inspo/imagined-desire

“I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”

He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.

He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.

“It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.

“Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”

I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.

I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.

He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.

Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.

She looks up. I’ve caught her by surprise. Her face opens up and all of a sudden it’s like that paper mask is transparent. I’m looking right through it, and I get a flash of some kind of life we could’ve had—barbecues, dogs, kids flopping over us in bed—it rolls through me fast but strong and clear, like one of those cooking smells that blows in the window so sharp you can pick out the ingredients. And then it’s gone. It’s gone, and Holly’s holding my hand. Finally, after that long long wait, her hand is back on mine. Dry cool fingers, slim. The rings loose. I close my eyes. My hand is so hot, I feel my pulse in every finger. I’m afraid she’ll let go but she doesn’t let go. She keeps her hand around mine and it’s like she’s holding all of me in her cool sweetness, calming my fever back down.

It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.

The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.

She saw, or knew, that Angus Dance had come back into the room. Making sure about some cheese puffs, she found him close to her, talking to a black-haired, blue-eyed girl who had come with the Dalrymples.

And why on earth not? A man like that could not possibly be leading a celibate life, abstinent in tribute to her own romantic fancies.

When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.