Hungry for the World (17 page)

Later that night, David urged me to tell him exactly what I had seen, what I had felt. He filled in his own details—her tongue, her teeth, the nape of her neck. Together, we spoke the story again and again, gave it color and texture, until I believed that I had not simply watched but had been there with them, in that harbor of blue light and cool air.

When, at the next party, I watched David ascend the stairs to his bedroom, another woman at his side, I didn’t lower my eyes but poured myself another shot of schnapps and lit another cigarette, biding my time. There were those who looked at me with pity, but I met their gaze with studied nonchalance. I knew that, when the evening was over, I would be the one left in David’s bed, and that I would possess the secrets of the women who had long since staggered to their cars alone.

I believed that this was a private and privileged thing between David and me. Any confusion I felt was replaced with David’s assurance that this, indeed, was what he wanted: my observation, my passive participation. When David touched me, I believed that I became for him the embodiment of every mouth and breast, the manifestation, the fulfillment of his truest need.

But what was it that I wanted from David? The answer
came to me clearly: not devotion, not domestic provision, but companionship. I wanted to be in his presence; I wanted the gift of his attention, the gratification of being his confidante, the one on whom he could depend. I wanted to be different from the other women he had told me about who had failed him, fickle and easily wounded; I wanted to be the antithesis of the female defined for me by the church, by my own family, by the books whose priggish heroines teased and withheld.

This was what kept me there—not the sex, not even the perception that I was winning David with my tolerance and patience—but the belief that I was setting myself apart, escaping my fate, ascending to a higher level of insight. Anything less would disappoint this man who had chosen me to accompany him toward discovery, who depended upon me to share the transcendence of his vision.

With David, there was no denial, no boundaries, or so it seemed. Over the next several months, those boundaries would become more clear. They were
his
boundaries, and though they bore no resemblance to the rules I had been raised to abide by, they were no less absolute.

Perhaps I believed that I could exist at the margins, that I could walk away whenever I chose, just as I had walked away from the house of my father, that I could pack my bags and step through that door, shrug off my fetters, and begin a new journey.

I wonder now when my sense of that journey changed. I wonder when it was I first heard the shades being drawn against the light, the doors closing, the slow, metallic clicking of locks.

———

E
ARLY SUMMER
. I lay one evening in the sleeper of David’s semi, listening to his easy banter with the shift workers. It was the first time David had offered to take me with him to Seattle, and we were docked to pick up our load and head west.

The tractor was a twenty-one-gear Freightliner, pulling a single trailer from Lewiston to Pasco, double from there into Tacoma/Seattle. My presence in the sleeper was a secret because no riders were allowed, and I spent the first few miles hidden behind the coarse black curtain that divided the cab. A pillow, a blanket thrown over a thin pad—nothing like other sleepers I’d seen at the car shows, with their king-size beds, walls plushly lined with fake fur and velveteen drapes. My Spartan quarters smelled of old smoke, unlaundered linen, moisture sweated and pooled against vinyl.

Between Washington’s eastern border and the ocean lie miles of scrubland, desert dry, blown with sage. The mountains that surround the river drainages—the Blues, the Cascades—seemed impossibly distant. We pulled the trip between dusk and dawn, and my sense of that land has less to do with terrain and sky than it does with the few feet of highway our headlights illuminated.

The moon rose like white heat, the rock fired in silver. Coyotes became foolish then, separating themselves from shadow, feeding on the small animals flushed out of hiding by the false sun. I could look across the cab and see David’s face, see his one hand on the wheel, cigarette in the other. I felt giddy, as though I had been given flight.

I discovered the night world of long-haul truckers wired on coffee, NoDoz, amphetamines—whatever it took to pull through hundreds of miles of darkness. Some spent their hours on the CB, radioing other truckers ahead or behind, calling up the locals whose towns they passed through. Others tuned in to preachers broadcasting their message of salvation, praying along as the mile markers flew by and the sun coming up seemed another kept promise.

That first night, when we pulled into one of the twenty-four-hour cafés that anchored the freeway, I lowered my eyes beneath the appraising looks of men at the counter. I found their gaze sinister and embarrassing, but David saw in their stares a validation of his judgment.

It is hard to remember myself there, in the white-yellow light of glass and fluorescence; not
hard
but painful, because what I see is a girl dressed in a dancer’s leotard, tight jeans, and high heels, balanced on a bar stool between men who hunch around her. They’ve got their elbows alongside their plates, their boots planted on the linoleum. Their hands are rough, their faces lined from the efforts of smoking and squinting through hours of fog, sunlight, hail. As David nudges me in front of him, tells me to straighten my back and lick my lips, I’m thinking that this is all a game, that David will protect me because it is he who has made up the rules.

“They’re wishing they had what I have,” he said later, patting my bottom as we walked from the brightly lit diner, and because some part of me responded to both his desire and his insistence on theirs, I let myself believe that I might please him this way. I did not let myself think of those other drivers as men like my father, men with wives and daughters and
sons, men who whispered not of my desirability but of my misfortune. Perhaps they even worried over me, seeing I was young and obviously ignorant. Many of them knew David, had seen him over the years in the same cafés, the same truck stops and rest areas, had seen his way with women and the kind of women he chose to share his bed.

Back in the truck, he told me I’d done fine. Next time I should wear something more revealing, something that would show them my tits. He lit a cigarette, smiled and winked.

There was nothing outside my window then but the charcoal silhouette of black trees against black sky. We were speeding toward Seattle, toward the ocean, toward people I’d never seen, land I’d never touched, water I’d never tasted. I meant to do that, taste the bay’s water and see if the salt were a true thing.

I cracked the window an inch. The wind came in full of forest smells as we climbed Snoqualmie Pass, and I had a sudden, nauseating ache for my family, for my child’s life spent cloistered in the woods, but that life was no longer mine.

Then who was I? The logger’s daughter come down from the mountains who hated her own ignorance of the world. A skinny, stubborn, strong-willed girl who needed to be broken, needed to learn. I didn’t know which side my bread was buttered on, didn’t know that if I wanted to dance, I’d have to pay the fiddler.

And that was the name—the truck driver’s handle—that David gave me so that I might be known on the waves of the air. “Tiny Dancer,” he whispered when I pleased him. “Dance.”

In the months to come, I would learn the complex shifting of gears, throwing my weight to the clutch, feeling the engine shudder and grind beneath me. I would learn the parlance of shortwave, the rhythms and code of numbers and names. Sometimes, listening to the voices floating in from the trucks and houses miles away, I felt as though I were a foreigner, the language not my own. The land was unfamiliar, my sense of time reversed, nocturnal. My family had no idea where I was, and I could not have said I knew the man who sat beside me. I would soon forget that I had ever been anyone else, that I had kissed with passion born of love, that I had once been touched by a lover whose hands held comfort.

Seattle, to me, will always be that city I first came to know not by its proximity to water nor its rain, but by First Street, the lineup of sex stores where David took me soon after our arrival. Seattle is a cramped booth with a machine that takes quarters for five minutes of flesh, filmed or sometimes live. Seattle is row after row of sex toys and magazines glistening with skin that has been pierced, tattooed, injected, impaled. Seattle is a cheap motel where truckers pay by the hour for a bed and curtains to draw against the light. It is a topless bar where women cup their breasts and lower themselves onto the laps of customers, women who, when they saw him, welcomed David not as a john but as a lover, as someone whose attention meant more to them than money.

This was the life he offered me, and even as he whispered with the women and I saw them take me in, something between jealousy and amusement in their eyes, I never thought to run.

From that first trip to Seattle on, during the nighttime hauls, during the days meant for sleep but fueled into wakefulness by speed, during all those times when his desire for me became a ritual of domination, I would do what David asked; I would become for him the woman I believed I must be.

“W
HAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?”

“It’s not what I want you to do. It’s what
you
want to do.”

We lay on David’s bed, in the breeze coming in from the patio door, open to the cool air of midnight. I took the joint that he offered, pinched it between my fingers. I pretended to take the smoke into my lungs, pretended to hold my breath. In the dark, he couldn’t see that the motions were false, that the smoke drifted free of my mouth. I didn’t want escape, disorientation. I wanted this moment with David, just the two of us, the wind smelling of the river, the muddy shallows. I wanted us to talk of other things—I wanted to hear the stories of his youth, of Vietnam. I wanted to know how his father had left and why. I wanted him to tell me what lay deepest in his mind, what wonders held him just before sleep, what answers came before waking.

I listened as David’s voice softened. I liked him high because it was the only time he seemed able to rest, the only time the rigidity left him, and I could reach out and touch him with tenderness. There had been so little lingering of lips at the throat’s pulse, so few caresses; I do not remember
his kiss at all. Each movement had its purpose, as if part of a well-rehearsed play, intentional and detached. He shied away from my eyes held too long on his; he turned his back when what I wanted was only to hold him.

This was not what David wanted—not the arm-linking, not the lush kiss or the spooning sleep of lovers. What he wanted, he said—more, even, than my voyeur’s eye and ear—was to have me lie with other men, men he would designate and direct. Our conversations had come down to this one thing: when would I be ready?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.”

“Quit thinking about it,” he said. “Just do it. The first time is the hardest. After that it’s easy.”

There was the encouragement of his smile, the sureness in his words that meant he believed I would do the right thing—and that right thing would be to step out of my old skin and into the new, free myself from the old parables of temptation and punishment. I needed to test my wings, he said. I needed to fly.

I felt a certain curiosity, but I cannot say I felt a true sexual urge toward such an encounter. My interest lay not in other men but in David. Yet how could I separate the two? Everything I knew about men and women revolved around this one truth: to keep a man happy, a woman must meld her will to his, become for him the extension and fulfillment of his need.

“Is that what you really want?” I spoke into the darkness of the room, smelling the sweet smoke, feeling as though I’d been unleashed from my mooring, floating toward deeper waters.

He tucked me against him, ran the length of his palm across my face. He held me for a long time, nothing more.

And then, after a time, he rose, pulled me gently after him. Already there was someone waiting in the next room, someone who had been there all along. I had not known this. I had believed us alone, believed myself free to contemplate and consider without consequence. I’d forgotten how well he knew this road, how he was always there ahead of me, preparing the way that I should go.

“COME HERE,”
he would say, and I would. Then he would tell me what he wanted. Sometimes he wanted me to do nothing more than undress for him. On the dance floor, he instructed me to move my hips, arch my back, tilt my shoulders. He scolded me for sunbathing in my swimsuit: the unattractive tan lines marred my skin. Sometimes, when another man asked me to dance, I would look up and see David where he sat at our table, encircled by friends, watching me, smiling, nodding his approval, pleased with his creation.

A kind of Bacchus, reduced to bone, running on whiskey and speed, he brought us together cheerfully, as though what we were about was a communal celebration. The ones left at the night’s end were the most or least hardened, the reduction of time and sobriety. These were the men I would come to fear most: those who knew what they were capable of, and those who, as of yet, did not.