by
Miranda July
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“Sorry.” We walked in silence, watching overly large crows land on a fence. “I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache,” I said, giving in to knowing more than him. “It’s a problem that you can’t fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second that you have is somehow for it.” You could also apparently lose your calling and wind up wandering around with a guy who worked at Hertz.
But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking.
“Hey,” they said. The young woman in the couple had hair down to her butt and wore a bra that was somehow a shirt. She looked me up and down not understanding that my outfit was sexy, too. We all went inside. Were we going to spend the whole night with this couple? I wanted to cry. The girl tossed her hair over her shoulder and mimed holding an invisible pool cue.
“Gonna clobber him,” she said, and the couple headed down a hallway to the right. Wonderful people, loved them. [...]
heh
“You recognized me,” I said tightly.
“Well, sure. I saw you talking to that guy at the gas station and thought I was going to have a heart attack. Then we had the thing when I cleaned your windshield.”
“But you couldn’t see me, the glare—”
“What are you talking about? We were looking right at each other.”
I felt like I was moving in slow motion, underwater.
“So when you came into that restaurant, Fontana’s—”
“I knew you’d be there. Because you’d asked the gas station guy where to eat.”
Not just a fan, a stalker.
“You really seemed like you didn’t remember seeing me,” I said evenly. “That was a good performance.”
“But I thought we both knew. We had had the crazy moment through the windshield, and now we were playing a kind of game. You asked me so many questions. And I kind of spilled the beans when I said I worked at Hertz.”
I didn’t see how that was spilling the beans.
“Oh my god,” he said, covering his mouth, “you’re so . . . You think everyone’s job is to clean your windshield.”
I shook my head. “No—you were cleaning another car, too.”
“A Hertz car. You do understand that I don’t work at a gas station?”
I turned red. There was a little vagueness around car-related jobs.
ahahaha
“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”
“On?”
“Or did I read you all wrong?”
If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the apex, the peak, it is perfectly still for a moment. Neither rising nor falling.
“Why did you come back?” he said. “Why are you here?” He waited, his sharp, dark eyes on mine. “You came back for me. You’re here for me.”
“Why would I do that? That’s crazy. That would be crazy.”
He smiled a little, sympathetically. “Yep. But that’s what people do.”
We sat in silence. I wondered if I was misunderstanding. He reached across the table and touched the back of his hand to the back of mine, ever so gently. There weren’t very many ways to take that. Just one, really. [...]
But our moral codes were entirely different. He keeled over, like he was having an ulcer right then and there. And he actually might have been. He had never done anything like this, never even been tempted.
“It’s only because it’s you. Anyone else I’d be able to resist.”
This was meant as a great compliment, but it felt impersonal to me, like he’d been caught in the snare of my work. Whereas my feelings for him were totally pure, I’d simply been drawn to him.
“To my pretty face,” he said glumly. We each worried that the other one adored something that wasn’t really us. [...]
The next day he was busy when I arrived so I had to sit beside a customer in the row of connected chairs while he rented a car to a woman my age. I tried to figure out from her back if she was flirting with him. It made me crazy, other people around him; he gave himself so freely to these customers. In some alternate dimension I engaged with other people, too. And I had stature! Sometimes people wanted my autograph! But I couldn’t even hold that idea in my mind for one second before it was overwhelmed by a new and much more profound thought: Who cares. None of that had any impact on what was going on in this Hertz on the Arcadia/Monrovia border. I looked at the ceiling, took smooth breaths, and pulled my shoulders back. The gray-haired woman sitting next to me chuckled a little and said something under her breath that weirdly sounded like “You’re admiring him” but obviously wasn’t that.
“Do you want to be with him instead of Harris?”
“No.” That was still easy and true. “He’s not a rock like that. I love him as my lover. I just want to dance with him, I don’t want to raise a child together.”
“So maybe it’s okay.”
“And fuck him. And kiss him. And lie in bed in his arms all day.”
“If you were a French man this would all be perfectly acceptable,” Jordi said.
She was a really good friend.
I lay with my head on his chest. He said he couldn’t believe this, that he was lying with his dream girl in his arms. I saw us lying like this for the rest of our lives, profoundly married to other people but always knowing we could return to our shared world. This was what I had always wanted; he was real enough to love and love me back but not so real that I couldn’t desire him. No matter how miserable I was, there would always be this to look forward to. I smiled, thinking of Parkers and Drivers. Now I could live a full and complete life as a Parker, rather than becoming a Driver, like Harris. And I would probably be a better wife and mother now that I had a lover. An almost lover.
“It’s just being cleaned right now, if you can wait a few minutes.” Skip had handed me the receipt already and now gave me a look like, Is there anything else I can help you with. The couple also now looked at me. I opened my mouth to say something about the suite, about it really being mine—but it wasn’t. If you wanted to own property you went about it in a completely different way. Escrow, things like that. I wheeled my bags out to my car, tears openly running down my face. Helen was carrying clean, folded towels to room 321, but she paused to watch me load up.
“I don’t regret what I did,” she suddenly called out. I was startled; my weeping paused. “If I could go back, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I would do it all exactly the same.”
It seemed like she had committed a terrible crime and somehow thought I was the right person to hear she was unrepentant. I nodded as if I understood and, now somewhat self-consciously, got in my car and began backing out.
Her affair. She didn’t regret cheating on Claire’s uncle. I looked back at her in the rearview mirror. With the towels clutched to her chest, she watched me drive away.