Virgin Territory (11 page)

I remind her about her plan—four houses, a private plane, and perfume. And then I tell her that my name is really Dylan.

“What do you mean?” she asks, tilting her head and looking as though she’s been insulted.

“My name,” I repeat. “It’s actually Dylan. I just thought you should know.”

She smiles at me kindly, as though I’m insane and possibly dangerous, and then asks, “Where’re the others?”

The others are in the living room, standing in front of the
china cabinet and ogling Marie’s plates of many countries through the glass.

“Sad,” says Angela.

“Tragic,” Crispy adds.

Desirée nods as though some things don’t even need to be discussed.

For me, those plates represent the good life, the part of my family story that I prize.

“Really?” I remark as casually as I can. “They look like they might be worth something. And besides, I think they’re kinda—”

They all turn toward me to find out what I’m going to say.

“I don’t know, quaint or something.”

Quaint?

No one is convinced.

“You mean quaint like third-world peasants making crap dishware for crap pay so that some American can fill her cabinet back home with fancy knickknacks?” Crispy asks.

“Essssssactly,” Angela says. Then she looks around the room and adds, “How come these people don’t have any family portraits? Everybody’s got family portraits.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they’re not that kind of family.”

If Doug hadn’t been so stupid and lost all our family pictures, we would have a portrait of Kat propped up on the mantel so everyone could see that we were that kind of family.
When people came over to visit they’d say,
“Is that your mom?”
And I’d say,
“Yeah.”
And they’d say,
“She was so pretty.”
And that would be that. It would’ve been the portrait that Kat had taken a year before she met Doug, back when she was at the height of her beauty. According to family legend, she went to a portrait studio at Macy’s because she wanted to send her parents a decent picture of herself. At the time, her parents were in Seattle, and they missed her badly. The photograph was meant to sit on top of their piano, a placeholder until she got back home. But she never did get back. Instead, she met Doug and then I came along, and life unfolded right where she was living. I love that portrait. And I miss it. Still.

“Where’s Angela?” I ask when I turn around to find her missing. “Where’d she go?”

Crispy looks around. “Who knows?” he says.

Just then, Angela appears at the top of the stairs, and she’s looking about as freaked out as a cat trapped on top of a moving vehicle. She flies down the stairs, taking two at a time, and then makes a mad dash across the living room, her black hair flying behind her like the tail of a sideways exclamation point.

“Angela?” I offer tentatively.

“Out!” she cries, and to prove that she means business, she doesn’t even bother to explain. She just keeps pointing toward the back door and moving through the kitchen like she’s on fire.

We follow her instinctually, like rats diving blind off a sinking ship. We don’t even need to know what’s causing her to panic.
We just run. And we keep running until we are out of sight and out of breath.

“What? What?”
we ask her all at once. We whoop air into our lungs; we hold on to our kneecaps; we wipe the sweat away. “What happened? What was it?”

“Oh. My. God,” she replies, covering her eyes and wildly shaking her head in what seems like a violent attempt to un-see whatever she’s just seen. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You’re never going to believe it. None of you.”

“What?”
we all yell at her in unison.
“What?”

“Okay. I heard something, some noise, so I slowly—very slowly and quietly—opened the bedroom door. And there they were. Two people. A man and a woman. Naked. Both of them. And they were having sex.”

Doug has been seeing Mary Jo Kowalski for about six months. I’ve known about her since day one because I heard him talking on the phone to her. He was saying her name over and over and speaking to her as though she were a Boeing 737 that he was trying to land at the local bar. Why did he think it was a good idea to keep her a secret from me, I want to know. Naturally, he sidesteps the question by asking if it was me who barged in on them this afternoon. He wants to know if that’s how I found out about Mary Jo.

“Don’t change the subject,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He then explains that Mary Jo lives in nearby Tequesta and works for a company that designs and sells software to turbine engine manufacturers. She’s a specialist in the field of non-intrusive stress-management systems (whatever that is), and she works with some pretty high-level clients, like the U.S. Navy. She offers them stuff like data acquisition electronics, as well as optical and eddy current probes. Sounds gruesome. Apparently, her job is very demanding, and though she’s often needed in the office, she also has responsibilities that take her out into the field. Sometimes, he tells me, she has to travel as far as Daytona Beach to lunch with clients or to meet with manufacturers.

Doug confesses all this while he and I are eating dinner (Chinese takeout), and as he pushes the piles of moo shu into his mouth with his chopsticks, I imagine Mary Jo driving her Honda Civic the length of Florida with no one breathing down her neck. “She calls her own shots on the job,” Doug declares, as if I ought to be impressed by this bit of news. I’m guessing this means that Mary Jo can sometimes manage a little detour and stop by to see Doug in the middle of the afternoon and then hop into the sack with him.

“Anyway,” he says, wiping his chin with a paper napkin, “you want to meet her?”

“Sure,” I tell him. “Someday.”

Doug has left the house now, and I’ve popped in a Bob Dylan CD. Songs like “Positively 4th Street,” “Lay, Lady, Lay,” or “Meet Me in the Morning” can bring me back to a time when someone like Mary Jo wasn’t even a possibility. In my mind, I can see my mom doing dishes over the sink in our old loft on Warren Street. It’s a small moment, but the sound of Dylan can still conjure it up in its entirety for me after only two bars of music. These are the only images I have left of her, and they’re fading fast. Naturally, I treasure them.

The phone rings. When I pick up the receiver, there’s no one on the other end. Again. Or rather, there’s no one speaking—just breathing.

“Gram? That you?”

No answer.

I decide to tell her about my new friends and what it’s like to know people my own age who can understand the feeling of being trapped in a life that isn’t exactly my own. I explain the rules of the Virgin Club, how we have to (a) want something, and (b) take a risk.

I sense that she understands. She was there once upon a time. But this may be just my wishful thinking.

“And it’s working,” I tell the phone. “Because here I am with a whole new life and new friends. I think I might even be in love.”

Nothing.

“Gram, you still there?”

This is the first time the thought occurs to me that the person on the other end of the phone might be my mother. I know it’s crazy to believe in ghosts, especially the kind that use the telephone, but we aren’t always in control of our thoughts, and sometimes hope is a thing that goes bump in the night.

“Mom?” I try.

As usual, there’s no response. So I sing into the receiver, tentatively at first, then with a bit more confidence.

By the time Doug gets home, I’m lying on the couch, tangled in a blanket with my guitar and fast asleep. He pokes me until I wake up, and then informs me that I’d be better off if I went upstairs and got into my own bed.

“Are you in love with whatshername?” I ask him.

Doug stands there mulling over the question. He looks pained, like someone who just stepped on a rusty nail and is
already thinking about the follow-up tetanus shot. He lets out a sigh and plops down on the sofa alongside me. The sofa cushions let out a sigh of their own, and then he leans his head all the way back so he can examine the ceiling.

“Mary Jo,” he says, and then he closes his eyes so that I can’t see that he’s about to lie through his teeth. But I have ears. “That’s her name. Mary Jo.”

“And is this Mary Jo the love of your life?” I ask him.

When he turns his head to look at me, I know for sure that I’m in trouble. The blood has drained from his face, and his eyes look as sharp as tacks. But if anybody should be mad, it should be me. I’m the one who is being lied to. I’m about to tell him that, but he beats me to the punch.

“What’re you up to?” he asks. “Just what’re you trying to do?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “I’m not up to anything.”

“Okay,” Doug says. “That’s enough. You’re going to bed right this minute.”

He gets up from the couch and starts toward the kitchen, but when he realizes that I’m not going anywhere, he turns and hollers,
“Go! Now!”

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask him as I turn toward the stairs. “You’re acting totally weird. I just asked a simple question. I have a right to know.”

He turns his back on me. Just like the Hulk before he explodes into monster form, he’s shaking, his shoulders heaving. He’s trying to contain himself before something bad happens, but
even from behind I can tell that he’s about to explode. I quickly gather up my blanket and head upstairs. When Doug gets like this, you don’t want to be around.

Then I realize that Doug is trying to muffle his sobs; he probably doesn’t want to scare me. But it’s too late. He’s standing in the middle of the living room crying like a beat-up kid.

“Doug?” I say.

He lifts his head, begins to shake it from side to side, and murmurs, “No, no, no, no, no.”

I’m standing behind him now, feeling sorry for the guy. I gently place my hand on his back. His shirt is damp, and I can feel the heat of him. He doesn’t want me to see his face. That much is clear. He’s turned away from me and is holding up his whole arm like a shield.

“Why?” he cries out. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why do you always have to be stirring things up? Reminding me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

Until this moment, it never occurred to me that seeing me must be some kind of torture for him. No matter how hard he tries to move on with his life, I’m always here, pulling him back, reminding him of what he’s lost, reminding him of her. He can’t escape it any more than I can escape the fact that my eyelashes and my toes and every particle of me carry the unmistakable imprint of her DNA. I’m like a broadcast station sending out the last dim signals of Katherine Anne Flack on a daily basis and right in front of his face; and every day he has to look at me. If
I stare at him from across the kitchen counter, he sees her eyes. If I talk back to him while riding in the passenger seat of his Explorer, he’s reminded of her voice. If I touch him, he feels a hand that isn’t hers. He lost the photographs, but here I am reminding him. Why haven’t I ever thought of this before?

“Go,” he says through his tears. “For godsakes, just go to bed.”