09-12-2014, 01:39 AM
Time in the Windows
When a man reaches his late thirties, the women that tormented and denied him decades ago come crawling out of the woodwork. Fumbling around in grocery stores, dropping her purse; by chance waiting on him as a waitress in a restaurant; a random and ill-timed meeting standing in line at the pharmacy in a warehouse department store. Drug-drenched and soiled, children ridden, lousy with men and phone numbers bringing the same problems and hopeless bad news. There she is, would feel insulted if you can't give her your number, discouraged after one refusal, but desperate all the same.
A woman doesn't get refused very often, no matter how far she's fallen. There's always some man in need of what only she can give him.
One such man sat, not dining in a restaurant or shopping for groceries or pharmaceuticals, but simply on his bed. She came to him through word of mouth, through a phone number, his, that someone he knows had given her.
He was thinking if these girls had any sense they would have used their hot asses to get out of this town when they were still young and malleable. Then he thought a few more things, then tried not to think anymore. He turned his phone off, and that was enough to distract him for a while, a phone turned off, now if anyone wanted to say something to him they'd come banging on the door. They'd be at the door before the phone even stopped ringing, or since it was turned off, they'd be there hammering their knobby fists against it right after the voice message gave way to the beep.
But he still had to give them their due. These girls. They still were the same skinny, long-haired, seductive eyed little things that could pull off, but usually left on, around him anyway, the sexiest tight pants, skirts and stockings since they were fourteen and would be doing the same thing, things, into their plump hipped fifties.
These were girls that had and threw away everything, yet still had everything. A wrinkle here and there, a new set of moles, maybe a scar, maybe permanent all natural eyeshadow around their eyes, and remarkably no stretchmarks. It was even rare for them at this point, early thirties or late twenties, to have achieved those mushroom bottoms and pearlike hips to replace their creamy ballerina-style slopes even after two or three kids. That was mostly the work of pills and pot and cigarettes and a never-ending carousel of a sex life. It wasn't like the pill-popping mamas you see with their fifty to eighty pound weight gain sitting around puffy eyes and mascara smeared in the waiting rooms of psychiatrist buildings. These young women didn't need doctors to fill prescriptions, the world, even one town, even one street of one town, was full of prescriptionless hookups that didn't have to end. That always ended, but never had to. But then there were other streets.
Here he sat on his bed with his feet up and his phone off at three o'clock in the afternoon, nothing to do, nowhere to go, and two, and possibly three, women that ten years ago he would have physically died for, in need of him in ways no woman or anybody had ever been in need of him before. So he ignored them, left his phone off so they couldn't reach him, and he wouldn't have to know if they were trying to reach him. And still the nervous concentration, the foreboding possibility of a knock, several harsh, rough knocks, from a girl with three kids, somewhere away, always somewhere else that she wasn't: her with skinny curvy hips, motherly breasts, pale but beach trim belly, looking out from big virginal Disney cartoon eyes, with hair just clean enough, just excited enough to bring out the trashiness behind the desperate solitude and anorexic hunger of a deserted mother; or maybe it would be the knocking of a neighbor, a friend, or of, God All Forbid, a family member. But he just sat and waited, not too nervous to do anything else, but too unhappy to care to do anything else. It was unhappiness that spread around, even from only a few random phone calls.
There used to be those nights, from highschool and from later, when a girl would call him and talk all night or until somebody's phone went dead. Laughing and tender, but sad and feeling lonesome or abused or betrayed or afraid, sometimes crying, sometimes hysterical, always in need, never wanting to be pulled into the dirty chasm of his needs. There's no friendship like the one a beautiful woman feels for a man she has no physical attraction for: until the day she kills him, or her boyfriend starts monitoring her phone bill, whichever comes first.
The bed started to get hard and almost painful under him; things always do if you sit or stand on them long enough. He got up and went outside on the porch. At least if a car pulled up he'd be able to see them possibly before they saw him. He stood feeling a mixture of things: lonely, bored, unworthy, discarded, standoffish, ruined, angry, rude, indecisive, but no love, or hope, or tenderness, or expectation. He just wanted to be alone. But he couldn't be now. Now they were coming, he knew they were coming. He just didn't know which one and how many. He had no clue when.
He wasn't waiting, he was standing outside trying to get away, and there was nowhere to go. He went and got in his car. The gas light came on, he pulled out his wallet and took off out of the driveway. There had to be somewhere to go, there always had to be some place.
They would come. It wouldn't be one, it would be at least two, about a week or two apart, then he'd have to choose. Each one would come alone and want to stay awhile. He could have both of them if he wanted to, but they would eventually find out, and soon. And then he would be in worse off shape than he had been all these years alone. Then he would be marked as a bad guy. And guys like him couldn't get away with being a bad guy; that's what they had bad guys for. And these girls had had enough of those already. They were looking for a turnaround, and he was the guy, at least he was a start. Easy to reach, nothing keeping him away from ready access. He was one of the best friends they ever had.
On the main highway he passed up two gas stations, trying to make it as far as he could go toward the city with as little gas in the tank as possible. But he was full of excitement, ravenous momentum. He swerved and broke traffic, and turned and took side ways and back roads. When he got to a little gas station on a little nobody road he pumped it, paid and was off. Going the other way. Going east, away from the city. The way people went to get to the beach, six hours away. He took advantage of the elevated speed limit on the long strip of highway driving straight onto the boardwalk. But he wasn't going to the beach; after an hour he took a quick, sharp and unplanned left over the other side of the highway and onto another darkish, thin and curvy and rock shooting nobody road, and easily skid his tires and threw up glass and gravel and heard the loud crunching of broken daytime road and smelled the sun melted overheated engine melted stink of worn out, recently laid asphalt. He made more turns, going deeper east, further into nowhere. East and south and then north, deeper into the grassy, unpolished, out of reach south, the smell of abandoned broken down farms, the glare of the sun stuck and refusing to come out of dark, rusted, worn and irreversibly unneeded trucks and tractors and dozers and other malformed and dust crusted farm equipment and machinery. He passed stores with no cars outside and blank windows. Passed houses that were mostly driveways, and trailers with yards bigger than fields. The sun gently broke in through the front windshield no matter which direction he was going in. It glared from all sides of the compass rose; through the front windshield through the thing he pulled down to block it some, and through the mirror on that. The mirror on it reflected the sun coming in through the back windshield too. The sun melted the road and rested without smoke or steam or even light in the greyish brown paintjob of the car.
The wind was silent, nonexistent except from the movement of the car. He smelled gas and tires and mud and dry dirt and thought he could even smell clouds and shadows between trees and the black of his shoes and the sweat not of his hands as much as of the steeringwheel itself. And then he stopped at a stoplight. A red, yellow and green overhead floating stoplight at the end of a dirty road in the middle of an intersection between three fields and an empty parking lot with no building anywhere attached to it. He thought about the girls he'd known, how it was out here on these kinds of backroads that they lived with their parents or parent or whoever back when they were younger and were in school. He felt the old smothering nostalgia of bus rides in the afternoons and misty, foggy, smoke-filled fall mornings walking into the front or side doors of the school. It was a hard but thinly shredded spittled wad of nostalgia like a tasteless wornout bubblegum stuck in his chest and throat broken up and thinned out in the exertion of momentum. He breathed calmly and easily and went again when the light turned. Straight along the now widening country road bright with yellow grass poking out of the ditches to the sides and airy and innocent-looking as an empty, undisturbed line of anonymity and pathway. Nothing for a good straight run of miles ahead but going and not enough time to even stay if you were to slow down or stop. And a little ways down he turned off that road and scraped down a white, sparkling gravel road that smelled of fresh sun-bathed dirt, and when he turned off that, now going west for the first time in awhile, he passed more small, unfinished looking houses and saw a pen with a collie in it and a parked bicycle in a paved cement driveway with a basketball goal sitting in front of a closed garage.
And then he was almost going home, noticing it getting darker, the sun straight ahead but only in the distance. He saw the mountains far ahead, always far ahead and farther the more westward he moved on the grey silverish road that looked like the main highway only thinner and more narrow.
He slowed down to meet the flimsy 45 miles per hour speed limit, and dared not turn the radio on lest he had to hear voices; he'd left his phone at home. The sun remained milder, less light and more room temperature heat on the empty road. He passed another vehicle, he magically had not seen head or tail of another human being since turning off the main highway so much time ago. He rode slowly, turning his head and admiring the slow, inanimate scenery on either side. His head tired, soon to exhaustingly be able to withstand the most heated and desperate nighttime pounding on his frontdoor.
The nostalgia was gone. It didn't seem like day or dusk or the depressingly exciting yearning-filled drabness of early evening or the humid breathless scorched crowdedness of an all day highnoon on the highway or in a shopping center parking lot back over in the city. It was a nothing type of mood; and he didn't feel the day much at all, only the sun was sinking slowly but surely, and soon he'd be at home with the lights off and dark.
In no time he was back on the main highway, closer to home than where he'd turned off as he'd been heading east on the long straight strip. He'd see the head of his road in less than thirty minutes. Even sooner if he tested the speed limit. Tired and calm and broken down in his seat, he cruised carefully and dragging the mild limit after the reckless winds and curves and turns he sped down on some of those back country roads. He would be at home, with no late phone calls, he'd keep it off; and maybe a quiet bath, where no one could even hear the water or see the light, and if they did see the light, it could be left on all night, and he would make no noise, as if no one was even there.
He stopped and turned onto his road and went even slower than the 30 mph limit down the unmarked black surface of the pavement. Watching the fields so mellow and shadowed it was if the clouds were in the fields rather than floating low above them. He passed the country store with the red pickup truck that always sat there whether there was anyone there or not. He slowed down even more on an almost self dare and hovered almost as slowly and softly as those clouds over the road and by the trees that signalled his one sharp turn at the fork that either led him to his house or to the shallow brown mud reeking pond where some of the younger boys went fishing.
He turned into his driveway and got out of the car without a thought in mind other than a glass of orange juice and maybe a bowl of Frosted Flakes cereal, and then most likely sitting down on the couch or in his bed, or going to use the bathroom for some reason. His phone was there on the table: its screen black, the space around it calm and uninteresting. He had his keys back safely in his pocket then turned down the hallway to his room and smelled the sweat and saw the shadowy unmade patterns of his hot, lonesome bed, and felt the urge for a woman. A vague, half thought out need for some company and some tender, innocent affection. No jealousy, no scandal, no anxious knowledge of another man, no lies to tell anyone, especially not another woman.
Nothing but a simple life with a girl that awarded a simply, exclusive nonconfusing or controversy eliciting sharing of human time, activities and emotions. Physical togetherness, and softly spoken words, loud laughs, and unquestioned, unalarming trips together into the city and walks side by side in parking lots in stores and on sidewalks.
He thought of the long, drawn-out battles he'd had with women, trying to get them to like him. All the compliments ill-received, opening doors to stern blank faces, the wallet full of cash plainly opened wide before the girl at the cash register as he says 'By the way, would you go out on a date with me?', the phones they used to cry in his ear and on his shoulder when their boyfriends hurt them or dumped them or sometimes worse. And he thought about what he had wanted: someone to hold near in front of a campfire on a chilly fall night, and on the couch in front of the TV when they're alone at night, and maybe a walk down or up the road on a summer evening, or a walk in the park, or a trip to another state on vacation and to walk around the cities and towns there. A lot of stuff really, but not really a lot, not when you considered that all couples do things like that without having to plan for it, it's just the things that casually happen. But that's not what he saw it as, he saw it as hard work, of weeks and months worth of planning, and when there's no success even getting the date, all that planning comes to naught, and all there's left is to think about all those things as they would be or could be but always as something difficult and then painful and then not even worth thinking about.
He took his bath, and felt a similar set of feelings about the bathroom and the tub as he did about the bedroom and bed. Getting out of the bath and trying to dry off, his flesh felt a dull heat that didn't burn, and his pores felt clotted and suffocating. He stood with the sweat pooled under his arms with the heat of the bath where he felt steam gathered, under his arms between his legs, in the tanned rings beneath his eyes and under his chin. The whole house, every room, air conditioner or not, felt like a summer, hard and relentless in September. His damp body like a dark dreary day but with no relief from the sharp muggy pore lacerations of humidity.
Only something about his bed was cool and warm in a comforting, needful kind of way. He thought again of teenage girls in flannel shirts on fall nights back in highschool, or girls in their early twenties that would speak with their soft, emotionally charged voices in his ear as he sat up or laid over in bed alone. It didn't seem to be right to be punished for yearning for something that if he ever got would be too little, too late. He didn't even feel young anymore, he didn't even want to.
But he thought he'd go get his phone. To have it, and to leave it on in his room when he felt like trying to get some sleep. Maybe one of the girls would call. He couldn't see anything wrong with talking to them, even if he ended up talking to more than one, he couldn't think of any reason, he couldn't feel how that could be considered wrong by anybody, no matter the circumstances. In any event, he had the phone there in the room with him in case it rang, not that he would answer it. But no one called, nobody came by, and nothing happened.