Chapter 8 Jane 3 #2
She doesn’t know how long the man has been sitting next to her, but when she turns from the couple—the wife is now running her fingers through the man’s chest hair—he’s at her elbow, taking her in.
He’s got sun-worn skin, and his eyes are a clear, placid blue, but shadowed by the baseball cap he’s got pulled low, the way so many of the blackjack players wear them.
To hide. His eyes flash out from under the brim.
Looking at them is like looking at a blue object sunk at the bottom of a glass of water.
The contrast is startling, uncomfortable and attractive at once.
She feels like he can see all of her—the place where the pawned wedding ring used to be, where she still runs her finger over the bare skin, the bruise on her thigh from where the last man whipped her with the cord from the clothing iron in the hotel room.
He drinks a beer and then a club soda but buys her another glass of wine.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
She surprises herself by telling him the truth. McLean, Virginia. It feels good, purifying, this honesty. Like her first fresh breath of air in long time.
“So what are you doing here?”
Maybe it’s the wine, or the dimness of the room, or the puzzling clarity of his eyes, but before she can stop herself she tells him about hearing the baby cry in the middle of the night, how she rose from her bed and stood outside of the nursery for a minute, how she couldn’t make herself go in.
Instead she walked past the door, put on a pair of shoes, took her purse down from the hook in the hall, got in the car, and drove away.
With each mile, she pictured a length of thread being wound back around a spool, returning.
Something being called in. She drove past the coffee shop and the preschool where they had talked about one day sending the baby.
She passed the 24-hour Qwik Mart, and then there was a highway ramp spread before her like an offering.
That night was daylight savings time, and she was still driving when the hour jumped ahead.
It made what she was doing feel more unreal.
She was no one, going nowhere. Just a woman in a box of steel and glass, like hundreds of others threaded along the highway, following the glow from her own headlights.
Maybe she should have felt terror, or guilt, but she only felt free.
She took a bus from the mechanic to Atlantic City, passing billboards for eighties cover bands, a performance by Frank Sinatra Jr., Donnie and Marie Osmond.
There was marsh on either side of the highway, the grass rippling in the breeze like a prairie.
A few squat motels, the ones where she now spends her nights when she’s not with a john, or when they need a place to go.
When the bus growled into the depot, she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the ocean, so she followed its smell, the brine mixed in with the reek of overflowing garbage cans.
She sat in the sand until the sun rose and the sweat began to slide along her spine.
The exhilaration had yielded to something else.
She felt scraped out, raw, exhausted. Used.
“Tell me more,” he says. They’re in his room.
He had stood apart from her on the elevator, three people between them, so that she could only see him in the metal panels of the elevator car.
She tried to study his face for what she had seen in the others’—greed, hunger, anger—but there was nothing like that.
He knew what she was, but he seemed encouraging, kind.
“What was that like?” he says, and a sense of confusion splices through her.
Is this what he wants? Is he the kind of man who gets off on playing the hero?
For some reason that makes her nervous, too.
But she runs her hand over the bruises on her leg and pushes the thought away.
She decides to spare no details, partly because it feels good to talk, and because it seems that this is what he wants, the way the others wanted her to slap them or call them “Daddy” or “sir.” She talks about the first time she slept with a man for money.
When her cash from the car and the ring dwindled, she asked one of the cocktail waitresses where she might stay on the cheap.
The woman told her that the Trump Plaza had been the cheapest room in town, until it shuttered.
Now it’s just the motels over by the marsh.
A girl like you doesn’t want to stay there.
No choice, she said.
Well, bring pepper spray. Make sure they give you a room with a door that locks.
She didn’t even make it from the motel office to the room before a man propositioned her.
She didn’t say yes or no, only let him follow her to her door.
Pointed to the bedside table until he peeled a few bills from a roll in his pocket.
She hadn’t even been with her husband since the baby.
The pain made her vision go white. They had sewn her up, and she swore she had come back together crookedly, wrong. She bled, stained the white sheets.
Didn’t tell me you had your fucking period, he said. Slammed a lamp to the ground on his way out.
“It was easier to keep doing it than to avoid it,” she tells the man.
She is oddly relieved at being able to unburden herself, but she’s anxious, too.
When will they get on with it—the thing he’s brought her here for?
Whatever way he’s paid to use her. She’s heard of men who just want to talk, from some of the other girls on the street, but never met one herself.
So far she’s only been with the ones who get their money’s worth.
“Don’t you think your daughter deserves to have a mother?” he asks her.
“It’s better this way.” She knows it’s true, but still, her voice cracks.
“Today, I went to a psychic, this little shop on the boardwalk near Caesars.” She hears herself laugh a bitter little chuckle.
“Not a psychic, really. Just this teenage girl. I wanted to know what she could see about my daughter. If … if … she might forgive me someday. A goddamned psychic. A kid, probably a fake. And even then I was too afraid to hear what she had to say. I’m too afraid to see how bad I’ve ruined everything. ”
He steps away from her and pulls a bottle from the mini fridge, disappears into the bathroom and pours it into a glass. She wonders if she’s imagining it: the way his footfall has changed, the work boots stomping away. He returns from the bathroom, holds the glass out to her.
“Have another drink, it will make you feel better.” She thinks for a moment about all of the rules you learn first as a girl: Don’t talk to strangers.
Don’t go anywhere with someone you don’t know.
Keep an eye on your drinks. Don’t dress like you’re asking for it.
Don’t get too drunk. But she is so tired of rules.
When she found out she was having a daughter, she worried that she would have to instill in her that same vigilance, and what was vigilance but a form of fear?
Screw it, she thinks, and swallows half of the glass in a single gulp.
She needs this, for the drink to do its loosening work.
But still she can’t help it. She doubles over, sobs until she gags.
He stands over her—she watches his shadow on the floor.
“You said the Sunset Motel?”
What is it she hears in his voice? Anger? Excitement? She nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, or else she’ll start to cry again.
“I’ll take you home.”
She’s failed. She’s not sure she can ask for money, but she’ll need to ask for at least $15 to cover her room.
She tries to think of how to say it on the elevator ride down, but the booze has already gone to her head.
She feels her stomach rise up into her throat when the elevator drops, and she tries to tally up her drinks—the math doesn’t add up.
She feels too drunk for the number of drinks she’s had, even with the way she gulped the last one down.
She chalks it up to the sobbing, and the way the sound of her daughter’s screams echoes in her mind.
By the time they are in the parking garage, her vision is fuzzy at the edges.
She tries to tell him that something is wrong, but there is a drag on her words when she speaks.
He helps her into the car but that is not the right word—help.
Help is what she needs, something that feels impossible and very far away.
Her words retreat. Her arms go heavy at her sides.
Along the road the lit billboards hover over the marsh, ringed in a hazy purple glow.
They pass underneath the neon sign for the Sunset Motel and into the darkness.
He guides his car around the back of the motel.
She wants to tell him that this is not where she needs to go but can only manage a groan.
And then his hands are on her, circling her neck, pressing against her throat.
She can’t raise her arms to fight him off or kick her feet.
She can’t scream, but the screams in her head are louder now, that three-part wail of her daughter’s that used to make her dig her nails into her palms. Her lungs burn.
When the blackness comes, it is a relief that she no longer has to look into his face, his teeth clenched, the pale blue eyes that now glow with rage.
The last thing Jane hears is the groan that escapes from between his teeth and the swish of the grass in the breeze.