Portland Noir

head, angled like she’s trying to lay her ear on her shoulder. Blood trickles out of one perfectly round nostril. There’s no blood coming out of her ears that I can see. Most likely she’s just conked out.

Charlotte thought she had the right to have an affair with the film critic because I occasionally found myself associating with Lorna, my ex-wife, the mother of my son. Once in a blue moon, after I’d taken Ray Jr. to the zoo or Malibu Grand Prix, I’d return him to Lorna’s apartment and we’d knock one out for old time’s sake. It was like looking through a photo album. Associating with someone after you’ve been married is not the same as meeting a film critic at the bar in Esparza’s, where you share a plastic wooden bowl of chips and hot sauce and listen to Patsy Cline and comment on the stuffed armadillos hanging on the ceiling and then share an order of ostrich tacos, all the while talking arty crap.

The film critic has more hair than I do.

Once, when Charlotte refused to show me respect by answering whether she was in love with the film critic, I was forced to shove her into a bookcase, so she knew we weren’t just having one of our usual arguments. I meant business.

I said, “This thing with the film critic is a dalliance, right? There’s nothing to it, right? Answer me. Yes or no.”

She said, “He’s actually more of a film reviewer.”

She bruised her back on the edge of the shelf. It wasn’t that bad. What’s a little bruise? She’s hardy. Skis and ride horses and takes kick-boxing classes. Most of the top row of books rained down upon her head and neck. They were only paperbacks. Still, she bitched to anyone who would listen, her herd of sympathetic friends, her therapist, her divorce lawyer, and of course the ostrich taco-loving film critic. Charlotte wouldn’t touch an ostrich taco when she was with me. Now it’s the new white meat.

Now Charlotte’s lying on my bathroom floor, wedged between the hot water pipe and the toilet. Is it laying or lying? Charlotte would know. She has a master’s degree and a daily subscription to the New York Times. The hot water pipe serves the whole building, and why it goes through my apartment I don’t know. At night it’s hot enough to leave a blister. Charlotte hit it on the way down, which caused her to twist her body, which caused her to lose her balance and hit her head on the edge of the tub. I stare at her head. Her curly hair is coming out of its scrunchie. She doesn’t look like she’s breathing. I stare at her tits. I wonder if she still wears an underwire.

It’s possible she’s holding her breath just to piss me off, to punish me for going to Prague.

She acted like I planned this. That’s what Charlotte never got. I’m a simple guy. I take life as it comes. When I mentioned going to Prague I was just talking, just filling the air with my words. She should know how it is. She’s fucking a film critic.

It was the last week in August. The leaves hung exhausted on the trees. I was still living over on Northeast Sandy. We met for dinner at the Kennedy School. The film critic was at the Sundance Film Festival. I told her the next time we met he had to be in town, for her to prove to me there was still hope for us.

“I don’t think there’s any real hope for us,” she said.

“Then why are you here?” I asked.

“I wonder that myself,” she said. She ordered a gin and tonic.

“That’s what he drinks, gin and tonic? Tanqueray and tonic?”

“Sometimes in the summer I’ve been known to order a gin and tonic,” she said. “Jesus.”

She lied. She was a liar.

She used to love me. Now she picked fights. Like about the gin and tonic. I buttered a piece of bread and put it in front of her. She folded her arms and looked out the window at the parking lot. A guy wearing a red plaid skirt pushed a shopping cart full of empty bottles. I could tell she was itching to get out of there. The back of my neck got hot, the way it did when she was pissing me off.

Suddenly, I said I had something to tell her. She looked back at me, but it was polite. She was so polite. I’d been fired from the pest control company out on Foster Road and was now working at a place that made clamps, couplings, screws, and knobs. They also made a really nice brass drawer pull. The week before, in the break room, one of the machinists was talking about quitting and moving to Prague, and then the HR chick, who’d never looked at this guy once, was practically in his lap. She said she’d always wanted to go to Prague.

“I’m going to Prague,” I said.

“Prague? What’s in Prague?”

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

“You have?” Her green eyes were on me. She leaned forward on her pale forearms. I could smell her grapefruity perfume, something called Happy I’d given her one Christmas. This was where she should have said, Ray, you are so full of shit. This is where her master’s degree failed her, where all her books and snooty left-wing websites let her down.

Did I say she worked in R &D at Intel, designing stuff she wasn’t allowed to talk about? Something to do with microchips and biology. When I met her I didn’t know what R &D was. She used words like ebullient just to make me feel stupid. Who was the stupid one now? Yeah, I’m off to Prague. The only foreign place I’d ever been before was Ensenada.

“Is this work-related? Like when they sent you to Chely-abinsk?”

“Sure,” I said. “A business trip.”

I’d forgotten I told Charlotte I’d done a business trip to Chelyabinsk.

Last year Donnie, a guy at the knob company, had found a terrific and extremely hot Russian wife on the Internet. Her name was Olga but she liked to be called Bootsie. She was a great gal. Once Donnie surprised Tootsie with a subscription to Self and she fell to her knees and sobbed with gratitude. She wrapped her hands around his heels and laid her forehead on his shoes. She then gave him the best blowjob he’d ever had, after which she went into the kitchen and whipped up a roast.

Donnie had given me the name of the website where he got his wife and I thought, Why not? Charlotte didn’t love me anymore. She was off drinking gin and tonics with the film critic. So one night after work, after I’d had a few beers, I typed in Charlotte’s height, weight, hair, and eye color, and out came Agnessa Fedoseeva.

She was studying to be something called an esthetician, but was hoping to find a big strong man she could love and kiss with enthusiasm. She was anxious to inquire if I was a big strong man. She was curious how many flat-screen TVs I had. She sent me a videotape of herself dressed in a red, white, and blue teddy and high heels, dancing around her living room with a sparkler sizzling in each hand.

I put the trip to Chelyabinsk on a credit card, and told Charlotte I was being sent there by the knob company, to set up a new factory.

“But why are they sending you?” Charlotte had wanted to know. “I think it’s great. Really exciting, and really good for you. You need to have the dust of the world on your feet. But you don’t speak Russian.”

“They’re impressed with my work ethic.”

“You do work hard,” said Charlotte. “When you have a job.”

I’m tired of staring at Charlotte laying or lying on the bathroom floor, playing passed out, milking the situation, doing her best to make me look like the bad guy.

I walk back down the long hallway to the kitchen. I sit in the dark at my kitchen table. Outside, the streetlights shine on the snow, filling my front rooms with that weird aquarium light. I look out the window at the Laurelhurst Theater marquee. They’re showing Alien and Meatballs. Charlotte would think that was funny. Agnessa spoke no English, but she’d laugh anyway.

Charlotte will come out of the bathroom eventually. For being so smart, she is so predictable. That’s how she works. If I stand over her and wonder whether she’s dead, she’ll act dead on purpose, just to piss me off. But if I turn my back on her, leave the room, she’ll come marching out and wonder what’s going on.

The back of my neck feels hot. None of this would have happened if she had let the Prague business go. It was just something I’d said to get her attention. Then I found myself saying I was moving in September, just after Labor Day, and would be there for at least six months.

“Six months?” she said, eyes big.

“Maybe a year.”

I thought she’d forget about it. She’d go home to the film critic and they’d open a bottle of merlot and discuss