Ann Beattie - Picturing Will

She started the game — the flirtation — as he reached out to insert the key in the lock. She put her hand over his and stopped him from turning the key, puckering her lips so he would have to stop to kiss her. He could have turned the key anyway, but he let her have the kiss. Her lips were soft — he was feeling skin, not oily lipstick — and he was also feeling her nice breasts, or one of them anyway, pushing against his chest. He started to get hard. She put her hand on his hip, and curled her fingers into his pocket. He tried to kiss her again, but she wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t move and she giggled and wouldn’t let him. Then she wanted him to look into her eyes, and he did, and it seemed he was seeing through to something. A couple came out of their room, closed the door, and passed by, pretending not to notice them. The man had on a shirt patterned with starfish. The woman wore a halter dress. Her bare back made Wayne raise his hand to Kate’s back. His hand felt heavy. He moved his fingers to the side of her breast and pushed gently. She moved closer, and he turned, taking his hand off the key, and stood facing her, knowing she felt his erection. She reached back and turned the key.

Inside, he pinned her hands to her sides. He gave her one very long kiss, after which she reached behind her to close the door and they settled themselves on the floor. Their bodies locked together, fast, and, as he pulled down her panties and pushed inside her, surprised and panting, feeling as if he were sixteen again, he suddenly wanted to know whether she was going to be in Florida for a day or a week, what her last name was, where in New Jersey she lived. Her dress was raised over her hips, her panties tangled around one ankle, and he was still fully dressed, his snap unfastened, the fly of his jeans unzipped.

“Come on,” she said, wriggling out from under. “We’ll tell them the room is too close to the Coke machine, that we didn’t like it.”

“What?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“We’ll get a refund,” she said. “We’ll get a refund and tomorrow night we’ll do the same thing, somewhere else.”

“What do you mean?” he said, wiping the sweat from his face. “They’re not going to—”

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “You go sit in the car.” She smiled. He saw that his zipper had left a red welt on her thigh. “I hate hotels,” she said. “I know my way around desk clerks. Particularly wimpy kids like that.”

Wayne’s knees felt weak. She closed the door behind them, and they walked to the elevator. The elevator door opened. There were several people inside, so they did not talk again until the elevator descended to the lobby.

“Hyatt can afford to give us a quickie,” she said. “We didn’t even use the John.”

A couple was registering at the desk, and the clerk didn’t look up when Wayne passed through the lobby. It had all happened so fast that he thought he could still be where he had been just a moment ago, debating between returning to the bar or going home. She was going to get the money back! He was giddy, thinking about it. And the next night … What next night? Corky was already going to kill him. He decided that he didn’t care. He’d lie to her, and if she didn’t like it, tough. The next night. Somewhere else.

She came out as he was still getting his breath, smirking and holding out the wad of money. “It’s minus a ten-dollar tip,” she said. “He very nicely ripped up the record of renting the room.” Her smile faded. “Listen, I’ve got to go home,” she said. “I told my mother I was taking a walk. I’ve got to get back.”

“What about tomorrow?” he said, as they walked across the parking lot.

“You must know the hotels better than I do,” she said.

As he opened the car door, she smoothed her skirt underneath her. Smoothed it as if she were a modest lady, not someone who had just hiked it up to her waist to fuck on the floor. Her hand slightly brushing the bottom of her skirt made his cock tingle and start to go hard again. It was really like being sixteen. He could hardly wait for the next night: another hotel, another closed door. The next night they could skip the drinks. Let her tip twenty dollars — who cared? The money would last for nights.

As he started the ignition, Florida began to look different. Like a botanist to whom a field is not just a haze of green but a very particular, complex world, Wayne saw the hotels and motels lining the highway as loaded with hope and possibility: stage sets for fantasies he and Kate could repeatedly create.

When he got home that night the situation was better than he could have imagined. Corky had gone to Corinne’s house because the electricity had gone out. A miracle! No electricity! The note taped to the front door told him he should come get her.

He went in, flicked the light switch up and down — no electricity! No electricity! He washed his face and then went next door and knocked, telling Corky that he had been so worried until he had found her note, which had fallen down at the side of the steps. With his arm around her shoulder, he led her back to the house, and they found their way upstairs in the dark.

Everything he and Corky said was all talk about another world. Wayne was sixteen, and his life with Corky didn’t really exist, let alone his first marriage, and his marriage to Jody. There was no Will. The next night he and Kate would be in another hotel, behind a quickly closed door. He heard the door closing. Slamming, in fact, though the sound was inside his head: a pounding headache that had come from exhaustion, drinking, guilt, and from holding his breath so long, earlier that night, while his body exploded.

The door closed over and over, creaking.

“Do you think you could find your way into the bathroom to get me a couple of aspirin?” Wayne whispered from beneath the noise of the crashing door.

Corky slipped out of bed and slowly began to grope her way down the hallway in the dark.

The day of Will’s arrival Wayne was shoveling mulch around bushes planted on an incline — some rich person’s last-minute thought about landscaping the hillside on the north side of the pool. The lady of the house liked Wayne. If it weren’t for Kate, he might even have been interested. He was amused — giddy, almost — that after years of putting out signals and hardly getting a head to turn, he now had a lover who was almost a nymphomaniac.

Zeke, who worked with Wayne, was slender and pockmarked. This was his first job since getting out of the Army. As he was marching one day, his arches just collapsed, leaving him with flapjack feet and a set of discharge papers. His family wouldn’t take him back; for two nights, when he was between places to live, he had camped on Corky and Wayne’s sofabed. But recently Zeke was much happier: sharing a place with an other guy at Breezy Palms trailer park just off the highway, dating a waitress named Susan who was almost ten years older and had dyed black curls and an appetite for sex that drove Zeke mad. He had her picture — a photo-booth square, laminated — along with a small silver cross and a miniature rabbit’s foot, hung on a chain that was tucked under his shirt, the way he used to wear his dog tags. Wayne was amused that Zeke thought of him as a family man (even if Corky was his family), a stay-at-home who must envy Zeke his wild adventures.

Wayne made it a point never to drink on the job. Zeke took Wayne’s lead, always, so the two of them were drinking lemonade out of paper cups. The pitcher was on a metal table under a striped umbrella. The good life, minus the person who made the money to buy the good life — the big-bucks businessman husband who commuted to New York. This weekend his wife would join him up North, and she had offered Wayne the use of the pool. He thought that he would take her up on it. It would give him something to do with Will, though he wished that instead of being with Will he could be swimming with the beautiful nymph Kate.