Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

The ones to which Polhaus pays close attention are the tantalizingly reasonable ones, which place a thin girl with a mole on her face at a gas station on 1–5, filling up a dusty Nova or a Maverick. She got gas. She bought American cheese and Campbell’s soup. She drank coffee and paid with a twenty. Because if these are not genuine sightings, they are at the very least duplications of actual events in which she was involved. The agents’ reports on their interviews with the service station attendants and waitresses and checkout clerks are his own personal pornography; with vague hostility he can imagine her right into the rhythm of these dull events. So this is what it’s like without the protection of the dazzling name, without the allowance checks and the trust fund income. How do you like it now? The kid had held one job. One god damned job, working the stationery counter at Capwell’s. Probably sounds pretty good around now.

GARY KEARSE ARRIVES AT the farmhouse out of the blue one afternoon. Though Yolanda’s account of their cross-country trip had been imbued with a careful affectlessness, it’s clear that she is excited to see him. The sudden infusion of raw sexual hunger into the usual SLA routine of gaudy self-abnegation has a turbulent effect. All Kearse and Yolanda have to do is smile at each other across the table. Not since before Mel’s has sex been acknowledged as a part of life, though mostly this has had to do with everyone’s habitual reluctance to have sex with Teko, who has handled the subject by recasting sex as simply another component of the cadre’s overall requirements, like ammunition and sacks of rice.

Drew and Diane Shepard married for more or less typical reasons at a more or less typical age. Still, it was a good little wedding, fun, unpretentious, the sort of wedding lots of people might be happy to have had. It was held at Drew’s mother’s house in Indianapolis. Most of the guests had driven up from Bloomington. A local judge officiated. After being forced indoors by a sudden storm that had thundered across the pancake expanses at the heart of the state, everybody crashed all over the living room where the ceremony had been held. Nobody had to dress up. Drew’s mom was cool that way.

And later, after Diane’s parents, slightly shaken and not quite sure what to make of this hairy little man their daughter had married, had been driven to the motel where they would be spending the night, after Drew’s mother had received a sustained ovation from her young guests for testily shooing away the two patrolmen who’d driven their cruiser up onto her lawn to shut down the noisy, cheerful party, after Drew had spent an hour in the backyard discussing the MC5 with a biker he knew vaguely, after all that, the groom and his bride retired at last to their bedroom (up the stairs, first door on the left, right next to the bathroom). The sky had cleared, and the soft light of the moon, its cool glow, fell into the room; Diane moved, became naked in the moonlight, became liquid metal flowing there at the head of the bed. Drew and Diane had been living together for months, but Drew felt a momentousness at this instant, watching his bride disrobe. Her having married him, her disrobing for him as his wife: these things struck him as unique gifts to him, as if he were being allowed to probe a virgin orifice. Because in fact it was true, that by virtue of the transformative power of the ceremony, their renovation into husband and wife, she was again new, she was again something that she would never be for anyone else.

He knelt on the bed in the dark, throbbing with lust, awaiting her approach. This was long before he had thrown off the shackles of bourgeois propriety, and he was completely unconflicted in his fierce desire to fuck this woman who was now his wife. And it was a desire that had stayed with him. Through it all, General Teko wanted nothing more than he wanted that Indiana bride, lustrous in the Indiana moonlight, with the sound of water running through the pipes inside the wall.

Nobody else, however, has any way of knowing about any of this, least of all Yolanda, who has always taken at face value Teko’s oft-professed conviction that the sexually monogamous relationship is an unforgivable impingement on individual rights. She certainly has never seen herself as liquid metal, as virginal again, as uniquely Teko’s. She smiles at Kearse across the table. He smiles back over the rim of his mug of Red Zinger, crossing his left leg over his right knee and fingering the three diagonal stripes embroidered onto the side of his sneakers. Teko slams plates and glasses into the cupboard while Tania washes up at the sink.

“Looks like rain again,” he says.

Yolanda stretches, languorously. “I’d like to get a walk in before it starts to pour.” Back arched, arms coiled behind her head, her eyes are on Kearse.

“I’d sure like to stretch my legs after that drive.”

Teko slams a glass into the cupboard. It breaks against an earthenware bowl, a jagged edge slicing into his fingertip.

“Ouch,” he says. “Shit.”

“What a klutz,” says Yolanda, slackening into her normal posture. “We’re not going to have any glasses left by the end of the summer.”

“You want to run some cold water on that,” says Kearse. “Before you wash it.”

Teko grunts in answer. Giotto-perfect circles of blood form an ellipsis across the countertop as he carries his injured finger delicately to the sink, holding it above his heart and squeezing it at its base with the fingers of his other hand.

“May I?” he says, gently shouldering Tania out of his way. In the sink he tenderly washes his hand with Octagon. Tania marvels: The guy’s so calm. She wishes he’d hurt himself every day. But of course she knows, she knows, knowing the two of them as well as she does, she just knows that this is yet another episode of the Teko and Yolanda saga, just as she knows that although the moment idles, free of any sense of danger, Teko is transmitting a clear signal to his wife, who is ignoring him, who couldn’t be less concerned with the man at the sink wincing and sighing, who at present is very suggestively cutting into a Sara Lee pound cake.

“Delicious,” Yolanda says, putting the tip of the blunt knife into her mouth and licking off buttery residue. “Mmmmmm.” She stares at Kearse. She says, “So good.”

“How about a Band-Aid?” says Teko.

“Teko. They’re all the way in the bathroom,” says Yolanda.

“I’ll get you one,” says Tania.

“Oh,” says Teko, “that’s all right.” He wraps his clean wound in a dish towel and goes to the bathroom.

“Acts like he’s going to bleed to death,” says Yolanda, before filling her mouth with cake.

When he gets back, his finger is rather showily dressed in gauze and surgical tape, tinged merthiolate red beneath. He wiggles the finger, as if to satisfy himself that it still works.

“Well, we’re on our way,” says Yolanda. She and Kearse stand.

“Jeez, well, what about the rest of us? I think we all want to take a nice walk.”

“You’ll just have to catch up,” answers Yolanda. “You take way too long.”

“But my finger!”

“If you’d cut the damn thing off, that’d be one thing. See you!”

Kearse and Yolanda go out. Tania watches as Teko silently cleans the pieces of the broken glass from the inside of the cupboard and throws them away. She goes outside and sits on the lawn before the house.

Joan’s voice comes from behind Tania and from way down in her diaphragm: “Mmmmm, delicious.”

“How about that?” says Tania, without turning around.

“Suck … my … knife, Yolanda.” Joan utters this in a baritone.