Charlie closed the window blinds. The blinds were plastic slats, dirty with age, and they clicked into place unevenly as he tugged on the cord.
Panic, like a large minnow darting upstream, moved back and forth inside him. He was suddenly as homesick as a child sent to stay with relatives: when the furniture seemed large and dark and strange, and the smell peculiar, each detail assaultive with a differentness that was almost unbearable. I want to go home, he thought. And the desire seemed to squeeze the breath from him, because it was not his home in Carlisle, Illinois, where he lived with Marilyn that he wanted to go home to, his grandchildren right down the street. And it was not his childhood home either, which was in Carlisle as well. Nor was it their first home as newlyweds outside of Madison. He did not know what home it was he longed for, but it seemed to him as he aged that his homesickness would increase, and because he could not tolerate the Marilyn he now lived with—a woman who nevertheless filled his estranged, expatriated heart with pity—he did not know what he would do, and the minnow darting through the stream of his anxiety landed briefly on his current Carlisle home with his grandchildren down the street, swam to the golf course where he did still sometimes enjoy the expanse of green before him, swam to the woman who might or might not show up here with her head of dark, glossy hair—and not one place seemed stable.
A soft knock came on his motel door.
“Hello, Charlie.” She smiled, her eyes warm, as she walked past him into the room.
He knew instantly. His instincts had been honed in youth and this ability had never left him, the one to detect disaster.
Still, a man needed his dignity. So he nodded, and said, “Tracy.”
She walked farther into the room, and when he saw that she had brought her overnight bag—and why would she not have, really?—he was pathetically and fleetingly gladdened, but then she sat on the bed and smiled at him again and he knew again.
“Take your coat?” he asked.
She shrugged her way out of it.
“Charlie,” she said.
He watched himself. A little bit, it was fascinating. He was an organism about to be dealt a blow, and he used his natural powers to defend himself. This meant that he observed carefully the pitted parts of her upper cheeks, the pores that were jagged shapes indicating an adolescence he already knew had been hard. He noted the scent on the coat that he held, how even in its faintness it was cloying and unsubtle, and he hung the piece of clothing on the back of the desk chair rather than in the closet next to his own. He observed the way her eyes would not look at him directly, and he thought that he hated dishonesty—or lack of courage—more than anything.
He moved as far away from her as the small room would allow, so that he stood leaning against the wall opposite.
Now she looked at him—with a sardonic, apologetic expression. “I need money,” she said. And she sighed deeply, putting her hand on the bedspread. The fingers each had a ring, including her thumb, and it was still surprising to him how his mind was trying to remind him—Charlie, for God’s sake, take note!—how repulsive so many parts of her should be to him and yet were not. The crap of class superiority would protect no man for long. Many lived whole lives and never knew this; Charlie did.
“Just tell me,” he said.
“Ten.”
He stayed exactly where he was. On the small table next to the bed his cellphone suddenly vibrated. Tracy leaned to look. “Your wife,” she said, just reporting. Indifferent.
Charlie walked to the phone and slipped it into his pocket, where it shuddered in his palm a few moments before stopping. He said to Tracy, who remained sitting on the bed, “I can’t, sweetheart.”
“But you can.” Clearly she had not expected this, and that was a surprise to him.
“No. I can’t.”
“You have plenty of money, Charlie.”
“I have a wife and children and grandchildren, is what I have.”
He had bought champagne because she liked it, and he watched as she noticed it now on the bureau top in the plastic motel bucket he’d filled with ice. She looked back at him ruefully. “You break my heart,” she said. “Of all—”
He laughed, a bark of a sound. “Of all your johns I break your heart the most.”
“But it’s true.” She stood and walked to the champagne. “And don’t be crass, Charlie. I have clients, and you’re not one of them.”
“I know you have clients,” he said.
“?‘Johns’ is so…yesterday, for Christ’s sake, Charlie.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I’m not forgetting it.”
“Tracy, stop. You and I—right now—are about to act out one of the oldest stories in the book. And I don’t care to. I know all the lines, I know all the background music. I don’t want”—he opened his palm—“to do it, that’s all. And I won’t.”
The pain that moved briefly across her face gratified him; he had always felt she loved him, as he did her. But there was suddenly a refreshing simplicity that seemed to move into the room, an unexpected and huge relief, a straightening out of—things. Go home and get your things in order, a doctor would say. No. Affairs. Go home and get your affairs in order. That clarification—he couldn’t help it—struck Charlie as funny. He was, in the tiniest way, delighted, as though all those people whose lives had occurred long before he’d been born had known these things, phrases used for years: Go home and get your affairs in order.
Inside his pocket his phone vibrated again, and he brought it out to see. Marilyn was printed in blue across the screen.
“Want me to step out?” The question was intimate because it had been asked so many times in the past. The tone was conversational, familiar.
He nodded.
She slipped her coat back on, and he gave her a room key.
He said, “They have that tiny lobby—” But she said her car was fine, she’d listen to the radio, really, it was no problem. She had always been pretty wonderful that way. It was her job to be wonderful that way. But even after the day she’d told him her real name—sitting fully dressed in the chair by the desk, “I want to tell you my real name”—and brought out her driver’s license to prove it, she was still wonderful that way. After the day she showed him her license, she’d insisted that he not offer her money again. Perhaps she’d been mulling this over, and now figured she was owed. Perhaps she was. The door closed quietly behind her. He resisted the urge to look through the blind slats and watch her get into her car.
The peculiar hopefulness had not left him, the pleasing understanding that the situation would be over soon, was—essentially—over already. And it felt quite survivable, which he had somehow not known.
His wife was crying on the phone. “Charlie? Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, really I am. You’re supposed to be having fun—well, I know it’s not fun, but I mean I know it’s your time, and—”
“What’s happened?” He felt no alarm.
“Oh, Charlie, she was mean to me again. I called, you know, to see if the girls were all set with their Thanksgiving dresses, and Janet said to me, she said, ‘Marilyn, I’m asking you, no, I’m telling you, I’m just going to come right out and tell you, Marilyn, that you call here too much. This is my house and Stevie is my husband, and we need some space.’ That’s what she said, Charlie. And Stevie, who even knows if he was home, does he have any spine, our son—”
Charlie stopped listening. He was absolutely and silently on the side of his children, and on the side of his son’s wife. He sat down on the bed.
“Charlie?” she said.
“I’m here.” Inadvertently he glanced at himself in the mirror. He had long ago stopped looking like anyone familiar.