Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“That’s not what this story is about,” I say, smiling, blushing.

“Come on, I want to know,” she says, laughing, putting her hand on my knee.

“I honestly don’t remember. But, all right, for the sake of the story, let’s say I was thinking about the handsome scarred Indian in The Searchers, the one who captures Natalie Wood.”

“I remember him,” and Lorene is really laughing now. “Captured by Indians, ooo—”

“All right, are you through? Let’s move on here.”

She smiles and nods. “You know what I used to think about when I was fifteen?” she says.

I look again past Lorene’s shoulder at the woman at the next table. She’s old, very old, and I watch her sip her Coke and move her lips. She’s talking softly to herself. I watch for a second, to make sure, yes, very much murmuring to herself. Lorene is talking, talking.

“I used to think about Gram Parsons,” she says. “Tragic cultrock star. Sweet, Southern-boy angel, a Christian junkie, in one of those cool Nudie suits he wore — you know, those suits with appliqué birds and marijuana flowers on them that Southern rocker boys used to get at Nudie’s Western store in North Hollywood, back in the early seventies during that weird segue between hippies and glam rock.”

I look at Lorene and shake my head. She thinks about clothes even when she masturbates.

“OK, Dennis,” she says.

“Skip it.”

“Come on, tell me. I’m listening.”

“Christ, OK. I was in my room, by myself, hating the warm embrace of my family, wanting separateness. Then there was a low knock at my door. It’s Dennis, with a drink and a joint, and he asks me if I want to get high. I’m rumpled and dizzy with dreams of erotic kidnappings. I let him in and we get stoned. He listens to my records with me and then he does the California come-on.”

“He gives you a massage.”

“Yes. And Lorene, to be touched felt so terrific. I leaned into it, and we were soon out of our clothes and on the floor of my room.”

“With your whole family just down the hall.”

“With my father’s best buddy. It was done rather easily, and I sensed after it was done a kind of paleness in his face. I think he realized then that this was a pretty odd situation, somewhat combustible, to say the least. I was suddenly in a panic.”

“It is important to get this right, the part afterward,” Lorene says. She is right, it feels absolutely necessary to get it precisely correct. To articulate something, if it gets at all at the thing, if it makes some narrative cohesion of it, even if it is not the truthbut the “truth,” is the only way to escape the things that bind your life. It’s the only way to make a life your life. The woman at the next table makes tiny gestures with her hands. She seems to think she’s invisible, murmuring to herself, in public.

“ ‘What happens now?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Nothing happens,’ he said.

“ ‘But what about my father? We can’t tell him.’ Dennis was getting dressed and he looked hard at me.

“ ‘Of course we can’t tell your father, Mina. It’s a secret.’ I, of course, started to cry at this point. He zipped his pants up. He said something to the effect of ‘Why are you crying?’ Then, I remember this, he said, ‘Things like this happen every day.’

“ ‘Not to me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying.’ And I’ll never forget what he said next.

“ ‘Look, Mina,’ he said, ‘let me let you in on a secret. Your father has a girlfriend. You know, his assistant Sheila?’

“ ‘He does not,’ I said, really crying.

“ ‘Your father’s sleeping with Sheila, his assistant. Or at least he was.’

“ ‘No, that can’t be true,’ I said.

“ ‘Yes. It’s a secret. Everyone has secrets just like this one. Even your mother, believe me, has her secrets—’ I stopped him, I guess, with my expression. But I knew it was true. He was right. The world, the grown-up world, was full of not-so-secret secrets. And really secret secrets. I thought of my uncles and aunts at family gatherings, and of distant looks at off-sides moments, unwrapping a present or pouring a drink. They were maybe thinking really of a secret life somewhere. Maybe even a grand passion. And it made them all seem complicated and sad in ways they hadn’t before. They were wives and husbands, human and full of desire, and no one knows, or maybe everyonedoes. And sometimes it is that way forever, and sometimes things break down and dissolve. My mother left my father the following year. And I never told anyone — well, except Michael, and now you — about Dennis.”

“All those stories are the same,” Lorene says. “Anyway, finding out everyone is weak and human happens sooner or later, anyway. It just seems a shame we can’t get any comfort out of knowing we are mostly all this way.”

The old woman is definitely talking softly to herself. Maybe she is finally telling someone all the things she never said in her life. Her secrets, except now no one is left who cares. And it’s unbearably lonely to have a secret that never gets told. It doesn’t exhibit its secretness unless it is known. It is made to be violated. Or maybe not. Maybe the old woman’s just crazy.

Mina could not stop thinking about Scott. She couldn’t shake the awfulness of how he had looked at her. She couldn’t shake the misery of Max’s videos either, or another fight with David because he guiltily returned from some secret meeting with whomever he met and returned from. She headed to the Gentleman’s Club, the night streets all cool desert and truly deserted.

Sex was not what worried Mina. It was everything else.

She for the first time felt a kind of queasiness about wanting-Max. She felt the hangover of Scott, and it gave her the doom-laden bends thinking of how things had developed with Max. Of what possible outcome there would be, because affairs didn’t just stay in one place. They didn’t progress necessarily, but they went places. The more static you try and make them, the faster they slip into strange, unforeseen places.

At first it was how often. Once a week only. Between oneand four. This was not negotiable. Max, despite his gut and his smoking and his paper-strewn house, adhered to rather strict rule making. The more arbitrary, the more vehemently he clung to it. Mina had to meet him once a week, but on constantly changing days. Monday this week, Tuesday the next, Wednesday the next. No discernible patterns must evolve, he said. But then it became impossible. They took more chances, they saw each other more often, she just had to. But the more they saw each other, the more elaborate the paranoia and the more complicated the restrictions became. He freely engaged, enthusiastically engaged, in the particularly dangerous and impractical liaison with his best friend’s wife. And yet he displayed rigid logic and rationalism in his execution of the affair, as if these rules mitigated it somehow, made it tolerable. The way he made her take a shower before she left. She knew then she would become a lightning rod for a subrational guilt. An intolerable transgression that fueled an excessive passion. And a hypervigilance, seen only in the most haunted men, combat vets, murderers, executioners, sweaty embezzlers, and Max. How is it she came to feel sorry for him? How is it she found his paranoia erotic, and she never felt guilt, she just didn’t think about it? So it was not really as odd as it might have seemed, given these rules, when they actually stopped having sex. Or intercourse, rather. Max liked to videotape her before, get her undressing, ask her questions. They both found this erotic. Then yesterday it finally happened. He asked her to lie on the bed. He continued videotaping. He instructed, and she obeyed. You look sexy, he said. And she knew instantly where it was going, but she played dumb. Because sex was a sort of anagram for them, a way of merely organizing and reordering the same elements. First I do this and then you do that. Say thiswhile I do that. The next time, he goes first. There were just so many possible combinations and variations. So she absolutely knew that the camera would become the preeminent thing between them, the variable that multiplied the limited possibilities. Show me what you do by yourself, he said. He was still taping. She didn’t care. She put her hand under her panties. No, don’t close your eyes, he said. And she opened them. Open your legs, he said. He sat in the chair, fully dressed.