David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“I thought it was all about me ,” I said.

“Oh, it will be. Do you want to get fed before or after? Or before and after?”

“You mean you want after.”

“Oh, my.” She leaned her head farther back to look upside down in my eyes. “Is it that effortful?”

“It’s been a shitty few days,” I said. “I’m losing people.”

“Who are you losing? Not me.”

“At work.”

“Ah,” she said. “Construction and its discontents.”

“One of them used to take class with you. Amber Sibley?”

“Oh God, all the Ambers and Crystals and Tiffanys. She probably hates me, right? I don’t mean to be a terrible person. I just feel they’re all so sunk . Like, submerged . You want to weep. There isn’t any light there.” She took another sip, a bigger one. “They’re the same age as Everett, some of them.” This was the son who was in Europe, living in fucking hostels. I guess he could have been some shining spirit and not just another privileged twerp. Like me at that age.

“So maybe you shouldn’t be teaching them,” I said.

“I try to like my life,” she said. “I really do.” I heard the ice cubes knock against her teeth. “So are you going to be able to find other people?”

“I don’t want to worry about it now.” With her head in my lap and the blue pill starting to work, I could feel myself growing. I liked that her jeans were tight on her thighs and I wormed my hand down between where it was warm. She clamped my hand down harder and I thought I’d be able to get the job done. “You want to have the next one upstairs? I don’t know how warm it is up there.”

“Then you must have a short memory,” she said. She went into the kitchen for refills, switching her ass like she was making fun of me. I put more wood in the stove and followed her up the stairs, my four fingers between where the thighs met, squeezing, my thumb poking where her butthole would be. She stopped, eased back into it and said, “I like the way you think.”

I shoved her into the bedroom, making her spill her drink; she tossed down what was left and sat on the bed. I drank mine in one gulp, pushed her onto her back and she bounced up again and slapped me, which was how we generally got started. But I felt my hard-on going away. Construction and its discontents —she just had to be snotty. I watched her unzip her jeans and begin working them off and I noticed welts along her big white thighs from the seams. I yanked them off the rest of the way, socks inside, and got my mouth down where her underpants were already wet. She tasted sour. She twisted out from under and tried to get at the top button of my jeans and I pushed her away and slapped her good. “No,” she said. “I want that.”

If she’d just let me go down on her I might be able to get it back, or else she might come a couple times and maybe I’d be off the hook. I grabbed at the underpants and she clawed my arms, still within the rules, but instead of wrestling her down or whatever I was supposed to do, I got up off the bed and just stood there. “Fine,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”

I let her unzip me, she slid her hand down in, then looked up at me. She did have that pretty face. “Poor baby,” she said. “Okay, I know how to fix this. Get those off and lie back down.”

This time I hit her hard.

“What the fuck are you doing ?” She put a hand to her jaw. “That’s not cool. I think you hurt me.”

“I am going to hurt you,” I said.

“Okay, stop. This is scaring me a little.”

“Maybe you better get out.”

She got up, took my arm and kissed where she’d scratched me. I pushed her back down. “What’s going on with you?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just not into it.”

“You mean tonight? Or anymore?”

“Christ,” I said. “Is it going to be that conversation?”

“Oh. Wow. Then I guess there’s my answer. So how long—no, actually I don’t need to know.” She found her socks, pulled them on and stood up to get into her jeans. “Here’s one thing about me, I make a clean exit. You don’t have to worry about hysterical phone calls.”

“Wait,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”

“Apparently there isn’t any ‘we,’ ” she said. “Why have I not learned this by now?”

—

I finally had to take a couple of Advil PMs on top of the Jack Daniel’s to get myself to sleep, and when I made it down to the kitchen in the morning I dry heaved at the smell of the scallops, which were still out on the counter. It was cold downstairs, but there wasn’t time to load the stove or make coffee—Amber would have some on, in the newly clean coffeemaker—or to shower or shave. If this guy did show up for an interview, it wouldn’t hurt for him to see me looking like a hard-ass. I stuck a PowerBar in my jacket pocket, put on my gloves and went out to start the truck and scrape frost off the windshield. Thermometer said three above. This would probably be the last cold snap, and then everybody’s fucking lawns would start greening up.

Amber poured me coffee and got milk out of the fridge. “I thought it was supposed to be spring ,” she said. “You look like shit, by the way. She wearing you out or something?”

“Something.”

“You should’ve had my morning. I go to brush my teeth and there’s his fucking outfit in the sink. I didn’t even want to handle it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “You didn’t tell me he was slamming. Okay, you need to get out. Like today . Is he selling?”

“Well, it’s not like there’s people coming to the house. Anyways, I decided the place I’m going. Venice, California. It’s right by L.A. and they have the beach there.” She sat back down at the computer. “You want to see pictures?”

“Amber.”

“I know, I know, I know. Everybody says. It’s not going to be all that much longer.”

“You could even—Shit, okay, you’re going to do what you do. Can I get on that for a second?”

I had three messages, a Canadian pharmacy that got through the spam filter, an ad from Lowe’s and an email from a guy I hadn’t been in touch with for years, with the subject line Look at this! Nothing from Kristin. I looked through the headlines in the Times but nobody good had died. I checked Renovator’s Supply for deals, then couldn’t think of where else to go.

“Okay,” I said, “I better roll. I knew that asshole wouldn’t show up. He gets here before nine, give him directions over to Miller Brook, okay? No, actually, tell him fuck it. Nothing from Johnny, huh? We’re in great fucking shape here.”

Over at the site, Myron was back outside with the floorboards, wearing gloves and brown coveralls; the sawhorses were frozen into the mud. Jesse was upstairs hanging drywall and the two kids were in the living room standing around a heater with their thumbs up their asses. I sent the one with the tats up so Jesse could maybe start teaching him and put the bodybuilder to work insulating the rest of the downstairs; the other kid hadn’t made much progress yesterday. We should have had the plumber in already, to run PEX on top of the plywood—Holtzman had decided that while we were at it he wanted radiant heat under the floors—but that couldn’t happen until we got the fucking walls squared away. I never should have said July. This was what my life was.

I’d thought that Dana—the woman I’d been married to—didn’t come into this story, but she saw it all those years ago. Nobody would anymore: the people I deal with now see only what I show them. She and I had a big thing in high school; then I went off to Berklee and she got into RISD. I used to go down to visit her in Providence until she hooked up with somebody there. Which is part of why I went with that stupid band. Then, ten years later, when my mother died, I came down to Darien and she was visiting her parents because it was Christmas. She had a job as a graphic designer in New York, still living with that same guy. But she said he was cheating on her—it actually might’ve gone both ways—and she was talking in terms of just chucking everything, maybe going off somewhere to raise vegetables and write children’s books. Not to suspect her, but she already knew, because my father had been bragging, that I’d bought a big house and my business was making good money. So long story short. I think she was remembering me like I used to be.