Someone farted and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. And then the guy across the aisle opened a can of tomato juice and that smell blended with the other. He poured the juice into a cup of ice and swirled it around as if it were a fine wine before taking a sip. When he was done, he unwrapped a sandwich, something beefy and horrible, and I was disappointed because I thought things should be different in first class.
Shelly switched us over to Bloody Marys. She asked for extra olives and celery, extra everything, which I also wanted but didn’t ask for. I was jealous—she had a side cup full of veggies, fat green olives with their little spears—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for one of my own even though the flight attendant was right there and ready to serve me. I tried to recall how long I’d been off my daily anxiety medication and whether it was possible that this had something to do with it. I didn’t think this kind of thing would have bothered me before. By all accounts my transition off meds had gone smoothly but I’d begun to notice small things: I didn’t strike up conversations with strangers as easily or smile at them; I didn’t ask for things as readily at restaurants and many of the tables felt too exposed. I was beginning to be afraid again.
. . .
The hotel was bright and modern.
There were two bedrooms, each with their own private bathrooms, and a sitting area with a fireplace. There was a balcony looking out at the water. Everything was spotless but Shelly had brought along a package of disinfectant wipes, saying she’d seen an episode of 20/20 in which they’d done tests and found that shitty hotel rooms were no more dirty than the expensive ones—fecal matter everywhere. Everything she said was obvious and boring. Of course nice hotel rooms were just as dirty; rich people weren’t any cleaner than poor ones. They might be neater, more conscious of hiding their evidence, but they weren’t cleaner. I recalled the last hotel I’d stayed in, a four-star with my parents on the coast, and how I’d just settled into the bath when I noticed streaks of blood above the waterline. I’d stared at them for a long time, considering whether they had been smeared there on purpose—they certainly looked purposeful, three fingers’ worth—and how the cleaning lady had missed it. But I hadn’t called housekeeping or wiped it off or anything. The following day I took a shower.
I counted the nights I had to be with her: four. It seemed like forever and I wondered how I’d found myself in this situation when I promised myself every time it would be the last, swearing that I wouldn’t put myself in her debt again, but here I was. She had her ways. She spaced the trips far enough apart for me to forget how miserable they were and so far in advance that I could imagine they wouldn’t ever happen, or we’d be different. But each time we were the same people who fell into the same roles and by the time the trip was over we hated each other. I had no idea why she kept planning them. It seemed a sort of sickness.
I sat on the couch and changed channels while she cleaned, the smell of lemony chemicals. Then I went to my bathroom and washed my face, took the toiletries out of my bag and placed them around the sink. There were fancy soaps and shampoos and mouthwash, Q-tips and cotton balls in silver containers. I cleaned my ears but they were already clean. I squirted some lotion into my hands and rubbed.
“I need a fan,” she said, when I resumed my place on the couch. “I can’t sleep without white noise.”
“You usually bring that little machine.”
“Derek uses it.”
“No prob, Bob.” I called housekeeping. After a guy brought the fan and she took it to her room, she had me call again for toothpaste and then extra pillows—she needed at least four pillows if she was alone. She gave me tip money and I answered the door to the same guy each time: well over six feet tall and slightly too thin, handsome. If he was annoyed, he didn’t let on. He called me Ms. Nugent, my friend’s name, and I didn’t correct him. Between his first and second visits, I put on lipstick. Between his second and third, Shelly suggested I blow him; she would give me five hundred dollars to blow him. I changed into a short strapless dress and imagined blowing him.
“Thank you,” I said, as he put the pillow in my arms. It was oddly intimate. Five hundred dollars, I thought. What I might do with five hundred dollars.
In a different context, he might have been my boyfriend. I had a boyfriend but I couldn’t stop myself from wanting others. It was a pattern. I’d start thinking about something small, like how my boyfriend didn’t cut his toenails but enjoyed pulling them off with his fingers, among other shortcomings and failures, terrible things he’d once said or done in anger or passion, and then I’d wonder how I could ever be with this person, just the two of us alone together in a house for years. What would we say after a while? I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which we might be happy. I guessed the one thing I couldn’t understand about life was why no one seemed to be with the person they loved most in the world.
Shelly opened the fridge and took out two mini-bottles of white wine. She handed me one and we clinked them together.
“I bet he had a really big dick,” she said. Then she said she needed a bath and went to her room and closed the door. We both loved baths and never showered. It was one of the things we had in common.
I took her pack of Davidoff Superslims and went out to the balcony. She always had cigarettes, though in all the years I’d known her, I’d only seen her smoke a few times.
There was a sign in the room that said smoking wasn’t allowed anywhere on hotel grounds—there was a $250 fine—but if I was caught Shelly wouldn’t mind paying. She would probably be happy to pay a fine and would enjoy telling people that we had gotten into trouble. Like many people who’d grown up without much that suddenly found themselves with more than they could spend, she seemed desperate to return to her original state. Every six months she put on a dress and met with a man who gave her figures and charts and tried to talk to her like a father. She was spending too much, he said, the money wouldn’t last forever at this rate. She told me she’d been happy before the money and would be happy without it, but I couldn’t believe this at all. What would she do? Go back to cleaning motel rooms? I wondered how much was left and how long it would last and whether Derek would stay with her if she was broke. I imagined her back at the same Super 8: highlights grown out, looking her age and older, old. I didn’t want to see that. I had genuinely liked her at some point, many years ago.