Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Another cigarette? An apple? I just have to check my voice mail. It will only take a second.”

Was this a sort of kindness? But it wasn’t really the marginal, in-between, down-time realness that she missed, was it? The real thing — the thing she could not bear, the thing that betrayed the hidden quotes around words like love and passion —was his intensity undone, his ordinary glances, his loss of interest in looking at her. The steady slackening of desire, the dreadful slide to a quiet indifference. And his videotaping, which occurred with increasing frequency, somehow seeming to ridicule her need for his attention, to caricature it, but she still couldn’t resist. It felt as if they were documenting their waning desire — precisely the opposite of the attention she really wanted. But it was a kind of attention, still. He was in a way right — there was no reason to stick around. She didn’t love him, she wasn’t really feeling affectionate. She just wanted — for as long as she could feel want — to put her mouth on his body every time she saw him, and she wanted him to see it in her face and let it hover in the space between them, making the air electric and the world myopic, making every ambiguity and doubt kaleidoscope to convey this desire, at this moment, in this place.

Mina continued to watch David through their window. He put his tea down, and his fingers moved on the keyboard again. She found this oddly erotic, his unknowing, her watching. She couldn’t bring herself to go in, she wanted to continue watching. The way he never looked up, her husband, David. She waited in this interim space. Things seemed momentarily alien, they hinted at other readings, other interpretations.

Maybe her father used to watch her mother like this, when he left his girlfriend’s apartment. Maybe he would watch her make dinner through the window, unable to move.

Probably not.Lorene Baker’s house was not difficult to clean. Lisa found that even at a leisurely pace she would be finished well within the allotted time period. On Thursdays, at Mike Birnbaum’s apartment, she had to work quickly to get it all done in four hours. She had to be organized, had to have a schedule and a discipline about it. First put the sheets in the washing machine. While those washed (thirty-five-minute cycle) she put the tile and porcelain cleanser in the toilet bowl to soak. She sprayed the tub with Soft Scrub Tile, Grout & Tub Cleaner. She rinsed the crusted blue gel Colgate Platinum toothpaste from the water glass, the faucet, and the toothbrush holder. She rinsed the sink sparkling, scrubbed the soaked toilet bowl with a round brush until it flushed clean. She sponged the hair and dust fromthe screws where the toilet seat attached to the toilet bowl. She wiped the base and the sides of the toilet, where a coating of dirt and dust and micro skin flakes unfailingly accumulated. Next she sprayed the shower curtain with Anti-Mildew Fast-Acting Formula 409 and sponged. If this was let go for even one week, white clumps of bacterial residue started to accumulate in crevices and folds. Then the shower walls, scrubbing the grout between the tiles with a small brush. Cleaning was finally all maintenance, a dutiful prayer against decay, and only finally winnable, manageable, if practiced unfailingly and diligently. Last, she mopped the bathroom floor. Lisa changed the wet sheets to the dryer (forty minutes) and put Mike Birnbaum’s dirty clothes into the washer. Socks hard — no, crusty — with his week-old sweat. His undershorts. She was doctorally immune to all of it. Now the whole process started over in the kitchen, beginning with the dirty dishes, which he always left. With rigor and precision (and not a little satisfaction) she finished the kitchen in time to remove the sheets and put the clothes in the dryer, iron the sheets and put them on the bed (air-smelling, warm) by the time the clothes were dry and could be folded and put away. Lisa was expert at this, she snapped order into Birnbaum’s life and disappeared. An invisible force.

Lorene’s place was different. Lorene sent her very apparently valuable sheets to an out-of-state laundry that specialized in cleaning sheets properly. All Lisa had to do was unfold the undyed brown paper from the packages and put the sheets on the bed. Her bathroom and kitchen were not in much need of scrubbing. She appeared to use neither. Lisa went through the systematic washing and scrubbing, anyway. She was a gesture, a luxury, for Lorene, or maybe a backup system. As she dusted Lorene’s living room (book-lined, many plants) she would playLorene’s records. Actual vinyl, with a needle in a groove, with static noise around the music. It made the music more tactile, less airless, somehow. Lisa swore she could hear it better than when she listened to compact discs. She enjoyed the strange old torch songs or big band stuff Lorene inevitably had on her turntable. Stupid songs about lovers and boats that made you feel like you were your grandmother — or in a movie about your grandmother. Music made for daydreaming.

Sometimes this music made Lisa emotional. She thought of Alex and Alisa. And at first this was nice, but somehow, some way, she would get it into her head that they were sick.Something in a look or feel of morning dressing, she would remember as toxic and symptomatic. Children do get sick, and mothers must notice these things early. And then Lisa would not be able to stop imagining her children ill. She imagined swollen lymphs and leukemias (just the word, the kemo part, so toxic and decayed sounding). Some horrible juvenile invasion of E. coli —what had she fed them, what some food terrorist might have contaminated. It happened all the time. Apple juice, organic spinach, for Pete’s sake, an American mass-produced hamburger in a clean paper package — and what? Kidney failure, irreversible brain damage, coma, death. It starts with “I have a tummyache, Mommy.” A sweaty forehead. Lisa would get faint and feel a hard round knot in her stomach. She would turn off the record player and hurry, heart racing, through the rest of her perfunctory duties at Lorene’s. She would pray to herself, feverish, hysterical bargains and third-world-mother ancient incantations, until she could get herself to Mrs. Brenshaw and see her two baby loves.

She inevitably found them watching TV, jammy-faced and sticky. Hi, Mommy.

* * *“Lorene, you feel very tense,” he said. “You must try to relax.”

“I’ll never get there,” she said. “It will take hours.”

“Shh, just feel my touch,” he said, blanket-voiced and comfort-toned.

“I am trying, damn it,” she said. “Oh, there, yes, that spot. God.”

“Stop talking. Shh.” He pressed the spot relentlessly, a pressured, steady rubbing.

“You’re very good. Very patient,” she said.

“C’mon, give in, it’s OK.”

Lorene felt herself letting go, a slow, deepening undoneness that started with his mechanical repetition and radiated out through her body and finally to the clamor in her head. Her mouth became slack, she felt her tongue as a muscle, her eyes rested shut. She saw red, shot through with veins of light. He moved to the next spot and pressed deeper. An hour and a half of Tactile Hue Therapy. One hundred and seventy-five dollars at St. John Spirit Gyms, and well worth it, she guessed. Her St. John’s counselor (actually, they were called “Healing Partners”), Beryl (not his real name and also the name of a quartz-looking heliodor yellow transparent crystal he wore around his neck, the pyramidal tip pointing to his heart), recommended touch therapy twice a week. Part of her prescribed Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification. She needed to be touched by another person. And she had to hire someone to do it, which was almost funny.