John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

But as he stirred in the stain, the drug, Stanley started to talk about the old days again. He said the business with the mirrors had made him think of it. Today would be so different from back in the old days, back at NYU, when he and old Ollie used to do acid all the time.

A lie: Alden had told her Stanley never tried hallucinogens. Nonie lifted her cup and drained it.

And choked; you weren’t supposed to gulp such a rank brew. They’d picked up some Nicaraguan blend in Eugene yesterday. It meant a special trip, one more hassle before they’d headed up here to Brownsville. But Stanley had insisted: a little extra kick, man, a little taste of the Sandanista Revolution to help us get off. Likewise by the time Nonie caught her breath he’d already started to embroider the lies about his acid trips with “Ollie”—with Alden. He’d started to work in details he knew she would have picked up from her younger professors, or from MTV. Guys like Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg, he said, they were in control right from the start. Guys like Ginsberg didn’t have to play it straight in front of their parents. But now Stanley was older himself, and a glimpse in the mirror wouldn’t make him freak the way it used to. It wouldn’t make him go jump off the roof or anything.

Today, Stanley said, he’d covered the mirrors for Nonie’s sake. He didn’t want Nonie to freak.

She kept her face formal. He was lying, and at the same time he was putting her in her place. He had a mean streak, certainly. But strange mean, indirect like just now: she’d been with Stanley two years now, and only in the last month or so had she begun to pick it up. Who was he, anyway? Even his clothes were a lie. That biker’s jacket and cap, that Italian undershirt, and always the light gauge on a chain round his neck. Granted, Stanley had the face to go with it. A rough-knuckle handsomeness, the eyes aging soft but the cheeks aging mean. His heavy mustache centered the vivid wrinkles and lines. And he had the energy, he was up clearing the table. Last night he’d hauled the table out from the kitchen, out here by the windows. There were still times she couldn’t keep her eyes off him.

He withdrew to the sink, still making explanations. More new trouble, he never used to complain so much. But now it was Nonie, my life is crazy, this wasn’t what I wanted. What kind of an artist works as a professional photographer? Stanley shook water off the coffee mugs and set them in the dry rack. He arranged them, really, propping each so the handles faced together from opposite sides of the rack. Meantime still griping, what kind of an artist has a contract with Sunset magazine? Man, all this western good-life stuffjust isn’t me. He returned to the table with two hefty slices of the bread he’d baked this morning. Each slice was paired on its dish with a folded cloth napkin, the dish a bumblebee colored earthenware that Nonie hadn’t even known her family owned. The bread was warm with butter and honey.

“I just have to remake my whole life,” Stanley announced. “I have to strip it down and see what it looks like naked.”

He sat and spread his napkin across his lap. Then he said it was time they got started, it was time they looked at Alden’s letter.

Nonie turned to the window. Brownsville, and another foul September sky. Her face was slack, ashamed. It wasn’t just that Stanley had finally brought up Alden’s letter; it was Stanley himself. There were still times. It was that Stanley lied to himself, as natural as lying to her, and when had their life together become this long-undusted houseful of lies? Everything knotted with dirt and smothering.

When Nonie had first seen the letter, yesterday, the effect was just the opposite. As soon as she’d spotted it in Stanley’s hand she’d withdrawn to an icy private sanctuary. She’d withdrawn to safety even as she stood there answering questions and knotting her thumbs. A mental holding pattern, she’d discovered the place when she started taking dance classes. Though yesterday, Stanley too had acted remotely. He’d made no move to open the letter. He’d smoothed the envelope against his drafting board, watching the paper emerge from his hand, and he’d asked about her folks’ place up in Brownsville. Still empty, babe? You still got the key? He’d asked — zoning off even further — if she’d heard the news: some outfit from Hollywood was using Brownsville as the set for a movie. A horror movie, babe. You heard?

Of course the house was still unsold, of course she’d heard about the movie. The answers were blips across a screen unreachably deep in her head. Only then had Stanley begun to come to the point: Think of it, Nones…just up the road, an actual movie.

Talking around a thick chaw of bread, Stanley pointed out the letter’s return address. Managua, babe. But in the other corner of the envelope, the postmark said Mexico City. “Alden must have had someone hand-carry it over the border,” he said. “Makes you wonder what he had to hide.”

He went back into his bag, getting his X-acto. Nonie hugged her knees. One instep jigged hotly at the edge of her chair, she couldn’t get back into her holding pattern.

She wished the drug would take over. God yes, take over . Better that than Stanley’s pick-pick-pick, so many delays that she wondered if he knew. Out the window, the landscape kept turning briefly to quartz. But it wasn’t enough. Nonie blinked and the stony interior folds were gone. Indeed the glimpse only made her think of herself: of how exposed and foreign she looked on Stanley’s contact sheets. Today’s shot had particularly harsh angles. Dancer’s shoulders and strong cheekbones, Indian hair and the long straight fall of her Peruvian skirt.

And Stanley read the letter in a normal adult voice, without the usual tics and twitches intended to sound streetwise. She had to stay with him; she had to keep thinking. He’d always played the straight man around Alden. His goodboyness after his friend arrived in Eugene had prompted her first suspicions about the stories. Alden proved so much more than the amphetamine-heated liner notes scrawled across a few bootleg Dylans. He was sloppy with red meat and scotch. He was marriage and a child and the separation which had brought him out West. Till then they’d both ridden the same legend, MacDougal and Bleeker and Stanley and Ollie. The first two into everything. But come June, Alden had actually shared the house. Commencement was past and Nonie had nothing going but her workshop sessions. Now the letter described his divorce. Alden was the first to try that too.

Stanley read this part with terrific feeling. Alden was saying goodbye to his daughter, the shape of the sentence was itself soft from bruising. Nonie faced him again at last. Such a voice, such a stare — Stanley couldn’t have known what had gone on. He couldn’t have known the letter was from the man with whom she’d cheated. Instead the job of reading well was for Stanley another dip into the tool kit: it was his own above-it-all sanctuary.

Good God, why didn’t the damn drug take over? Out the window, she noticed only the bits of hard color visible between the trees. The film company’s color, the fakery down on Main Street. She waited to see what Alden would reveal.

He claimed that Nicaragua wasn’t enough for him. He belonged in another time, Alden said, a time when a man could take an honest leap off the edge of the world. These days it was nothing but meanness any way you went. You blundered into old lives, you stirred up old pain. Beg, borrow, steal. Nonie was still sorting out the emotions when Stanley began to refold the letter.

He pinched the folds, the paper squeaked.

The out-of-place table, the autumn cold.

Of course Stanley began to talk. Old Ollie, man, so many ideas. He even used to take acid for the ideas, when the rest of us just took it for the thrills. Nonie let him go. She was goofy with relief. Some clottage inside had burst and set free a thousand skittery creatures, every one of them made of relief, every touch of their feet another tickle. She had to laugh. She sprawled in her chair. Every time she caught her breath she saw more of the whacky outdoors invade the house, visual overlaps flip-flopping from Stanley to the kitchen and back. His mustache blipped across the fridge and linoleum; the mugs and dry rack settled web-like over his head. His noise was a chatter on the edge of sleep. The chair itself made more sense, creaking Alden didn’t tell, he didn’t tell as she tried not to fall. Certainly she was too busy with laughing to finish the new questions coming to mind: Were they already…? Was it all going to be like…? Certainly she couldn’t be bothered trying to read Stanley’s gestures, or what it meant when he hiked his chair closer. At least the dry rack’s grid had left his face. She could see the strain in his grin. Finally she caught what he was saying, enough to understand. Easy babe. Stay within….