.

Later, Rosie and I carried our things to room 214 and settled onto the double beds, two feet away from each other, in oversized T-shirts and underwear.

We watched television for a little while and then, tired from the beach, from the reunion itself, we turned off the lights and lay on our backs in the dark, talking quietly as if someone might hear. The room had the minty odor of the Noxzema we had both used to wash our faces.

There was a long pause and I felt myself swimming in it, fighting through it, trying to come out armed with the words, the sentences, I could give to Rosie to make her understand, make her know.

But I couldn't.

I retreated back into the bed, the silence.

Though Rosie was lying an arm's span away, I missed her, missed most the person I used to be when I was with her.

For a long while we both lay listening to each other's breaths, murmuring now and then, and then not at all.

Long after Rosie had fallen asleep, I crept from the room and sat on the docks alone, shivering in the cool night air, the tiny white lights of the far-off boat blurred by my own tears.

We kissed goodbye the next afternoon, and promised to see each other in school the following day, but I didn't go.

 

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
on a Saturday afternoon, a man named Frank Xavier rang the office bell and asked for a room. Though he was short with a slight build, there was something grandiose about his ears, eyes, lips, even his limbs, as if the features of a much larger man had somehow gotten attached to the wrong body. His voice was low and gravelly, and Astrid, standing beside me, had to lean forward to hear it. “We don't usually get people checking in on Saturday,” she told him. “Most of our guests try to make a weekend of it.” She glanced down at his four matching vinyl suitcases.

“I'm a pharmaceutical salesman,” he explained. “I cover most of the hospitals from here to the Keys.”

Astrid smiled, buoyed by the prospect of regular routes and recommendations to fellow salesmen.

“I'd like to stay till Wednesday, if you can find something for me,” Xavier said. The tips of his teeth, white and even, were also oversized.

Astrid smiled once more. Midweek guests meant unexpected money.

She told him that there was only one room available for the first night, room 110, with an entrance to the rear of the courtyard, facing the road, but that she would change him to a better location after everyone checked out on Sunday.

Xavier took the key and followed her directions along the path to a door partially hidden by palmettos.

We did not see him again all evening.

Sunday morning was always busy, with people trying to cram as much vacation into their last hours at the Breezeway as possible. The children's yelps by the pool were shriller, the sport fishermen, who did not have time to go out on their boats, loitered about the dock drinking beer for breakfast and dreading going
home to their wives and jobs, the married couples stayed behind the drawn curtains of their rooms, making love one final time and then beginning to squabble while they packed.

Frank Xavier lay on a lounge chair by the pool. His bare belly was flat and muscular, with a triangle of coarse dark hairs. He was reading a newspaper when I walked by on my way to empty the trash. He watched me pull the large black plastic bag from the wooden container, knot it, and replace it with a fresh one before he spoke. “You're Marta?”

I stopped and looked down at him. “Yes.”

Xavier nodded. “I'm a friend of Lewis Harmon's,” he said. He stared directly up into my eyes without squinting from the sun.

Just then, Astrid stuck her head out of the office door and called to me. “Can you come help me, sweetie? The Weinsteins and the Littles both want to check out.”

I glanced back at Frank Xavier and then I hurried away.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Astrid offered to move Xavier to a better room with a door and window directly on the courtyard.

“There's no need to go to all that trouble,” he told her. “I'm fine where I am.”

“What a nice man,” Astrid remarked as we watched Xavier leave the office. “So easy to please.”

It was an overcast day, the sky a patchy gray quilt, and the courtyard was empty. Xavier settled at one of the round tables with a carton of orange juice and
Time
magazine's year-end issue.

I glanced curiously at the “Women of the Year” cover as I passed. I had already stripped the beds in half the rooms, and was on my way to the laundry room with a basketful of sheets when I heard his voice.

“Come talk to me.”

I turned around.

“I've got work to do,” I said.

“I'll help you.”

He stood up and took the full plastic basket from my hands, following me to the narrow unlit laundry room, with its two washing machines and single dryer.

“We're going to be friends,” he said, as he rested the basket on top of one of the machines.

I began to pull sheets from it and load them into the washer. “What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Call it a hunch.”

I had to maneuver around him to reach the detergent, and our forearms brushed against each other. “Good friends,” Xavier added.

 

W
HY DO YOU
go to what you are most afraid of? Later, when I had to think of something, I thought of that. Why I went, knowing even then, from the very first, that there was something, a glint, a warning.

Sometimes, I tried to go back and make myself run in the opposite direction.

But I couldn't.

 

I
WALKED ALONG
the walls of the courtyard path and turned the corner to the barely visible door of room 110. I knocked once and he let me in.

He looked me straight in the eyes. “Come in.”

The only light was from the reading lamp on the night table.

“Sit,” he instructed.

He got two Budweisers out of the small refrigerator and handed me one. I had never had beer before and was surprised by its bitterness. We drank in silence for a minute.

“So what did Lewis Harmon tell you?” I asked.

Xavier smiled. “He told me you like it.”

I didn't answer.

“You've got a good body, Marta,” Xavier said. “Slim, with tits. That's rare. Usually you get one or the other.”

Instinctively, I wrapped my arms in front of me.

Xavier took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand without taking his eyes from me. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled a crisp twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, and put it on the table.

“It's thirty,” I said.

“That's not what Harmon said.”

“The price has just gone up.”

Xavier looked at me stonily and then erupted into laughter. “You're awfully smart for a girl your age.” He got another bill out and added it to the twenty. “I think we're going to like each other. I think we're going to like each other just fine.”

He began to unbutton my shirt. We were standing six inches apart now. His eyes traveled across my body unabashedly, taking me in, my breasts, my nipples. I felt more naked than I had ever been and I moved over to him, pressing my chest against his. At least he couldn't see me that way.

He laughed. “You're an eager one, aren't you?” And with that, he yanked me roughly onto the bed. He held both of my arms above my head, clasping my wrists so that I couldn't move. With his free hand, he pulled down my shorts.

He stripped off his own clothes and then he flipped me over, slapping my ass once before entering me from behind, pushing me down into the bed, my face pressing deeper and deeper into the mattress, where all I could see was blackness.

 

A
ND WHEN
I thought of it all those years later in my frequent wakeful moments between night and dawn, this is also what I thought: That what I was most terrified of was not him, but myself, the part of myself that responded to him, and that is what I should have run from.

But I dove right into it, right fucking into it.

It didn't feel like I had a choice.

 

W
E DID IT
the next day in broad daylight, lying on the cement path behind his room beneath the spray of palmettos, the ground scraping my naked butt and ankles, the cars driving past just a few yards away.

It took ten minutes.

Then he slipped into his room and got the money while I scurried into my clothes, pieces of dirt sticking to my skin.

 

T
HESE ARE NOT
things I am proud of.

In fact, it feels like someone else did them. In a way, it was someone else.

I realize that's no excuse, of course.

Maybe the past always feels that way. Maybe everyone has a separate self lost back there, connected by only the thinnest thread to the person they are now.

Who, after all, would repeat the past in exactly the same way, given a choice?

 

T
HE LAST TIME
I went to Xavier, he was sitting at the table cutting a cord into four pieces. The money was already laid out. I sat down at the table and watched him work.

“Where are you from anyway?” I asked.

“Georgia.”

“You don't have an accent.”

“I've only been there two years. Before that Ohio. Then there was Maine.”

“Why do you move around so much?”

“Just making a living.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“I was.”

“Do you have any kids?”

“One. A girl. I haven't seen her in a long time. Four, five years.”

I leaned forward, alert. I was endlessly curious about absentee fathers. “Why not?”

Xavier stopped playing with the cord for a moment and stared down at the scissors. “I guess it's inconvenient,” he answered at last. He frowned. “Christ, you ask a lot of goddamned questions. You see me asking you questions? Nosirree. Not one. I figure your business is your business and mine is mine.” He measured and snipped the last piece of cord. “You ever done this?” he asked.

“What?”

“I'll show you.”

He tied a knot around my wrist and fastened my left arm to the bed. Then my right arm.

My left leg.

And finally my right leg.

I was splayed open.

He stared at me, his mouth parted, his eyes gleaming. “You got any questions now?” he asked.

I turned my head away.

My ankles and wrists strained against the rope, toward him or away from him, I wouldn't have been able to tell, and I knew then that people were wrong, that it was possible to leave your body behind after all.

Afterwards, he sat up, wiped himself, and walked naked to the refrigerator to get a fresh beer while I was still tied up. I thought at first that he had forgotten me, but he turned once, glanced down at me, and then went into the bathroom to pee, leaving the door open.

“Hey,” I demanded when he returned.

“Yes?”

“Are you going to untie me?”

“I don't know. Should I?”

“That's not funny.”

“Isn't it?”

“No.”

He stood completely still for over a minute, and then he picked up the scissors and cut the bonds on both of my hands. He handed me the scissors as I sat up, rubbing my wrists. I cut the ropes on my legs myself.

“Don't lose your sense of humor, Marta,” he said. “Nobody likes a girl who loses her sense of humor.”

 

W
HEN
I
GOT
back to my room, I ripped up the money he had given me into tiny shreds and buried them in the trash can behind the motel.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Astrid and I sat at the kitchen table together, balancing our coffee cups on top of the papers and leaflets and phone books that never seemed to move. On the second
Wednesday of every month, we totaled up the previous month's credit card receipts. Astrid had the stack of inky slips before her and she read out numbers while I punched them into the adding machine.

I sat with one hand on my lap, a woven string bracelet about the wrist of my other hand, carefully putting in the numbers. Both wrists had pale rings of indigo about them. I kept one eye on Astrid and whenever it seemed that she might notice them I shifted my hands out of sight.

“Sixty dollars and forty-four cents,” Astrid continued between bites of powdered-sugar donut. “Thirty-eight dollars and twelve cents.” The fine white powder fell about her chin like a goatee. She didn't notice a thing. “Did you get that last one?” she asked. “Okay, let's see. Fifty dollars and eighty-three cents.”

Slowly, I brought my left hand from my lap and rested it on the table.

Astrid continued reading, eating.

I took off the string bracelet, revealing the bruise.