Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

Pochard watched the thick slide of tar through Grebe, nauseously conscious of her ruin. He smelled the mesquite cling to her. He gave up his back pockets to her to try and help. He watched her roll into rooms like a truck without brakes. He italicized himself to fit into this new lifestyle; he pulled himself sideways. He dropped a mess of postcards across the country, trying to make sure someone always knew where to find him, if he needed looking for.

He scrubbed her stains and nudity and filth. He fell into and crawled out of that space between too many times to keep blaming her for it. He made temples and rubbed sharp corners round.

But still he wanted her fist in his mouth. He wanted to feel the cotton of her skin magnet to him with sweat. He wanted to taste the metal of her blood and feel the gold flecks of her eyes shine all fake on him. He wanted one more dark summer. He wanted to feel one more wall close in. The tiny electric motors in him began telling the truth, but he ignored them.

Now, after the months they’d spent together, after she’d turned out to be the one to swat him away, he wondered at how clocks must have pocketed the time away, at how he’d never learned his lesson, at how the fear boated through the murk of him , rocking and sinful. The windows bundled the light in and made it all clear.

A gulch split Odette down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was uncomfortable, out of her element, ready to leave.

Odette had fallen in love with a waitress who was too good to be true. Odette thought the woman looked familiar and asked if they’d met somewhere. The waitress said, “Nope. I remember everyone I haven’t met.” Odette tried again the next weekend, made sure she was seated at an appropriate table. Nothing.

Odette dreamed of the waitress, dreamed she found a red silk blouse on the ground in the woods, and several yards up, she found the shirtless waitress crouched in a bush. Odette dreamed she handed the waitress her blouse with her head turned and then the waitress walked out of the woods while Odette walked farther in. The dream happened again and again. Odette went to the restaurant the next week. Still nothing.

The next time she had the dream she crossed a shallow brook before she found the red blouse in the woods, and when she found the waitress in the bush, after she’d put her blouse back on, the waitress said, “The water is taught to become wider.” Then the waitress walked back, and when Odette followed her several minutes later, the waitress was almost to the clearing, a full stretch of rapid river between them.

Odette returned to the restaurant and the waitress said, “Listen, I will never remember you, okay? I have been yumped up too many times and I’m not ready for it to happen again.” That killed Odette. She left a bigger tip that night.

Odette returned to the restaurant the next week and the waitress said, “Listen, you act like you know what I’m doing, but you don’t. Trust me.”

Odette said, “All I’ve got is every minute of the day.”

The next week, she went for a drink at the 40 °Club instead. She felt uncomfortable in low-class places, like she was pretending. All these people saying they preferred a dump, but she required a bartender in a collared shirt, a clean glass, a hand-stuffed olive. She couldn’t help but feel the money within her. At the 40 °Club, a banker appreciated her youth, thought she was an escort. “I’d like to use your dress as an alibi, if it’s all right with you.” She accepted the drink he offered her and hoped the mirrors would carry her off into some netherworld while he went on. Before long, his thumb bones cocked up and down her knee and she would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it.

The banker asked Odette if he could lure her home with him for a nightcap. Odette said, “You’ll have to delay the sunrise if you want me to go anywhere with you.” She’d drunk enough to arrange herself into poems that he wouldn’t understand. He urged her on, unable to take a circuitous “no” for an answer, but she spouted off another refusal: “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of spare change and guts in your piggy bank, but I’m going to my own home alone before the light reveals me.”

“Odette is the world is Odette.”

The banker pouted. “Can I get your number?”

Odette shook her pretty little head. “You can have my permanence and the rest of this rotgut.” She handed him her glass and he drained it. There were enough napkins on the bar, but the banker pulled a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and wrote his number on Odette’s arm.

She watched the runny ink bleed between her skin cells. By the time she got home it would be unreadable. “Classy,” she slurred.

Odette did nothing that week. She thought, “I wish that asshole would have written his number on a goddamn napkin.” When the next weekend rolled around she went back to the 40 °Club, the banker already at the bar, talking to another girl. Odette walked up to him anyway.

The banker frowned at her. “You didn’t call me.” He looked over at his new companion as if to say, “So this is what has happened.”

Odette said, “The ruins were profound and formful, but totally unreadable.”

The banker nodded. “Nice to see you though.”

Odette walked away; some sentiments she understood.

She drank her whiskeys slowly and alone, eavesdropping for a while on a bottle blonde ranting at her companion about how they never went out for nice dinners anymore. She listened to more of the conversation and built her remaining suspicions carefully. This woman had found her meal ticket in a guy who was tall, well-built, attractive, but obviously lacked confidence for one reason or another. This man could do better than a bleach job with a hunger for fancy dinners and an allowance.

Odette spun on her stool to get a look at the man over the shoulder of the blonde, and before too long the man couldn’t hide his attentions and both he and his companion had turned to Odette.

“Can I help you with something?” the blonde asked Odette.

“Put your mask back on, sweetie.” Odette was ready for a fight.

The blonde said, “Excuse me?”

Odette shrugged and looked over to the blonde’s companion, raising her eyebrows. He smiled a little and then tried to take it back. The blonde kept looking back and forth between them, until she was disoriented and her anger carried her off.

“I needed that,” the man told Odette. “You saved me.”

Odette offered her arm. “Take me for a walk.”

The man was anxious not to lose his chance. “It’s raining out there, you know.”

“We’ll admire the light catching the umbrellas together.” The man looked a little stunned. He didn’t know the game of saying extraordinary things, but Odette thought, “I’ll teach him.”

This man was an engineer who didn’t engineer anymore. They strolled the wet streets and he began talking about how it was tomorrow already and how tomorrow, today, marked the anniversary of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.

Odette thought, “This guy has a long way to go,” and so she said one of her extraordinary things. “Can you imagine the bodies trying to heal themselves? The contrast of their wet new skin to the cremains around them? The pattern of a dress burnt onto a woman in patches?”

The engineer who no longer engineered looked at her with the boned vision of envy and disgust. The engineer would not play the game and so Odette said she was heading home. He asked if he could give her a ride, but Odette refused and walked the miles carefully in her heels, hesitating and imaginative.