The Parallel Apartments (45 page)

Just thinking about the import of the collage made Justine sad and tearful, and this impaired the surgical temperament needed for magazine snipping; she accidentally pared off a tiny spear of thumb cuticle.

“Ow,” said Justine, even though it hadn't hurt at all. “Ow.”

A rapid knock came at the door, and then keys in the lock. The door opened four inches and then stopped at the length of the chain.

“Oh, sorry, no sign on the door,” said a dark eclipse that blocked out half the light from the sliver of open door. “Okay?”

Justine didn't move. Usually when the maids came by, an instinctive spasm of modesty caused her to pat at her messy hair, draw up the covers, turn the channel to something neutral, smile in divine serenity, or anything else that made it seem she was at the pith a demure but efficient regent of her little motel realm rather than her real persona, which Justine had lately been imagining as a guilt-clamped, sod-dwelling creature with lots and lots and lots to hide.

“Washrags? Soap bars? Tissue?”

“No, thank you,” said Justine, grinning like a sweating serial masturbator.

“Sugar Babies? I found a whole box left by someone in 227.”

“No, thank you.”

“I'm new. I'm Lacey. They told me you been here awhile.”

“Hi.”

“Don't forget to put your placard out next time.”

With a little wave Lacey pulled the door shut. Justine relaxed. With care not to disturb her piles of glossy red and white fragments excised from
Marie Claire, Bizarre, Gol Nogomet, World Domination Sudoku Swimsuit Issue,
and
Knit Praxis,
Justine climbed out of bed, put out the placard, and did up the other two locks. She tinkled, got a Dr Pepper out of the her ice-filled Styrofoam chest, wiped off some greasy mare on the TV that had been smearing about an eighth of the screen since she'd moved in and that had been driving her crazy but never seemed worth getting up to clean and besides was kind of disgusting, then got back into bed.

Then somebody knocked again. Justine got up and looked out the window, expecting to see Lacey's hamper-wagon, but it was not in evidence. The placement of the window revealed only the edge of a blue-rayon-cloaked shoulder blade and a white, shorts-covered buttock. An excellent white buttock, thought Justine. Incomparable. Well, that's just great. Now Justine would have to avoid Lacey in order not to fall in lust with her, muddying further her already well-muddied emotional psychology. And what if she fell in love? That would be devastating.

Justine noticed a car down in the parking lot. A Jeep. A college-guy Jeep. Pink and green neon letters on the back bumper confirmed the vehicle to be the same one that lived on top of the Crammed Shelf parking garage.

A knock again, hard.

Justine grabbed the phone and ran and hid behind the bed. She was going to be killed by a UT football monster who had obviously seen her eyeing his Jeep. She grabbed her scissors, holding them dagger-like over her head.

The college guy's fist hammered at the door.

Justine was about to dial 911 but it was not at all clear how to do so on the complicated hotel-room telephone. So she called the lobby.

“Amy,” Justine hissed. “Someone's trying to get in. Call the police.”

“Who is it?”

“Justine. Moppett.”

“No, I know that, who's at the door?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe a copycat killer,” said Amy, gorgeously excited. “A lot more common than you'd think.”

“Call the cops.”

“We really will have to raise your rate if anything happens to you.”

“Help,” said Justine, dropping the phone, climbing on the bed, and banging on her neighbor's wall.

“Justine?” shouted a voice at the door. “Matt asked me to come by and tell you he's sorry. He's feeling bad about being mean. Don't be shy.”

Justine stopped banging.

“Okay in there?”

Craft supplies and raw materials lay in wrinkled chaos all over the bed and the floor. The Dr Pepper had leaped off the side table onto the bed and was pooling around her feet and between her toes.

“I have to tell you something else, too. Open sesame.”

“I'm glad you're still here,” said Rose. “I figured you might've checked out already.”

Justine and Rose sat on either side of a booth at the diner next door to the Frito. A quick, pleasant waiter named Wart (or at least that's how he was addressed by the outraged-for-obscure-reasons cook) sat down on Rose's side and took their orders for ice waters and cups of coffee and Texas toast and chorizo-potato-egg breakfast tacos. Justine ordered a cold Dr Pepper in a can for herself. She had been so looking forward to the one that, during the short
peril a few moments earlier, had been irreversibly leached by her motel bed.

“Matt's not so bad usually,” said Rose, biting off half of a taco, chewing twice, and swallowing. “But he confessed to me he was kinda mean to you. And that you had never come back.”

Justine stared at the extraordinary creature before her. This was a prank of some kind, or a mistake, or a parallel fantasy universe that would fold over on itself and snap into infinite disappointment at the same instant it convinced Justine of its reality.

“He's just mad because of the last girl I set him up with,” said Rose, vanishing the other half of the taco. “I eat fast, I know, I'm in trouble with everybody for it, especially my aunt Olympe. I'm just hungry. I wait too long to eat, and then overcompensate.”

“I don't mind,” Justine managed to say. She added, in a sort of hemi-sequitur, “I like junk food and candy.”

Justine noticed that Rose had skin a shade or two darker and warmer than that of Sugar Babies. She would have to ask Lacey if she had any left.

“Anyway, in spite of himself I think Matt may have done us a favor,” said Rose, slicing open another taco and flooding it from stem to stern with habanero Tabasco.

The words
us
and
favor
elevated Justine from a state of agitated confusion to one of hopeful agitated confusion. Rose took another big shark bite of taco, and smiled in a Mona Lisa way. Justine recalled that at one time a theory that the real Mona Lisa might have been a man had gained some merit among scholars. She smiled back, rigidly self-conscious about what felt like it must be a whole patty of chorizo stuck to her front teeth.

“I guess we should start at the beginning,” said Rose, using her forearm to squeegee away the table's spreading tide of ice-water-glass condensation. “Because no matter where you start, that
is
the beginning. Right?”

The mystery and improbability of the situation at hand, along with the shape of Rose's nose, were creating in Justine a sexual demand. It—Rose's nose—was regally wide across the bottom, saddling out to a parabolic low that seemed to invite one to roll little orbs of mercury off of it. Justine wished mercury wasn't deadly poison, because it really was sexy stuff.

“Right.”

“Except for a few times when I was little, I never did any matchmaking,” said Rose. “Those really early times all I did was marry bugs to spiders, toys
to toys, weeds to flowers. It wasn't until I was seven that I first felt this weird urge. It was sudden and strong. I guess it's similar to how some seven-year-olds suddenly, desperately need to take ballet or own a lamb, but my urge didn't feel material. It was—and is still—an urge to make whole.”

An obscure thing began racing around inside of Justine that might've been just smittenness but was probably a relay team of lust and need and hope and love and disbelief passing her heart off to one another like a baton. What a raw-bait tiger pit this Rose Balaguer visit was turning out to be. Visitation, more like. She did not seem like the kind of being who paid mere visits. If Rose appears before you, you are either in her grace or in deep trouble.

“Back then there was this grumpy old guy who ran a 7-Eleven in Laredo,” Rose continued. “We called him Ivan, Uncle Ivan, though he wasn't my or Olympe's uncle. One day when I was in the store buying Lik-m-aid with a quarter I'd found, something in my seven-year-old head told me that Uncle Ivan was unwhole, and needed something to make him whole. Something else told me that that thing was Mrs. Ayers, my Sunday-school teacher.”

Rose browbeat Ivan, a then-forty-six-year-old paradigm of the commitment-avoiding male, into going on a pizza-and-rollerskating date with Rose's freshly widowed catechism teacher. En route to the Skatodrome, the couple broke down and had to call Puny's Wreckers to tow their borrowed Volvo to a Swedish-car specialist in Beaumont. The tow-truck driver, one of the violinists in a three-string klezmer act, invited the couple to ride with him on the drive, as long as they didn't interrupt his song composing, a process that he felt creativity most favored when driving his tow truck. During an air-violin arpeggio, Hilyard, the driver, lost control of the wrecker, totaling it and the Volvo, and blamed the collision on Mrs. Ayers, who in turn blamed it on Ivan. This exquisitely rotten date graduated to pure enmity, with both Mrs. Ayers and Uncle Ivan blaming each other, for years, for the date's failure. However, Rose's aunt Olympe blamed the situation not on the fledgling marriage-bawd Rose, but on Rose's grandmother, a self-serving harridan who had tried to awaken the matchmaking talent she felt sure lay dormant in the child.

Not incidentally, it had been Olympe's Volvo the daters had borrowed.

“Come to find out,” continued Rose, “the urge I'd felt was, specifically, the urge to match-make. Many people have it. My grandmother,
her mom, and her grandmother, etc., all were partly controlled by that particular gene.”

Why at this moment Justine began to feel the black suck that only romantic doom can apply, she could not say. The “us” Rose had referred to earlier was not, Justine felt certain, the two persons in this diner booth.

“It wasn't your fault, then,” said Justine, with a conversational steadiness that surprised her. “It's in your genes.”

“That is right,” said Rose, with a spank of indignance. “Matchmakers make matches. We guarantee nothing, and we aren't relationship counselors.”

Rose stood up. She drank the rest of her water, and Justine's water, too. “You done?” she said. Justine nodded.

While Rose was at the register paying the bill, Justine picked up Rose's water glass and licked, inside and out, the place on the rim that had rested on Rose's lips. The immediate shame this lecherous act brought served to clarify the imprecise black sucking Justine had felt earlier. Though still wet and blurry, it was steadily precipitating into something well infused with a loneliness even deeper than the one in New York she'd recently fled. Once, while sitting at a free lecture on medieval tempera-painting techniques at the Morgan Library, Justine had been able to secretly masturbate by sitting in her chair, Indian-style, like now, and slowly rolling the heel of her Cydwoq shoe against her crotch. It had been a pretty damn good orgasm. She very seriously considered doing the same right now. It would take only a moment, given the effect of the mildly habaneroic flavor of the ice-water glass.

“C'mon, Justine,” said Rose after she paid. “Let's go outside. It smells like sheep in here.”

They sat out in the diner parking lot on one of those concrete logs sometimes found at the end of a parking spot. Justine finished her Dr Pepper and casually placed the can down as close as she dared to Rose's complicated, heavily laced soccer shoe. Justine wanted to hook a finger under the hem of Rose's green-silk soccer shorts and lift to see if the skin of her way-upper thigh was the same brown as the rest of her, or if there was a tan line, or what.

“You might be wondering what makes a match between two certain people!” shouted Rose, barely audible above the groaning, split-level roar of the interstate less than twenty yards away. “A good question. Okay: I have a large mental file of people I've met—I never forget a face or a disposition or
a perfume or cologne or favorite book or coffee drink or pet. Or income or job or arrest record or anything else I find out about them.”

Ah. That's why she's here. Duh. Rose was not here for Justine. Not really. She was here in blind agency of her own instinct; she had a match in mind for Justine, who now considered leaping into traffic to die.

“So when I meet somebody new, I run their profile against my database, looking for potentials. I always find at least one. But most never get off the ground, for practical reasons. Can't find someone, they're in jail, or Sweden, or dead. However, if they're in a relationship already, that won't stop me. If I get the bingo feeling, I have to act on it.”

“Bingo?” Justine shouted.

With her traffic death pending, a sudden freedom to think what she wanted, no matter how ugly or depraved, was granted to Justine. The first thing she wondered was whether Rose wore a jockstrap. After all, Justine was still not certain what Rose was, what those shiny soccer shorts concealed. Agh. Why was lust so often attached to pain and death?

“Bingo. Like just when you're playing and waiting for the next number and they call I-20 or whatever and you get a step closer and then G-51 makes your Bingo. It's a thrill covered in suspense and uncertainty—maybe they made a mistake, maybe they really said G-61, maybe you really just fell asleep during
Wheel
and dreamed it all.