Hummingbird Salamander(25)

“I sell security,” I said. “Now that I’m not a detective.”

I don’t know why I told the truth, except “security” could be so many things.

“That’s my business, too,” Jack said. “In a way. Not the way you mean, though.”

“How do you know what I mean?” A little irritated. He’d sounded dismissive. And the more I looked at Jack, the more I saw the imperfections. A hint of a belly. The way his features resembled those of a local weatherman. How he might be a bit older than me, but had worked carefully to conceal that.

“No offense,” Jack said. “I guess I think everyone sells security in some way. You’re selling this idea that you’re dependable, honest. Trustworthy. But most of us aren’t. It’s just a matter of whether it manifests in the job or not.”

Manifests. Trustworthy. A strange kind of hitting on. In that moment, Jack didn’t look like he much cared for the task at hand. He was sitting sideways—the better to see me, I’d thought. But also that way he could survey the entire length of the bar. Some other women had come in, were sitting at the far end.

Then the moment passed, and Jack said something witty about bars and bartenders, and I laughed and I described my frustration with conferences in general and I had my second drink, which was my limit. And we both kept the conversation going, as if it was necessary for whatever might come after. But we didn’t particularly care about the conversation. It existed there, in the air, between us. All those words. A cloud of them. Maybe I sounded risky or exotic or eccentric. Maybe I didn’t care what I sounded like.

At some point, conference-goers kept bursting into the bar in groups that made it hard to hear yourself talk. The music rose in volume until it wasn’t just a mumble under the carpet. Someone spilled a drink, broke a glass.

At some point, Jack leaned over and whispered a room number in my ear, his arm around my shoulders. And then he was gone, as if a ghost torn apart. Too delicate, under the gaze of all those people. As if he’d never had a thing to do with them.

I didn’t usually go up to a man’s room. I was happy enough with my bar ritual. How it got me out of myself. How playing a role helped me somehow. I didn’t want to. I wanted to. The drug of the unknown. That was simple. Aftermath wasn’t simple. I’d been good for three years. Why now?

I made Jack wait. I had a third drink, downed some bar snacks, ravenous. I went to the elevator, to the seventh floor. Wandered, confused, down dim-lit corridors, lost in the maze of a dark fairy tale. I didn’t mind—that was part of the story. This difficulty, this disruption. Which heightened the intensity and the risk.

But I never found his room.

I never found the room because the room number he’d given me didn’t exist.

In the moment, you tell yourself he got it wrong because he was drunker than he looked, or he’d gotten confused and come from a different, adjacent hotel. You don’t want to think that he blew you off, but that’s what comes next.

Relief, disappointment. How you wander back down to window-shop the closed avenue of tacky stores on the street level.

How you look at the stiff mannequins in a clothing store and will them to move, to become something other than what they are.

How you’re drawn back into your own shit no matter what the distraction.





[32]


What went on between my parents when I was at school or out, I don’t know. Can’t imagine. I want to think there was an affection there, an intimacy, they could not display when I was around. I want to believe that both could be more present.

My father went around with a perpetual frown, as if he thought the world was making fun of him. As if, in living, he’d stolen something from God, and every breath was a kind of trickery. He could be known to smile at the right joke or something absurd that had happened on the farm, but that was it. That was when I liked him best, if I liked him at all.

In those days, growing up, the farm might be tolerable and even “something special,” as he called it. But the frown became over time a kind of cynical wince. The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him. A sourness that creeps in when you have no more hope of being successful. My dad had degrees in animal husbandry and agriculture; knowledge, smarts, were not his problem.

Toward the end, as we hurtled toward bankruptcy, that’s when Grandfather became an anchor. The “indispensable weight,” as Dad’s neighbor, another struggling farmer, called him. To us, he was just the agony of bursts of temper and bursts of static. I hate that one of my enduring memories is Grandpa, before he lost his mind, taking us to a Sears lingerie show and leering at the models. I was twelve, my brother three years older.

The cutaway of that, two years later. Cut away to: seeing my brother’s lifeless face framed by mud. Framed by the riverbank.

My father’s failure with the farm is one thing. My mother was another: easy to diagnose, hard to talk about. It had started with a forgetfulness I might understand. Because you saw it in others. A slack gaze, a misunderstanding of relatives. A need to be taken care of. These might be things that came premature, but fell into familiar categories.

But as if familiar wasn’t her forte, the tiny, spiteful woman who had come from a strict religious upbringing into the evils of my father’s agnosticism found ways to express whatever was going on in her mind that ventured into strange places.