Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“You have a better subject,” she says.

“You mean the first time I had sex with someone. Loss of virginity. How I became a woman. We are that bored. No, don’t answer that. But these are guaranteed dull stories.”

“No, never dull. Guaranteed not dull.”

“Look at Louisiana. Lorene, look — Louisiana. Bayou country.-Below sea level. Slant-roofed shacks and mushy turnip gardens,” I say.

Even from the leveling uniformity of the interstate a difference has settled in. Everything looks fetid and damp, sagging in the middle and abandoned. Things seem to be growing in the wrong places, more bacterial than lush, a huge petri dish where people could live only if they grew up here and had the proper biology.

“I don’t like looking at landscape. I like people talking. I want some secret and intimate memory. Some human experience to make all this window-watching palatable,” she says. Lorene has revealed her bar owner soul. She wants to hear the intimacies of others’ lives as fill and distraction. She is not, as I had thought, a great listener, but instead an interrogator, an extractor of confession and disclosure. A verbal voyeur, I guess.

“You tell, then. What your first time was like,” I say absently.

I see a man up ahead, sitting by the road. The road runs so flat and uncurved that I notice him as a dot and watch him grow larger and more in focus as we travel toward him. He, I suppose, watches us grow larger, and now we are nearly upon him as he sits, doing, I think, absolutely nothing, not hitchhiking or trying to cross or walk, but just sitting there, in a duster shirt untucked and loose jeans, his face caved in and sunbeat, his mouth working as if chewing or speaking. He is in a crouch, not sitting but squatting, and I realize that he is defecating, or trying to, but I can’t be sure because of the shirttails and the speed at which we pass. As I glance at the rearview mirror, though, I think the posture unmistakable, and he continues, unaffected by our passing.

“I asked you first. I want to know, just tell me,” she says, lighting a cigarette with the car lighter, the toasted cigarette paper clinging to the hot gray-red glow. It smells almost good— mittens, maybe, if you put them in the toaster.

“Your nail polish looks like hell,” I say, gesturing with my chin at her lovely hands. The nail tips are showing white where the ever-shiny Perpetually Wet and Angry Anise purple-black has worn and chipped away. Her fingertips are bitten into Good & Plentys.

“Sorry,” she says, clenching her hands and actually sounding-sorry.

“You’re not traveling well,” I say.

“Shut up,” she says.

“It’s awful,” I say, “it’s depressing me.” She actually looks quite beautiful, but I enjoy upsetting her, hectoring her a bit like some bully boyfriend. I find it sexy. She turns her head away from me at a sulky angle and stares out the window. We sit that way until I take the cigarette out of her hand and take a drag.

“All right, I’ll tell you. Are you listening,” I say.

Lorene is wearing a white T-shirt, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in a T-shirt before. Her perfect C-cup breasts appear to be having an exceptional day. She is, of course, braless, the tightness of the T-shirt holding everything in place. Her nipples are smooth and darkly visible. I don’t mind looking at them.

“I was fourteen. His name was Mal Ortensky. He was sixteen,” I say.

“Mal,” she says.

“We were on the same baseball team. He used to meet me after games and help me with my swing, with my arm, with my catch.”

“You played catch,” Lorene says.

“Yes, Mal. He took an interest in me. So one day he was standing behind me, helping me with my swing. You know, his hands were on my hands. His arms on my arms. He was standing behind me, talking in my ear. You get the picture,” I say.

“Fourteen.”

“Yes.”

“Catch,” she says, “his arms on your arms.”

“Yes.”

“Then what,” she says.

“Well, these stories are pretty standard from there, aren’t they.”

“No, you could say where, and what was said and how it felt,” Lorene says, “what you thought, what happened after.”

“OK. Under the bleachers, after dark. He said nothing. It felt like nothing. A little pulling at first.”

“Then. Seven seconds over Tokyo.”

“No, he made me come eight times.”

“Eight times in seven seconds.”

“Pretty good for sixteen, huh,” I say. She smiles through a weary giggle, examining her hands. She uses her thumbnail to peel bits of polish off her other nails. It has become her road project.

“I think I should have said more about breasts or thighs or something. Thrown in a detail about blood or how he kept his baseball cap on and it kept hitting my forehead.”

“That’s all right, though,” she says. “The baseball stuff is kinda sexy, actually.”

“Your turn.”

Lorene does not stop picking her nails.

“You shouldn’t have said under the bleachers.”

“Your turn.”

“You may as well have said in the backseat of his car, Mina.”

“Your turn.”

“OK, my turn.”

Lorene doesn’t say anything, but tilts her head in the way certain women do when they are making room for their thoughts. The way men tend to stand back to make room for their speech. She untilted. I see a shiny look come over her. She removes her sunglasses. The gesture exudes a wistful earnestness.

“It’s difficult to explain,” she begins.

“Lorene.”

“I was eighteen.”

“Lorene.”

“What.”

“Sorry about the bleachers.”

She made it to the bar just as Scott was ready to leave.

It had never felt real to her. Not even a real betrayal of her husband, none of it real until this moment when she had to extract herself from his life.

The first time with Max, however, had felt absolutely a betrayal. Not even that, but the first real thought of it, and then the weeks when the thought wound its course to the first time and then a series of times. She had thought of Max, imagined them together, right in the kitchen while she washed dishes with David. While they rewound a video, in those whirring seconds of unoccupied time, or when they shopped, or, oh, yes, when they spoke of ordinary, Sunday things. She thought of Max. Especially then. David touched her, or put an armaround her, and she allowed herself to think what if it were Max’s arm, and it made the act pleasurable for her. When they watched a good movie, and she noticed something she hadn’t before — what was it? That movie where Joseph Cotton is the evil uncle — she didn’t want to share her thoughts with David but wanted to tell Max. She made a mental note to tell Max. That was betrayal.

The actual doing was all fear of being caught and consequences — not any real line being crossed that hadn’t already been crossed in her imagination. And when she felt her longing for Max while David smiled at her, at first she wanted to confess, to beg him to understand, to wear ashes, to burn her hair, anything. But instead she drove the feelings from her mind, did a sort of mental hygiene — this is one man, that is another — imagined she could will a compartmentalized life. And to her amazement, for a while, it worked. She could drive it out, nearly live in separate parts of herself. She felt her own power, and astonishment. She realized, coldly, ambivalently— she could do anything. She could do anything.

But now things had changed. Some feeling of vague agitation, anxiety. A worry she couldn’t contain it and would make a blunder. Some horrible exposure. She would trip herself up, and in fact she sort of vaguely wished for it — some trip-up so she could at last be relieved of it. The external pressure, the nagging fatigue. Something in the notes from her brother was making those segues between one interaction and another longer and more difficult. Or the not driving, which made it impossible to move fast enough to not feel everything confused and out of her control and sure to collide. Or maybe it was the way Max’s movies had quickly moved from the embellishment of their erotic life to becoming the thing itself. Or the way hertriple life made her think everyone wasn’t as they seemed, made her suspicious of David, of everyone. She knew she couldn’t contain it any longer, hold it together.