I extended a hand and he stepped outside and closed the door behind him. I’d seen him onstage, crouching with a mike. Strobes and girls in Lycra short shorts. The man in front of me looked like he’d never spoken loudly or danced.
—How was the drive?
I said that it was good.
—Man, I love that drive. It’s been too long. Planes trip me out.
He made wings of his long arms. By now my scalp had begun to sweat.
—Planes trip me out, too.
—You want your keys, I imagine? You need some help moving some things?
—I’ve got movers coming, thanks.
—All right, all right. I ain’t got no lemonade to offer. I didn’t bake no meringue pies. But I’ll get something to you. This is gonna be nice. You’ll like it here, Miss Joan. We like it here. We’re like a small family. You met my man Leonard? My boy River?
—Nobody.
—Whoosh, he said. The lady swoops in—his palm dove down and sliced by my waist—under cover of night. I’mma get your keys, Miss Joan. Let you get settled. Let you get your house in order.
When he returned, he handed me two keys held together by a twist tie.
—Mailbox, he said, pointing to one. House, he said, pointing to the other. No, wait, other way around. He laughed delightedly. I’m all turned ’round today. Forgive me, Miss Joan. I recorded all night. I do that and then sleep all afternoon. This is five a.m. for me.
I took my keys and our hands touched and I shivered and I thought, oh for God’s sake. I looked at him and he considered me; I could see him taking my measurements. Then he smiled. He was over it.
Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media. Sex made me feel pretty. By the time I reached Texas the trip was almost over. The man I fucked was named John Ford. He wore a western shirt and placed my palm over his zipper in the lobby of the Thunderbird. The walls were aqua and there were cowhides on the floor. He said he’d once worked on a ranch. But it turned out to be a Boy Scout trip he remembered like it was yesterday. He was in liquor sales out of Chicago. He’d never heard of the film director who shared his name. Or Monument Valley, where the films were made, the soaring westerns I watched with my mother. He belched twice, too loud to ignore, and ordered the flatbread pizza with balsamic onions. But his name was John Ford.
3
INSIDE THE HOUSE IT SMELLED of toothpicks. What is it about moving into a new place that makes you want to kill yourself? I imagine this isn’t true for women with labeled boxes. Women who own flyswatters, who store their winter clothes for the summer. Me, I had my mother’s eyelash curler. I had old yellow lotions from stores that no longer existed. My unpacked boxes would stay unpacked. Full of mementos, full of smells and especially the pungent odor of the mothballs my mother placed inside her handbags. As a child I thought they were balls of crystal.
The house was a giant sauna, three floors of all wood. It could have been beautiful. It was, in a way. But as with many run-down places that had potential, you needed to bring a skill to it. The ability to position certain rugs and lamps. You had to not mind dirt in places you couldn’t get to. I imagined Alice to be one of these people.
The first floor was made up of the kitchen and the living room and the only bathroom. In the living room the black pellet stove was filled with lilac crystals instead of wood. The side of the house that faced the mouth of the canyon was all windows. In the photographs the realtor sent me, there was a towering ficus and assorted singed palms. But without the plants the sun was white-hot and despotic. It illuminated the dust in the sockets of the outlets.
There was no dishwasher and none of the cabinets lined up with one another. The insides of the drawers were sticky, as though honey had been mopped up with plain water. I wouldn’t be able to cook long, lovely meals in there. Steaming bowls of mussels or crackling hens. It was a kitchen for turkey sandwiches. I once had a boyfriend from Ireland who would make these schoolboy sandwiches with old tomatoes and cheap turkey, slicked in gloss and full of nitrates. He would leave the turkey out on the counter after making the sandwiches, and in the morning it would still be there and then he would put it away.
I was reminded of that boyfriend in my new kitchen. The notion of making do. The first night we made love it was so hot in his railroad apartment that he was sweating profusely above me. The sweat dripped off the paintbrush ends of his hair onto my face and chest.
The second floor was supposed to be a bedroom. You reached it via a spiral staircase. There was only enough room for the bed. There was a small pine closet. It looked like Colorado in the bedroom. There was an old western saddle slung over a beam. I could picture a different life, Rossignol skis lining the walls.
I climbed a short attic staircase to the third floor, which had been advertised as an office. There was makeshift shelving left over from a former tenant, a few old record sleeves dredged in sand and hair. It felt like walking into a steam room. By that time droplets were falling from my underarms and plinking the floor.
I sat down on my thin white dress. I could feel the splinters of the wood pricking the silk and knew that when I got up, the dress would be ruined. I’d worn it across the country, washed it once in Terre Haute and again in Marfa, in the sink of John Ford’s hotel room. I’d pulled it on wet that morning and let it bake dry against my skin in the sun. It was my mother’s dress. She’d kept it for so many years in mint condition.
A silverfish sprinkled across my kneecap and then someone banged on the door. I ran downstairs and opened the door to two broad men in black shirts and denim shorts. I always thought, If I had to fuck one man in the room, to save my life. If I had to be ground down. Which would it be?
With these two, I couldn’t tell which was safer. The one with a neck tattoo looked like a man who lets a dog hump his leg until one day somebody sees, so he has to shoot the dog.
They asked me where I wanted certain things. When they saw the spiral staircase, the one with the neck tattoo grunted. For the first few minutes they made me feel alternately like a rich old lady and a babysitter. I didn’t want to be either.
The second man, the one with a gold front tooth, looked from my eyes to my breasts so often that I thought he had a tic. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so my nipples poked out, looking like whelks. I don’t know why these thoughts came to me, but I pictured myself being bent and raped by the one with the gold tooth over the shallow sink. I reasoned that I might then feel comfortable asking him to build my IKEA furniture.
Halfway through the move I realized that the men were doing meth in my bathroom. They were going in one after the other, every thirty minutes, and coming out like goblin versions of themselves. I wonder what to tell you about drugs. I took pills and I smoked marijuana and there were monthlong stretches here and there when I blew coke alone at night. I would snort it off of my mother’s antique makeup mirror with a five-hundred-dollar bill of Monopoly money. Then I would stay up until three and four, buying dresses online. But mostly it was pills. I wasn’t strong enough to get through life without being able to go to sleep on command. Maybe you won’t need to take pills. I dream that you’ll be so much stronger. One time on an island I swam in a green lagoon and saw through the clearness of the water the simple fact of my limbs. I watched the purple, red, and blue fish moving around my body and I paddled to keep myself afloat for a long time. Afterward, I lay down on the sand and concentrated on the sun warming my kneecaps and my shoulders. I can count moments like that on my hands. My dream is for you to have many such moments, so many that you notice only the times you slip into your own brain and recognize those instances for the traps that they are.