The Lucky One
On the kitchen counter is a set of keys to a rented Nissan Sentra. I love renting cars. A rental is the only kind of car I drive. The cars are practically new, they even smell new, which is important to me. It’s a reminder of possibility. I always buy the insurance. I drive fast. If I dent the fender, I don’t worry. I’m “stationed” in the south right now, in central Florida, and in this part of the country the cars are cheap. You go to the airport, show some identification, a credit card, you get a car. You can get them for one week, two weeks, four weeks—it’s your choice. I usually keep the cars four weeks at a time, then trade them in for a different model. I ask for the standard transmission and I get to pick from whatever they have since most people go for the automatics. I was surprised once last month when a sort of wanna-be Trans Am was available. That’s Florida.
I just returned from the Western Union office, collecting the cash my husband Robbie sent. He wires me spending money every couple of weeks, though I don’t have much to spend it on. Western Union is one of the few places I have to go around here. When I was younger and still at home, my mother used to say I always needed to be in motion—doing something or going somewhere. I never felt that was an accurate description. I loved my mother, but she missed certain nuances about me. I don’t have kids so I don’t know if that’s typical of motherhood or not.
Other than my visits to Western Union, there’s not much for me to do. Sometimes I get in the car and head for the freeway. I love driving. I love it the second I slide into the driver’s seat and place my hands on the wheel at twelve o’clock. Right away a feeling of calm and excitement passes through me. Before I turn over the ignition, I slide my arms forward until my hands touch the inside of the windshield. I flick the back of my fingers against the glass and hear the click of my nails. I don’t know why; it’s something my father used to do when he drove. Something about luck. Like the way he spit on a fishhook or bait before casting out. I’ve been gone from both my mother and father for what seems like a very long time, but I notice they pop up every so often. Especially around here where it’s kind of just me and my mind.
I look in the rearview mirror, reach down, start the car and turn up the radio. Central Florida has a lot of territory that can be covered in an afternoon. The freeways go on forever. It’s easy to drive eighty miles an hour. If I start to get tired, I pull over, have some lunch, walk around a little and then turn around and head back to the house. I park the car in the driveway and go inside. I walk through the entire place. This is a ranch style house and it’s not like anywhere I’ve lived before. I’m used to city apartments with maybe a couple small rooms. Here, there’s a long hallway with doors on each side. I walk down and look into the different rooms. They all have the same cream-colored walls. The surface of the walls is a strange nubbly texture, as if the color had been sprayed on with a tinted crush of gravel and sand rather than paint. With each step, I feel my bare feet sink into the thick beige carpet. I try to get comfortable, but it doesn’t work. I think about what colors I might paint the walls if they were actually paintable and if this were really my house.
The French foreign exchange student from next door is coming by this afternoon. He wants to go over his film script. He’s making a ten-minute movie for school and I guess I’m the star. He loves that I have thick streaks of blue running through my hair. He plans to film me swimming in their pool later this evening. He’s already shot quite a bit of daylight footage, next he wants to shoot during the sunset. There are gorgeous sunsets here and he says my blue hair against the striped orange and purple sky will be so cool. The other day he filmed me at the grocery store. I faced the camera and read my shopping list out loud, threw cereal boxes into the cart, squeezed some fruit, laughed a little bit. I blew a kiss into the camera. He took closeups of my feet walking down the aisles in my flip-flops. Maybe he’s got a foot fetish. He filmed me paying at the checkout counter. The cashier was thrilled to be a character in someone’s movie. Jean Luc seemed very satisfied with the results. He says he’s never known a married woman with blue hair and that I don’t seem like a really married person anyway. There’s a lot this kid doesn’t know; that doesn’t matter, I enjoy having him around.
I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade and some beer. I’ll probably make hamburgers on the grill. We’ll eat here before going back over to the pool for the swim scene. Candy will most likely send Jean Luc over with a bowl of potato salad. She’s always sending something for me to eat or she’s having me join them for meals. Candy and Al are the next-door neighbors; Jean Luc is the high school foreign exchange student they are hosting this year. Candy and Al continue to be very nice to me. It’s a nervous kind of nice though. At night, I can imagine them saying to each other, God, I hope we’re not making a mistake.
This is a terrible thing to say, but I sort of hate them. Because I know their hospitality does not come out of true kindness to me; they’re hoping to get something out of it. They hope their acts of generosity pay off. They’re middle- aged adults with nearly grown children, yet I can tell they want to be rescued. They’ve made assumptions about me and my husband, about the fact that I am young and that my husband is an entrepreneur, that he flies around the country first class and, most importantly, that he always has lots of cash. He gave Candy and Al five thousand dollars just to keep an eye on the place after he bought it a few months ago. My wife will be coming down soon, he told them. Do me a favor, look in on her every once in awhile, she doesn’t know anyone here. Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re well compensated.
Although Candy and Al appear to be model suburban citizens, they’re the type who wouldn’t be adverse to benefiting from a shady deal, as long as they could pretend they didn’t know anything about it. I try to keep my heart open and a little soft, no matter what happens. It’s a good approach to living for me personally, helps me get through things. Survive. It’s a decision I made a long time ago and it works fairly well most of the time. Part of the approach is, I try to believe the best about people, at least in the beginning, so I always have a little bit of goodness to hold onto and that’s the way it was with Candy and Al. So when I first met them, when I arrived in Florida and they were there at the house, waiting to welcome me, I was surprised they were so taken with my husband, Robbie. I listened to the way they talked about Robbie and about how happy they were to finally meet me. I watched their eyes get shiny as they kept talking about how wonderful he was and how he had told them so many great things about me. Their smiles got bigger and they talked faster and faster.
As I watched and listened, I realized pretty quickly they weren’t entirely themselves anymore, whoever that had been before I met them. Something they hadn’t planned on had come into their lives and they began thinking this unexpected development might fix things up for them in a way they couldn’t accomplish by themselves. There might be certain aspects of the arrangement they made with Robbie that could cause them concern, but if such a thought came, Candy and Al would find it easy to push the negative from their minds. The moment they were handed five thousand dollars out of the blue from their new next-door neighbor, they got the feeling Robbie might be their lucky thing. Finally, they were going to get their chance at being the lucky ones. To me, Robbie is a Rorschach test. The truth is, he’s basically a criminal and it’s not hard to see. It’s right there if your eyes are open. When I meet people who moon over Robbie, I know they are either criminals themselves or easy marks for becoming criminals, perhaps without even knowing.
I don’t know yet what Candy and Al’s problems are. They’ve got a nice house, a swimming pool, their kids speak French. Maybe they’re in debt. That often brings people down. Makes them do things they might not otherwise do. But maybe that’s giving them too much credit. It’s possible that even though they seem to have all the comforts of life, they also have basic character flaws, which could lead them easily to corruption, whatever their circumstances. They certainly don’t know what’s going on in their own home. Their kids are so high most of the time they can’t walk and Jean Luc is doing any girl he can, whenever he can. He’s basically using their house as a location for an American sex tour.
I don’t really like this house, the house I’m living in. All the woodwork, the paneling, the furniture, is blond. The cushions on the couch are a bumpy brown plaid. There are lots of windows and normally I’d say that’s good, but with so much blond, it all becomes too light for me. I feel like I can never rest. There’s always the call of the light making noise. The back windows look out onto a lake at the end of the backyard. There’s a rowboat.
The job I have here, other than living in the house or making it appear lived in, is to collect the mail. I don’t open anything, except when there is a letter from my husband in his handwriting. I open that letter and inside will be an address. Then I pile the received mail into another envelope and re-mail the package to the listed address. How I got involved in this, how I got married to Robbie in the first place, is a long story. But I think that part of the story is not so interesting except to say I do understand my getting married to him was more about my own character flaws. If I ever end up in a court of law, my defense might be that I’m young, though that doesn’t really explain anything. It’s probably not fair that I get so disappointed in people who fall for Robbie when I have fallen so far in with him myself. I might be participating in corruption, but I don’t have the soul of a criminal. I think I have the soul of a psychiatrist.
I’m lonely here. I feel it mostly in the mornings. Sometimes when I get up, I set out two coffee cups. I drink from one and look at the other empty cup. I stare out the huge picture window in the dining room and wonder what I’m doing. So I appreciate it when Jean Luc comes over. He breaks things up for me. Yesterday he massaged a muscle in my shoulder. He used a method which he says is used in France by professional soccer players: deep concentrated rubbing on the afflicted spot, over and over so it begins to hurt and drive you crazy because it’s the same spot, no moving around. Eventually the hurting and craving for the massage to spread out over the rest of your body stops and then amazingly, the original pain is lifted. He liked having his hands on me. He’d like to fuck me. It’s not a problem though because we both know it would never happen unless I wanted it to and I don’t.
I have my own lucky thing: a small clipping from a newspaper that I’ve got folded up into a little square and tucked inside my wallet. It’s an advertisement for a divorce attorney. Across the top of the ad it says, Cost Could Be As Low As $250! Below that is the phrase, Not Daunted By Difficult Situations, Call Today. I’m not calling today, but I’m glad they’re not daunted by difficulty because I expect there might be some. Right now, I’m keeping the idea to myself because who would I talk to about getting a divorce? Candy? Oh man, she’d flip. She and Al would confer in a panic late at night in their bedroom. They’d envision their new life as daily thousandaires slipping away from them. All those thousands, the thousands that just seemed to start dropping from heaven, gone.
So even though they might have an awareness that the young woman living alone next door could be unhappy, maybe very unhappy and maybe everything wasn’t going so well for her with her husband and that something wasn’t quite right with the whole set up, again, they would eliminate that thought. Instead, they would put all their efforts into making sure life stayed the same for all of us. They would tell me I was like their own daughter to them now, how they loved me and would help me get through this little bump in my marriage. They would say, Look at us! We’ve made it through some tough times. But we’ve hung in there and we’re happy. Marriage is hard work, but it’s worth it and it’s worth it for you, too. Or worse, they might try and talk to Robbie about it. Get out in front of it. You know, get on his side, maybe with the idea they could elevate themselves more in his eyes by revealing something unsuspecting about his young wife.
No, talking to Candy would not be a good idea.
The only thing I’d really miss would be the cars. I know if I leave Robbie and start a new life, I’ll soon be driving a four-hundred-dollar junker. Even though I don’t like this house, there’s not really anything wrong with it. It’s basically a nice house, just like the others. But I can feel it coming to an end for me. I don’t necessarily want that feeling, but it’s there.
Tomorrow morning I think I’ll get up early and go for a long drive. I’ll drive until I’ve had my fill of driving, until I can say goodbye to the Sentra. I’ll make my way to New Smyrna Beach, get out of the car, watch the surfers, soak up the sun. When I get back to the house, I’ll get out of my sandy clothes, run naked up and down the hall, go into each bedroom and flop onto every bed. Then I’ll put on my black and white striped one piece with the high cut legs and go over to Candy and Al’s for an impromptu supper. Jean Luc will be home from school by then, if he went to school. For all Candy and Al know, he could be at a college girl’s apartment in Daytona fucking his brains out. But wherever he is, he’ll be back by dinnertime. Jean Luc and I will take a swim in the pool. We’ll bring out their old boom box, slide in a tape of Roxy Music’s Avalon and crank it up as loud as we can. We’ll splash in the shallow end and dive between each other’s legs. My hair beams electric blue in the pool light. Jean Luc goes nuts over that. It makes me think, What? You mean French girls don’t do blue hair? He’ll flirt with me, pretending to be an innocent schoolboy and everyone will laugh a lot. Candy, Al, and Jean Luc will all be feeling great about the way things are going. We’ll watch one of those on fire Florida sunsets appear over the lake, the deep timbre of bullfrogs will start and the cicadas’ mating calls will be so loud they’ll drown out Bryan Ferry as he croons through the lost and smoky Avalon lyrics. Spanish moss will hang from the big oaks and willows in the backyard like clumps of silver curls in evening light. Eventually I’ll push myself up from the smooth cement edge of the pool. I’ll say goodnight and walk back to Robbie’s house.
I’ll go into the dining room and sit on one of the pale blond chairs around the table. I won’t bother to change out of my damp suit. It will dry soon, as dry as is possible here. Sort of like my hair, which will become a half- dried coil of loose matted ringlets. A lot of night action will still be going on and be visible from the picture window. All the sounds remain audible—the grunts and groans of amphibious life, the slithering on the ground and flapping and rustling in the air, chirping of bugs and rubbing of grasses. I’ll be able to hear it all, it will just be muffled and softer, partly because, though windows and doors will be open, I’ll be inside the house, and partly because I’ll be alone.
There’s maybe a darting thought of my mother. It’s very fast and small, like the silhouette of a songbird barely visible in the willows. This bird thought flies by quickly in the night and I will be so glad I did not have to explain to her how I came to be in this house in Florida. I will stare at the darkened sky and reach for my shoulder bag hanging on the back of another chair. I’ll get out my wallet and put my hand on top of it, knowing my lucky thing, my little scrap of newspaper with the phone number, is inside. There’s something about the heat here in the summer. So thick and wet. It gets inside you and turns you in ways you wouldn’t expect. Suddenly, you almost don’t notice the moment it happens, you’re not so different from the sounds and creatures surrounding you.
First published in the Winter/Spring 2019 issue of The Southampton Review.