Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“If you think it looks beautiful, you ought to feel it,” she said quietly. She held out a fur-covered arm.

“Oh, no, I can’t do that. I’m sure it’s great, it’s best if I don’t touch it. I’ll just look from afar.”

“That’s wise. If you touched it, you might be overcome with a desire to get your own, and coats like this one are very rare. Very, very rare.”

“Yes, I’m sure. I think you actually get crucified in some parts of the city for wearing a coat like that. Don’t they like force you to register with the police when you move into a new area, with the sex offenders? Are you restricted to after-curfew hours so no small children see you? Aren’t you like barred from whole arenas of employment possibilities? Do housewives burst into tears at the sight of you?”

The doll woman smiled and pulled out a long European cigarette. She held it near her mouth and stopped smiling. She looked down at Mina’s feet, then back at her face. Perhaps she was trying to find something to comment on in her clothes. In any case, she kept it to herself, because she just looked at Mina with that near-smile. Mina supposed it was a vague sexual come-on, but couldn’t be sure. She began giggling, and Minawas hopeless when she got nervous and got the giggles. The woman pursed her lips, about to say something. Mina continued to giggle.

“I’m sorry, I’m hopeless,” Mina said, now breathless. The woman again seemed about to speak, and Mina suddenly came forth with another muffled guffaw, which she tried to extinguish in her mouth and instead created an actual snort. She had to admit, as embarrassing as the giggles were, as conscious as she was that her nervousness was causing the laughter, she did enjoy it. She couldn’t stop because the laughter itself became funny, the way it sounded and felt in her body, it was hilarious. So she was trying to stop, but then she wasn’t really. The woman finally smiled benignly, and then looked away, no longer about to speak. Michael approached and lit her cigarette. She smiled at him and he turned to Mina.

“Are you OK, Mina?” he asked.

“Me?” she said, and then it was gone, the laughing fit. She was exhausted and serious. “I’m OK.”

“You met Lorene, I see,” he said.

“Yes, sort of,” Mina said.

“Lorene, this is my fantastically wonderful and much missed little sister.”

Lorene smiled. She looked at Michael and then got very sad-looking. She touched his collar and smoothed it a little.

“Are you leaving?” he said. She nodded. Then walked away.

“Just don’t ask, all right?” he said before she could even open her mouth. He was in a bad mood the rest of the night. It was years later, after Michael got sick, that Lorene called her and asked her to help her open her first restaurant. She knew it was Lorene’s way of staying close to Michael, but she didn’t mind. She wanted to be Lorene’s close friend. She still wantedto be her close friend. And they hardly ever talked about Michael anymore.

It had to be the last meeting with Scott. She was supposed to meet him at the usual time, the usual place. Only this was the last time, she swore it. After all, she had done everything she could to contain it, made strict limitations. No phone calls. The Gentleman’s Club’s number in an emergency, because she “lived there, practically,” and no discussion of her life. Her life was simply “complicated” and “private.” And Scott had accepted these terms.

They would meet, have a drink. Just like yesterday, when she couldn’t get the drink in her fast enough.

The month before she had almost ended it. It had started in the usual way with them. London, he would say. Bahrain. Taiwan. Singapore. Hotels. Dinners with clients. The lonely timezone boy. Bonus and banks and Bedouins. Finance deals. Conference calls. She liked to hear the details of his banker’s life. She found catalogs of his business details erotic. Then she would press him. How lonely were you? Did you get a massage? Did you have a Thai girl sent to your room? Scott would blush and deny it. She found it exciting to press him for sexy details. To untie his Southern gentility.

“Well, there was one time.”

“When?”

“I was feeling awful, drunk, far from home. I ordered a massage.”

“Charged to the bank, I hope.” He put his index finger in his drink and stirred the ice a little, then put his finger in his mouth. Mina found the gesture an oddly feminine one. It was too overtly sensual for Scott, too contrived. She preferred himwound tight, audience to her own sexy gestures. But she had pressed him for details too many times, and now he was a little self-conscious in his revelations. It made her weary.

“She came to my room. Tiny, shy.”

“Eyes averted,” Mina said.

“Eyes averted.” Scott smiled. Mina tried to picture it, but Scott’s smile ruined it.

“Have you ever told anyone this before?”

“No, no, I haven’t,” he said. He took a sip of scotch. His usually very short hair had grown out a bit. He looked boyish, his eyes were sad. Mina suddenly felt it then, in that second, his sadness, and she wanted him again. She picked up his hand. He had large hands, the palms wide and the fingers in proportion, but elegantly formed, and the skin was soft and smooth.

“She had me undress and lie on the bed. She draped a towel over my hips and rubbed oil on me. She gave a slow, deep massage with tiny, strong hands.”

Mina turned Scott’s hand over and gave the lightest possible kiss to his inner wrist. She let her lips relax and catch a little as she moved them slowly on the pale veined skin. She moved over his palm to his fingers. She could taste a bit of salt, a bit of scotch. The tang of nicotine that tasted a bit like a woman to her. She thought of how after sex his fingers did smell like her. She imagined, even after a few hours and a shower, he might get a hint of sex on the airplane home when he rested his fingertips on his upper lip during a lull in conversation with the old lady from Greenville sitting next to him. Azaleas and spring, her unmarried niece. He blushes as the old woman talks, remembers how long a month is. When Mina thought of Scott like that, polite to the world, holding open doors and carrying coats but secretly overwhelmed, still kind of blushing — she’d think she couldmarry Scott, take care of him, be wrapped in some perfect suburban dream of bourgeois sex and storybook Christmases. Her secret desire to be Doris Day and normal came over her. It even felt sexy to imagine him coming home from the office late, smelling of another woman’s perfume, guilt-ridden and skittish. They would fight and have aggressive sex. But no, not likely. She was confusing Scott and Max. Scott would just weep, probably, confess everything and feel too guilty to touch her. She would watch TV and eat fat-free cookies.

“She had massaged every part of me, and I’m nearly asleep but nevertheless aroused,” Scott said.

“Yes, are you on your back at this point or your front?”

“My back, towel draped over my cock.”

“Are your eyes open or closed?”

“Open, definitely,” he said.

“Men’s eyes are always open, aren’t they?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” he said, watching Mina rub his fingers almost absently across her lips.

“Is it sexier if the woman’s eyes are open or closed?”

“You ask the strangest questions. It depends, I guess.”

Mina looked up at him with a closed-mouth grin. “Do you think these questions are sexy?”

“Umm. Yeah.”

“You’re on your back, towel draped across you, aroused.”

“Yes,” he said, shifting in his chair, looking sadder still and down.

“What next?”

“She said, without looking at me, ‘Massage?’ and she pointed at my toweled midsection. I nodded and she put her hand under the towel and very quickly and expertly brought me off,” Scott said, pursing and grimacing his lips a little. “Shewas quite efficient and matter-of-fact about it. It was, I admit, very pleasurable, a clinically precise and passive relief. There was, I think, a fifty-dollar charge on my hotel bill for the addendum hand job.”