Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

Mina thought it wasn’t a sexy story at all, but it was undoubtedly true, and so ordinary and dull a little tale that she almost convinced herself she was in love with Scott, that she needed to wrap him in warm flesh for the rest of his days. But this was just because she had to end things with him, because she knew it would be one of the last times.

At dinner that night he had calculated the number of times. He had a financier’s belief in interest and dividend, as though accumulated days guaranteed a return of some kind. He ordered a second bottle of wine. She let him. He spoke about his newly purchased house in Brooklyn Heights. Its authentic Federalist details. She didn’t quite listen, but thought of the first time they ate together. How he took her coat for her. He pulled out the table for her when she stood and when she sat. She knew these gestures meant nothing, that politeness was just learned habit. Yet when he held open doors and pulled back chairs, she felt an undeniable comfort. It was a protocol that hinted at an intact fabric, an order, a world in which she would be safe. When he pulled the table back to ensure she sat more easily, when he concerned himself with ensuring her comfortable and frictionless glide through the world, it had an embarrassingly intoxicating and erotic effect on her. Mina realized, suddenly, that this was a date, that these were the gestures of an old-fashioned date. That he was not winking at gestures, not imitating a fifties movie or displaying anything but complete earnestness. She knew then she should tell him, warn him, but she didn’t want to. Mina had never been on a date before.

That time he had spoken of a domestic life, a new life. He wanted to care for her and have her care for him. She smiled and touched his hand and said what she always said when he tried to escalate and accrue.

“But this is nice, isn’t it? The way things are right now between us?” And Scott nodded and stopped talking and they went to his room and had undistinguished, comfortable sex. When he touched her these days, she had to think of Max, of a whispered word, of a forceful kiss. No way would Mina manage to be what Scott hoped she would be, even if she decided she really wanted it. No way.

No letters, she had said. She had tried in good faith to contain it, hadn’t she? No gifts. No phone calls. But containment didn’t really work, and there was a deepening asymmetry between them. It made their relations stagnant and lonely.

She was getting close to being late for today’s assignation. (Lorene came up with names: assignation, rendezvous, tryst, bankers’ meeting, ATM time, MI — monthly indiscretion. It was amazing how the more names Lorene came up with, the less Mina was able to give it serious regard. She felt guilty about that, guilty toward Scott, then guilty for her guilt, for pitying him.) She lingered at the restaurant.

Scott would be at the hotel bar, by himself. Ordering a second drink, maybe. Watching the door, glancing at his watch, certainly.

Mina left the restaurant. She walked past her favorite boutique on Beverly Boulevard. She wandered absently inside. She was really late now. She needed some new shoes. She needed black kid-leather sling-backs. Maybe open toed. She usually didn’t go open toed. But sling-backs, or maybe mules. Black silk mules. Something Betty Grable-ish, somethinglook-back-and-over-the-shoulder-ish. Something to sit in her closet for a lifetime, unworn except for three minutes in a boutique on Beverly Boulevard. Shopping is a form of daydreaming, a way to recast your life instantly, a desperate optimism about the meaning of style and detail. Such a fleeting feeling, but impossible to resist. She knew she was the kind of woman who couldn’t walk past a post office without wanting to buy stamps.

Scott finished his second drink.

He’d have called the restaurant by now. On that awful little streamlined and lightweight cellular phone. To be interrupted at all times in all places is a contemporary privilege, privacy and exclusivity oddly inverted. Do you think people might figure that out, that all the underlings of the world might be forced to carry mobile phones, and the big bosses the only ones entitled to be unreachable?

No, definitely not sling-backs, but mules. She looked at her foot. Her instep. Even the word oozed sex: instep. When you walk in mules, your eyes go to the curve of the instep, the sudden nakedness of the secret underside of the foot, the way it promised things about your life.

She didn’t make it to the bar. She went to the Gentleman’s Club with her new purchase. Lorene sat at the bar with one of the night managers, Sam (real name Kenny).

“Mina, my love, what a surprise,” Lorene said, patting the barstool next to her with a freshly manicured hand. Moroccan Mauve Lacquer in Cool Matte. One of Mina’s least favorites. She sat, dazed, imagining she might just have a drink and a cigarette or two. She drew her packages on her lap. She liked the sound heavy paper boutique shopping bags made when they rubbed up against slick-coated cardboard such as an expensiveshoe box. It sounded clean to her, and she liked it almost as much as the sound the boxes made when they were at last opened, the pulling up, the lifting of the whole of it until the bottom half slid apart with a moany, pregnant sound. Then the whispers of tissue, everything encased in matching colored tissue paper.

“Let’s see what you got,” Lorene said. Lorene placed the box on the bar top. She pulled out the perfectly formed mules, the raw black silk spotless and pristine. It was curvy and dangerous, a personality-altering shoe. One must feel a certain way in it. One must.

“A shoe like this could change your life, doll.”

Mina put a finger on the vamp, the open-toe cap. Lorene looked at the shoe and then back at Mina’s absent fondling. She frowned. Lorene knew how to read the gestures of women. Mina put the shoes away.

“I’ll have a drink, Ray,” Lorene said. “A Ward number six, please. Cuban style. Mina?”

“A club soda.” She smirked at Lorene.

“You’re no fun,” Lorene said.

“I stood up Scott,” Mina said.

“Yo, no kidding. I could tell from the shoes. Heart-trampling shoes.”

“Did he call?”

“Just three times.”

“Oh, God. I’ll go over there. I should.” Mina got up and pulled her hair back into a thirty-second ponytail, then dropped it.

“Hey, you forgot the shoes.”

“You keep them,” she said, nearly through the door, not looking back.

“The first time you did it,” she says.

We are escaping whole states on Route 10.

She has made me drive the long haul from Santa Fe to Houston, one unbreaking line, speeding through the flat brown Texas landscape, the air saturated with manure and dust. We had stopped miserably in Lubbock, found an offbrand ersatz Howard Johnson’s where Lorene had eaten a butter-drenched gray twice-microed potato and I kept eyeing her cell phone on the table between us. We are going miles out of our way, on Route 10, to get to New Orleans. Lorene wants one girls’ night out in the French Quarter, a forced idea that only grows less attractive the closer we come to it. I can’t wait to get to the East Coast, my mother, some safe, sane place where I can consider myself. I couldn’t get out of Texas fast enough, only finally relaxing into a driver’s highway trance after we crossed the Sabine River.

“That’s the subject,” I say.

We have taken to asking questions with no inflections in our tone, a form of road disease that has come upon us simultaneously, and we adjust without speaking of it. It is an intimacy, the beginnings of a secret language, the way a journey makes you alien to everything but the journey itself.