Jane is sitting in a motel room with her legs hanging over the bed. The man who's nearly a stranger sleeps, his face to the wall. She sees yellow carpet, his shoes under the table,
one white sock, and her own fancy underwear.
Outside, the sun is coming up.
Last night is mostly black now, gone to her, but there are things she remembers. Like his name. She remembers twisting on the barstool, facing him, and lifting her eyes. "Jones?"
"Yes," he had said, almost apologetically. "It's a last name, I know, but it's my first name."
"Nice. I like that. Jones," she said, moving a piece of hair behind her ear. She was getting to that familiar, liquor-induced place where suddenly she felt more attractive and sensual, where sex was imminent, and simple things like a man's first name teased and interested her. "Jones," she said again.
She remembers, too, their last drink, something short and creamy and sweet. He ordered it without asking her; it was his first assumption, that she liked sweet drinks. She hated them, in fact, but swallowed the frothy things down appreciatively, smiling. She remembers the white freckle of whipped cream on his bottom lip, how his tongue dashed out to get it and quickly went back inside his mouth.
After that drink everything went black, became lost in Jane's
head, sat somewhere inside her with other too-drunk evenings and unbearable events
from the past. She doesn't remember the two of them, after an hour's search,
finally finding a motel that wasn't fully occupied. And she doesn't remember
the vacancy sign, the V gone, leaving the word ACANCY in neon red letters, how
she
found
the word funny, so funny that she laughed out loud, tossed to one side, and hit
her head on his car window. "Acancy," she said to him, not even slurring.
Now she rubs her head, wondering what she hit and when.
Jane is most comfortable after shots of tequila, and if it weren't for deadly
diseases, she would sleep with strangers more often. Unlike most women she knows,
evenings with men she's only just met do not frighten her. And mornings are interesting.
She likes to watch them drink their coffee — one of them
"The
least attractive of you can go out and get sex any time you want."
squirming, one of them guilty, twirling the ring on his finger — another proud, beaming with his bad skin or soft belly, lifting his coffee cup high. The ones who invite her to eggs and toast would probably call; it means they can eat and look at her. The ones who curl into corners or leave in the night are more like her. It is nothing she brags about.
Early last night she left her apartment with two condoms in her bag.
She sprayed her neck with perfume at the door.
She took a train to another town.
Jane remembers once, a few years ago, a friend of hers commenting that women are lucky. "The least attractive of you can go out and get sex any time you want," Bruce said, envious.
In bed, Jones flinches in his sleep. That something frightens him makes her want to touch him, but she resists. She has learned some things. About deprivation and seduction — how though only hours earlier he complimented her skin and teeth, her hands and sense of humor, how he placed himself inside of her, how she opened — still, these moments in the new light are unpredictable, and any one of her gestures may be
read as desperate, or worse, much worse, as intrusive, like she's crossing some line, entering a territory of real concern where she's not been invited. In her early twenties, if a man like Jones panicked in his sleep, she would have moved toward him, pressed her breasts into his back, and left them there, like that — her breasts against his back while he slept. Instead, she watches him flinch and does not move.
Years ago, when Bruce said, "The least attractive of you can go out and get sex any time you want," Jane had the urge to lift the checkered napkin from her lap and cover her face with it. She remembers fighting the urge, lifting instead her wine, taking a big drink. She remembers holding the wine in her mouth for several seconds before swallowing. She remembers letting him talk.
They were just friends, coworkers, out to dinner on payday. His teeth were bad, small and brownish, but the rest of his face was
"We should be able to walk out of here, go across the street to my apartment, and fuck."
beautiful, bright gray eyes and fine bones. As he uncorked the second bottle of wine, he stared at her in a way that said that he knew what she looked like naked, that he'd imagined her standing before him, and had the image in his mind. She was sure he could recall the image whenever he felt the urge, and he felt the urge now, obviously, staring at her like that, a tricky grin on his face.
He'd never behaved that way before and Jane was surprised.
"You didn't get your raise, did you, Bruce?" she asked.
"Nope," he said.
"You're angry?"
"Hell yeah."
"You feel like you deserved it."
"Damn right. Deprived of something that should have been mine. You know it, right? I deserved it — absolutely. Fuck it," he said.
They were at an Italian restaurant downtown, and Bruce was changing the subject or not changing it at all. He was leaning forward, enunciating each word, saying, "Men need sex in a way women don't, Jane. I think friends should be able to have sex, just sex, and leave it at that." He lifted his glass in the air and looked at her.
"It's bad for friendship," she said, not knowing exactly what it was she meant, if it was his teeth or bad manners, or the fact that she'd have to see him every day at work. She imagined herself sitting with him at meetings, standing with him at the copy machine, behind him at the water cooler, acting like nothing had happened, and decided that if she had sex with him that night, each workday following — each mundane, previously harmless interaction — would carry in it some small
and brutal rejection.
When the second bottle of wine was finished and the pasta was smelling bad, hardening on the plate in front of her, he said, "We should be able to do it. You and me, we should be able to walk out of here, go across the street to my apartment, and fuck." He was looking at her intently. "Let's go. Let's give it a whirl."
"I'm not a carnival ride," she'd said.
"A what?"
"Nothing."
"Don't you want to? I know you want to." She was
saying "No," but inside she was drunk enough to wonder where she stood
on his attractiveness continuum. "The least attractive of you . . ." he
had said. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. And she hated herself
for giving him that.
"No," she said again.
The smile on his face disappeared. He was scowling, wagging his finger at her like an angry father. "See, you don't need it the way I do. If you needed it, you'd leave with me."
"We're friends," she had said, wondering if they were even that now.
"Women are different," he had said.
At eight in the morning, Jones sings out a yawn and Jane is sitting in a wooden
chair by the window, watching twin little boys in the parking lot. They scream
and laugh, zigzagging their way from one end of the lot to the other. One boy
chases, and the other boy runs
In the sheets Jane opens her mouth and legs.
from him. Because they are twins and dressed alike, Jane watches closely to see who is chasing whom. She wants to understand the game. It is impossible however; they are identical. Every time she blinks or pauses, she is confused.
One boy crouches behind the huge metal trash bin, hiding. He is panting, curling his body into something small. She can see him perfectly from the window, his small back falling and rising. The other boy runs between parked cars, searching. His mouth hangs open. It is a big job, this search.Within minutes, he finds his twin and slaps the boy's shoulder. Then, the boy whose shoulder was slapped fills with a new energy; he is now It.
"Tag," Jane says.
The boys wear matching yellow sweaters and little jeans. They look around seven. Jane is thinking about turning thirty next month and how she's never loved any man enough. "Cute boys," she says to Jones, and then she's suddenly embarrassed, afraid he'll feel pressured by her comment, afraid he'll think she wants him, after just one night, to give her cute boys.
He sits up in bed, calls her to him by waving the blankets.
In the sheets Jane opens her mouth and legs. It is here, like this, that she
can tell Jones with her hot skin that she likes him. He is moving and she is
moving and she is listening to the little boys' high voices. They could almost
be girls. One little boy screams "motherfucker" and Jane hears him clearly while the man on top of her takes her ear in his mouth.
"Let's take a shower together," he says, smiling, up on one elbow now, cheek in his palm.
She shakes her head.
"Come on," he says.
"I don't think so," Jane tells him, thinking that showering together is not what she does, that showering together is too much, that she will not stand up naked with a bar of soap in her hand — not with him.
"Why not?"
"It's too much," she says. "It's something you do with someone you know really well."
"What do you think we just did?" he says.
And she tells him that she is not at all sure what she did.
He walks to the bathroom alone, and she sees he is angry — his butt clenched into two fat fists.
Minutes later he stands with a towel around his waist and another around his neck. His chest is wet, drops on the few dark hairs. He looks somewhat recovered.
"The boys are still out there," he says.
"Hmm?"
"The boys you were watching. The cute ones."
"They're not so cute," she says.
"I want to take you to the train station, Jane — want
to see you off, get your number. Do you want breakfast? You hungry?" She
shakes her head, reaches for her shoe.
"Come here," he says. "Stand here, look at the boys with me."
Jane goes to the window, stands there with Jones, holding her
shoe in her hand. She is about to ask him something: his last name, how he feels
about the war, if his parents are still alive. Something. She is about to ask
him something when the little boys start fighting. There's pushing and more namecalling.
There's Fuckwad and Pussy and Asshole. One boy punches
the other boy in the face. Hard. His fist flying from his shoulder and landing
on the other boy's nose and mouth. And then they are on the ground, rolling around,
pulling each other's hair. They are screaming. One boy is crying. Or they both
are. And then a father or maybe an uncle stands above the boys, says something
Jane cannot make out, and the boys stop fighting. They roll to opposite ends
of the man's outstretched arms and then stand up. One boy wipes his nose with
the back of his hand. They are panting. Their faces are red. They are fixing
their little jeans when Jane turns from the window. n°
Lisa Glatt’s work has appeared in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Other Voices, Columbia, Indiana Review, Pearl, and The Sun. In 2003 she received the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction. She currently teaches at California State University, Long Beach and is married to poet and visual artist David Hernandez. A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That is her first novel. Visit her website at www.lisaglatt.com.
