Lightning Field Read online

  Perhaps because she worked in a restaurant, or maybe because of her own food obsessions, when the dinner hour came around, and she glimpsed kitchens through windows and heard loose segments of family dialogue, at once strange and familiar, she found she couldn’t resist thought runs of them all. She first thought of him. Her brother. And Jack, her father. And even everyday David, husband of three years, through the pink dusk-lit window.

  She imagined her brother eating something institutional and monotextured, perhaps laced with his resisted psychotropics, or at least an undertaste of hospital. Michael was in Alcatraz gray and grainy black-and-white, eating in mechanical gulps — although she’d never actually seen him eat that way, she couldn’t help imagining it now. And for symmetry’s sake, she tried to imagine a quick cut to Jack, the repressed fat barely kept at bay with diligent counting of caloric values, everything he ate meticulously low-fat and macrobiotic. Bragged about sourdough bread from two-hundred-year-old starter, perhaps Indian-touched in some way. Her husband, David, was of course strictly cardboard and plastic, the foodalready congealing on arrival. There was something so sad to her about eating alone, and something particularly unbearable about men eating alone. Maybe because only women actually preferred to eat alone, while such solitude made men vulnerable. Then Mina stopped, just shook her head slightly. It had become easier than she would have thought, this not thinking. Lately, her afternoons at Max’s fixed that for her.

  In another lightning edit—

  Max’s jean-clad thigh pressed between her legs. Or just him saying yes in the lowest of voices in her ear. Just thinking about it made her press her thighs together as she walked, made her careless and even smile to herself. Something there, in his gaze as she moved on the bed. The way she felt it even with her eyes closed. Being watched. She could close her eyes now and feel it, an intoxicating glow of attention not so far off from how the world looked with her eyes closed, warm darkness somehow shot through with sunlight, somehow seeing by feeling, probability shot through with suspense and memory and a tiny bit of faith, even.

  Past the cemetery, Gower lost its interest, and Mina could have moved more quickly, could have felt urgency, should have, but she refused.

  The afternoon’s tiny gestures, the taste of his fingertips, the seconds when they finished their drinks and his breathing changed, and she walked accordingly, meanderingly, kicking at gravel and feeling the edges of her shoes drag on the seams of the sidewalks. She looked at her feet as she walked — see the girl kick at the pavement. See her swing her arms.

  When Mina had finally walked up the stone path to her house, she stopped at the point where she could look into David’s office. His computer was on, as it almost alwaysseemed to be. She stood there, as she had last night and the night before. It seemed she always ended up needing a bit more time, and the odd waiting and looking had become habit, even inevitable. She could spend her life in segues, commercial breaks, cigarette pauses, walks from, hallways to. She felt most herself hesitating before doorways and listening to the dial tone on her phone as she mustered the energy to call, or to hang up. These sideways, solitary moments when she could catch the world from the margins or at a glance. At the seams of things, or the awkward lulls the editor would leave out. She was convinced the truth of things could be glimpsed in these off-sides and in-between places. It was just these sorts of telling nonmoments that are most noticeably lacking in affairs. The incidentals that happen to couples when they move from one ordinary thing to the next, revealing the intimate ways people negotiate the world — pouring cereal, or addressing a letter, or the shape their mouth takes when they are on the phone with Mom. And any attempts to introduce them with Max seemed unbearably intrusive, a breach, a kind of rudeness. What’s worse, she’d begun longing for them. An almost insatiable curiosity and desire for boring quotidian details of Max’s life. She’d become even reluctant to leave him afterward, the horrible telltale thing — wanting to linger. She wanted to elongate her late afternoons at Max’s, stay in bed until they felt nearly stuck together, until they spoke and revealed odd things to each other, stick around until a meal was suggested, or a back rub, or a bath — anything but separating and that lump of afternoon light that hit her when he closed the door behind her. Today she had stayed in the lull, couldn’t help it, but in fact — and she knew this — the lingering and elongating tended to make things only sadder and weirder.

  He complained of an arm falling asleep. Not complained, but said, “Honey, can I just shift my arm, can we just. . yeah, much better,” but it was not just repositioning, it was incremental separating. First it was the arm out from under her, then he had to go to the bathroom. Then she heard him pee. Next the move to the shower, and it was his not-so-subtle signal that the cuddle, bed part of their afternoon was over. And if Mina defiantly stayed in bed throughout the shower, as she had today, if she remained warm and quiet until he came out in a towel, he would act as though it did not bother him, in fact he would appear pathologically unbothered, severely without bother, and this would bother her and she would tell him to come here, as though she was longing to touch him, but it was really a battle of wills at this point, a war of trite longings.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Another cigarette? An apple? I just have to check my voice mail. It will only take a second.”

  Was this a sort of kindness? But it wasn’t really the marginal, in-between, down-time realness that she missed, was it? The real thing — the thing she could not bear, the thing that betrayed the hidden quotes around words likeloveandpassion—was his intensity undone, his ordinary glances, his loss of interest in looking at her. The steady slackening of desire, the dreadful slide to a quiet indifference. And his videotaping, which occurred with increasing frequency, somehow seeming to ridicule her need for his attention, to caricature it, but she still couldn’t resist. It felt as if they were documenting their waning desire — precisely the opposite of the attention she really wanted. But it was a kind of attention, still. He was in a way right — there was no reason to stick around. She didn’t love him, she wasn’t really feeling affectionate. She just wanted — for as long as she could feel want — to put her mouth on his body every time she saw him, and she wanted him to see it in her face and let it hover in the space between them, making the air electric and the world myopic, making every ambiguity and doubt kaleidoscope to convey this desire, at this moment, in this place.

  Mina continued to watch David through their window. He put his tea down, and his fingers moved on the keyboard again. She found this oddly erotic, his unknowing, her watching. She couldn’t bring herself to go in, she wanted to continue watching. The way he never looked up, her husband, David. She waited in this interim space. Things seemed momentarily alien, they hinted at other readings, other interpretations.

  Maybe her father used to watch her mother like this, when he left his girlfriend’s apartment. Maybe he would watch her make dinner through the window, unable to move.

  Probably not.Lorene Baker’s house was not difficult to clean. Lisa found that even at a leisurely pace she would be finished well within the allotted time period. On Thursdays, at Mike Birnbaum’s apartment, she had to work quickly to get it all done in four hours. She had to be organized, had to have a schedule and a discipline about it. First put the sheets in the washing machine. While those washed (thirty-five-minute cycle) she put the tile and porcelain cleanser in the toilet bowl to soak. She sprayed the tub with Soft Scrub Tile, Grout & Tub Cleaner. She rinsed the crusted blue gel Colgate Platinum toothpaste from the water glass, the faucet, and the toothbrush holder. She rinsed the sink sparkling, scrubbed the soaked toilet bowl with a round brush until it flushed clean. She sponged the hair and dust fromthe screws where the toilet seat attached to the toilet bowl. She wiped the base and the sides of the toilet, where a coating of dirt and dust and micro skin flakes unfailingly accumulated. Next she sprayed the shower curtain with Anti-Mildew Fast-Acting Formula 409 and sponged. If this wa
s let go for even one week, white clumps of bacterial residue started to accumulate in crevices and folds. Then the shower walls, scrubbing the grout between the tiles with a small brush. Cleaning was finally all maintenance, a dutiful prayer against decay, and only finally winnable, manageable, if practiced unfailingly and diligently. Last, she mopped the bathroom floor. Lisa changed the wet sheets to the dryer (forty minutes) and put Mike Birnbaum’s dirty clothes into the washer. Socks hard — no, crusty — with his week-old sweat. His undershorts. She was doctorally immune to all of it. Now the whole process started over in the kitchen, beginning with the dirty dishes, which he always left. With rigor and precision (and not a little satisfaction) she finished the kitchen in time to remove the sheets and put the clothes in the dryer, iron the sheets and put them on the bed (air-smelling, warm) by the time the clothes were dry and could be folded and put away. Lisa was expert at this, she snapped order into Birnbaum’s life and disappeared. An invisible force.

  Lorene’s place was different. Lorene sent her very apparently valuable sheets to an out-of-state laundry that specialized in cleaning sheets properly. All Lisa had to do was unfold the undyed brown paper from the packages and put the sheets on the bed. Her bathroom and kitchen were not in much need of scrubbing. She appeared to use neither. Lisa went through the systematic washing and scrubbing, anyway. She was a gesture, a luxury, for Lorene, or maybe a backup system. As she dusted Lorene’s living room (book-lined, many plants) she would playLorene’s records. Actual vinyl, with a needle in a groove, with static noise around the music. It made the music more tactile, less airless, somehow. Lisa swore she could hear it better than when she listened to compact discs. She enjoyed the strange old torch songs or big band stuff Lorene inevitably had on her turntable. Stupid songs about lovers and boats that made you feel like you were your grandmother — or in a movie about your grandmother. Music made for daydreaming.

  Sometimes this music made Lisa emotional. She thought of Alex and Alisa. And at first this was nice, but somehow, some way, she would get it into her head that they were sick.Something in a look or feel of morning dressing, she would remember as toxic and symptomatic. Children do get sick, and mothers must notice these things early. And then Lisa would not be able to stop imagining her children ill. She imagined swollen lymphs and leukemias (just the word, thekemopart, so toxic and decayed sounding). Some horrible juvenile invasion ofE. coli—what had she fed them, what some food terrorist might have contaminated. It happened all the time. Apple juice, organic spinach, for Pete’s sake, an American mass-produced hamburger in a clean paper package — and what? Kidney failure, irreversible brain damage, coma, death. It starts with “I have a tummyache, Mommy.” A sweaty forehead. Lisa would get faint and feel a hard round knot in her stomach. She would turn off the record player and hurry, heart racing, through the rest of her perfunctory duties at Lorene’s. She would pray to herself, feverish, hysterical bargains and third-world-mother ancient incantations, until she could get herself to Mrs. Brenshaw and see her two baby loves.

  She inevitably found them watching TV, jammy-faced and sticky. Hi, Mommy.

  * * *“Lorene, you feel very tense,” he said. “You must try to relax.”

  “I’ll never get there,” she said. “It will take hours.”

  “Shh, just feel my touch,” he said, blanket-voiced and comfort-toned.

  “I am trying, damn it,” she said. “Oh, there, yes, that spot. God.”

  “Stop talking. Shh.” He pressed the spot relentlessly, a pressured, steady rubbing.

  “You’re very good. Very patient,” she said.

  “C’mon, give in, it’s OK.”

  Lorene felt herself letting go, a slow, deepening undoneness that started with his mechanical repetition and radiated out through her body and finally to the clamor in her head. Her mouth became slack, she felt her tongue as a muscle, her eyes rested shut. She saw red, shot through with veins of light. He moved to the next spot and pressed deeper. An hour and a half of Tactile Hue Therapy. One hundred and seventy-five dollars at St. John Spirit Gyms, and well worth it, she guessed. Her St. John’s counselor (actually, they were called “Healing Partners”), Beryl (not his real name and also the name of a quartz-looking heliodor yellow transparent crystal he wore around his neck, the pyramidal tip pointing to his heart), recommended touch therapy twice a week. Part of her prescribed Spiritual Exfoliation and Detoxification. She needed to be touched by another person. And she had to hire someone to do it, which was almost funny.

  Red. She was supposed to think about the red she was seeing-as he touched the parts of her he was touching. No, not think about, of course, but meditate on the red she was seeing. But that’s not it either — she must just feel the red, become thered. That was the first color. Then Beryl instructed her to take control of that vivid, anxiety-tense red and make it into a peaceful medium blue. A low, saturated pacific blue. Then transform blue to white, make it drain slowly to a perfect celestial white of complete mind-body-soul equilibrium. But she had first to think of red. But not think, feel red, feel it turn to another color from someplace unwilled and natural in her person. She must “feel” the color and “see” the touches. All these “supposed to”s and “must”s in order to relax — it was nearly funny, wasn’t it.

  He switched to long pulling strokes on the back of her thigh. She felt where her muscles attached to her bones. It felt to her that he was gently lifting muscle from the bone, creating a space deep inside where everything was generally muddled tightly together, as if he shared the weight of her body for a moment. Lorene found this pleasurable, his going against the constant, everyday burdens of being a body. What did he feel, or see, or think, the toucher? The professional toucher?

  When she was without money, before she had the restaurants, she had only her beauty, her taste, and her style to recommend her. She had to market professional glamour. Lorene guessed she must have been the first life-stylist. She figured out how to sell her life-style consultancy to the rich, particularly rich men. Men who spent all their energy making money and couldn’t be bothered with how to spend it. Her first client was Joseph Walker, some sort of software tycoon. She was already a personal shopper then, starting at Neiman Marcus and then quickly going freelance, working not only to wardrobe Beverly Hills second wives in the taste- and wealth-indicating appropriate designers befitting their newly acquired positions, but she also helped men like Joseph do their Christmas, birthday, andanniversary shopping. She would buy perfume and lingerie for his ex-wife or his current girlfriend or his secretary. She began also to help him pick his own wardrobe, and even guided him as to what kind of aftershave he should wear, where he should get his hair cut, and what sorts of plastic surgery he might consider. In short, he paid her to tell him how to spend the money he worked so hard to earn. And Lorene found she could do this very well. When she had finished her makeover, and he looked, if not great, then at least vastly improved, he asked her to have a drink at his Westwood condominium. Lorene was, of course, a bit wary of Joseph having fallen into an infatuation with her (such transference was only natural, as dependency and desire get conflated in any quasitherapeutic situation, and some men — she particularly had suspicions about Joseph— just really got off on being told what to do), but she nevertheless met him to celebrate their success. She entered through the front door, and although Joseph was dressed well and impeccably groomed, she saw that her work in fact had just begun.

  He poured Chivas Regal into thick-based hexagonal highball glasses.

  “A man of your position shouldn’t use glasses like these,” she said, twenty-two and somehow supremely confident in all the things people found so difficult to navigate. “And only a very young man should pour blended scotch, or a woman. It’s too cliché for someone of your age. You should pour some obscure but delicious Skye or Islay peaty single malt — Talisker, perhaps, or Ardbeg.”

  Joseph looked at her and smiled. He took out a ballpoint pen and indicated to her she should write it
down. Lorene took the pen and then gestured with it.

  “Get a Pelikan, or — just not a Mont Blanc, OK, Joseph?”

  “What else, Lorene?”

  “Well, where do we start? It isn’t a matter of simply spending-money. . ” The art on the walls — there wasn’t any. She would give him the names of some galleries. His music collection — awful. She composed a list. A certain amount of fifties and early sixties jazz, some well-chosen classical. And opera, lots and lots of it. She must offset his techno geekiness with something Old World and unexpected. Emotional and passionate. She found it easy. She just thought of what would impress and surprise her. What things she could discover in a man like Joseph that would intrigue her as a woman and make him seem unusual and impressive. It was a kind of love, or a creative sympathy. She put the pen down and pushed it toward him. He stared at her with a child’s conspiratorial joy.

  “Joe — which is a great name, by the way, no need to change that — Joe, you need one sort of eccentric thing which you must be quite passionate about. For example — German cabaret music. It’s a little kinky, but in a classy sort of old-school way. Deep, throaty lesbian chanteuses, lots of Kurt Weill and women named Ute. What do you think?” He was nodding, smiling with her. She warmed to it. A real makeover.