Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Fancy-looking ladies came and went, but Will’s lady stayed away. They closed at ten, but because Thom was there it took a little longer to finish cleaning up, because he hovered over every spot and smudge, though he never actually cleaned anything himself. Sean had told Will that he wanted to leave at midnight, and had offered to help him pack that morning and sneak his bags past their parents. Will had just shaken his head.

“Do you need more time to think about it?” Sean had asked, and Will had said, “Maybe.”

“Take all the time you want,” Sean had said. “Take all day.”

“Okay. I don’t think I want to go anywhere.”

“You say that now,” Sean said. “But will you say that at midnight?”

It was eleven when Will left the store, and though he started toward home, he took a detour to 813 Old England Avenue. It wasn’t totally out of his way, and he told himself convincingly that he just wanted to see where the lady lived. At the end of their phone conversation she had said he could come by anytime, exactly how she had said he could call anytime. Still, he was only going to stand in the driveway. It turned out to be a guesthouse set back away from the road, and long sweeps of Spanish moss hid her windows from the sidewalk. Will walked down the driveway, meaning to leave as soon as he had counted her windows, but he knocked on her door instead, and it didn’t occur to him until after he had knocked to worry that she might have a family.

“There you are,” she said, and seemed to appraise him as he stood in her doorway.

“I guess,” Will said.

“You look better out from under those fluorescent lights.”

“Thanks,” Will said. “You too.” That made her laugh. She turned around and walked inside.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asked him as they passed her kitchen.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Me neither,” she said, and took his hand. They passed through the rest of her tiny house to get to her bedroom, but she wasn’t giving him a tour. In brief glimpses he saw her little living room and dining room before she led him upstairs. Her bedroom took up the whole second floor, and her bed, king-size and strewn with green and blue pillows, was the biggest piece of furniture he had ever seen. She let go of his hand and lay down, turning to face him as she raised her hands over her head, stretching and sliding in a way that made him feel like he was watching her at the bottom of a pool. “There you are,” she said again.

In his fantasy it seemed like the right thing to do. There, he imagined a moment when, inside her, he paused to consider that this was how things were supposed to be, and he made a point of enjoying how nicely they fit together, how something or someone in charge of them both had engineered things such that they fit together. He imagined himself thinking, This is perfect .

The actual fucking left him little time to think, or really enjoy it, though it went on a long time. He came right away, while she was still nosing around in his groin. She surprised him by shoving her tongue in his ass, and more than pleasure he felt the most immense and startling surprise: at the narrow, suspicious look on her face, at the way his cock arched and bucked without being touched, at the fountaining geyser of semen and the discrete noise it made when it fell on her pillows, a rapid series of soft tip-taps that sounded like some fleet little creature had just run across her bed.

“Is it over already?” she asked, but he wasn’t done. He put away all thoughts of his fantasy, because he hadn’t really imagined any of it correctly, and they did things that he probably couldn’t have imagined, because he thought it was disrespectful to imagine such things. He stopped thinking altogether, and just did what he was told and when they were finished he continued not to think, but lay away from her on the far side of the bed, silent since his third big shout, which was only a peep compared to hers. He stared at her, not holding an opinion one way or the other about her or what they had just done, until she made an odd noise, a burbling sigh the sort of which he’d never heard come out of anyone’s mouth. When she did it again he realized it wasn’t coming from her mouth but from between her legs. It broke the silence and his unthinking reverie and seemed like the greatest and suddenly the worst surprise of the night, and for all that it was just a meaningless utterance of air, like the beginning of a regretful conversation he would have with himself for the rest of his life.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Of course you do,” she said into her pillow, half-asleep. “But don’t stay away too long.” Will picked up his clothes and dressed on the stairs, and started to run as soon as he was out the door, not really understanding why it seemed like such a good idea now, after all, to get in the car with Sean and drive and drive and drive, but knowing it as certainly as he had ever known anything. It was hardly a mile to his house from hers and he was home by twelve-thirty. The house was brightly lit and his mother and father were both waiting up for him, but his brother was long gone.

A s she ran, Molly heard her mother telling her it was too soon after eating to exercise so vigorously. When she heard the noise of the iron doors falling down, she had sprinted out of the feasting chamber through the nearest door and hadn’t slowed down since, running at top speed down a featureless gray corridor that opened every few minutes into another marvelous room, but she knew it would be stupid, or even deadly, to stop to see the sights. The more she ate, the hungrier she had felt, and even though she had gravy on her lips and pudding in her hair, she felt very light on her feet and was sure she could run a mile, or swim two, if she needed to. She went along with a bottle in her hand, sure she could feel the threat behind her as an actual pressure and heat against her back and her bottom. When she finally paused for breath, she took a long sip of the wine.

The more she drank, the more clearheaded she felt and the more coordinated she became. As she ran, everything was feeling for the first time like it was making sense: she was lost in a cathartic dream of instruction, peopled by incarnations of her neuroses, and the deadly threat behind her was nothing less than the roiling mass of her feelings for her dead, abandoning boyfriend. She neither knew nor needed to know why those feelings should take Peabo’s form in the same way that she didn’t need to worry anymore about whether or not what was happening was real. It was real enough to demand that she deal with it, and sometime very soon she was going to need to stop running and turn around, but not quite yet. The lesson of the meal she had just left was that there is always room to enjoy yourself, and always something to appreciate, even when you’ve lost your mind and lost all hope and have clawed your way down not just into the slough of despond but beyond it into the subsequent sloughs of despair and please-kill-me-now. She hadn’t meant or wanted to enjoy that unexpected feast, but she had, and it made her feel big in her soul, how she could delight in the texture of a crispy bit of chicken skin at the same time that she mourned her lost boyfriend and her lost mind, and she didn’t have to choose between delight and despair: she could experience them both to their fullest simultaneously. She didn’t know whether that was progress or just a detour on her road to suicide-survivor recovery, or if this double capacity for feeling might dissipate when she turned around to be rent by monster-Peabo. But she was going to enjoy it for a while. If she was drunk, this was the best drunk of her life, and she wanted it to go on and on. She sped up, sure she could be sprinting down a balance beam as easily as a sidewalk, and gave it a try, fleetly placing one foot in front of the other, and then leaping imaginary candles perched along the imaginary balance beam, and then stepping through tires set at intervals between the imaginary candles on the imaginary balance beam, and wondering, just before she tripped and fell, if she could see the tires and the candles so clearly, why they didn’t just appear, here at the approaching bottom and climax of her allegorical recovery dream adventure?