Empty Mile

CHAPTER 8

I saw Marla the following Saturday. It was a hot day and she’d called and suggested going to the lake for a swim. Tunney Lake was not the first place I would have picked to continue our reunion but I was so relieved she’d finally called I would have said yes to anything.

When I picked her up she was wearing a tight white T-shirt and denim cutoffs and as she slid into the passenger seat I was suddenly aware of how dreadfully alone I would be if I failed at working her back into my life.

She seemed preoccupied during the drive and spent most of it staring through the side window and picking at the frayed hem of her shorts. It wasn’t the best of signs for reestablishing a relationship but when we got to the lake and parked and were walking away from the pickup she put her hand in mine and squeezed it.

We went down to the southern end of the beach where there were fewer kids running around, stripped down to swimsuits, and stretched out. I could feel the heat of the coarse sand through the cotton of my towel. I rolled onto my side and looked at Marla. She was wearing a plain red bikini and I noticed that she had put on a little weight. Her breasts were fuller than I remembered and her waist no longer lay flat between the bones of her pelvis. She saw me looking and sat up and drew her knees up in front of her.

“You’re very pale, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you think about me in England?”

“I thought about everyone and everything. It got so I thought I’d go crazy with it.”

I saw from her face that this wasn’t the answer she wanted.

“Yes, I thought about you a lot.”

She looked out across the lake. “I used to come up here after you left. Until the water made me think of you on the other side of the world. Then I stopped.”

Her arms were folded on her knees. She turned her head and rested it on them and closed her eyes.

“You know, Johnny, if the past was a forest I’d burn it down.”

She stayed that way for a while, cradling her head in her arms. The air was hot and heavy around us and I thought she might be falling asleep. I watched her face, the dark lashes that lay against her skin, and wondered why she would say something like that.

“Were things that bad? I don’t mean me not being here, but life generally.”

She lifted her head and blinked. “Life generally? Yeah, life generally sucked.”

“How?

Marla lay down facing me and sighed. “I don’t want to get into it today, Johnny.”

She glanced past me and I turned to see what she was looking at. Back up the beach Bill Prentice was sitting on the grassy bank between the sand and the parking area. He was facing our way and though he was busily drinking from a can of soda I was certain that he had been watching us a moment before. I turned back to Marla.

“Tell me about your job.”

She shrugged. “The admin side’s okay. I take minutes. I organize filing, make appointments, set up meetings, that kind of thing. But I also get to research stuff and that can be cool. Like I’ll have to find out the history of a particular building, or some old fact about the Gold Rush. That’s the part I like most. If I hadn’t gotten this job I honestly don’t know how healthy I’d be now. Mentally, I mean. I have to take a piss.”

She stood and walked quickly away toward the parking area and the small cinder-block set of public toilets. I watched her as she went. The day was not going quite as I’d hoped. I’d pictured us sunbathing in each other’s arms by now. I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes.

Marla came back after a while and sat down beside me full of jittery energy and comic disbelief. She jerked her head toward the parking area. Bill Prentice was still there, but now he was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking straight at us.

“You know what he asked me?”

“Bill Prentice?”

“Yeah.” She laughed like it was the biggest joke, but it was a brittle sound and I could tell that she was nervous. “He wanted to-” She stopped herself and shook her head. “It’s too ridiculous.”

“What?”

“He wants to pay to watch us have sex.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what he said.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You know about him, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen him in action.”

“What?”

“Stan and I saved him from a bear at an Elephant Society picnic the other day. He was getting blown by a cheerleader at the time.”

“A bear? Wow.”

Marla made me tell her about the episode, but before I was halfway through she interrupted me.

“You think doing something like that would be gross?”

“Having someone watch? I don’t know. Right place, right time, right person to do it with. Might be interesting.”

We’d been treating it as a joke but when I said this things suddenly became serious. Marla looked at me and I held my breath. After a long moment she shrugged.

“I guess we’ve got to start somewhere.”

And I, of course, figured that all my Christmases had come at once.

“Where would we do it?”

“He knows a place back in the forest. He wants it to be outdoors.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I said I’d ask you. He said he’d pay two hundred dollars. But you know we totally don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid I need the money too badly. Absolutely. In fact there’s no way I could possibly turn down two hundred dollars right now. Not at all. No sir.”

Marla nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

The air in the forest was so humid it seemed to push back at me and the buzzing of cicadas made my head swim. What we were doing was crazy but I couldn’t stop myself. The heat and the insect noise and the throb of sexual desire had combined within me to a kind of fever that made me want to race through the trees, to be wherever it was we were going, to be inside Marla right then, that second.

The place Bill led us to wasn’t far into the forest, but it was well screened and it was unlikely any nature-loving hiker would stumble across us. Behind a large boulder on which some delinquent teenager had splashed red paint there was a shallow dish-shaped hollow that was shielded around three-quarters of its circumference by a wall of trees and shrubs. As we entered it I was aware we were probably only a few minutes away from the place Marla and I had first made love.

Marla avoided looking at Bill or me. We had brought our things from the lake and she rolled out a towel in the center of the hollow. Bill sat a few feet away. I did my best to pretend he wasn’t there.

When Marla had finished with the towel she stood beside it, her arms straight at her sides as though she had no desire to make any further movement. I realized that she was scared.

Bill watched us like nothing else existed. His hand was between his legs, squeezing his crotch.

“Do you want us to, like, just start?”

Bill nodded. “Yes, please. And take all your clothes off.”

I stepped close to Marla and held her. For a moment she didn’t respond, then she lifted her head and looked at me sadly and whispered, “This shouldn’t have been our first time.”

I kissed her. And with that kiss I tried to pull us into a dark cocoon that would hide us from the man who sat watching. For a moment it worked, for a moment we were lost in each other. But then his voice came again.

“Take her clothes off.”

I knew, even as I began undoing her bikini top, that I should stop this, that she was uncomfortable, unhappy, that the honorable thing to do would be to just give Bill his money back and tell him we’d changed our minds. But I didn’t. I couldn’t let go of this opportunity. I wanted sex, there was no doubt about that, but what drove me more to peel away Marla’s swimsuit was a raging emotional greed, the need to be close enough to her again to begin fixing the piece of my past that belonged to her.

We got down to it, there in that warm hollow that like a lens seemed to capture the heat and concentrate it about us. When I entered her, despite being watched, despite the tawdry circumstances of the act, I felt an immediate and overpowering sense of relief. She had let me close to her. And if she could do that then surely there could be no further barrier to becoming a couple again. In Marla, too, I sensed a relaxation of spirit, as though she had wanted to clear this hurdle every bit as much as I.

This letting-go of hers, though, didn’t last long. At some point she shifted under me and I saw that she was looking over my shoulder at Bill. I turned my head. He was standing, pants around his ankles, masturbating as he watched us. It didn’t surprise me. In fact I had assumed he’d do exactly that, but it seemed to disgust Marla and she went stiff and kept her eyes closed until we were finished.

Bill left as soon as it was over, just buttoned his pants and walked quickly away. I thought about yelling after him to look out for bears, but I didn’t. Marla and I sat there silent and naked and watched him go. When he was out of sight I turned to her and forced a laugh.

“Well…”

I wanted her to laugh too, but she did not.

We got dressed and made our way back through the forest holding hands and not saying anything.

In the parking lot Bill Prentice was waiting beside his SUV. He waved for me to come over. Marla let go of my hand and went to wait by the pickup. Bill had the lease papers for the warehouse ready for me to sign-one year with the option to renew for two more, a reasonable yearly fee, three months up front, the rest in monthly installments. I signed them against the metal of the car’s hood and prayed that this venture with Stan would not turn out to be too disastrous.