down on by some greater imperative, some dark need for atonement that will not be ignored. But that was what Marla made me do to her for the first time that night.
She had found a slim bamboo rod somewhere in town and hidden it behind the dresser. When we went to bed she took it out and begged me to use it on her. I refused, of course, but she walked out to the kitchen and came back with a knife and said she’d start cutting her arms if I didn’t do it.
How had such emotional horror come to be part of my life? How was it that a woman could feel so bad about herself? I’d known since my return to Oakridge that she was a long way from happy. I had stolen eight years from her, she felt terribly responsible for the death of Patricia Prentice, and she lived in daily fear of Gareth’s pimping. But needing to be caned? None of it seemed a basis for such an extravagant act of penance.
Yet I did what she wanted. She was so insistent, so crazy with need, so determined to self-harm if I did not play this role that it seemed a safer option than leaving her to punish herself.
It wasn’t until it was over and we were in bed together that I hit upon a possible motivation for her behavior.
The roller coaster photo.
My father and Marla together in San Diego.
Had there indeed been something between them? Was it this that drove her to fits of depression so black that her only escape was the distraction of physical pain?
It sounded like something from a daytime soap opera. But it was possible. My father was a handsome man. He was in his mid-fifties in the photo, not too old for a fling with a girl at the end of her twenties. And Marla? Could she have done something like that? I figured if she could be a hooker she could probably do pretty much anything.
I turned on the light and lifted my wallet from the nightstand. I took out the photograph of Marla and dropped it on the covers in front of her.
“Maybe it’s time to stop feeling guilty.”
She pushed herself up from her pillow, wincing as her back pressed against the wall, and picked up the photo with an expression of puzzled query on her face. Her eyes, though, I saw, carried a sheen of fear.
“It fell out of one of the trash bags when we were cleaning out your place.”
“Oh. Yeah, I went to San Diego once. I didn’t tell you, did I?”
“No.”
I took the second photo from my wallet, the one of my father, and showed it to her.
“My father had one too, in his things. Just like yours.”
Marla put a brittle smile on her face. “Well, yeah. It was kind of a coincidence. It was… It was…” She stopped and swallowed and tried again. “It was…” Her face crumpled and she began to cry, huge wracking sobs that tore through her chest as though they carried small pieces of her soul with them. For a long time she could do nothing else and I held her and felt her body shaking. Eventually, though, there was nothing left in her and she was able to force words into her broken voice.
“Three years ago we had an affair. It lasted six months. Sometime in the middle of it we went away for a few days, not even a week. Ray paid someone to take care of Stan.”
Marla wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. She didn’t look at me.
“I thought you were never coming back. I’d waited so long. I’d waited for years. And then I just gave up and it seemed like it didn’t matter what I did anymore. There wasn’t any right or any wrong, there was just… nothing. I didn’t have anything left to lose. But even then I knew it would turn to shit. You can’t do something like that and get away with it. It doesn’t change anything, I know, but we both felt terribly guilty about it. In the end the guilt was all Ray talked about. And I knew you’d find out. I didn’t know how, but I knew you would. The only good thing was that no one else ever did, we were very careful. Stan never knew.”
“How did it end?”
“Ray. But I was glad he ended it. There was never any love there. We were just company for each other. You must be disgusted.”
“I’m not disgusted.”
“I’m such a pig. It was an insane thing to do.”
Marla cast her eyes wildly about the bedroom. They came to rest on a small pair of nail scissors on her nightstand. I knew what was going through her mind.
“Don’t you fucking dare.” I reached past her and threw the scissors across the room.
Marla folded her arms over her chest. “When it was over I felt so sick with myself. That’s when I started hooking. I figured if I was such a pig I might as well act like one.” She shook her head and laughed sadly. “All I wanted was to live in Oakridge and be quiet and to just get by. If you can do that anywhere it should be here. But you can’t, you can’t do it anywhere, not if you’re the wrong sort of person. Are you going to leave me now?”
“Leave you? It was three years ago. I wasn’t even here, I hadn’t been for five years before that.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“Of course it matters. I particularly don’t want to visualize the bedroom scenes. But I’m not going to leave you over it.”
I thought I would see some kind of relief in her face. Some great weight rising from her, freeing her of at least some of the hell she lived under, but it didn’t happen. She closed her eyes and hung her head, slowly turning it from side to side like a blind woman listening to something in the distance. It was disturbing to watch, but not as disturbing as when, a moment later, she threw back her head and opened her mouth, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, and laughed at the ceiling-long, mad peals of noise as though she had just been told something so crushing that the only possible response was an insane, deformed humor.
I let it go on for as long as I could bear. She’d been caned, she’d been forced to confess to an affair with my father, some purging of emotion was understandable. But it was too raw and I became frightened that she was heading toward some sort of fit, so I held her and kissed her hair and at my touch she stopped her howling and buried her head in the hollow of my shoulder and sobbed quietly as I rocked her and made quiet noises to her until she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 26
I was buying vegetables in an open-fronted store in Back Town the next day when Gareth accosted me. He’d just turned away from something he’d been watching out on the street and when he saw me he came right over. When he said hello I just stared at him.
Gareth waved away my anger as though I had made a blunder that was too embarrassing to address. “Jesus, Johnny, you’re always focusing on the surface of things.
Lighten up. The other day was just something that had to happen.”
“What you made Marla do was disgusting.”
“Forget that shit. You gotta see what’s happening. You won’t believe it.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the sidewalk.
“Look! Look what that fucking bitch is doing.”
A small van was rolling slowly along the street. It had posters taped to its sides and the front of a handheld loudspeaker stuck through the open driver’s window. It looked like something a small-town politician might use for electioneering. And it was being put to a similar use now. The posters displayed several different slogans, but they all boiled down to the same thing-that the proposed road to Tunney Lake should be stopped on environmental grounds. And backing the posters up, the loudspeaker demanded that we save one of our natural beauty spots, that we preserve it from the overexploitation that would certainly come with easier access.
“Look at her. I mean, am I insane? Did the world just take a vote and decide to fuck me in the ass? This is unbelievable.”
I followed his outstretched arm as it tracked the van. In the shadows of the cab, past the bullhorn, I saw the reason for his rage. Vivian was speaking into the microphone and driving one-handed.
“She’s been doing this for three days. And that’s not all. Come here.”
He pulled me along the street to a lamppost. Stapled to the dusty gray wood there was a flier outlining in
