Richard Ford - A Multitude of Sins

“I wish you’d do what I ask you to,” Frances said disappointedly, steering them into the motel’s gravel lot. A lighted office building inside of which a man was visible behind a counter, talking on the phone, sat beside the highway. The units, in a row behind it, were white stucco teepees with phony lodge poles showing through phony smoke holes. There were ten teepees, each with a small round window on either side of its front door. Two other cars were parked outside individual units. Lights shone from their windows.

“If you have a heart attack,” he said, “I promise I’ll ride with your body back to Willamantic. Just like whoever that was. President Kennedy.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Frances said, stopping in front of the office, and staring ahead disgustedly.

“I’m your idiot, though. At least tonight,” Howard said.

He was out the car door fast, his sneakers in the gravel, the sky all around suddenly dazzlingly full of pale stars, though a strong disinfectant odor was floating all through the little parking lot, and there was country music coming from the casino. Frances continued talking inside the car— more about leaving her behind — but he didn’t hear. He looked up and breathed the stinging disinfectant smell all the way deep down in his lungs. This was a relief. They’d driven way too far. The whole idea sucked to begin with. But he just wanted to get her off her stupid subject — heart attacks and deaths, etc. — and back to why they’d come. People talked and talked and none of it mattered to the big picture. It was like buyer’s remorse — but tomorrow would be different, no matter what you worried about today. You rode it out. He thought quite briefly about having been named agent of the year. It made him, for a moment, happy.

. .

From the driver’s seat Frances watched a large, long-tailed rat as it pestered and deviled a snake while the snake tried to make its way across the gravel from the line of teepees to the scrub ground where the desert began. The motel sign hummed and made the floodlit lot feel electrified, and kept the entire little skirmish visible. She wasn’t aware things like this even occurred. The snake, she thought, was the natural enemy and physical superior to the rat. The rat had things to fear. But here was the surprising truth. As she watched out the window, several times the snake stopped, coiled and struck at the rat, who reared up on its little hind legs like a tiny stallion and danced around. Then the snake, having missed, would start to slither off again toward the vegetation and shadows. The rat pursued almost idly, nipping then hopping back, then nipping again, as if it knew the snake personally. Eventually she let the window down to hear if they were making noise — if rattles were rattling or anyone hissed or growled. But the country music from the casino was too loud. Eventually the snake found the edge of the gravel and slid away, and the rat, its work complete, scurried back across the lot and disappeared under one of the dark teepees — not, she hoped, the one they’d be staying in.

She felt strange waiting here. Not really like who she was, the little agent from Nowhereburg, Connecticut— specialist in starter homes and rehabbed condos. Daughter. Wife. Holder of an associate’s degree in retail from an accredited community college. In a way, though, this guy was exactly right for her, as wrong as he was. Aren’t you always yourself? Is anybody you want ever wrong for you? She did desire him, especially after all the drinking. It was like her father had said. And anyway, why not want him? Life was sometimes a matter of ridding yourself of this or that urge, after which the rest got easier.

And adultery — she liked it when her thoughts connected up well — adultery was the act that rid, erased , even erased itself once the performance was over. Sometimes, she imagined, it must erase more than itself. And sometimes, surely, it erased everything around it. It was a remedy for ills you couldn’t get cured any other way, but it was a danger you needed to be cautious with. In any case, she felt grateful for it tonight. And because she thought all of this, she knew she had to be right.

Howard strolled out of the motel office flipping a room key back and forth, and smirking. She wondered how often he’d done this. It seemed so natural to him, not that she gave a shit. She never had, and yet it felt perfectly familiar to do it, as if she’d been doing it forever.

“Drive down to the last teepee,” Howard said, leaning in, hands on his bare knees. “And if you want to hit the casino, Big Chief Poker Face in there gave me two drinks coupons.”

“I just want to get fucked, is all.” She looked out the other window. “I don’t like to play slot machines.”

His eyes narrowed, the corners of his large unintelligent mouth turned almost imperceptibly upward. He wasn’t handsome, his hair buzzed and his ears and mouth way too big. He was clownish. Though that probably made his little wife ecstatic: a husband no one else much wanted, but who could work wonders.

Howard again put his big hand, adopting a cupping motion, in through the window, and up under one of her breasts. He didn’t seem to have a purpose. Just a pointless act of uncaring familiarity. “Back this baby over across the lot and we’ll do it in the car,” he said in a husky, theatrical voice. His small eyes twitched to the far edge of the gravel. “Nobody’ll see.” He sniffed a little humorless laugh.

“I’ll wait.”

“That’ll work, then,” he said, standing up, sniffing again.

“Good,” she said. “I’m ready for something to.” She turned the key in the ignition and began backing up.

She knew exactly what he liked. He liked her eyes to be on him. He liked for her to slip his cock into her mouth and, just as she did it, to raise her eyes to his. “I’ll do this to you now,” was what that meant. Like a cheap betrothal. Otherwise he liked her voice. With her voice, with whatever she chose to say when she was whispering to him, she could make him ejaculate. Just like that. Even her breathing could do it. So she had to be careful. Though coming wasn’t what he wanted. He was smart. He wanted to stay in it with her, move her where she needed to be moved around the bed, have it go and go and go until coming was just a way to end it, when they weren’t interested anymore. Strange, to be so intelligent in bed, and other times not at all. It was her doing, she thought; she’d invented him, turned him into someone she had a use for. His real intelligence was not to resist.

Only, in the cramped airless teepee, with the rayon portiere across the doorway and beetles crawling on the floor and the air heavy with bug dope, he wanted to take her too fast too violently — suddenly, vociferously — as if he meant to rid her of whatever had its grips into her, all by himself. As if it was his duty. Pounding, pounding. Like that. No time to work him with her voice, or bring him along and ease him in and out of it. Just the hard way, until it was over. And again — so odd that this man should be aware of her; knowing that something was wrong and setting out to fix it the way he knew how. That was intimacy. Of a certain kind. Yes.

Though possibly, of course — as she lay in the grainy darkness with Howard instantly, infinitely asleep beside her — possibly, she’d expressed herself perfectly in the car, and he’d just done what she’d told him. “I just want to get fucked.” That’s what she’d said. Anyone could understand what that meant. She had orchestrated things then, not him. She just hadn’t been aware of it. He’d simply let her employ him — that was the word — become the implement for what she wanted fixed, emptied, ended, ridded — whatever. Really, they didn’t know each other so well. She’d been mistaken about intimacy.