My Convenient Life

I married Morgan for his money—I don’t think he knows, but I don’t bring it up. I don’t have to try hard to hide it. He works late, and I don’t think he screws around. He’d be better in bed. Morgan was my brother Tracy’s friend all through high school, and I think by the time he went to college and Tracy started slinging pills from Bernard Street, I’d made it pretty clear that I despised him as yuppie scum. Right up to the time when he inherited. He was twenty-one and I was eighteen and I convinced him at a party to buy me a pair of Mark XIX Desert Eagles, .50AEs. He showed up the next weekend with a pair of Researchers, .44 Magnums Mark VIIs with scopes, Pau Ferro grips, and walnut showcases. Not what I asked for, but at a grand plus per gun, one-fifty for the scopes and two-fifty for the cases, that made twenty-five hundred bucks from the pawnshop where my boy Peter works. Twenty-five hundred closer to Cali. A good deal closer to Morgan, for a while, until Paul bought me a Glock PI 343. Then, unfortunately, my house was robbed and I lost the Mark VIIs. “Maybe the thief pawned them, you might be able to find them again.” He didn’t look, and a month later, Danny bought me a Smith and Wesson Double Action .44. Fifteen hundred between the two of them.

I was figuring I could get established in Cali with ten grand. By the time I was twenty-two I had five or six guys buying me gifts I could pawn, so I didn’t think it would take much more than a year or two to get the money together. But things come up. I started drinking more than I’d been able to afford before, for one thing. Buying clothes, which I pretty much considered a business investment. Then Tracy got jumped for two grand worth of product, and by Christmas at twenty-three I was back down to zero. By then Morgan had started as a manager at his father’s insurance company, and when he bought me a diamond necklace, marriage started to seem like a pretty good idea. So I had Peter make me a glass mock-up, banked it, and told my other guys I’d see them in six months.

Here’s how it works: guys in bars buy drinks for pretty girls, and we give them a conversation, take her to dinner, you probably get a kiss. Flowers, if you’re a tool. Jewelry, perfume. Lingerie gets you laid, but not while I’m wearing it, cause Pete would know. Diamond gets you married, and a nice house keeps you that way. I just break it down into smaller subdivisions and draw the process out. Buy me a dinner, get a kiss. If you bring me something nice, but not something I can hock, I’ll let them take me out drinking and give them a nice cock-tease before they black out. If a guy shows up with whatever I ask for and feeds me he gets a nooner and a nighter a week. I’m like retail for hookers. If I’m feeling closer to Cali, I’ll let him stay the night, bum five bucks in the morning to go down to the 7-11 and get a carton of OJ. Have a smoke, drink some juice, and think about it while I walk. In Cali it’ll be sunny like this every day, or, in Cali, I’ll have to run in the rain like once a year. What city I’ll go to. I’ve checked out craigslist, it looks like I want to go to Venice. Cheapish with a beach. I’ll have a dump of an apartment, and a big piece of beach on the Pacific.

What I really need are handguns.

Peter Mintkesky is a guy I used to sleep with until he got married. He’s a smart guy, and we still get along. He also gives me retail prices on pistols, partially because he’s soft on me, but also because he runs up the prices on lowlifes who think that the receipts and license copies he keeps somehow don’t count in court. He says hopefully they’ll go broke and have to stab each other, but it’s funnier when he says it. He works at Silver Lining over on High Street. I’ve been pushing almost everything through him for the last six months. I tell him I inherited and I’m getting a master’s. The guns were my dad’s. He’ll believe it when I graduate and go to UCLA. Too bad I won’t be able to call.

I’ve gotten five more guns since Morgan gave me those first two. I learned to bring them along slow at the beginning. “Hey, pink-shirt, buy me a gun” doesn’t work. I tried, and according to Tracy I was so wasted that all anyone heard was “gun” and the guy in the pink shirt ended up getting his ass kicked and thrown in the street. Now I describe seeing it, putting my hands on in, checking the clip, aiming it, how heavy it was and what it would feel like when it kicked in my hands. Basically porno. If that doesn’t work I’ll add on something a little different each time. I’ve told two guys a homeless guy tried to rape me, I’ve told one I wanted it to threaten an ex-boyfriend who was stalking me. One that I wanted a .38 special to keep me safe until I had a man like him in my bed to protect me.

The point is to make it sound legitimate when you say “I never wanted a piece this bad before.” Any self-respecting man is going to offer. Nine times out of ten they don’t intend to give it to you. One wiseass bought me a can of pepper spray. So I repeat myself without them realizing it. Passing mention of wanting to wear a warm Derringer on my thigh. The empty bed in a bad apartment, or the big empty house, once I’d moved in with Morgan. Worst that happens, he won’t take the hint and I get a free dinner. Sorry, try again next week. I have no intention of cooking and it’s not like Morgan was home to order food, ever, although that’s changing. Pretty soon I’ll have to just start telling them I’m cheating. Go for older guys, with more money.

I’ve got a legit job, too, at this café. Not Fennario, where you can wear whatever you want and at night they have live music, but a nice enough place. They tried to make me the manager a few months ago, but I turned them down. Told them Morgan and I were planning on having a baby in the next year or so, and then I asked them to cut me back to part time. I don’t hate my job, I just don’t want to spend my whole life there. Just enough to explain why I never need to borrow money off Morgan, and to get out of the house sometimes.

West Chester, is the name of the hive of cafés, car dealerships, restaurants, and strip malls where I grew up. My mom loves it here. Classic colonial, she calls the architecture. Or Neoclassical. I forget the difference. Downtown is all marble pillars and cobblestones, cafes and SUVs, brick walls and pastel shutters. It’s mostly populated by people who work in Philly, but make enough money to drive their Beamer to work in the mornings. Then there’s a university with pretty low standards, which means a good customer base of drunken, drugged up idiots for Tracy to squeeze, though Tracy tells me the yuppies buy more pills than the college kids.

Then there’s everything east of Bernard Street, where Tracy lives. Rowhouses, potholes instead of cobblestones, warehouses and rusted out Chevy Novas, the occasional shooting. The people who live here cut the cobblestones, man the warehouses, wash dishes, pump gas. Tracy’s the only white guy on his block. He moved in there after high school, because he thought the blacks were going to be his best customers. I guess now he just lives over there because he thinks it makes him cool. I almost moved in with him one, right after he wiped out my bank account for the first time. I got married instead.

Morgan and I have been together for five years now, married four and a half, and I’ve got eight grand in an account he doesn’t know about. I could have cleaned him out a long time ago, if I’d wanted to. I know all his PIN numbers and credit cards by heart. Sometimes I feel like it, but you’ve got to have some standards. So I keep a few on the line. I’ve got Mickey, the manager at the Goodyear plant, who just bought me a ruby ring I hocked for two hundred bucks and replaced with a five-dollar bit of costume jewelry. Standard procedure. Then there’s Daniel. I got him to give me the winning lottery ticket I bought him for his birthday. Five grand before taxes, so it’s not actually that much, but when I think of him telling me, “having you is like winning the lottery every day,” I sometimes get a chuckle. He’s such a meathead. This guy Steve, who’s really pretty sweet, got me a cashmere scarf the other day. It only brought in seventy-five bucks, but I like the guy, and I know he broke the bank on a cashmere jacket last fall. He thinks I love the stuff. I tell him it’s too nice to wear out. It’s still sitting in hock, and Peter will let me take it out if I ever need it for a night. Then I’ve also got some minor leaguers to help me cut down on expenses. James works at Tolsdorf, the oil company with the gas tanks out back, and there’s Teddy at the Irish pub who gets me drunk, feeds me, and occasionally palms twenties out of the register to buy us a gram. A couple others, here and there.

They all get what they want, more or less, and I get what I want, and Morgan doesn’t have a clue, so nobody really gets hurt. Except me. I have to live in suburban paradise and slut myself out for trinkets. I wouldn’t mind as much if I had an apartment of my own. Morgan’s place just gets to me. It’s this four bedroom house on a hill over by the hospital, with this real long, winding driveway that he can’t even drive down in reverse. It used to be his parents’ place. We’re the only two living there now, so it always seems empty, even though there’s furniture in every room. Twice a week a maid comes and cleans the whole place, so it always smells like Pine-Sol and dish soap. There’s a huge TV we only use to watch the news and a stainless steel refrigerator that doesn’t even have any condiments in it, let alone actual food. It’s so damn comfortable, every day I have to fight to keep myself from just lying down on the leather sofa and forgetting all about Cali.

One night we’re lying in bed, my hand down the front of his flannel pyjamas, and he turns to me and says. “You love me, don’t you Alex?” He’s got the same face he had in high school. This curly black hair that you can lose your fingers in, big brown eyes and meaty, eager-to-please lips. Sometimes it’s hard to forget that he’s actually a ruthless bastard, because he acts so pathetic around me all the time.

“Sure I do.” I am reciting his credit card numbers in my head. “I’m all yours.” Visa 0024-2230-9741-0836. The first time he asked, I told him I loved him, and I thought I might have meant it. We were sitting in his Benz, and he’d just given me the matching Desert Eagles, but instead of immediately jumping me, he popped a bottle of champagne. We sat there listening to the radio and wishing all kinds of evil on pop princesses, and then he asked me if I loved him. I’d known Morgan for my entire life. The same way I know Tracy. I don’t respect him, don’t even want to be near him most of the time, but I can’t imagine my life without him. So a little drunk on champagne, a little drunk on a thousand bucks and a hundred and thirty-five ounces of steel, I thought I loved him, so I said so. I didn’t know he’d take it so seriously.

“You’re the only one I’ve ever loved.” Mastercard 4532-1126-4576-1110. There is a desperate tone to the words. American Express 9164-7600-7564-2102. Maybe he knows he’s losing me. “I mean, ever since we were kids, I just kinda knew.” I never despised Morgan until he proposed. Even when he bought me those ridiculously expensive killing machines, he had enough money that it wasn’t an obsequious gesture. Actually, the money gave him an aura of unconcern about delivering the unwrapped box that I found quite sexy at the time. Of the dozens of guys I’ve asked for guns, Morgan was the only person who didn’t ask why. I thought he was the one. That idea went south when he proposed a month later, down on one knee with a ring and a speech. As if romance has anything to do with marriage. It was hard to keep the disgust out of my ‘yes’. Either I succeeded, or he didn’t notice.

One of the things he routinely doesn’t notice is his credit card bill. “Do you remember that time…” He’s talking about the time he and Tracy were playing guns in the woods and he came out with this piece of wood stuck in the back of his leg. Apparently I came out and gave him some flowers, marigolds or something like that. I remember him blubbering and bleeding like hell, but I don’t remember anything about any flowers.

He’s repeated this story about a million times, I’m thinking ‘I’ve gotta get the hell out of here’ thinking I’m gonna flip, saying, “marigolds, right?” Visa 0024-2230-9741-0836.

“Nobody ever anything like that for me before.” He leaves this awkward pause after he says that, like he’s weighing his options. He actually has something to say. This is the first time in years. ‘He either wants a divorce, or he’s been cheating on me,’ I think. He looks half-terrified, but also a little bit proud, thinking he slept with someone.

I’m not going to take it personally. I’ve been sleeping with lots of other people, and not exactly saving my best for him. I shouldn’t take it personally.

“I’ve been sleeping with someone else.”

I take it personally. The bastard. He blurts it out just like that. Apologies follow, and self-condemnation, but just for show. Like now that he’s said it, that’s the end of the conversation and we can just go on with our lives. And he’s got this half a smirk, like the fact that he screwed around makes him macho.

“Who?” I say, thinking, ‘let’s stay calm here,’ thinking crush his balls.

“Calm down,” he says. “I can’t tell you who.” Can’t? “But it was just once.” Does he think I don’t know he’s lying? “Okay, okay, four times. But it’s over.” That may be a lie, too, but right now he means it.

“Why?” I am not crying.

“Honey, honey.” He sticks me into his stank armpit. “I don’t know why I did it,” thinking ‘get your hand out of my hair’ but not really thinking at all. This is going too fast. Morgan was cheating on me, and I’ve still got my hand down his pants. He’s saying, “It’s just this town, my job. It just seems like a way to get out. You know? Everything the same every day. I just get so.” He reminds me of someone I used to know, maybe of me.

I slip out from under his arm. I’ve got to get some air. “I’m sleeping on the couch,” I tell him. Mr. Romantic doesn’t mind taking the bed. He starts trying to apologize again, calls me honey and hon and baby. But he doesn’t get out of bed. I want to throw my wedding ring at him, but that would just piss him off, and in the back of my mind I see the advantage in having him feeling guilty.

The whole house is filled with his smell. I suppose I smell the same way. Pine-Sol and dish soap. Despite myself, I’m getting used to it. I can picture myself here in twenty years, still sponging off Morgan’s money, buying trinkets to entertain myself, basically being my mother. It makes me want to retch, I see it so clearly. The kitchen is cavernous, especially in the dark, so big you can’t see one end from the other and you get echoes off your footsteps on the way to the fridge. The moonlight coming in the window looks the way I feel: pale, cold, two-dimensional, laid out on the floor, futilely trying to absorb the local color. The stainless steel sink and the matching refrigerator are unnatural highlights in the big, empty room. I open the fridge, even though I know there’s nothing in there but moldy cheese and mayonnaise.
I realize I am slowly making my way to the garage. Once it hits me I walk straight-away to the back door, open it up, and stand on the doorjamb in my bare feet looking at the cars. Morgan gave me a new car, the same make as his old one, except in bright yellow. He had to get it custom painted. It looks gaudy as hell. I told him I like the color yellow, which I do, but as an abstract. Attaching it to a noisy, exhaust-spewing machine ruins the effect. I kept the Fiesta. it’s out in the driveway gathering more of its natural rust-coloration. I briefly consider getting in and taking off. I can tell I mean to leave for good because I am telling myself it would just be a short drive in the country. But I’m not going to leave without all my stuff.

My cell phone is ringing. I consider not answering. I don’t feel like seeing anyone tonight. But I check the number, in case it’s someone whose company I actually enjoy.

It’s Tracy.

“What’s up, A?” he says, I’m thinking, ‘what’s with the serious tone?’ thinking damn, he needs money.

“Hey T. Haven’t head from you in a while.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, you don’t want to buy some stuff, do you?” Right to the point, sort of. I tell him no. Not that I would mind a pill or a few lines, just that I don’t want it from my big brother. I would only buy something off him if I had nowhere else to go, which is not a problem around here. Drugs and boredom flock to the same towns. I’ll send him some dough, though, later this week.

“Good,” he says when I tell him I’m not interested. He sounds like he means it, too, I’m thinking ‘I hope that’s a good sign,’ thinking sounds like remorse.

We kick it around for a while, and I start thinking about L.A. Maybe it won’t change anything, but it can’t be worse than here. I have no aspirations towards actressing, but then again, why not? I’m a good-looking girl, and acting can’t be any harder than what I’ve been doing. But I’ve been around my mom too long not to recognize a pipe dream when I hear it.

“Maybe we can take off together,” I’m saying. “I’ve got some dough saved up. Put it with what you got…” I don’t actually know how much he’s got. He’s got a car and an apartment to keep up, and slinging is his only job.

“Yeah. Maybe.” He sounds distant. I wonder if he’s on something, thinking ‘of course he is,’ hoping maybe he’s not. He and I are too similar. So f my big brother is going down, how far behind can I be? Then he says, “We’re gonna get out of this hellhole, you and me.” Now I know he’s definitely on something. “I’m thinkin’ about getting out of the game,” he tells me. My brother, the suburban gang-banger. Adopted slang, urban clothes, dumb kids dressed up for a permanent Halloween. They’re all over this town, like the high school is a factory, pumping out wannabe hoods. “Mostly I just want to get out of West Chester, y’know?” A little more inanity, then click. I’m left in the cavernous kitchen.

I really would take Tracy with me, that isn’t just idle talk. But I know how it would work. I’ve seen too many guys get strung out to think he wouldn’t steal off of me. No matter how much money he has saved up, it’ll disappear eventually, then so will he and my purse. I don’t hold it against him, but I keep it in mind. Plus it would cost twice as much to get the both of us out there, and I plan on being gone by November, before it gets cold.

I briefly consider going out to McFadden’s for a couple pints, but decide the buzz doesn’t merit the hassle of dealing with drunk girls trying to relive old times and Tracy’s skeezy friends drooling on my neck. Besides, they’d never let me in with a sweater and jeans on. Around here they like you to dress up to catch a buzz. I flip around the T.V. for a while, listening to Morgan snoring upstairs.

When Tracy started to get strung out I drove down to the city to see Morgan, to get him to do something. They were supposed to be best friend. This is when Morgan was a sophomore at Drexel, and I was sixteen, taking my first trip out of town in the Fiesta. When I got down there he was with some guys from his fraternity, playing Xbox and drinking at two in the afternoon. He lived half an hour from West Chester, but it turned out that he hadn’t seen Tracy in almost a year. I got the feeling he knew what was going on with Tracy and had just written him off as a loser. He wouldn’t even talk to me until I took off my hoodie and he saw that I had tits. Then he called me all grown up and tried to get me into his room. I didn’t go, and he never went to see Tracy. Now they live in the same town, and they still don’t talk. Tracy didn’t come to the wedding, and I don’t expect he’ll ever set foot in Morgan’s house, despite the fact that he came over here every day when he was a kid. I invited him for a swim once, but he never showed. One time a few years ago I got Morgan to agree to give Tracy a job. Tracy laughed harder than I’d heard him laugh since high school, then he hung up on me and I didn’t hear from him until tonight.

Around midnight the phone rings, and I grab it on the first ring, by instinct. It could be anybody, but in the time it takes to get the phone to my ear, I know it’s Tracy.

“Hello?”

“Hey A.” I should have guessed he was calling for money. I knew he called for a reason. He just punked out.

“What’s up?”

“I need five grand.”

“Five grand? Jesus, Tracy, what ever happened to ‘lemme borrow five bucks?’” Five grand is more than half what I’ve got. It’s five Desert Eagles. It’s a year as a whore, a year of trying to reconcile with Morgan, a year watching my mother fawn over me while on the other side of town her son and my brother rots from the inside out. He’s going down, and he’s going to bring me with him. “You know you’re getting strung out, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So what the hell?”

“This weekend we all…” Him and Jared and Marco blew all their coke, ate all their E, smoked a pound up, who knows. I’m not listening because I don’t need to. “I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate.” For some reason I start thinking about Venice. Venice, Italy, that is, not California. Morgan took me there in July. It was stinking hot. The streets smelled like sewage and the famous canals were full of garbage and coated in this brown foam like spit after drinking too much coffee. They say the whole city is sinking into the ocean, and there are houses that are only held up because they’re floating on these giant pontoons.

“Fine,” I tell him. “You owe me a pill.” And I hang up. I can’t believe I’m going to help him. But deep down I know I’m better off than he is. Way better off. I can trade on my looks and it’s perfectly legal. If somebody rips me off for a couple guns I got as a present, I can go to the cops, call the insurance company, and probably get more cash out of the deal than I would have otherwise. People will help me. Nobody is going out of their way to help a strung-out gangbanger. Nobody except his stupid sister.

But now I’ve got another year to deal with. I’ve got Morgan upstairs, snoring away, the cheating bastard. I thought he told me everything. He unloads so much garbage on me, how could there be any more? I wonder who it was that he was afraid to tell me. A guy, maybe. Someone I know, is more likely. But all the people we both know are strangers to me anyways, so I don’t see what he thinks he’s protecting me from.

I go and look out the window. The moonlight gets into my wedding band, but it doesn’t bleach the color all the way out. This little metal reminder that I am owned. I take it off, stick it in my pocket, and decide I’ve forgiven Morgan. Alright, so we’re both pretty screwed up. Bored as hell, like everybody else around here, except maybe my mother. I’m not going to blame him for that. If anything, it makes me feel a little closer to him. Maybe I should invite him to California. I wouldn’t have to pay that way. I could give Tracy the five grand and blow town with Morgan. Even better, we could keep going down to Mexico, convert all our dollars to pesos and buy a shack by the sea, make souvenirs out of driftwood, teach our children to string beads and pick pockets.

So his father’s company is here. The money is here. And Morgan without the money is just another schmuck who says he loves me, when he doesn’t have any more idea of what that means than I do. This has to be true, because, frankly, there’s not much in me to love. All my beauty is on the outside. Giving money to Tracy, I guess that counts as beautiful, or even as love, seeing as how I don’t stand to get anything out of it. Maybe that is love. Voluntarily debilitating yourself to help out a loser who is never going to be able to make it on his own.
Is that what Morgan does for me?

‘Screw it,’ I think, thinking it’s already screwed, and I go out for a few pints. My life isn’t so bad. It’s not as if I don’t have options. I could drive my Benz to the bar, or the Fiesta to California. I could get drunk, or I could stop by Tracy’s and get some uppers. I could go back inside and fall into the leather sofa and never get up. If I’d kept any of my guns, I could blow myself away. Or Morgan. No, I should probably just divorce him before I leave. I’ve got another year to get that straightened out, it seems. He has taken pretty good care of me. I shouldn’t just leave him high and dry. I’m not going to rob him, or shoot him in his sleep.

I sit in the driveway working the gearshift. First, second, third, fourth, fifth, fourth, third, second, first. The Fiesta starts up on the third try. Reverse. I whip around the turns and into the cul-de-sac. The brake lights turn the neighbor’s mailbox red as a murder weapon. In neutral the car rolls forward, so I put on the emergency brake, then I roll down my window and lean across to roll down the passenger side window. It’s early September, just starting to get cool at night. The fresh air smells so good, I get out of the car and sit on the curb looking at the stars. They’re a bit bleached out by the lights from the hospital parking lot, but if I turn around I can see them just fine. I wish I knew the names of some constellations. People have tried to show them to me, but I just don’t see anything up there. People always talk about the stars being linked to destiny, too. Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in destiny. Or maybe I’m one of those people who doesn’t have one. Up until now, I’ve found that to be pretty convenient. It means I can do whatever I want.

Being out of the house is good. Maybe I should get a job. An actual job, that is. Not pouring coffee and sweeping cigarette butts of the street, and not picking up and stringing along idiots. Something I can actually dedicate myself to. The problem is, I can’t think of a damn thing I care about that much, except getting out of town.

First, second, third, first and I’m heading towards 202. Then I’m getting onto 95 South. This road runs all the way from Maine to Florida. I could be in Miami in about twenty-four hours, with a sufficient dose of uppers. At this time of night the roads are empty, just a few tail lights up ahead and a single pair of headlights in the rearview. The Fiesta can’t get much over sixty-five without a considerable amount of coaxing. Really, it’s not fit for a road trip. But my Benz is in Morgan’s name, so technically he could call the cops on me. He’d do it, too. Cut me out of his life, the same way he did with Tracy. He said he loves me, you’re the only one I’ve ever loved, but that’s just guilt. Once he realized I’d ditched him, he would cut me out. Gone. He’d have me arrested for grand theft auto, do all the paperwork for the divorce, and that would be the last I’d hear of him, even if I stayed in West Chester. Maybe I’d run into him once, if I went to one of the posh bars, but he’d pretend he didn’t see me, and I’d give him the finger, but only behind his back. Still, he was feeling pretty low tonight. I could tell that he didn’t like the idea of cheating on me. Maybe he really does love me. It’s hard to say.

While I’m trying to decide what to do, I drive through Delaware and into Maryland. The stars are much clearer out here. I pass over the Susquehanna, a huge black swath sprinkled with stars, and I stop at a rest stop about ten miles from there. The parking lot is deserted except for a few eighteen-wheelers off in one corner. There are picnic tables scattered under the trees, and a few vending machines next to cement buildings for the bathrooms. On one of the walls there’s a huge map of Maryland. The ‘you are here’ arrow tells me I’m still in the north half of the state. The air seems a little warmer, but the trees smell just like home. Morgan’s home, that is. Where he’s probably sleeping, with no idea that I’m in Maryland.

What am I doing in Maryland? What would I do in California, for that matter? I just picked it because it was the farthest place from West Chester that I could imagine going. I don’t want to be an actress. Sure, I’d make friends there, get a job, probably a lot like the job I have now. But not too much would change. There wouldn’t be any winter. No summer, either, just the same day over and over again. I’d get older, probably get remarried. I’d come home for my parents’ funerals. Or for Tracy’s.

A trucker coming out of the bathroom spots me and saunters over, runs his hand over the hood, leans up against the door. “What are you doing out here?” like he’s concerned. He’s young, got a southern accent and nice legs. He kind of reminds me of Peter.

“Just sitting.”

“Want someone to sit with?”

“No.”

“In the mood for a little fun?” I shrug. “I could make it worth your while.”

“Like how?”

“You mean besides the sheer pleasure?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

“I dunno. Cash, maybe. I got a hundred bucks in my wallet.”

A hundred bucks. Nothing. “Got any guns?”

“Guns? No ma’am.”

“Forget it then.”

“I mean, I’ve got my shotgun, for protection, like.”

“What kind?” I only get retail on handguns.

“What kind? Well, it’s a Winchester.”

“Which one? I bet you’re a hunter. You got a twenty-two or something?” He’s wearing a camouflage hat with a picture of a fish on it.

“Twenty-two? I’ve got the Select.”

“Select Platinum?”

“That’s the one,” he grins.

“Field or Sporting.”

“Well, I mostly hunt ducks and pheasants, so I got the field.”

“You got a cigarette?”

“Sure,” he says, takes them out of the front pocket of his denim shirt, lights me up and one for himself. In the light from the flame I can see he’s pretty handsome. Not like Morgan or anything, but he’s in good shape. Doesn’t seem dangerous, just lonely. I work the gearshift a bit, until he notices it and starts giving me the eye. “So is that a yes?”

“I’m thinking about it.” But what I’m thinking about is Tracy. Sure, I’d mail him the five grand when I got out west. But what about the next five? How long would it be before the cops found him out in the woods all full of bullets and half-eaten by coyotes? I’ll take this year to clean him up, and then I’ll go. But not to California. I’ll go to Mexico, or farther. I’ll stop drinking, start eating at home, and I’ll save the money I make at the café, take it to Mexico and live like a queen. I’ll drink tequila on the beach, get tan and not even so much as talk to a man for years and years, except my brother. I’ll get a proper divorce from Morgan, he’ll understand, and me and Tracy will drive south and west until we get to a place where nobody speaks any English. I know how to say cerveza, tequila, leche, pan. I’ll learn the words for unleaded, beach, I don’t speak Spanish. I won’t learn the word for gun. There are a lot of words I won’t learn, and there will be a whole lot of things people won’t be able to say to me.

“Whatddya say?” he flicks his half-smoked cigarette into the grass. I have another drag of mine.

“I’ll do it for the gun,” I tell him.

“My gun? Lady, that gun cost me two grand.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“You’re crazy,” he tells me. Like I don’t know that.

“Thanks for the smoke.” I drive off with his cigarette, and he motions for me to turn on my headlights.

When I get back to town, I stop off at the grocery store. I buy a couple frozen pizzas, two bags of frozen peas, two cans of corn, a tub of potato salad and a pre-roasted chicken. I buy mustard, ketchup, horseradish, and a new jar of mayo. Some packets that say you can stir them in with water and make all sorts of sauces for pasta. The lady who rings me up asks me why I’m smiling, but I don’t really know. I tell her I forgot my credit card, ask if I can just give her the number. She says that’s fine, she recognizes me. I’m Morgan VanSandt’s wife. I tell her nevermind, I’ll pay with cash. I’ve got plenty. When I get over to Tracy’s, I’ll write him the check for the five-thousand, plus another five-hundred for rent. I’ll cook us some pasta, we’ll get drunk and I’ll convince him to give me his stash. Then next time he goes out I’ll find the rest of it, and I’ll do the selling from then on, he can work at the café, and next November we’ll get out of town. Maybe later, if we can both kick our habits.

Buried in Pillows

They were on a cruise to Bermuda when Jeanne killed herself. Tom knew she must have decided on it earlier, because she brought her entire supply of pills. The ones from the medicine cabinet, and from the linen closet, and the ones she kept hidden in the hollow space in the wall in the basement, behind the photo of her grandfather in his army uniform. She told Tom she had a headache and that he should go on to the captain’s dinner by himself, without her. That was the night they served lobster. That was actually half of the reason he’d wanted to go on the cruise. A stupid reason, he’d figured, but why the hell not? Jeanne needed sunshine and a break from teaching. So he’d booked a second-class cabin and he’d given her the tickets for her birthday, along with the print of Renoir’s Boating Party, which she said she’d always wanted.

She’d been talking about suicide for over a year. Sometimes he would come home and look all over for her, and after he looked in her office, their bedroom, the living room sofa, and the bathroom, he would find her in the guest bedroom, lying on the couch, buried in pillows. She’d have tears in the hollow of the bridge of her nose, pale skin almost iridescent there, as if her sorrow had fled with all of the livelihood in her and squandered it on worthless and misleading beauty. Then he would lie down on top of her and she would sob into his armpit and say that she didn’t want to live anymore. The first time he called her parents. They said she should be in therapy. He took her, and they gave her the antidepressants and they worked for a while. Then he came home from Christmas shopping one day, and she was in the guest bedroom. For a few months they upped her dosages, switched medications, slotted her in for more and longer counseling sessions. Everything would be fine for a few months or a year, and then he’d come home and she’d be buried in pillows. She said she was a waste of a life. Waking up in the morning was too much for her. Every time a car passed, she wanted it to hit her, and in her daydreams it would swerve out of control and crush her head open on the pavement, so it wouldn’t be her fault.

This wasn’t easy on Tom, but he tried to stay positive. “You have good days,” he’d tell her. “Sometimes we’re happy.”

“But it never lasts,” she’d say. “I’m not normal. And the worst thing is that I walk around the streets and see everyone else living whole, full lives, and I can smile and they think I’m like them.” But actually she was fractured, missing a big piece of herself. She said her students thought she was happy, maybe even a bit ditsy. Tom could see how someone could think that, if they hadn’t known her as a teenager. “They turn in their poems just so full of pathos, and rue, and regret, and I talk to them and they’re going home to see their parents for the weekend, or going off to meet their boyfriend or feed their cat or to a frat party or a concert or something.” But Jeanne would stay in the darkened classroom, unable to write because she could feel nothing. “I don’t care about anything,” she’d always said.

“What about me?”

“I don’t care about you. I only want to die.”

Tom was kind, generous, patient, all of the things a husband should be. But he was also an optimist. In his world, things were always going to work themselves out. In hers, things tended towards chaos. After a few months without any of her usual indicators—loss of interest in everyday affairs, secrecy, unexplained tears, clinical discussion of death, detachment from friends—he would think everything had worked itself out.

Instead, he came back to the cabin with a stomach full of lobster and he found Jeanne on the bathroom floor with her nightgown pulled up around her waist. He pulled it down and hunted for a pulse or a breath, rolled her on her side. The recovery position, his pamphlet had called it. Started towards the door and ran back to Jeanne. Back to the door until she’d almost disappeared from sight, stopped and started, cursed by indecision. Then he fled down the corridor, heading back up the stairs towards the deck. On deck he found cool air and some kid wearing the absurd sort of sailor’s uniform he’d only ever seen worn by infants. He had ginger hair and a pimple tucked into the folded skin beside his mouth, a bored expression on his face as he smoked a cigarette, staring idly over the black ocean.

“Can I help you with something, man?” the kid asked.

Jeanne would have taken the pills as soon as he’d left earlier that evening. She’d told him how she would do it—a razorblade was the surest way, up the entire length of the forearm. Pills were unreliable, antidepressants especially. They could take hours, she’d said, but you still had to take them slowly, and on a full stomach. She’d had two bagels and a bowl of cereal for breakfast, pasta salad, tuna steak and two baked potatoes for lunch. More than she’d eaten in weeks, more than he’d ever seen her eat. There’d been a bottle of rum between her legs.

“No,” he told the kid. “I don’t need any help.”

Instead he went to the top deck of the bow. There was a young couple there, sharing a cigarette of their own, laughing about something. He went to the stern where there was no one and he sat down to cry. There was nothing. How could he feel anything without Jeanne? Tom laid down. There were stars, same as they’d been an hour ago when he’d stepped out for some air. The boat still battered through the waves, headed for some island in the middle of the sea. So many things had stayed the same.

After he’d calmed down he went back to her. Picked her up and laid her on the bed, then, instead, propped her up against the headboard, pillows behind her back like she was up late reading. One pillow laid vertically, one horizontal. Only her mouth refused to stay closed. He arranged her nightgown again, buttoned the top button for decency’s sake.

“What will the children think?” he kidded. They didn’t have any children, though he’d always wanted them. “I’m not going to pass on these genes,” she’d said. That was how those discussions eventually ended.

“You were right,” said Tom. “At least this way you only ruined my life.” For a minute he thought he was going to cry. Then he got angry, so angry he wanted to hit her. Then he realized that she was dead. He reached back and hit her as hard as he could, and her nose snapped like a celery stalk. “Oh god,” he said, one hand pulling back the other’s blow. “I’m so sorry.” There was no blood. Her heart had stopped beating hours ago. Her face was pale, her mouth open, her nose now flat, pushed over against her left cheekbone. He shifted it back, ground it in into place with the balls of his hands, the splinters of cartilage crunching as he forced them flat. He adjusted her nightgown again, then let her hair down. Chestnut hair, auburn highlights, the one feature she like about herself, she’d spend hours vacantly brushing it over one shoulder, then the other.

“Remember when we went to the Jersey shore? We rented that piece of shit house on the end of the boardwalk where those crackheads fought outside our window all night, so we had to sleep on the beach? It’s like that outside tonight. So cold, you would have loved it. You always felt good when it was cold outside. Remember in high school when you had to stay at my house because of the snow? You got snowed in. And I waited on the couch downstairs until one in the morning. That was the first night I ever slept next to you. I never wanted to sleep anywhere else.” Tom pulled the blanket up to her waist, ran his hand over her stomach, unbuttoned the top button of her nightgown. He’d never told her, but sometimes while she cried into his armpit he would look down the front of her shirt. “Remember after junior prom? Wow.” He pressed himself up against her, looking for the heat still lingering in the parts of her tucked away from the open air, crawling on top of her, tongue searching for the heat in her mouth.

No response, and his passion faded, and he laid his head in the crook of her neck. “Do you want to go outside? Fresh air? We’re in the middle of nowhere, fresh as it gets. Come on,” he said, and hefted her up, with one hand laying her arms around his neck. He carried her out to the deck, then to the bow where he’d seen the couple sharing the cigarette. They were still there. “Evening!” he called to them, and they laughed and waved.

“I wish my husband would give me a lift!” the woman yelled back.

“Bit too much to drink!” Tom said, and laid Jeanne down on a deck chair, crossed her legs and kissed her forehead, left her hands in her lap and then sat down with her, laying her legs over his thighs. The couple came over, staggering a bit, a burning ember passing from his hand to hers. “It’s okay,” Tom told them, “she sleeps like a rock when she’s drunk.”

“I wish I could say the same about Carlo,” she said. “He sleeps like a rock, but I’ve never heard a rock snore so loud.”

“I lucked out there,” Tom laughed. “I’m the snorer in this marriage.”

The couple introduced themselves as Carlo and Carrie, and asked if Jeanne might wake up for one more drink. They were both dressed for the captain’s dinner in more elegant clothes than Tom and Jeanne could have afforded. While they talked they shared cigarettes, but smoked twice as much, one stubbing out a butt as the other lit one up.

“Mind if I bum one of those?” Tom asked. He took a few drags, and with the cigarette hand nudged his wife. “Love? Love? Lover? Cigarette?” Then he chuckled, shrugged his shoulders, and let the cigarette burn between his fingers as he chatted to the couple. They’d been married just three years, but treated each other with a familiarity as easy and as rare as the passing of a cigarette. Carrie was in graduate school and Villanova, working as a counselor for abused children. Carlo consulted for a big IT firm in Center City. “Jeanne is a poet,” Tom bragged. “Teaches at Penn. Her fourth book is coming out in the fall.” Carrie wrote down Jeanne’s name, said she’d look for her work on Amazon.

“How are you liking the cruise?” Carlo asked.

“Great,” Tom answered. “Just great. Well, Jeanne wanted to go to Africa this summer. I kind of talked her into the cruise instead. But, you know, we’re having fun.” Jeanne had said that when there was nothing left for her at home, she would try one last time to make a life in Africa. Tom hadn’t wanted to go, and in the end she’d decided that she couldn’t leave him that way. He pictured her alive, before a red sun setting over red earth, wearing boots with dust to the ankles, talking in French to a swarm of children, handing out food and medicine to a long line of women in the early morning. She wasn’t smiling, and she was alone, but she was alive.

The young couple talked for a while about the safari they’d gone on with some of their friends the year before. They said they’d really wanted to get out of the Range Rover and see some of Africa. They hoped to go back. Maybe they’d see Jeanne and Tom there.

Tom fell into his thoughts and eventually the couple left, arms around each others’ waists, blowing smoke into the wind. “They were sweet,” Tom told his wife. “I know, you think they were idiots, but they weren’t. I liked them.” He kissed her forehead. “I’m glad you can see it my way. Come on, let’s dance a bit.” He picked her up under her armpits, draped her arms over his shoulders and slowly began to turn a waltz. They’d taken dance classes the summer before last, at his insistence. Neither of them had been able to dance a proper salsa, so they’d gotten a voucher for ballroom classes and attended three of them before Jeanne had opted out, citing exhaustion. But she danced beautifully beneath the stars, wan moonlight turning in her skin with the nascent glow of a pearl, her body obliging, following his lead as they worked their way around the deck.

“I need a rest,” he told her, leaning both of them against the railing. Then he took a deep breath and confessed, “I know I don’t tell you enough, but I still love you very, very much. I mean, I guess I always think that you should just know, you know? I should tell you more. I really should. The past few months have been hard. I know that. But you could have told me you were thinking about it again. We could have gone to Africa. You said you wanted to go before you died, and now you’re dead, and I’m alone, and what am I supposed to do?”

Tom looked out over the railing. The moon was laid out on the black water like a cadaver waiting for dissection. He tried to imagine himself, a long time in the future, married to someone else, having kids with this person he’d not yet met, forgetting about Jeanne. That’s what she would have wanted. For him to meet this hypothetical stranger, fall in love, have children that were half Tom, half some woman he didn’t even know. Oh, of course it was possible, Tom admitted. Really it was Jeanne’s way of avoiding the fact that she was contemplating murdering a large part of him along with herself.

“You always did want the impossible, didn’t you, love? Remember how you used to tell me that you’d have been fine if people would just treat each other decently?” He tried to chuckle ironically, but sounded as if he was being strangled. Her head bobbed, eyes fixed down on the sea, constantly rushing away. “Well, that’s never going to happen. Just like you thought your parents would come and save you every time you were depressed, but you never called them. I had to call them. And you would hide it from me, just to see if I would be able to figure it out in time to save you. I can’t read your mind, Jeanne. Look, I don’t mean to yell, but damnit, Jeanne. Why didn’t you think of me for once?”

Tom’s knuckles turned white around the railing, and for a moment he considered shoving her overboard. She’d disappear into the black, sink even further out of existence. Instead he sat her down again, crossed her legs at the ankles and briefly rubbed her feet. “You’re cold, love. Feels good, doesn’t it?” Beneath his hands, the muscles of her legs were hardening. His hands, calloused and accustomed to working wood, covered the length of her right leg as if he were planning on making something of it, drawing new life out of a dead thing.

“Let me tell you what we’re going to do, Jeanne. In the morning we’re going to land in Bermuda, in a town called Hamilton. When we get there, everybody’s going to want to rush off the ship, so we’ll hang back, have a couple drinks by the pool while it’s empty. I know you hate the pool when it’s full of screaming kids. So we’ll sit there for a while and get good and drunk, and then we’ll head into town. Maybe we’ll get something to eat, if we walk by someplace that looks good. Maybe we’ll have a bit more rum, and I’ll buy a Cuban cigar for later. Then we’ll rent a couple of mopeds, and we’ll drive off into the island. We’ll go from beach to beach, we’ll swim, we’ll get you tan all over, and if people show up we’ll just get on our bikes and move down the coast, all day long. At night we can sleep on the beach, if it’s not too cold. Just like in Jersey. There will be pink sand and turquoise water, and we’ll stay drunk the whole time. We’ll make love in the water, on the beach, in the bathroom of the restaurant. And if we get caught, who cares? We’ll just get on our bikes and go, find another beach and curl up there and just watch the sun move across the sky. Nothing to read, no iPod. Just you and me. Sound good?”

By this time, Tom was starting to shiver. It was past midnight, the quarter moon straight overhead, like a hangnail waiting to be torn from the skin of the night. “When we get home, you’re going to write about our vacation, and your poems aren’t going to win a single award, because they’re going to be too full of joy. What was that word? Complacent. They’re going to be complacent as hell, Jeanne. No one is going to admire your suffering at all, or think it was romantic or any of that crap. You’re going to sit down at the desk I made for you, and you’re going to write about how much I love you, and how easy it is to be happy. Worst poems you’ve ever written, that’s what your agent will say. But he’ll sell them anyways, and some editor will pick them up because he knows your name, and you know what’s going to happen? People are going to read them. It will be just like you wanted. People will put down the newspaper, they’ll stop buying tabloids and war novels and they’ll start reading poetry again. They’ll turn off the TV and they’ll read about how we rode around from beach to beach, because you’ll make them feel how clean the air is, and how the sun feels when you’re naked and your husband’s rubbed your skin with lotion. Everyone will read it, and it will be like you gave them a little vacation. For a little while they’ll be happy. Right? Oh, I know it won’t last. It never lasts, Jeanne. That’s just an excuse to take another vacation, and write another book.”

Jeanne’s body shifted slightly with the rolling of the ship. Clouds passed over the moon as the wind began to blow, at first wisps of silver, then deep and rolling grey, and by the time the rain began to pound down on the deck the sky had gone completely black, except for the occasional stab of lightning which colored them both electric white. Wind tore like furious hands through the lounge chairs, slamming them against the rails and walls, pulling Jeanne’s nightgown open. Tom moved next to her, arranged the silk against her soaking chest.

“Incredible!” He had to shout for her to hear him. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” He knew for a fact that she hadn’t. Jeanne had loved storms of any kind, the fiercer the better. “Watch this!” he yelled, euphoric beneath the destructive hands of nature, and he picked up a deck chair, tossed it straight into the air where the wind took it, hurled it overboard, fifty feet away from the ship. He laughed, turned into the wind and tried to walk, pitched forward and struggling for steps. “Jeanne! Come try this!” Her body rolled and her wet hair blew out to the side, her nightgown clinging and clear as plastic wrap, her pale skin showing through like a second moon.

Finally it was too loud for her to hear. Tom went over to her and picked her up, turned her to face the bow. Her hair whipped back into his face, but he stayed, letting her absorb the storm. He knew she’d be feeding off of it, storing up lines like bolts of lightning to illuminate the night. He propped her up against the wind, making no effort to protect her from the rain. That was how she liked it.

The storm settled into a steady rain, then a drizzle, then it was gone. The moon crawled into the beads of water hanging in her eyelashes, beautiful as the tears she’d tried to bury in the pillows. Sometimes those tears had fallen as words, like letters falling as fingers on a keyboard, a patter of rain. But the words and the tears were gone, and the rain he wiped from her lashes. The sea flattened out to all its hundred horizons, and Jeanne’s face glowed. It was almost time to go.

He warmed her cold lips, cold bodies pressed together. Her hair had worked itself into wet clumps, which Tom tried to coax apart arching back to get a clear look. Finally he pulled the whole mess back into a ponytail, the way she wore it when she was writing or jogging. She looked like she’d just come back from a run, what she would have called a wet one, a jog in the rain. “Good one, love? You look happy.” He was proud that his wife kept herself so trim, though he knew a lot of that was due to anxiety.

He stood her up a bit straighter, then he climbed over the railing with Jeanne dangling at the waist beside him. “Let’s get in the water.” He couldn’t get a hold of her by the nightgown. He had to seize her by the hips and roll her onto the railing in front of him. He would have preferred to stand her up beside him so they could both go upright into the sea, but her weight and the lack of a foothold made that impossible. So he held onto her as he let himself fall.

It went on forever. The lights from the passing portholes blinked in her hair, but otherwise Tom saw only the stars, fixed in space. He could hear the wind as if the storm had grown again, feel the pressure of the air pushing against his back coaxing him upright, fingers of air stroking the nape of his neck. He closed his eyes and pretended it was Jeanne. They were in a convertible, driving around the back roads out by Lancaster. He was speeding and she was egging him on. “Faster. Come on, Tom, you girl, let’s go!” His heart rose into his mouth, blocking his breath. His body loosened, as if he’d grown accustomed to the feel of falling. With Jeanne beside him, it was almost like flying.

Then they smashed into the sea. His legs hit early and were wrenched upwards, Jeanne’s head crashing into his chest and his own snapping forward, sending a shock down his spine and into his fingers and toes. For a minute he thought he was paralyzed, but then his feet began to kick and one arm to claw for the surface, the other searching the silence for Jeanne. He struck her nose again, caught her by the hair and dragged her in the direction he thought was up. He kept pulling, kicking until he was sure that he’d been turned around. He was swimming down, away from the surface. He had no breath left. He stopped kicking, let his heart stop its furious pounding, and he readied his lungs to breathe water, like they had before he was born. As he waited, Jeanne’s body passed in front of his eyes, rising on the air still trapped in her lungs. Floating upwards. Part of him wanted to ignore her, let himself drown in the perfect silence. But the stronger part reached out through his hands and grabbed her, started fighting again for the surface.

He’d only been three feet from the air. “Thank you, love,” he gasped. “You saved my life.” He turned her over onto her back. Hair clung like seaweed to her face, and he cleared it off to kiss her. No response. He floated beside her, now looking out over the ocean. They were alone in the black. The sea had suddenly become much more real, no longer the endless expanse over which the ship passed, but now a world like a second sky, a taste on their lips and a burning in their eyes. It almost surprised him, that the sea wasn’t flat. At this level the surface was pulled and rippled with wind, and the gentle roll of swells which wouldn’t become waves for another hundred miles. In the back of his mind, the droning of the ship’s engines. Tom paddled them around to watch it moving away. He hadn’t realized that it gave off so much light. The sky around it was misty, the sea speckled with white. Already it was distant. As small as the moon, he could only dimly hear the engines over the water lapping against his chest. “Look Jeanne. Didn’t it seem so big? It’s just a tiny little thing.” It kept shrinking, to the size of a light bulb, to the size of a firefly, until it reached a size no bigger than another star sitting directly upon the horizon. And there it stayed, another star with nothing to say to anyone.

Then it was just Tom and Jeanne, floating in the stars and the sea, alone in beautiful limbo. They drifted for a time, until Tom broke the silence. “Most men don’t say this to their wives, but I wish you would talk more.” He splashed her a bit, instinctively reached out to catch the drops rolling over her cheeks, wiped them away with a sigh. “We’ll probably stay afloat like this for hours. I guess we’ll just fall asleep eventually. Not so bad. Unless sharks get us. They’re night feeders, you know.” He laughed. “Shh, it’s okay, I was kidding. We’re too far north for sharks, I think.” He wanted to joke that he’d feed her to them first, because she was all full of sedatives, but he was afraid of hurting her feelings.

The drifting went on for hours. Tom would lapse into little catnaps, until water touched his lips. The first time he bolted upright, afraid he’d let Jeanne slip. Each time after he woke more languorously, her hand still safe in his hand. Once he woke to the sound of a distant foghorn. There were black, glistening islands rising and falling in the water, dozens of them. “Jeanne, wake up. Whales!” They were all around, no more than twenty feet in any direction, rolling, glistening hills big enough to stand on. The sound rose and fell, pitch deep enough to reach into his ribcage. “They’re singing, Jeanne. They’re singing for you. Look how many. What a big family. Like a whole town.” Up and down, pressurized geysers of air and water from their blowholes, followed by a great sucking of air, monsters breathing, rolling together through the night.

“Amazing. I’m glad we could see that together, love. And the storm. What an incredible night.” Tom let his legs float up and drew Jeanne’s body beside him, closed his eyes to rest. The water was warmer than the air. “It’s so quiet, Jeanne. Just the way you like it. Are you happy? Good. I’m glad.” He held her tighter, opened his eyes. So much emptiness around, sea and sky and stars so close, so far. Jeanne like an anchor by his side. No fear, no emptiness inside. He would float with her into forever, carried on the palm of the warm sea into a night that would last until the end of time. “That night we were snowed in, I wanted to sleep next to you forever.” He looked over at Jeanne. Her dark hair floating around her, face still and smooth, her eyes full of moon. She had started to pull lightly against his hand, burrowing into her pillows, drifting down, down. It was almost time to go. “Goodnight, Jeanne.” He kissed her once more, and now the tears came. He pressed his face to her face to share them, a final kiss, and then he let her go. “Sleep well, my love.” She sunk, and he floated on towards a separate death, his tears flowing into the sea.

On the horizon, unseen, a firefly was returning.