Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“That’s nearly my whole check, Lisa. I have to have some money for gas. And I need some money to go out and blow off some steam tonight. My one night of the week. I have to drink cheap beer and stay home watching TV, is that it? I have to work at five in the morning and I can’t even buy a damn hamburger?”

Lisa put the kids in the backseat. They were quiet andpliant, thankfully. He watched her. They were a whole thing, united against him. He stood apart, unregarded. She moved heavily in the front seat and waited for him. He stood in the parking lot; the hot asphalt and the relentless summer California sun made him squint and sweat. He finally got in. She looked at his thick fingers on the steering wheel. It wasn’t going anyplace. Things were stuck. They were stuck.

“I’ll take care of the rent. I told you,” she said.

Mark shook his head.

“But I’m not asking her.”

Lisa felt a tiny soft hand on her cheek from the backseat. Her son, Alex, stroked the side of her face that was turned to the car window. A gentle little-boy touch. She reached behind her for his hand.

Mina was trying to walk fast from her meeting with Lorene, which naturally she had been late for. First Lorene, then Max, then Scott. She had made Lorene late for an afternoon session at her spirit gym, again, Mina’s fault, again. But Mina couldn’t help it. She had, in a mere matter of weeks, hopelessly complicated her life. Now it seemed out of her control, a momentum of disaster. And on a Sunday. She remembered, with odd nostalgia, the way Sundays used to be. David and Mina’s unassailable day at home. It had all started on a Sunday, though, hadn’t it? She had sat on the porch with them, David and Max. Anordinary Sunday afternoon. They sat, drinking beer and eating potato chips, sucking on the occasional hot-weather cigarette. She kept lighting one and then putting it out — it never tasted as good as she imagined, but she kept trying, thinking some subtle chemical change had occurred since the last attempted drag that would make the cigarette as satisfying as she hoped.

If a person — Mina herself, for example — if she were a stranger, passing this porch and taking in this tableaux, here is what she would think: she would envy the handsome group of friends, leisure-wilted, good-looking, laughing and slightly drunk in the afternoon. And the average-looking girl, in the casual company of men and their jokes and their ease. The luck of the girl, with the attention of the two men, and their laughter. What must her life be like? And Mina would see her as if she were in a print ad or a TV commercial, laughing open-mouthed, throwing her head back, shooting pool in a sequined dress, leaning into a sail on a perfect blue sea, throwing an arm up in the swing of a convertible, waving — open-mouthed and impossibly carefree — at unseen friends, but always outnumbered and accompanied by men. Always backlit by their charmed and undivided attentions. What a lucky girl, what a life she has, she would imagine, watching herself. And she’s not even beautiful.

David’s best friend, Max, sat on their porch steps, unshaven and sweaty, smoking and drinking at twice the pace of the other two. He kept holding the sweating beer bottle to his forehead and rolling it horizontally, occasionally pressing the wet glass to one of his cheeks. David’s cheeks looked cool and dry. He wore an Australian army cap with a brim that suited his face, made him cinematic and casually glamorous. Where Max had an apparent early-thirties thin-guy gut that pressedagainst his T-shirt when he sat hunched, David was sleek, and inoffensively so, no hard-earned ripples in his stomach, just a natural slim elegance that made Mina think, He really isn’t like me, is he? It was in a silent pause in the afternoon sun, as she compared Max and David, that it happened. Max looked at her, looked when David wasn’t looking, looked when she was looking. He stared at her, and she felt it. It was like that, nearly conscious, although it wasn’t, she just made it so when she recalled it, finding reasons and ironies and logic and psychologies. But there, with the heat and the sweating beer bottles and the porch, within exhale reach of David’s obscene elegance, Mina nearly fainted with desire for his best friend, Max, his sweat and his soft, decadent body, his chain-smoking, his sideways cynicism, and his dead-on gaze.

She walked faster. Faster and faster. She didn’t even notice that above Gower as it crossed Sunset the slightly sloping Hollywood sign was visible through the afternoon haze. From Gower you could see a red-tile-and-adobe church with a tower and a cross atop the tower. And only from this particular vantage point of Gower and Sunset did the cross seem to punctuate the “Hollywood.” She didn’t notice this today, although it was just the sort of thing she liked to notice, some hyper-unsubtle Babylon irony, one that you could imagine a fifties soundtrack punctuating grandly with telltale-sudden-realization music. One that surely was in some film, at some time.

Lorene watched water collect in pools on the white tile floor.

“Keep breathing,” he said. The water moved from rivulets to tiny pools. Eventually, a puddle. It collected, swelling, and then married other nearby puddles. The room must have a drain.

“Concentrate on your breathing only,” he said.

She was naked, perched on a bench with her back to him. She felt his hands — large, soft — on her lower back.

“Expand your diaphragm. Expel all your breath slowly.”

Mina walked from Max’s apartment off Rossmore to Beverly Boulevard. There she turned right and walked to La Brea. She moved briskly, attaining a sort of rhythm she found relaxing, even liberating. She was damp from the shower, and the hot, flat heat of the afternoon streets slowly penetrated her skin, replacing outward dampness incrementally with her own perspiration. She wore no stockings, just bare legs under a cotton dress and flat shoes. She felt peasantish and pure, but with a sort of sexy Sicilian-widow world-weariness. She walked along La Brea down to Wilshire. She walked, quickly as she could, west on Wilshire toward the streamlined moderne facade of the former May Company Department Store dimly visible in the hazy distance. This was it, the Miracle Mile. The first shopping district built for car shoppers instead of pedestrians. She was in true enemy territory now. She walked defiantly on, window-shopping the cul-de-sacs of parking lots, strip mall-ettes, and monolithic gray-faced buildings set back, way back, from the street. There was, miraculously, still a sidewalk. She laughed at this, their lack of commitment. Total car culture shouldn’t have sidewalks, should it?

Lorene’s Talk-n-Touch Advanced Well-Being Therapy sessions with Beryl were even rougher than basic touch therapy. She sat naked on a towel-covered bench in a steam-filled room. At some point she would have to speak, not incessant rantings, but speak out of some inner hypnotic state. Beryl would lightly touch pressure points on her back, his hands hovering over energy points. Where energy collected, tension would beexcised through speech. She felt dizzy. When she took deep breaths, she felt her breasts rise. She was steamy wet; her nipples felt hard and swollen. She looked down with a careful pride. Still perfect, beautiful breasts at thirty-two. Not her original breasts, of course, but from this angle the scars from her breast augmentation were invisible, she had a flawless, natural-looking C cup. They looked even larger, though, because she was so slender and the skin was so white. She thought, I want the whole world to see my breasts. She almost laughed at the absurdity of this, but it was halfway true. Here was the greatest cultural asset a girl could have (attained at no small expense) and no one had seen them in years.