A Multitude of Sins

  She felt strange waiting here. Not really like who she was, the little agent from Nowhereburg, Connecticut—specialist in starter homes and rehabbed condos. Daughter. Wife. Holder of an associate’s degree in retail from an accredited community college. In a way, though, this guy was exactly right for her, as wrong as he was. Aren’t you always yourself? Is anybody you want ever wrong for you? She did desire him, especially after all the drinking. It was like her father had said. And anyway, why not want him? Life was sometimes a matter of ridding yourself of this or that urge, after which the rest got easier.

  And adultery—she liked it when her thoughts connected up well—adultery was the act that rid, erased, even erased itself once the performance was over. Sometimes, she imagined, it must erase more than itself. And sometimes, surely, it erased everything around it. It was a remedy for ills you couldn’t get cured any other way, but it was a danger you needed to be cautious with. In any case, she felt grateful for it tonight. And because she thought all of this, she knew she had to be right.

  Howard strolled out of the motel office flipping a room key back and forth, and smirking. She wondered how often he’d done this. It seemed so natural to him, not that she gave a shit. She never had, and yet it felt perfectly familiar to do it, as if she’d been doing it forever.

  “Drive down to the last teepee,” Howard said, leaning in, hands on his bare knees. “And if you want to hit the casino, Big Chief Poker Face in there gave me two drinks coupons.”

  “I just want to get fucked, is all.” She looked out the other window. “I don’t like to play slot machines.”

  His eyes narrowed, the corners of his large unintelligent mouth turned almost imperceptibly upward. He wasn’t handsome, his hair buzzed and his ears and mouth way too big. He was clownish. Though that probably made his little wife ecstatic: a husband no one else much wanted, but who could work wonders.

  Howard again put his big hand, adopting a cupping motion, in through the window, and up under one of her breasts. He didn’t seem to have a purpose. Just a pointless act of uncaring familiarity. “Back this baby over across the lot and we’ll do it in the car,” he said in a husky, theatrical voice. His small eyes twitched to the far edge of the gravel. “Nobody’ll see.” He sniffed a little humorless laugh.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “That’ll work, then,” he said, standing up, sniffing again.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m ready for something to.” She turned the key in the ignition and began backing up.

  She knew exactly what he liked. He liked her eyes to be on him. He liked for her to slip his cock into her mouth and, just as she did it, to raise her eyes to his. “I’ll do this to you now,” was what that meant. Like a cheap betrothal. Otherwise he liked her voice. With her voice, with whatever she chose to say when she was whispering to him, she could make him ejaculate. Just like that. Even her breathing could do it. So she had to be careful. Though coming wasn’t what he wanted. He was smart. He wanted to stay in it with her, move her where she needed to be moved around the bed, have it go and go and go until coming was just a way to end it, when they weren’t interested anymore. Strange, to be so intelligent in bed, and other times not at all. It was her doing, she thought; she’d invented him, turned him into someone she had a use for. His real intelligence was not to resist.

  Only, in the cramped airless teepee, with the rayon portiere across the doorway and beetles crawling on the floor and the air heavy with bug dope, he wanted to take her too fast too violently—suddenly, vociferously—as if he meant to rid her of whatever had its grips into her, all by himself. As if it was his duty. Pounding, pounding. Like that. No time to work him with her voice, or bring him along and ease him in and out of it. Just the hard way, until it was over. And again—so odd that this man should be aware of her; knowing that something was wrong and setting out to fix it the way he knew how. That was intimacy. Of a certain kind. Yes.

  Though possibly, of course—as she lay in the grainy darkness with Howard instantly, infinitely asleep beside her—possibly, she’d expressed herself perfectly in the car, and he’d just done what she’d told him. “I just want to get fucked.” That’s what she’d said. Anyone could understand what that meant. She had orchestrated things then, not him. She just hadn’t been aware of it. He’d simply let her employ him—that was the word—become the implement for what she wanted fixed, emptied, ended, ridded—whatever. Really, they didn’t know each other so well. She’d been mistaken about intimacy.

  In the parking lot she heard men’s voices, talking and laughing, followed by car doors closing and engines starting and tires rolling over gravel. Farther away there was a sudden blare of country music, as if a door had been thrown open. Then the music was muffled, so that she realized she’d been hearing it for a while without knowing it. Someone shouted, “Oooo-weee,” and a car roared away. She’d brought in the bottle of gin from the car, and she reached it off the bedside table, unscrewed the cap and took a tiny sip—just to kill the stale-paper-bug-dope taste. And then she couldn’t help wondering, idly, she knew: does this really come to an end now? Couldn’t this go on a little longer after tonight, without the need of a fixed destination? There was a small good side to it. They both understood something. People ended things too soon, lacked patience when they could go on. If they truly erased themselves with each other, they could go on indefinitely. She could, anyway. And Howard wouldn’t resist, she assumed. This was a view she was glad to have, something more than she’d expected from this night. A surprise found in the dark.

  On the concrete stoop of their teepee lay the littered brown husks of two hundred beetles killed by the bug dope somebody’d squirted around the door after they were asleep. Unpleasant to step on them. An Indian woman was sweeping them off the other teepee steps, using a broom and a plastic dustpan. A young Indian man with a ponytail was standing beside her watching and talking softly. The only other car in the lot was a dented black Camaro with yellow flames painted on its side and a spare-tire doughnut on the back.

  The morning sun was warm, though a cool autumn breeze shifted the dust across the hardtop toward the casino, where there were still some cars and trucks in front. It was eight. A small neon rectangle, previously invisible on the STRIKE IT RICH sign was illuminated to say BREAKFAST NOW BEING SERVED. The blue police lights were turned off.

  Breakfast was an idea, Howard thought, shirtless in the teepee doorway, his eyes aching. He couldn’t find his shirt on the floor in the dark room. But it would be a relief—even without his shirt—to eat breakfast in the empty casino while Frances slept on. They’d seen it all in a casino. He could bring coffee back, pay for it with the drinks coupons.

  Up behind the STRIKE IT RICH, treeless brown mountains stood stark against the cool sky. These weren’t available when they’d arrived last night. You definitely never got a view like this in the east—just trees there and clouds and a smaller hazy sky, even by the ocean. So this was good—the drive had brought them up to where the air was cleaner, thinner; to a beautiful wasteland no one but Indians could stand to live in. And somewhere beyond this was the Grand Canyon—the big erosion hole Frances was now sleeping through. Maybe she’d forget about it and want to drive back to the convention.

  He stepped out into the lot, shirtless, in his terry-cloth shorts and sneakers. Across the highway, beside the casino, was a small, new-looking, white clapboard chapel with a steeple and some plastic-looking stained-glass windows, surrounded by a white picket fence that also looked plastic. For quickie marriages, Howard thought, a wife you ended up with when you got lucky in the casino. Like in Atlantic City. Indians owned it, too, he was certain. A wooden sign in the grass-less fenced yard read, CHRIS DIED FOR YOUR SINS, which put him in mind that his family had been Christians. The Camerons—Presbyterians, somewhere back in Scotland. Not Christians, per se, anymore. Sunday was everybody’s personal day. But perfectly good people. His father was always pleased to see a church.

  Except, what thi
s crummy little chapel made him consider was that life, at best, implied a small, barely noticeable entity; and yet it was also a goddamned important entity. And you could ruin your entity before you even realized it. And further, it occurred to him, that no doubt just as you were in the process of ruining yours, how you felt at the exact moment of ruining it was probably precisely how this fucked-up landscape looked! Dry, empty, bright, chilly, alien, and difficult to breathe in. So that all around here was actually hell, he thought, instead of hell being the old version his father had told him about under the ground. The breeze moved just then across his bare chest, giving him a stiffening chill. A Greyhound rumbled past on the highway, stirring up dust and bringing a lone man out of the casino door to stare. Just being out here, Howard thought, was enough to spook you, and make you ready to have Chris go to bat for you, before you fell victim to something awful—despair you wouldn’t escape from because you were so small and insignificant. Or worse. He felt completely justified to hate it here. He was glad his father wasn’t along. The Greyhound was becoming a speck on the highway heading south. He needed to get Frances to forget the Grand Canyon and get in behind that bus back to Phoenix. He’d really just come along for the ride—to keep her company. None of this was anything he’d caused.

  When Frances stepped out of the teepee into the sharp light and cool breeze, she looked tired—her blue, anchor blouse rumpled, and her sapphire earrings missing, leaving just the little holes showing. Though she looked happy. She’d showered and slicked back her short blond hair, and had her purse and the gin bottle in hand. She looked younger and like she wasn’t sure where she was, but wasn’t displeased about it. Whatever last night had been hadn’t left her dissatisfied, though he couldn’t remember much except that it hadn’t lasted very long and he’d passed out.

  He’d bought Styrofoam cups of coffee in the casino and was sitting on the fender of the Lincoln, looking through her Grand Canyon book. He’d found his shirt and felt better, though he was ready to leave.

  “You rarin’ to go?” Frances was looking around the empty lot and up at the mountains. She smiled at the pure blue sky as she sipped her coffee. Her throat was congested and she kept clearing it. She wasn’t really steady, her eyes were slits, her face puffy.

  “Ready to go somewhere,” he said, hoping for Phoenix, but not wanting to press it.

  “Isn’t it beautiful here.” She blinked, her cup to her lips. “Are you happy?”

  “I’m great.”

  “Last night?” she said. She looked confused. “You know? After you were asleep? I woke up, and I had no idea where I was. I really didn’t even know who you were. It was weird. I guess it was the gin. But I got on my hands and knees and I stared right down into your face. I could feel your breath on my eyeballs. I just stared at you and stared at you. I’m glad you didn’t wake up. You’d have thought you were in the middle of an operation.”

  “Or that I was dead.”

  “Right. Or that.” She noticed all the beetle husks that had yet to be swept off the teepee steps. “Oh dear,” she said. “Look-it here.”

  “Who’d you think I was,” he said, slipping off the fender.

  “I didn’t know,” she said looking at the beetles all around her feet. “I didn’t think you were anybody. You could’ve been an animal. You could’ve changed shape.”

  “Did you think I was Ed?”

  “No.” She reached into her purse for her car keys and nudged a few husks with the toe of her pink shoe. “No resemblance there.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “No. You wouldn’t,” she said and seemed annoyed, and began walking toward the car. “Come on,” she said. “We’re late.”

  A mile beyond the motel, a green highway sign said SOUTH RIM—85 MILES. They turned that way, and Howard put on the Tito Puente music, then remembered what it was and turned it off as the road immediately began climbing and they began encountering campers and more tour buses creeping up and coming down. The landscape that was beginning to be below them looked flatter and smooth, pinkish like a sand sculpture, and, Howard felt, totally different from when he was on the ground in it, when it seemed spooky and uninviting. When he’d thought it was hell.

  Frances produced a camera, one of the new sleek, molded operations designed by Japanese to look serious and professional, though it was actually cheap. Three times on the steep road up, she stopped the car and made them get out so she could take a picture of the desert. Twice she got him to take her picture, posing short-necked, stiff and squinting in front of a flagstone retaining wall. Once she took him, and once she got a man from Michigan to take them together with the empty sky behind. “These can be used in divorce court,” Frances said when the Michigan man could still hear them. “I’ll give you the negatives and you can destroy them. I just want a print.”

  Howard was remembering how little he liked tourist venues, how you could never see anything 10 million yokels hadn’t already seen and shit on and written graffiti all over before you could get there. What they were doing now really had no purpose. Purpose ended last night. They were just doing this.

  Frances stood beside the car, studying her camera, which she’d tried to make operate automatically but couldn’t. The camera made its soft, confident whirring, clicking, sighing noise. “There’s another one of my hand,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’m going to get the Grand Canyon,” Howard said. She’d gotten different again now, become businesslike. She was different every hour. You needed a program.

  “You haven’t experienced it yet,” she said, holding her camera up, pointing back at the retaining wall and the perfect blue matte of empty space. Again it whirred, clicked and sighed. “It has to be believed to be seen. Of course, I haven’t seen it either. Just pictures.”

  “Me not know,” he said, but didn’t sound Japanese. It was more like Indian, and sounded stupid.

  She smiled painfully as she turned the camera upside down and read something on the bottom. “Well, you will.” She shook her head and stuck the camera in her purse and started around the car to go. “Then you’ll want these pictures. You’ll pay me for them. You’ll have been exposed to something the likes of which you’ll never have seen or expected. And you’ll thank me all the way back to Phoenix.”

  She loved it that the air grew cooler, and that the plant life changed, that there were little pine trees growing right out of the dry, rocky mountain turf. She loved it that the scrub desert floor looked, from high above, like a sand painting an Indian might do—reds and pinks and blues and blacks in layers you’d never see when you were in the middle of it. This was the lesson of the outdoors, she thought: how much that actually existed was hidden in the things you saw; and, that all the things you felt so sure about, you shouldn’t. It was hopeful. She would have to go outdoors more. Selling real estate wasn’t really being outdoors.

  She still hated it, and couldn’t quit thinking about it, nearly three weeks later, that he’d said she was good in bed—like she was some carnival act he could give a score to and maybe clap for. Howard was her mistake, no matter that she’d tried to see it different, tried to make him happy. It was one thing, she thought, and maybe okay, to fuck Howard in a HoJo’s by the Interstate. But it was quite another thing—much less good—to move it all out to Phoenix, get to know him a lot better, risk being caught and fired, and still think it could turn out good. And it was stupid, stupid to take him to the Grand Canyon, given his little withholding, stand-on-the-sidelines, complaining self. Ed would’ve been better. Ed would be better because even though sex was out, Ed at least had once been a good sport. As a human being, Howard Cameron had been subpar from the beginning. She hadn’t read the fine print.

  She glanced at him, musing away on his side about absolutely nothing, his long hairless white legs planked out in front of him like stilts, his pale knees too far below his shorts, his enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten, and his soft, characterless face, and his bus
hy unkempt eyebrows. And his basketball haircut. What had been wrong with her? He wasn’t interesting or witty or nice or deep or pretty. He was a pogo stick. And up here, where everything was natural and clean and pristine, you saw it. And that it was wrong. True nature revealed true nature.

  But steering the big fire chief’s car up the winding, steepening road with the sheer drop to the desert twenty feet away, she understood she wasn’t going to let him ruin another day with his poor-mouth, sad-sack, nothing’s-perfect, pissy bad attitude. Today she felt exhilarated—it was dizzying. The feeling went right down into her middle, and set loose something else, a spirit she’d never realized was there, much less locked up and trapped. And, they were still on the road, not even to the canyon yet! How would it feel when she could get out, walk ten paces and there would be the great space stretching miles and miles and miles? She couldn’t imagine it. The profound opening of the earth. Great wonders all had powers to set free in you what wasn’t free. Poets wrote about it. Only the dragging, grinding minutiae of every day—cooking, driving, talking on the phone, explaining yourself to strangers and loved ones, selling houses, balancing checkbooks, stopping at the video store—all that made you forget what was possible in life.

  Probably she’d faint. Certainly she would be speechless, then cry. Conceivably she’d want to move out here right away, realize she’d been living her life wrong, and begin to fix it. That’s why the people she sold houses to moved—to go where they could live better. They made up their minds—at least the ones who weren’t forced into it by horrible luck— that they and not somebody else ran their lives.

  “Those were Navajos,” Howard said, staring out at the drop-off beyond the right road shoulder. He’d been nursing his thoughts. “Not Hopis, okay? I read it in your Grand Canyon book while you were asleep this morning.”