Trust Exercise(70)
In the first confusing moments, going out through the gate in the railing and struggling to get to Liam through the crowd, it wasn’t obvious that Martin wasn’t there. It still seemed possible that he was parking the car, or getting a coffee, or returning from a trip to the men’s room. Liam grabbed Sarah around the waist while jumping up and down so that they banged clumsily into each other, and then Liam got his tongue in Sarah’s mouth until Sarah pushed him off to arm’s length. “Wait, wait! Let me look at you!” she said, as if she wanted to gaze in his face and not get his tongue out of her mouth. That was when Liam caught sight of Karen, it seemed for the first time.
“Oh wow, Karen! You came!” Liam said. “I thought Martin wrote you, about his big part? He got a summer stock part—”
“You mean he’s not here?” Sarah said. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“He told me,” Karen said before planning to say it. “I mean, he said he was up for a part. Probably his letter saying he got the part is still on its way to my house.” Karen felt Liam looking at her in confusion. Clearly Martin had gotten the part, if there really was a part, a while ago. But Liam was too stupid to know she was lying. He was even more stupid than Karen.
“It’s so cool you came anyway!” Liam said earnestly. “We’ll all have a great time—”
“But where’s Martin,” Sarah demanded. “Can’t Karen go where he is?”
“He’s touring, Sarah. I can’t just go along on his tour!”
“He really told you he might be on tour? How come you never told me? You came all the way here and he’s not even here?”
“I’m sure my mum won’t mind if Karen stays too,” Liam tried interrupting.
“Your mum?” Sarah said.
It was interesting, actually, how everyone’s primary feeling-state at that moment was disguised as a different emotion. Sarah’s repulsion at being reunited with Liam took the form of outrage at Martin. Liam’s passion for Sarah took the form of concern for Karen. And Karen’s unbearable humiliation, which she had always expected and never expected, took the form of emotionlessness and not caring. “I still want to see England,” she said to Sarah angrily. “Stop making such a big deal about it. I have to go to the bathroom.”
In the bathroom Karen threw up again, but since she’d felt too sick to eat on the plane, all she threw up was smelly clear slime. She hadn’t made it into a stall and she could feel the eyes and hear the feet of Heathrow travelers as they steered clear of her while she heaved and gagged over the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Did Martin somehow know? She’s always wondered. Despite his obvious defects of character he’s persisted in her psyche as a weird joker-god, malicious and omniscient. Karen finally left the bathroom. Her eyes felt scrubbed with salt. An endless punch was landing in her gut.
Karen, Sarah, and Liam went to the youth hostel where in a room like a prison cell Karen lay in a bottom bunk facing the wall with her suitcase on her feet so she could feel if someone tried to steal it and slept a feverlike sleep while Sarah and Liam did whatever they did, had whatever adventure they had, made whatever postcard pictures in Sarah’s mind part of her life. Later Sarah would be someone who referred to Trafalgar Square and U2 in Cardiff and bangers and mash. Later Sarah would go home with Liam to Bournemouth and meet his mum who watched the BBC and spread Marmite on toast and waited hand and foot on Liam as if he were a king and on Sarah as if she were his new wife the Queen and who seemed to have no idea that Sarah was still in high school, and later Sarah would learn that Liam had been “on the dole” for his entire adult life and was perfectly happy about it, and later Sarah would break up with Liam and go back to London alone and live in the hostel again and somehow get a job at a nightclub as a cocktail waitress, and later Sarah would meet a guy at the nightclub who took her with him on a train to see U2 in Cardiff and whom she lost in a stampede for floor seating in the arena, and later Sarah would stop sending Karen these updates, each one so flashily stamped with different-color silhouettes of the Queen, because Karen never wrote back. Karen never even read the letters until many years later and still isn’t sure why she read them at all. In London Karen lay in the bunk in the prison-cell room in the hostel, and knelt behind the door down the hall labeled “Water Closet” gagging over the toilet, and sat in the grimy vinyl chair in the hostel office while a robotic guy from Germany figured out how to place an international collect call for her. Bunk bed, toilet, telephone. That was London.
Karen and Elli had succeeded in keeping the escapade a secret from her father yet when he answered the phone he wasn’t as surprised or confused as you might think to learn his daughter was in London and that she was sick, broke, and alone. The sound of his voice, unemotional but not exactly cold, drawling a little in a way she’d somehow never noticed before, coming out of the phone into her ear as she sat in the chair in the hostel in London, marks the beginning of Karen’s true adult life, if these things can be marked. Karen hopes they can. She finds that sort of historical clarity helpful. At the time Karen couldn’t have explained her decision to call her father and not her mother but it was part of that beginning of true adult life, paradoxically since it was a decision to make no more decisions, to seek out superior judgment, to acknowledge there was such a thing. Karen’s true adult life began when she recognized she was a child, and remembered that, unlike her mother, her father viewed her as a child as well. Calling her father meant doing things his way, but at least he had a way. At least he had a way, and the will to stick to it. Karen put herself into his hands. All the way back to America, Karen remembered nothing, she kept nothing in mind and called nothing to mind. Now she was an expert traveler: she did it all with a mind that was totally empty. Her father was waiting in the airport for her with his belly buttoned into his work shirt and his big hairy hands gripping each other in front of his crotch. Elli sometimes called Karen’s father “a fucking hick” with great scorn but Karen’s father had command of the resources. That first night he said nothing to her, just let her sleep in the small, sad room that was always reserved for her and Kevin’s rare visits and that wasn’t decorated with anything but their school portraits, every single year but one (Kevin first grade/Karen third grade—Elli had forgotten to order the packets), framed and lined up on the wall. Paneling on the walls and shag on the floor Karen’s father had nailed up and tacked down himself. Military-style bedsheets Karen almost couldn’t wedge herself into, they were tucked on the mattress so tight. Then their strong detergent smell gave her a headache and kept her awake. This kind of thing had never bothered her before. The next day, the trip to the doctor. Back home again Karen’s father tanned her bare butt with his belt the way he’d done when she and Kevin were very little, before the divorce. All of this had been expected and hoped for. Karen’s father let her get back in bed afterward, brought a folding chair in and sat on it, watching his knuckles until Karen stopped crying. Eventually he said, “Who’s the guy.”