Extraordinary Adventures

  She laughed. “Not all,” she said. He watched her chest rise with a breath. “Almost none, in fact.”

  “Then I’ll try to get in trouble more often.”

  And she laughed yet again. He was making her laugh! Was there any greater power? If there was, he had yet to discover it. “Well,” she said. “There are other ways to get in touch with me.”

  “There are? Oh! You mean your card.”

  “I mean my card.” Her left eyelid fell and rose in a friendly wink. “You still have it?”

  “It’s in my wallet.”

  What was happening? What was he saying? What was she saying?

  “Good,” she said. “Because you never know—”

  Then slowly, languidly, she removed a pen from her breast pocket. Just like that, without a word. She held it out for him to take, and, hand shaking, he took it. But there was a moment, not even a moment, perhaps, but some fraction of a moment, when their fingers touched. He had never been given a pen by a woman before.

  “Well, this is odd.”

  It was Muriel. She was standing at the half-open door, squinting in the light. She looked at Bronfman, then at Serena, then back to Bronfman. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “What do you mean?” Bronfman said.

  “I mean I’m done with the room if you want it.”

  Bronfman flushed red. “God, Mom,” he said. “This is Serena. She’s a policewoman.”

  “I hope so,” Muriel said, looking at Serena’s uniform. “Otherwise, this would be even odder.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Bronfman,” Serena said. “I got a call from the manager, came down. You’re going to have to vacate the premises.”

  “And vacate I will,” she said. “Serena.”

  Muriel looked at Serena and then at her son as if she was trying to figure out who he was, as if the information she was receiving now contradicted everything she knew about him and it was time to reassess.

  “May I use the ladies’ room? Or will that get me thrown in the clinker?”

  “Of course you may,” Serena said.

  “You can’t wait until we get home?” Bronfman said. Enough laws had been broken, he thought.

  “No, I can’t wait until we get home. And why should I? I may never get to be in a hotel bathroom again. It’s sanitized for my protection. I like that. Breaking the seal on the toilet is like opening a present on Christmas morning. Cool your jets. This will only take a minute. Two at the most.”

  She turned and reentered the darkness without closing the door behind her. They could see the light come on, hear the paper ribbon tear, some elfish laughter.

  “She’s a card,” Serena said. “I bet she was fun to grow up with.”

  “Tons,” Bronfman said. “It was a regular circus.” He stopped. “I’m being sarcastic,” he clarified.

  “Ten-four,” she said.

  When Muriel finished several minutes later, Serena led her to the passenger side of the car, opened the door and, after she was settled, closed it firmly, as if to ensure against Muriel’s escape. Then she walked around to Bronfman’s side and leaned in the open window. Muriel was watching them the way a cat watches a bug.

  “Have a good day, Mrs. Bronfman,” Serena said.

  Muriel turned away and looked down at her shoes. “I have all my life been in the pursuit of happiness, as is our right as human beings,” she said. “Thomas Jefferson said so.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Serena said.

  “Boomshakalaka,” Muriel said. She stared through the windshield at nothing.

  To Bronfman, Serena said, “Get her home safely. And no more B&Es, okay?”

  “No more what?” He thought she’d said, “No more bee’s knees.” That couldn’t be right.

  “Breaking and Entering.”

  “Absolutely not. Never again.”

  Her eyes were as green as a garnet. They were inches away from his. So close they exerted a very real magnetic power, and he felt his face being drawn toward hers in infinitesimal increments. As if realizing the danger she was putting both of them in, she pulled back, put on her sunglasses, and, just like that, reinhabited her professional capacity.

  “Be good,” she said.

  He nodded and tried, unsuccessfully, to see through her glasses. “Is that the motto of the police department? ‘Be good’?”

  “Nope,” she said. She slapped the roof twice with her right hand and stepped away. “Just mine.”

  SIX

  Muriel was quiet all the way home. He was tempted to break the silence two or three times—at stoplights, when an old lady pulled in front of them on Montevallo—but it was clear that she had no room for words in her head right now. She sat as if alone in the darkness of a movie theater, watching a movie of her own life. Some of it was probably blurry, and whole chunks of it missing in parts, but there was no doubt more than enough for her to see. If you could remember every moment of your life, every person you ever met, every tear you ever shed, every time you made somebody laugh or cry, would the end of your life be more meaningful? Does more data, collated and filed away, mean greater understanding? Or is it all about feeling? Does it all come together at the end in a great rolling snowball of emotion?

  She was still like that, still watching her movie, when he pulled up to the house. She didn’t move, so neither did he. He just idled there at the curb.

  “I almost died,” she said.

  “What? When!?”

  “Back there,” she said. “In the hotel room.”

  “No,” he said. “You were fine. You were asleep.”

  “I mean, I almost chose to die. You can do that, you know. Kill yourself with a thought, if the thought is powerful enough. You couldn’t, you’re too young. But you get to a certain age and you’ve lived a certain life, it’s been documented—in rare cases, there’s a moment you can choose to die. Have you read The Denial of Death?”

  “No,” he said. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a book.”

  “And it’s in there?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. But I know what I know. Roy invited me to die. He invited me into the light.”

  She was almost upset with him, so he backtracked. “Okay,” he said.

  “The thing is, the important thing is, I didn’t choose to go. Even though for all practical purposes my life is over.”

  “It is not, Mom,” he said. He couldn’t bear this, her saying this. “It is not over. Look at you. We just B and E’d a hotel room. That’s a lively thing to do. An alive thing.”

  She ignored him. “Don’t you want to know why I didn’t go?”

  “Of course. Sure.”

  “Because I wanted to stay alive a little bit longer. For you.”

  Finally, she turned to him. She was crying. Not a lot, though, just a couple of leaking tears navigating the wrinkles of her cheeks. She looked into his eyes.

  “I fucked up, Edsel,” she said. “Big-time.”

  “Mom,” he said. This was excruciating for him. His chest felt explosive. “Muriel. No. You didn’t.”

  “I did! I did, Edsel, and the thing is? I am so glad I did. I fucked up in every way I could think of. Men, drugs, alcohol. I smoked. I made you eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for years. But look, everything turned out pretty much okay. Better than okay, actually.” She let her old time-splotched hand rest on his knee. “That’s why I chose to live. That’s why when Roy invited me into the light I said not yet. Because it’s about you now. Your life. And you haven’t fucked up. You’ve never fucked up. You’ve never given yourself permission to do something really, really stupid, and I want to live long enough to see that happen. All your life you’ve been a perfect little boy, and I’m not saying this to be hurtful, sweetie, but it’s been a little dull. For me, I mean. Your audience. I’ll be fine. Sheila will be fine. But, most of all, you will be fine. I promise. Just go out there and for once in your life fuck things up royally. Put your heart into it. Make a mes
s of things. I know you can do it. For me.”

  Bettina appeared at Muriel’s window, bent over, and waved. But Bettina could tell something was going on, so she didn’t open the door. She took a step back. “You almost fucked up with that policewoman,” Muriel said, and laughed. She punched him lightly in the arm. “What was her name?”

  “Serena,” Bronfman said. “Serena Stanton.”

  She threw her head back in silent laughter. “You know her whole name,” she said. “And she knows yours. That’s pretty good right there.”

  “Mom.”

  “I’d take her back to 2D if I were you. And bring at least three quarters. It’s worth it.”

  “Mom!” he said. “I’m with Sheila.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, that spot on his cheek that she’d kissed a million times or more. “Of course you are, dear. Of course you are.”

  Then Bettina opened the door, took his mother by one of her little arms, and led her away. They walked down the driveway, then across the sandstones surrounded by monkey grass, and made it to the front door. It took a while, because these days his mother took teeny-tiny steps. But he watched them the whole way, until they were gone inside and all there was to look at was the house, the house that he used to live in with his mother, where more than a thousand peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches had been made.

  As he drove away, he had a thought that later he would feel his mother had deftly planted in his subconscious. He made a decision. I’m making love to Sheila, he thought. How that would actually happen was a mystery to him, but he was going to do it. Tonight. Evening was just now falling. Bronfman went straight over, before he changed his mind.

  SEVEN

  Since Bronfman had been seeing Sheila, his life had expanded geometrically: once a mere triangle, Cedar Court introduced a fourth point, another edge, and now his life looked more like a rhombus, or a parallelogram. It was more complex, more interesting. On the way there, he transferred a condom from the glove department to his pants pocket. He had stopped thinking. He was on a journey, a quest, and since he’d already determined what the end of the quest would be there was no reason to think of it any longer. All that remained was to do it. His body swelled with intent and desire. All he knew was this: he would stride into her condominium, turn off the television, take her by the hand, and pull her into the bedroom. She would not resist. Far from it. Their desire would be as one; they would feel everything the same at the very same time; he could say “Jinx” to their desire.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Sheila came to the door wearing a short black slip with a lacy trim, spaghetti straps, and red stitching. Her breasts seemed bigger than they normally were, bigger than he had ever seen them, fuller. Her hair was down, wavy now (he had never seen it wavy), and her lipstick was so red against her fair white skin that she looked like a lady vampire who’d just finished her dinner. The lights were out and squat little candles were everywhere: on the coffee table, the television set, her bedside table—even on the toilet, he found out later. All Bronfman could think was fire hazard! She had a bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries in her hand, and before he could say the first thing she popped one into his mouth, and then went after it herself, her tongue probing the cavities of his cheeks for food, as if a chocolate-covered strawberry was something to be shared like this.

  He had the impression (and it would turn out to be the case) she was following directions from a book on how to bring passion into a relationship. Sheila was good at following directions, of course. When she cooked, if the recipe called for one-eighth of a teaspoon of salt she used one-eighth of a teaspoon of salt. Never a pinch. “What’s a pinch of salt?” she’d argue to no one. “Everybody’s pinch is different!” She had a trust in and an affiliation with other direction writers, he thought, which was admirable. They were a very exclusive club, he imagined, though it was not anything she ever talked about, or wrote in his presence, and he never talked about it, either. But soon he hoped to, when Sorsby came through with his IKEA connection. He promised Bronfman that he would do what he could—“because we’re so close,” he said. But he was being sarcastic, as they weren’t close. So Bronfman wasn’t sure he was doing what he could at all.

  Bronfman was swept up in the rush of Sheila’s plans, and yet, at the same time, completely overwhelmed. He helped her remove his jacket and tie, and then there was the time-consuming and onerous task of unbuttoning his shirt. Once he was half-naked she paused and produced a flute of champagne, which she sipped from and then offered to him. Still, she hadn’t said a word. The sex directions must have called for “half a flute of champagne once half-naked.” She drank her half a flute in a flash and waited for him to finish his, her smoky eyes glowing with the coals of passion. She licked her lips. He was getting chilly, his arms and stomach a goose-bumped terrain. She took the glass from his hand and, holding him by the wrist, led him into the bedroom, where, thank God, there were no rose petals. But, with her customary foresight, the blankets had been turned down. The bed was passion-ready. She crawled under the blankets, and he did, too, and once there she loosened his belt and unbuttoned his pants and tried to pull them off, but they got stuck on his thighs and he had to help her by undoing the zipper. A team effort. Then she removed her negligee, if that’s what it was, and together, under the covers, they could not have been more naked. Her hands were a little cold, and when she touched him his penis—and God, how he hated to remember this, would flinch at the memory for the rest of his life—it totally retracted, turtlelike. It was still there, though. He felt it. It hadn’t disappeared completely. There was something there for her to work with: hope. She had a special lotion nearby, and she opened it and rubbed it on her hands and then on him, until there was a sufficient amount of warmth for him to move, and he became bolder, and then—with absolutely no empirical basis to justify the move—he mounted her. He was determined. Something might happen if he was up there. Ninety percent of everything is showing up! That’s what they said! And here he was! Bronfman, present!

  But even Bronfman, who knew relatively nothing, knew that sex was never just sex. Especially not this sex, his sex. This sex tonight with Sheila could be his cure, the cleansing, the erasure of a past in which nothing like this had ever happened—nothing so real and unfiltered and honest—replaced by a future in which it happened all the time. A future in which he was the man he might become. Sex was not just sex: for Bronfman, it was life. It felt facile, even sort of inane, to think so, but the single most important thing in the world right now was this, now, where he was, with this beautiful woman beneath him.

  It was almost too much to bear.

  Time ground by like fingernails slowly scraping across a blackboard, like a horse dragging a car without wheels up the steep side of a mountain. Interminable.

  Nothing at all.

  And then Sheila said the first thing she’d said since he arrived.

  “It’s okay, Edsel,” she said. “Really. Let’s just lie here.”

  “I’m a little tired,” he said.

  She brushed the hair off his forehead. “Long day?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” he said.

  So they just lay there, side by side. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see her now, her eyes so sweet and open, without judgment, without complaint. Then she smiled.

  “I have an idea,” she said. She was very excited. “Let’s share our sordid pasts!”

  “Sordid pasts?”

  “We skipped that part.” Step 4. Share sordid pasts. “You tell me about everyone in your past and I’ll tell you everyone in mine.”

  Had he understood her? “Everyone in my past?”

  She punched him playfully in the shoulder. “It’s that long a list, eh?”

  “I just don’t think I know what you mean.”

  She kissed his nose. “Everyone you’ve slept with, silly. And I’ll do the same. It’s what you do, before … you know. It’s like an exorcis
m, full disclosure. Turns the past into the past and the present into the present. I’ll go first if you want.”

  And as if he had assented, which he didn’t think he had, she began.

  “Okay. My first was Ryan Brouchard. I was eighteen—yes, a bit of a late bloomer—he was twenty-two. Nice guy, scratchy beard. We were together for two years, and then broke up when he moved to Seattle. No, Portland. Then I was brokenhearted and just was very … God! Loose, I guess. So embarrassing. Gary Franklin, and, like, a month later, his cousin, who was just abominable. Couple of years—no one. Abstinent. Like a nun. Then, okay … just really quickly: Toby Vandeveer, Morgan Freeman (not the Morgan Freeman), Ben (I don’t think I learned his last name) and, last, Jedidiah Jensen from the bluegrass state of Kentucky.” She laughed, and then put her arm around Bronfman’s shoulder. “But that was some time ago. I’ve been on my own for a little while now.”

  She heaved a huge sigh, as if she’d just finished running a marathon while reciting the alphabet backward. He thought she might be blushing, but it was hard to tell in the flickering light. He was warmer now, under the covers, and so was she, and her nipples kept brushing against his arm, back and forth, as she breathed. It was an odd sensation, as if she was trying to tickle him with a pencil eraser.

  It was his turn. She was waiting, expectant; he had probably never seen her eyes more eager. But his mouth wouldn’t open. He was being asked to speak a language he didn’t know, one he had never even heard until now, and it made him mute. His head was half swallowed in the pillow, so she could see only one of his eyes, but that was all she needed to understand that there was a problem.

  “What, Edsel?” she said. She raised herself up on one elbow. “You don’t want to or … you’re shy about it, I get that. But I did it. That would be really unfair if you—”

  “Mary McCauley!” he blurted out, as if he were being cross-examined, beaten down by the opposing council. “Mary Day McCauley, when I was fifteen years old.”

  “Fifteen!” she said. She laughed. “That’s astounding! I didn’t expect that. You surprise me, Edsel Bronfman. Mild-mannered on the outside, a roaring tiger on the inside. So. Okay. Next?”