To grab the phone I have to reach through flames, and I suffer a burn I won’t feel till hours later. The receiver is off the hook—evidence of second thoughts? I’m shaking her with one hand, but I’m also listening for a dial tone. Then I see the cord yanked from the wall jack. I frisk myself for my mobile. 911? Or patch through to the desk for the in-house team of medics that any hotel this size must have on standby? The decision hangs. I shouldn’t have to make one. I’ve outsmarted myself by imagining the medics.
The emergency operator wants my room number, which I never noted; I followed the jasmine. The lady drawls. Her westernness offends me. I run to the hall, read the number off the door, then hustle back to list the names of the poisons, the medications. I arrive at the wrong side of the broad mattress and instead of circling around I climb across. I brush her skin, traversing. It might be colder. Still time to pump her stomach, to give the shots. The small print on the bottles’ labels is faded, low contrast. I squint and report. I’m asked to speak more clearly.
Instructions next. Check the airway for obstructions; the victim may have aspirated vomit. I don’t understand. “With your fingers,” drawls the operator. I’m surprised she didn’t call me “hon.” I ask her for specifics, mechanical drawings. Which fingers? How many? In the throat? Somehow I fumble the handset in my scramble and lose it in all the roses and knotted laundry. It rings seconds later, an automated callback, but I perform the more critical mission first. I roll her on her back—I’m sure I’m wrong here; the victim
Jaws dully close and gum me—wakefulness. Then her head makes a ripping, canine shake. She bites.
“The fucking hell . . . ?” Huge eyes she has. Like Lazarus.
“Alex, oh fucking god.”
“You choked me. Shit!” She jerks back her knees and goes fetal against the headboard. Cornered, curled, as if I had a knife. Extremely wakeful, though. My phone still ringing.
“You never came,” she says. “I fell asleep. Where were you?”
“Are you okay? You said to wait.”
“Not two hours,” she says. The phone is by her hand, I see. She slaps it and it goes quiet.
“I,” I say. “I,” I continue. “I,” I offer. I pause.
“Playing cards? Just one more hand?” she says. She gathers the sheets and covers all her good parts. Again the phone rings. She answers it and listens and says, “I’m fine,” and repeats it until even I’m convinced, her face showing comprehension of my mistake, of everyone’s mistakes, and then disgust.
“Thank you. I know, but it wasn’t that,” she says. “He’s self-important, so he thought it was. He knew I used sedatives, but apparently . . . I know, I know.” They’re hitting it off, these gals. “He got himself all hung up in the casino and tiptoed in here with a guilty conscience and saw what he wanted to or hoped or something. His poor, poor Juliet. If you want to send someone over to confirm, be my guest . . . Right. Okay. She wants to talk to you.”
I explain that there’s no emergency after all and turn the mobile off and face my date. If she lit all these candles when she first came in and they were new then and now they’re this burned down I’m surprised it was only two hours I wasted down there.
“You got the bear, I noticed,” she says. “From Paula. My friend. Who you don’t remember, either. Tall. Wore flannel slacks. She worked that mannish thing.”
“A Paula. Statuesque,” I say. “A Paula.”
“When I told her I saw you on the Reno flight, she said ‘Oh goody,’ and asked me for your info. You ticked her off. She’s touchy, but she’s a gas. She said she was going to do something, but not what, though it must have been her because she gave those bears for Christmas once, the year we were fired, when those bears were big. She’s back in PR, in Miami. Fashion stuff.”
“I should probably get my own room tonight, you feel.”
“Get me one. This one’s trashed. I want fresh blankets. I spent a lot of money on all this gear.”
“Or maybe we can both get a new room.”
“You must think I’m a pretty lonely lady. Pretty twisted, too. Just say it.”
“No.”
“That was your moment of grandeur, wasn’t it? Your slain despondent virgin,” Alex says. “I know your big atonement’s set for nine, but I’d just call and cancel if I were you. You haven’t really earned the cross, you know? You flatter yourself and it’s sort of getting old. Try to book me another suite. Or anything. It doesn’t even have to be Mount O.”
I take down the cue when I’m alone again and venture a few four-bumper extravaganzas, but I’m out of my groove and not much sinks. Pool balls not sinking, just knocking around, are sad. Some entertainment? I should love this Wurlitzer. These are my people. Haggard. Baez. Hank. Country-Western Music as Literature. I’m told I had ambitions as a folk singer, and I don’t doubt it, but it’s too late to learn an instrument. I click my sleep machine to “prairie wind” and gobble a pill I found under the sink and an Ambien from my pocket, to hedge my bets.
I call Alex in her new room three floors above me to see if she’s comfortable and to make sure she won’t be down to murder me in my sleep. She answers from the bathroom, from the john, whose whirlpooling I can hear when she picks up. I’m calling from the same spot—we’ve found a wavelength?—though I’ve already flushed. I flush again, a kind of mating call, and Alex says she’s preparing to go out again and I say, competitively, that I am, too. “As what?” she says. It’s the question I should have asked her; she’s the one who’s always going out as things. “As Danny,” I say, and at last I get a laugh from her. Why didn’t we begin things in this fashion, toilet to toilet, at a modest remove, the way the balanced Mormons do their courting?
I ask her why she takes so many pills, my concern for her seeming genuine, even to me, and she says she doesn’t—the pills are a collection, a way of adapting to the flying life and self-employment, which she’s never grown used to. Consulting with a doctor in each new city is like redesigning the lighting in her hotel rooms; it helps her to feel connected and at ease; and she only asks the physicians for prescriptions because she’s from Wyoming and grew up poor and believes in value for her money. She broke them out tonight because she saw I’d stolen a fair number and she concluded that drugs were my passion or maybe just my pastime and she wanted to swing along, not be a spoilsport. I tell her I buy all this, although few others would, because I know what she’s up against out here, having to set up anew each time she lands—I do it, too, by rooting for local teams, and I tell her the story
