Fiction

The scene at the airport had fallen short of elegance, but it hadn’t lasted long. He didn’t come in with her because there was nowhere to leave the car; he double-parked near her airline and they got out, and he took her suitcase and her duffel bag out of the trunk, and then they climbed up the curb and stood near the big check-in hall windows where they each had a cigarette.

His lighter had been broken and his efforts to get the last spark were so laborious that a kid smoking nearby with his mother came by and lent him his, which he used to light his and his wife’s cigarettes, and then there’d been an exchange in which the kid had wanted him to keep the lighter, and he’d tried to give it back, and the kid had in turn refused to take it, and on and on until he finally agreed to keep it, but by then it was time for her to go and whatever few words they might have said they did not say.

The kid had brought that lighter and come there to mock him, he thought, pulling out of the airport parking lot and heading back toward the interstate, imagining her already in the air although in reality she was probably still just checking her bag and printing her tickets from the kiosk, or perhaps she was by now getting a bottled water and some gum at the newsstand, and looking at a couple of magazines that she’d decide not to buy without even having almost bought them. He thought about throwing the lighter out the window of the car, but in the end he just put it in the glove compartment.

She had asked him for a ride to the airport as if it were a favor he might have refused.

Now he was back on the interstate, thinking he would stop for lunch and then do the grocery shopping, getting the things he needed, walking up and down the aisle. His name was Will Strite and he was married to his wife Deb. Now she needed to spend the summer at her parents’ house, an airplane ride away, and get a few things sorted out and cleaned out and cleared up. At least when she meant the summer she said the summer, and not the weekend, and for that he was grateful.

He had this lighter now and thought that with it he might burn down his car.

He got a grilled chicken sandwich with potato salad, thinking this would start him out on the right foot, rather than the burger and fries for the same money, or even a dollar less. She might not really have been going to her parents’ house, he knew. He pictured her wandering the highway in some long distant state, looking for a ride, for someone with a big mustache who would pick her up and call her a gal. When the waitress brought the check he waved it off and asked for a scoop of ice cream, and then thought to ask which of the cars in the parking lot was hers, or if he could give her a ride if she didn’t have one, but he didn’t.

The man who picked up his wife might ask where she was going, and then they’d laugh all the way to Oklahoma when she said she didn’t know.

Or she’d just say Oklahoma and they’d go someplace else instead, for the weekend.

According to Deb, she had had to leave because he had forgotten how to find her vagina. She was going to give him some time to think about it. There was no more delicate or precise way to explain what she meant, she said. At night, after they’d both finished work, or finished looking for work, depending on the night, and finished up at the bar or the bowling alley, or finished eating out or eating in, they’d wind up half naked on the couch, or all the way naked in the bed, and it’d be going along, stray thoughts popping into each of their heads and being cast out like the garbage on Tuesday nights or Wednesdays after Monday holidays, but then when it came time, they slipped away from and not into one another. He battered and butted away down where he couldn’t see, in the city of his ancestors, but all he could manage was to rub her thighs, or kind of hunch up and bear down on her belly.

She would reach down and try to help him in, but it wouldn’t happen.

They would toggle shapes and sizes, at first he’d be a little boy and she an old woman, and then she a little girl and he an old man, and then they’d lose track of one another all together, veering off into crude and hilarious shapes, her skin would turn to sandpaper while his turned to shampoo; his to seed chaff and hers to lemon pulp. Sometimes she would push him off the bed and spend half an hour looking for him on the floor, sometimes he would spend so long licking her bellybutton or the backs of her knees that she would wake up with a sunburn, or the sheets would become a desert and he’d be walking all alone, tripping over his boxers, the bottom sheet the sand and the top sheet the sky, yelling through his dry, dry mouth. The salt flats of the pillows, the gushing alarm clock.