From the doorway the nurse said Althea was still asleep and they would ring her when she was ready for the baby. Robert thanked her and looked back outside. Down below in the parking lot was a young family: a man in sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt, and a woman in a sundress holding a little boy with a blue cast on his arm. In his hand was the string to a large red helium balloon floating over their heads. The father opened the rear door for his wife and son, and while the mother lowered the boy into the backseat the father took hold of the balloon with both hands to keep it from popping or drifting away. He stood there a moment and looked past the parking lot to the stand of pines beyond, his face tanned, maybe from outdoor work, Robert thought, landscaping or carpentry or roofing—honest work. The man was smiling in the grey light, holding his young son’s balloon. His wife straightened and her husband watched her walk around to the passenger door, his smile deepening. He leaned into the backseat with the balloon, handing it to his son, waiting for him to get hold of the string. Then he kissed him and shut the door gently, clicking it shut with his hip.
Robert’s heart was beating fast. He turned from the window, walked to his daughter’s bassinet, and touched two fingers to her tiny forehead. She was warm and stirred slightly. He left the room, smiling politely at the nurses at the counter, though his daughter’s wasn’t there. In the passageway he hung up his gown, picked up Althea’s flowers, and carried them close to this chest all the way to the elevators and down to her floor.
Room 214 was directly across from the nurses’ station, and Althea’s door was closed halfway. Robert slipped in shoulder first; he was relieved to see her asleep, but her face was puffy and still yellowish, her lips dry, almost chapped, her wild black hair matted and tamed-looking. Beneath the sheet and light blanket, her belly was flat.
Robert’s face grew warm and he felt queasy again. He sat in the chair near her bed. It was deep and soft, welcoming his body as if it had been made just for him, and he knew he could easily sleep in it, would sleep in it if he weren’t careful. He sat forward, looked at his wife’s sleeping face, noticed how even her eyes seemed swollen. Her mouth was closed, and she was breathing steadily through her nose, her breasts rising and falling.
Robert’s mouth was dry again, his fingers trembling. He was afraid of her waking, but more afraid of not being the first human being she saw when she did. Then he remembered the flowers still in his hand; some of them looked as if they were beginning to droop, and his heart began to pound an insistent echo through his throat. He stood to find a vase. But in the small room there was nothing but the chair in which he sat, Althea’s bed, her table and moveable tray, a TV built high into the wall, and the bathroom.
He went in there with the flowers. He thought there might be a water pitcher or a plastic urinal container or something, but there was just the sink, toilet, and mirror. He could put them in a sink full of water, but then she wouldn’t be able to see them or know that he had brought them. He plugged the basin and began to fill it with cool water, afraid now the sound would wake Althea; he pulled the door closed and when the sink was half-full he shut off the tap, unwrapped the flowers, and lay them in stem-first. He took a long breath and let it out. He opened the door and saw his wife still asleep. He knew he would not be able to hand her the flowers now when she woke, to use them in the way he’d imagined, but that no longer seemed to matter.
He walked to her bedside and stood there, then sat on the edge of the chair. Althea’s bare arm lay at her side on top of the blanket. He reached for it, but then stopped, not wanting to wake her, not wanting to see her eyes yet. He lowered his hand and looked at hers. It was small and he could see the sewing calluses at the tips of her fingers. His own hands looked softer, and he thought of their daughter’s, pink and curled into tiny fists. He wanted her here now, but first he had to see how Althea would look at him in all her silence. He would wait for that, truly wait. Soon enough she would open her eyes, and he could only pray that when she did they would be the ones she’d first shown him, the ones he’d received for a poem he never wrote and knew now he probably never would, eyes he did not deserve but hoped to earn—eyes of black hope.
DIRTY LOVE
IN HER HEAD IT’S ANGRY, MOST OF THE RAPPING VOICES JUST A few years older than she is, mostly black, one white, all of them boys though she knows they think they’re men because they’re known and can talk like animals and everybody loves them for it. She loves them for it, though she doesn’t. Not really. But there’s respect there, respect for their rage. She can feel it like a small fist inside her just barely touching another’s, then they’re gone, all the motherfuckers and nines and dead boys in caskets, a woman singing now, a guitar and piano and the woman is a face and a name on the covers of magazines Devon never reads but sees in the 7-Eleven on her walks home from work. All the store magazines have three-quarters naked women on them, all of them, even the ones about cigars or antique trucks or guns. Always a woman’s cleavage and long naked legs, her arched back and ass, her fake smile and too much gloss and eyeliner that some nights makes Devon want to kick them all in the face. Sometimes she buys a Coke. It used to be a pack of Merits, but no more, not for sixty-three days anyway, and not to save her lungs or skin, teeth, and hair. It’s so she isn’t like him in any way, her piece-of-shit father, Charlie Brandt.
But anyway she’s still working, running the duster over the cooling unit under the windows in 419, the British woman singing about running after her boyfriend, chasing him and chasing him but he never stops or even seems to notice. The window has a gray mark on it. Like whoever used this room last threw the remote or something else hard and plastic, his cell phone maybe, or his BlackBerry or iEverything, a screen with his entire life on it he can’t stand anymore. Or maybe there was a fly and it was the heel of a shoe, this grayish smudge Devon has to reach up and deal with now, scratching it off with her fingernail. They’re still long but she doesn’t paint them anymore. Two nights ago, her laptop on her knees in bed in the near-dark, a man in Albania asked her to paint them for him and she nexted him like pulling a trigger but then ended up with two drunk girls in France somewhere. They just looked at her the way girls do, like she’s their competition and they already know they don’t like her and never will.
Devon scrapes away most of the smudge. Outside, the sky is a bright gray, the August kind that can give you a sunburn when you think you’re safe, and she has to squint and now she’s pissed that she has to even deal with this window and she presses shuffle on her iEverything till she gets mad music again, a dead boy rapping about slinging and his niggas and his nine. Now everything is lined up, her mood and the music in her head and this always makes her feel like she’s moving forward, gliding down a moving sidewalk at the airport, that time she was on one, back when she was little and her mother and father seemed happy, or at least laughed a lot together, her mother still pretty or at least looking like she cared, big but still sexy-big, though Devon never thought about these things, just felt them, like she was lying in a soft bed surrounded by cool, deep pillows and the smell of something sweet was in the air, and that day the three of them were getting on an airplane to Disney World where everything was more real than real could ever be.
A gunshot ratchets through her head, then three more, fast and one after the other. Boys are yelling and running, car wheels squealing, then it’s the low rapping voice of a man sitting in a prison cell. All his homies are dead and he’s got nothing to do but sit in his cell and miss his little girl, her mother a cheatin’ bitch he’s gonna cap soon as he’s out, and after a while Devon doesn’t listen anymore, just hears it, this song from a world she’ll never be a part of though she’s never really felt part of her own either.
This isn’t a window day, but she gets Glass Plus from her cart in the hall and shoots where the mark has left a white shadow and she pulls the rag from her back pocket and wipes it clean. Paula wouldn’t even see that smudge, and if she did, she wouldn’t fucking do anything about it. She’
s still on the second floor, and Devon has already done the third and now she’s in the second to last room on the fourth. Outside and down in the gravel lot, the waitress shacks look like those toolsheds you buy at Home Depot, but each has a little porch with railings, and Devon can see Jackie in a bikini lying on her back on her chaise lounge, her red hair fanned out around her face and shoulders.
Devon wonders if she feels guilty about what happened, and she can see why the bartender wanted to fuck her but how could Jackie have fucked him? Not just because his quiet pregnant wife lived with him two shacks down, but because Robert Doucette was a creep. Friday and Saturday nights, Devon bussing tables with three boys, Doucette would call one of them over to get him some ice even though he had a barback to do that. His bar would be full, tanned men and women sitting and standing, drinking, eating, talking and laughing, the restaurant even busier, every table taken by families staying at the hotel or tourists staying at other hotels, sometimes couples, never anyone sitting alone, the fake jazz the manager liked blaring, the tinkling of silverware on plates, low voices and high voices and obnoxious laughter, and Devon just wanted to put her headphones on and make the whole place the background of her world, just a crowded carpeted bad dream she had to move through that smelled like perfume and shrimp scampi and sweat. But Danny Sullivan didn’t allow headphones or iEverythings on the floor (or her nose stud or more than one in each ear), and Devon had to work those nights with her insides never matching her outsides so there was never a sliding forward on a current you made yourself.
Instead, she had to load her bussing tray to bad jokes from sunburned fathers, dead stares from sullen kids, tired smiles from half-drunk mothers who just knew her and her life because they had been young and pretty once before, too, when Devon knew they never had. And Danny only allowed trays, never the rubber tubs from the kitchen which would have been much easier for loading the dirty dishes and glasses, and Devon hated the polyester black pants she had to wear, the white blouse buttoned up past her bra. Sometimes clearing a table she’d glance over the heads and tables out to the street where cars and pickup trucks cruised slowly past, their headlights lighting up whatever car or van was in front of them, and on the other side of the boulevard was the dark beach and the black ocean and she almost pictured herself on a ship to France or Portugal or Italy. Only she didn’t. Maybe she used to. But why go there now? She went places every night—France, Spain, Turkey, Belgium, Algeria, once Moldova (wherever that was), Portugal, Luxembourg, Italy. And she was seeing only rooms; behind the head and shoulders of whatever man or woman or boy or girl she’d found, was the room they sat in. Sometimes it’d be morning or afternoon and the light would be coming in, but usually it was rooms with shades pulled to day or night, very little on the walls, a shelf with a TV, a few magazines or a book. In Ireland one time, behind a drunk boy with a beard, a sword hung on the wall over a PS3 station, somebody else playing a soccer game on it behind him; there were couches with blankets thrown over them, empty wooden chairs turned facing nowhere. There were lamps on small tables cluttered with ashtrays or empty glasses or a sweatshirt balled up and hanging off one corner. In Morocco, a man stroking his penis lay sideways on a mattress, his whiskered cheek propped against his hand, and on the wall behind him hung an oriental carpet the colors of plums and blood. Usually Devon nexted right through the assholes masturbating, but this one was pulling lazily back and forth on his erection like someone would pet a cat. His shirt was off and his skinny torso was covered with black curly hair, and now she knew he could see her, but nothing changed; he kept pulling on himself like he was just passing the time, waiting for her to do something or say something or write or draw on his screen anything that would get him to stop or take more of an interest, but he just stared at his screen in Africa and she stared at hers in her great-uncle’s guest room in Hampton, New Hampshire, and they stared and stared while he did what he did and then the chat wheel began to spin again, and she was sitting in front of a man in England her father’s age, behind him a brightly lit room and framed photos on a wall that looked like family. He had high thinning hair like her father and fleshy cheeks and he was wearing reading glasses and a loosened red tie and white button-down shirt. Immediately his typed words appeared on her screen.
Hello. Are you alone?
Normally she would next him like a slap in his face, but she typed: Fuck you. We’re all alone.
Then she nexted him and kept going, but she never really knew what she was looking for, if she was looking for anything, only she knew now that other parts of the world no longer interested her. What was there to find there but houses and buildings with rooms in them that held people like her? She’d seen enough and no longer needed to see more. So the money she was saving was for a car and a room of her own somewhere, a quiet zone of her own, away from everyone, even her kind, lonely great-uncle Francis, and she’d be rounding the corner of the bar for the kitchen, carrying a full tray of used plates and glasses and silverware, when Robert, looking over his shoulder while pouring a drink and shooting a mixer into it from the soda gun, would shout over all the human noise: “Ice, Devon! Thank you, honey.” And even then, working away like he was, his eyes would drop to a side view of her ass and she’d want to kill him. She’d push through the swinging doors into the bright kitchen, and she’d see one of the young homies in her head doing it, just walking up to Doucette with a nine and pressing it to his sweaty neck and squeezing the trigger.
Devon pushes the cotton rag into her back pocket and blows once on the glass. The smudge is gone, no sign of it, no sign of Doucette anymore either. The song in her head is a happy one, dance music, a Puerto Rican girl from New York singing high over thumping bass, and because Devon’s done with this room it’s a good song to keep. She runs her hand over the spread of the perfectly made mattress. She checks the bathroom one last time, the sink, toilet, bath, and mirror, the toilet roll full again, its first square folded into an inviting V so the next customer thinks no dirty fingers have ever been here before.
That’s what Doucette made her feel, dirty, his eyes taking her in like he’d already fucked her and wanted just one more cheap go at it again. She was eighteen. Didn’t that stop him even a little? But she knew better than that. There were all those men around the world who perked up as soon as they saw her. There were the fathers and husbands in the bar and restaurant, their eyes taking her in like a nasty memo to themselves. There were the boys and men behind steering wheels as she walked down the street, their hungry eyes on her in the side view mirror. And there was her own father and Amanda Salvi, his twenty-three-year-old girlfriend with her tits and flat stomach and big mouth she showed off on her Fuckbook page.
Devon places a Going Green card on the pillow, a wrapped chocolate beneath that. She steps into the hallway and locks the door behind her. Just one more room to go, then she’s off till she has to come back to bus at five. She pulls her iEverything from her shorts pocket and checks the time. Three hours to do whatever she wants. Except shit, it’s Friday and she has a tutoring session with Francis for her GED. Not that she wants it, but Francis wants her to get it and he’s letting her live with him for free so she kind of has to.
Devon checks her messages. Three texts from her mother. One from Sick. None from her “friends,” which is how it is now, and that’s fine with her.
Mom: R u working 2night? Thought we’d have dinner 2gether.
Mom: Did u get my text? I miss U, honey.
Mom: Text me please!
Sick: Wuz up D?
Like they’re just friends and that’s all they ever were. Fucking asshole.
The happy dance song is all wrong now. She runs her finger over the screen till once again there are gunshots echoing through her head, the bass beating between her ears. The man’s voice is her own, rapping about all the motherfuckers out there she’s gonna cap, her body and cleaning cart gliding down the hallway, nothing and nobody holding her back, especially Sick and her weak father and even
weaker mother who still lies to herself and hasn’t kicked him out of the house he took a shit in like it was a toilet and never once had been their home.
UP AGAINST THE FENCE, the mixed yarrow have gotten out of hand. They’ve ranged too freely and shoved everything to the side: the asters droop to the left and right; the day lilies, taller than the asters, look like they’re holding their own, but the flat heads of the yarrow—rose and ivory and apricot—surround them like approaching thugs; only the white phlox seems free of them. Three years ago Beth planted them closer to the deck, and they began to bloom again only days ago, clusters of tiny white flowers that from the kitchen window look to Francis like the heads of intelligent beings nodding in assent to something quite reasonable.
If only things had ever been reasonable. Though his life has been, hasn’t it? Except for having been a drunk, he has lived it reasonably. He has filled it with reasonable things and people, including his wife Elizabeth, whose death, while unexpected, was reasonable too. But he’s begun his ninth decade now, and as his own death draws nearer, something he does not fear, his dreams have become more vivid. In this morning’s offering, he is once again nineteen years old on a July afternoon sitting behind the wheel of the captain’s jeep just outside Pusan. Captain Hunt has folded down the windshield and is resting his elbows on the hood so that he can better steady his camera, a Retina 35-millimeter Kodak made in Germany. Francis has lingered on that many times over the years, the word retina, our lens of witness running directly to the brain. And of course he’s had to confront the word witness as well.
For weeks it had rained, but then it was July and there came a break in the summer monsoons, and all along the ridge above the ditch, the sun glinted wetly off a stand of Korean pines, their branches gnarled and stingy. Down in the ditch three hundred members of the Bodo League were shoveling dirt out onto one long mound, still moist and dark. They wore the white cotton clothes of farmers and peasants for that’s what most of them were. Many years later, Francis would learn they’d been promised good jobs if they joined the Bodo League, that they had no idea of its leftist leanings, of its supposed alliance with the north.