The Zero (30 page)

April rubbed her foot against his leg. “We could take off all our clothes and crawl under the table,” April said. “They’ll never think to look for us there.”

The waitress brought their drinks and Remy drained his whiskey and gestured for another.

April raised her wineglass. “Just for the record, Mr. Remy, I am having the time of my life.”

Remy smiled. “Good.” But then he had a troubling thought. He picked up his menu and leafed through it quickly, running his index finger down the rows of appetizers and entrées. When he saw that it wasn’t there, he sighed, set the menu down and fell back in his chair.

“Relax,” April said. “You’re doing a great job, whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Have you decided?” The waitress was standing over them.

“Yeah. I have,” he said, and with a relief that bordered on joy, Brian Remy ordered the yellow pepper, black bean, and artichoke quesadilla.

THEY MADE
love in the new hotel room, too, and when they were done Remy took a long shower. He closed his eyes and let the hot water cascade over his face, pelting his eyelids and his forehead. He opened his mouth and it filled with water and he spat it out, over and over. When he came out April was sleeping and he watched her for a moment, the slow rise and fall of her breasts.

Finally, Remy dropped his towel and climbed into bed, nestling in behind her and staring into the tangle of her dark hair. He kissed the top of her head and she stirred slightly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, smiled, and faced the other way again.

“How was your shower?” she whispered.

“It was good.”

“Good. I like showers. I like to let the water run right over my face like I’m standing in a waterfall.”

They lay there quietly for a while, until her breathing caught up to his and for a moment they were inhaling and exhaling together, and then her breathing began to pull away again, with those cute little puffs of air. It occurred then to Remy that they had no clothes except the ones they’d arrived in, which were now lying on the floor. They’d either have to go back to the airport to get their luggage or go shopping.

“Listen, tomorrow—” Remy began.

“Shh,” she said. “No tomorrow.”

HE WOKE
at ten to the sound of a light knocking at the door. April was still asleep. He looked up. The walls in the room were off-white,
and the room had a light oak armoire that contained the television, refrigerator, and stereo. The door was still deadbolted shut. “Yes?” he said.

“Housekeeping,” said a voice on the other side.

“Can you come back?” Remy said.

“Chure. I comb back.”

Remy sat up and looked around the room. It was smaller than the other hotel room, nothing in this room but a bed and a small desk with a business phone. He called downstairs for coffee, fruit, and bagels.

“We could stay here forever,” she said from the bed.

“You think so?” Remy asked.

“Just run from hotel to hotel, screwing and pretending someone’s after us.”

Remy didn’t say anything.

“We’ll change our names every day. Today…I’ll be Monique. Who are you?”

“What?”

“Who are you going to be?”

“Uh…Steve,” Remy said.

“Steve and Monique. Good. Okay, who are we? What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Remy said.

“Monique is a jewel thief. She’s fifty-two. A former actress and figure skater from the old Soviet Union who defected as a teenager, but after the Cold War ended she missed the old intrigue, so she works for an international cartel stealing jewels from wealthy industrialists and other assholes who capitalize on poor workers.”

Remy looked back at her. “Monique doesn’t look fifty-two.”

“She’s had a lot of surgery.”

“So who’s Steve?” he asked.

“A dentist. From Akron, Ohio.”

“Yeah…I don’t think I want to be Steve.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be Steve. You be Monique. Come here, Monique, lie on your back and show me your mouth.”

And then a thought bobbed to the surface and he had to ask it. “April,” Remy said. “If Derek hadn’t died…is there any chance you and he—”

She looked stung and her eyes moved almost imperceptibly to a point just beyond him. “No.”

“But you still loved him. You said so.”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“Was it the other woman?”

“No…I don’t think there was really anything between them,” she said quietly. “In some ways it was…incidental.”

“So what…you just couldn’t forgive him for doing that?”

“Something like that,” she said. “Look, I don’t—” She sat up and reached for her shirt, tugged it on without a bra and pulled the sheet up around her waist. “We were having so much fun, Brian. Why’d you have to—” But she didn’t finish. She picked up the remote control and started running through the channels again. Remy watched the TV go from one reality to another and again—it was mesmerizing—and he thought about how familiar this was, the way the television skipped from news to sports to music videos, the way these imperceptible gaps led from sorrow to humor and pathos, from a game show to televised real estate listings to a panel talking about books. But this time, the pictures moved too slowly for April and after a minute of trolling inanity she turned off the TV and hurled the remote across the room. It hit the wall and fell in pieces of plastic and double-A batteries.

THEY BOUGHT
new clothes in a store called Fugue. She got tight leather pants and a little spaghetti strap tank top, and Remy bought faded jeans and a powder blue dress shirt. Remy carried their old
clothes in a shopping bag. They went to a boutique shoe store and picked out a pair for each other: hers had straps that wrapped around the backs of her ankles and he got low-cut boots with square toes.

“Wow. We look hot,” she said when he came out in his new shoes. “I kind of want to screw us.”

They hopped in a cab and April told the cabbie to take them to a romantic restaurant, so he dropped them off at a little place in North Beach, where they had lunch and a bottle of Chianti in a sidewalk café. The wine was gone before their entrées arrived, and they had another carafe and lingered over a split bowl of spumoni.

“What’s your names?” asked the walnut-eyed Italian waiter.

“I’m Steve,” April said. “And his name is Monique.”

“Steve,” the waiter said, looking at Remy. “Monique. Can I tell you something?”

“You can tell us anything,” she said.

The waiter proceeded to tell them how he’d been raised in a vineyard and hotel on the western coast of Italy and how he’d gone into debt over some gambling expenses and escaped to the United States to work for an uncle, who had kept him in a kind of indentured servitude at the restaurant ever since. Remy didn’t know if he believed the story, but he liked it very much.

“How old you think I am, Steve?” He put his face close to Remy’s. He looked to be about fifty, Remy thought.

“I don’t know…forty?”

“Come on,” the man said. “I look sixty easy, yes? Well what I am, I tell you, is thirty-eight, Steve. That’s all. Thirty-eight. An’ you know why I look so old, Monique?”

She was resting her chin in her hand, smiling. “Why?”

“Because I never fall so much in love like you two.” The waiter held his hands out between Remy and April, as if he were performing a wedding. “I never find no one make me so happy.”

“You’ll find someone,” April said.

“No. Not me. No more.”

“Sure you will.”

“No. It’s okay.” He seemed to be looking for words. “In America,” he said, “everyone thinks every story have a happy end, yeah? You’re not happy about one thing, what do you do? Sue each other. It’s so stupid. How can every story be a happy end? Someone got to be sad.”

A SIGN
on a light pole advertised an
End of the World Party
at a club near the Haight, and April wanted to go somewhere in their new clothes, so they took a cab and waited on line with people at least a decade younger, overgrown boys in sideburns and girls with lower back tattoos rising from their pants like bursts of hair, all of them bouncing on the balls of their feet and yelling into their cell phones. Remy and April stared at the door and listened to the thumping for about thirty minutes until a thick bouncer took twenty bucks and waved them past and they walked through an awning, around an iron gate and down a staircase into a cavernous basement with pillars, floor lighting, and a low ceiling. A disc jockey was playing punkish electronic music on a simple turntable set up on milk crates, the sound a slush of guitars, synthesizers, and sibilant voices, punctuated by that same thud of drums, merely suggestive from the outside, insistent now that they were on the pulsing dance floor.

It was so crowded that all they could do, all anyone could do, was bounce up and down, jerking their heads, everyone occupying his own airspace—and for such a writhing, wriggling mass of people, Remy was surprised how little they touched each other. He tried to place the music, but his points of reference seemed more than dated, possibly anachronistic—David Bowie covers played by robots? Inside, the crowd wasn’t as young as it seemed on line, but it felt to Remy as if these peo
ple had all been given some sort of manual before they arrived explaining how to act in such a club. They all danced the same, heads jerking, bodies coiled, no partner in sight, and they raised their hands at the same time, but most of all they knew how to communicate with each other, bobbing in to the left ear of the listener so that, from a distance, every conversation looked like a mother bird feeding her chick.

There were no tables, and everyone along the walls was dancing, and yet people seemed to have drinks, so Remy began to search for the bar, and that’s when he saw a staircase to the left of the stage, lined with people trying to get a drink.

April was dancing with her eyes closed, her body snapping like a stiff whip, her head nodding as if she were being forced, over and over, to agree with something she found distasteful. When did I forget how to dance? Remy thought. When did I lose track of music and what you’re supposed to do with it? “Let’s get a drink!” he yelled, but her eyes didn’t open, so he did the mother bird and yelled in her ear. “Drink!” and she opened her eyes and grabbed his arm, shaking her head no.

“I’m going to get one,” he said and pointed to the stairs.

He read her lips. “No. Stay here. Dance. Unless your back’s bothering you?”

“My back is fine,” he yelled. And so they danced for more than an hour, until Remy’s back did ache, and his head swam with the unceasing drums, and finally he couldn’t dance anymore and he just stood in the middle of all those swirling young bodies, watching as April—eyes closed—snapped her body over and over, from her tight leather pants to the tendrils of black hair that lashed her face unmercifully.

MORNING AND
Remy sat up cold and naked in the hotel bed, all the covers wrapped around April, who slept peacefully facing away from him. He looked around the bright room. Two empty wine bottles sat on
the table with two red-rimmed wineglasses and their new clothes were strewn around the floor in front of the bed.

There was a light knock at the door. “Housekeeping.”

Remy looked at the clock. It was 9:45. “Can you come back later?”

“Chure,” the man said. “I comb back.”

Remy padded off to the shower and after a minute she joined him and soaped him into making love, and when they were done they went back to bed.

It was two in the afternoon before they made it out of the hotel room. They had gyros at a little Greek stand that April said reminded her of her father’s cooking. They bought more new clothes—April got a tiny denim skirt and high boots, and she even talked Remy into loosening up and he got a shirt with wild cuffs and jeans with manufactured rips in the thighs, and when he said he felt stupid in them, she took him to a bar and made him down three whiskeys in quick succession and, he was forced to admit, he didn’t feel stupid any longer.

“Where you folks from?” asked the female bartender.

“British Columbia,” answered April. “A little town in the Rockies at the foot of this glacier. We hike up and carry buckets of ice down for our drinking water. There’s no electricity or phone service and Dustin here has to cut logs for us to burn in our woodstove to cook and keep us warm.”

“Maggie makes all our clothes,” Remy said. “We eat only roots. In the summer we’re always naked. I have a pet moose.”

“Wow,” the bartender said. “How’d you end up there?”

“Dustin was a draft dodger,” April said. “Conscientious objector. He moved up to Canada and I went and joined him. Fucking government, you know? We just got so sick of America we couldn’t take it any more. At some point, a place loses enough of itself that you have no choice but to abandon it.” She leaned in as if sharing a secret. “And frankly, I think it’s gotten worse.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” the bartender said as she loaded glasses in the dishwasher. But then she looked up at the couple and Remy could see that she was calculating their ages.

“You went up there to avoid serving in
Vietnam
?” the bartender asked.

“No,” April said. “Panama.”

“Oh,” she said. “Sure.”

On the advice of the bartender, they took the train to the baseball stadium and walked to a nearby pier, where they found a man with striking gray beard renting kayaks and wetsuits from a huge shipping container. The man asked if they had experience with sea kayaks.

“Not specifically,” April said, “but I was a river guide in the Grand Canyon the summer after I got out of the Peace Corps, and Toody here rowed crew at Princeton.”

“JV,” he said.

“Still,” the kayak guy said, “you should have no trouble.”

They set out awkwardly from the pier, where the water was still, and quickly figured out the balance required. Remy loved the way the edge of his paddle disappeared in the dark water and the way he could thrust the boat forward, the muscles in his arms and shoulders burning from the work. They developed a quick rhythm, April in front, digging with her paddle, her little shoulders beginning to quake with the effort, and when Remy tried to slow down, for her sake, she just pushed harder, and so he did too, their leans and pushes working together until they got going so fast that it felt as if they were carving the water, as if their wake might go for miles, across the bay to the rest of the world. And only then did April stop and look around, at the diffuse clouds battered by light blue sky.