Shifting Occupancies by Corinna Vallianatos
They treated themselves at the end of each year with a trip to the desert. There was something unfailingly optimistic about the long, light sky, and by the time they arrived in Desert Hot Springs at a hotel with three naturally heated springs on its property, they were both in high spirits. Seth would drive on to Joshua Tree, where he’d rented a little house, but first he helped Laurel carry her bags into the lobby, introducing himself to the woman behind the desk as her driver. They kissed goodbye. “Nice driver,” the woman said.
“Oh, that was my husband,” Laurel said, laughing. She could afford to be frivolous with this woman, this pleasant helper in peacock feather earrings who was not the manager of the hotel. Laurel could just make out the manager standing at a worktable in the back, using a curved knife to cut a block of green glycerin soap into cakes for the rooms. This was her third visit, and the manager would not let on whether she remembered her or not.
The helper led her out of the lobby, across the patio, and to her room. All of the rooms opened onto the patio. White linen curtains hung from a line strung inside the double glass doors. There was a platform bed and a concrete floor. The room was cold. The cold was sharper in the desert than in the San Gabriel Valley. The mountains weren’t smog-shrouded but enormously visible, their sides scored with long crisp folds, runnels through which snowmelt flowed, and the cold, too, felt clearer, more significant. She plugged in the electric heater, rolled it as close to the bed as she could get it, and texted Seth to see how he was faring. He replied that the house was heated only by a pellet stove. I’m freezing my balls off, he wrote.
Ah, but this was good for them, wasn’t it? Getting away from their lives, getting away from each other. On a wooden shelf was a laminated menu of massages one might order (the manager was the masseuse; it was generally understood that she was not trained). Just-What-You-Need; Couples-Just-What-You-Need; Deep Deep (Really Get Into Those Troublesome Parts); A Sensory Trip For The Mind And Body And (Maybe Even) Spirit. The idea of engaging the manager to massage her was a horrifying breach of the manager’s mystery. No, she was here for the springs, three concrete pools heated by the geothermal wells the town was known for. She changed into her suit, and with a towel and novel tucked under her arm she went to submerge herself in the warm pool. A wind picked up, raking the palms and sending a wren spinning off into the sky and a shiver of delicious contentment though her.
She sank into water to her chin, flexed her calves and wiggled her feet. From her place in the pool she could see the building that enclosed the hottest of the springs mere steps across the patio. The building was twelve-sided, with wooden walls and a corrugated metal roof that angled upward toward a hole cut into the middle to let out steam. This was the prize, something to admire from afar, to anticipate its enclosing warmth, the steam that rose from the water’s surface and the hollow slap and gurgle of the water as it swayed into and out of the pipe that fed it. The wind gusted once again. She climbed out of the water, hurried to the twelve-sided building, and wrenched open the glass door only to discover that someone was in the pool already. A couple could be ignored, but another solo soaker had to be acknowledged. She dropped her towel gamely. “Just need a little warm-up,” she said.
“Of course.” The skin above the man’s upper lip was beaded with water, as if he wore a sparkling mustache. Laurel made a show of reading her book as they sat in silence in the haze and heat, but she couldn’t concentrate with him there—it felt unnatural to read in a stranger’s presence, and she had to hold the book at an awkwardly high angle to keep it out of the water. When she marked her place with the dust jacket and looked up, he was staring at her frankly. “How is it?” he asked.
Laurel liked it so far, but her tastes had changed. She used to read as a writer does. Now all she wanted was for the story to pick her up and carry her along and deposit her somewhere else, unaware of how she’d gotten there. The characters in the novels she read spoke to her like her friends did, regaled her with their suffering for which she truly did feel sympathy tinged with tawdriness, a voyeur’s pleasure in their misfortune. It wasn’t the misfortune she experienced as pleasure, it was the distance she stood from it. For the last eight years, as she’d followed Seth from teaching job to teaching job, she had been writing a novel. But it was a heavy, tethered form, and it dragged her down and held her under and she sensed with the thrumming attunement animals brought to their environment a shining place above her, and she stopped working on it and came up. The shining place wasn’t visible once you were in it, surrounded by it.
She knew her friends must feel sorry for her. They must say what they were supposed to say, Laurel got so busy with her job. What is her job? some must ask and others answer, She’s a copywriter, isn’t she? Yeah, I think she’s a copywriter.
They would not understand that only when you stopped wanting, stopped grasping, did the gift give itself to you.
Time, as sweet and dense as honeycomb.
Now she replied to the man’s question about whether she liked the novel she’d placed a careful arm’s length away. “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I’m a little farther in.”
The pellet stove didn’t feel like it was putting out much heat. Seth had just finished unpacking groceries—coffee, half-and-half, pasta, tomato sauce, bagged salad, wine—when he heard Juliette’s car in the dirt driveway and went out front to greet her because this would be the last time, though she didn’t know it. She stepped out of her car and dropped her bag at her feet and opened her arms. She would expect him to rush to her and pick her up and carry her into the house. Which he did, knocking her head against the doorway when he pivoted to enter. He apologized. He knew she was starting to hum inside like a windup toy and indeed she leaned her body in his arms to steer him toward what she guessed, correctly, was the bedroom. Seth was thirty-eight. She wouldn’t let him forget that he was ten years younger than her. “Can you just be a fucking feminist for once and stop nattering about it,” he’d said during their sole fight, and to his surprise she laughed at him.
He dumped her onto the bed and she bounced neatly back up to a sitting position. Her hands found his belt buckle.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he said.
“You sound like a stewardess. You can—” and she described a sexual endeavoring with such specificity he felt the embers of arousal in his stomach snuff out. The lingua franca among women in their forties was that they would inhabit and delight in themselves as they wished they had when they were younger, so Juliette inhabited and delighted in herself, speaking brashly of her body and its pleasures and needs. She cast off her shirt and hoisted her breasts out of her bra. Her nipples were like the soft eyes of a drunk. He had to tell her they couldn’t see each other anymore. He would not say he hoped they’d remain friends because he knew they would not remain friends. And because they would not remain friends, he had to wait until the last day of the trip to do so.
They had started out as friends. She was the director of communications for the college where he taught history. She was always going on terrible internet dates, and they’d have lunch and she’d tell him about them. “You never talk about Laurel,” she said one day. She knew Laurel a little—they saw each other occasionally at events at the college.
“There aren’t as many adventures attached to that subject,” he said, which was harsher than he meant to be. He was trying to compare a marriage of eight years, the stories he could squeeze out of it, to Juliette’s tumultuous flings. But she seemed pleased with his answer, seemed to think he was flirting.
‘There aren’t as many adventures attached to that subject,’ he said, which was harsher than he meant to be.
“I’m an adventure to you, am I?”
Seth laughed. “Yeah, you’d be an adventure.” It was funny that he was flirting back with this person he wasn’t at all attracted to, he thought, before realizing that he was, just this moment he was, less attraction than a swift shifting force inside him that unfolded itself in his chest like a pair of massive wings. The span of it shocked him. Later that day he texted Laurel to say that he’d forgotten there was a talk he had to stick around for, and she texted back an emoji of a face wearing a knowing smile. It seemed to say I’ll withhold judgment, mister, but whatever you’re doing is probably unnecessary. What he was doing was having sex with Juliette on her couch. To be caught between an urgency that built until he was sure there was nothing but its detonation and bright fallout in which he lost himself, his contours and earthliness, and then the process of return as he took on weight and shape again—in other words, metamorphosis—yes, maybe that wasn’t strictly necessary. His confusion might’ve turned to fatal regret had Juliette—naked and wiry as a dancing skeleton—not fetched a bottle of scotch and two glasses. They drank. She sat back and spread her legs like a man on a subway, and he crouched in front of her, knowing this proved his respect, how equitable he was in terms of ministering pleasure. She began to laugh and pushed his head away.
Now he got up from the bed in the rented house and pulled on his jeans. “Let’s go on a hike,” he said. The park was nearby, the Joshua trees furry and listing.
Laurel was walking along the hotel road, a luminous, jellied quality to the air. Morning, not quite seven o’clock, the distant white wind turbines like wavy lines of crosses planted at the feet of the mountains. A medical glove star-fished in the scrub. Blossoms on cacti like crepe-paper thumbprints. She never walked far, just up and down the road a few times. Back in the lobby, she spotted the man from the pool in the kitchen where coffee and breakfast were laid out. He was wrapped in a robe, cutting a piece of Meyer lemon cake. She’d intended to pour herself a cup of coffee but at the sight of him she continued out the door that led to the patio. She had a habit of avoiding men who made her feel this way, this prick and skitter of awareness. Before Seth the avoidance had a textured, erotic quality. She ignored those whom she knew she would come to love. And then put off saying so, waiting for a moment of unimpeachable integrity until it became a mind game, for what did one mean when one said I love you, and how could one know for sure at their tender age, and who would be crass enough, brave enough, crazy enough to say it first, and how would that person broach it, and would that person cry, and would that person look beautiful crying, and so forth. Now that she was married the avoidance couldn’t give. There was no crumbling of will to look forward to, no slow descent into the softness of beginnings. She turned away.
Not that she felt, with this man at the hotel, that there was anything to avoid except speculation. It was all on her side, she was sure.
After she’d had her coffee and fruit and toast slathered with Nutella, she swam laps in the cool pool, soaked in the warm pool, and entered the twelve-sided building where he was installed again. Apparently it couldn’t be avoided—when one person spent so much time in one particular pool, it might seem as if he was always being interrupted when in fact he was the interrupter, ignoring the natural flow of the place, the gently shifting occupancies.
She gave herself permission not to apologize as she joined him, and he said in a conspiratorial voice as she sank into the water, “Feel nice?” and Laurel realized her face must be dumb with pleasure.
She blushed. She didn’t want to play along, didn’t want to admire his angled collarbones and lean shoulders and blithely revealed interest.
“That book I was reading?” she said. “I do recommend it.”
“What was the title?”
She named the name of the novel that was a novel in name only.
“Thanks.” He yawned. It turned out that he was an actor. He used to do theater exclusively, but you couldn’t make a living doing that, he said. Now he did television. Television was easy money, just very limited people with large heads reciting lines some twenty-six-year-old Iowa grad had written. “Not to be gratuitous about it but I could write that shit! I could but I wouldn’t.”
He told her about a few of the plays he’d done. “So this may interest you. I did Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames a while back. Denis Johnson. It was in New York, at the Dimson. I got to talk to him a little and I’ll never forget what he said about himself. How he described himself. He said, and I quote, he was a ‘criminal hedonist turned citizen of life.’”
She didn’t reply for a moment. “I guess I find that strangely impersonal. Like it’s a process he’s describing, something outside himself.”
“Really?” he said. “I see it as turning from estrangement—I suppose that’s being outside yourself—to a radical intimacy.”
“How intimate is it to be a citizen of life, though?”
“Life’s a big thing. Most people don’t feel they have access to it. He was saying that he was staking a claim.”
Then he asked her what she did, and she said she was a freelancer, and he asked her what type, and she said the writer type, and he asked her what sorts of publications she wrote for, and she said alumni magazines, law firm blogs, the occasional professional association quarterly, making sure to maintain a hearty note of contentment in her voice. She was getting hot and rose to leave. He didn’t follow her.
Juliette shuffled around the kitchen as they made dinner, her socked feet thrust into Seth’s wool slippers. She said their relationship had become about more than the sex, of course.
“What do you mean of course?” he said.
“It was its basis and it’s not anymore. We didn’t get together to talk about Robespierre.”
“Why, is it bad?”
Her face cracked open with pity and triumph. “No! That’s not what I’m saying but your worry is touching.”
“I’m not worried. Funny you would interpret that as worry.”
“Funny? What else could it be?”
“Ever heard of pure curiosity?”
“The cologne for intellectuals?”
He didn’t laugh. He dumped the pasta into a colander, steam clouding his glasses.
“Speaking of curiosity, how often do you and Laurel have sex? I bet not as much as you used to. Same with us, but if anything I feel closer to you.”
It was unseemly of her to bring Laurel into it, though he knew it wasn’t really about Laurel. And he didn’t agree that they had sex less—it seemed nearly incessant, like a roller coaster that had no line so you rode it again and again, the front car this time, the back the next, the place where you knew your picture would be taken so you mimed pleasure with overly large gestures . . .
He felt weak, suddenly, and sat at the table under a sign that read Bless the Food Before Us and the Love Between Us and wondered if love, unbound, invisible, would really content itself ponging back and forth during some lame couple’s dinner. He doubted it.
Juliette poured the pasta back into the pot and mixed it with tomato sauce and veggie sausage sautéed with onions and peppers. Why had it come to his eating an early dinner in a freezing house with a woman who was not his wife? Yes, he was going to end things, but the affair would remain immutable. Maybe Laurel would never find out. Maybe she would. That wouldn’t change the fact of its happening, only whether it was received, rued, discussed, whether it hardened and grew into the blade that severed his marriage. He had not thought through this possible severing. Had he acted out of spite? No. Boredom? Not really. Think, he told himself. Examine your life. It was too disheartening to admit that there had been no good reason, that he had been acting on chemical impulse, his body no better than a circuit box, fuses connecting simply and mechanically and at the behest of nearly anyone who stopped before him. Actually, it had been his ego Juliette had appealed to. The ego tripped the body, it happened that way.
And yet there was an element in his marriage to Laurel of being held back, of an expanding circle of energy sucked back into incipience. Their routine was limiting. He knew Laurel must feel it, too, but some arrogance inside him ardently believed it was his uniqueness being snuffed out, not hers. His potential for being whoever he would’ve been without her. He thought of this person every so often with a tenderness he could not summon for himself.
He knew Laurel must feel it, too, but some arrogance inside him ardently believed it was his uniqueness being snuffed out, not hers.
Juliette was speaking. “. . . if we drove home, we could stay at your place for once.”
Seth shook his head. “The neighbors.”
“I have neighbors too.”
“And I’d basically have to turn around and drive right back out to get Laurel.”
“If we left now we’d be home in two hours. We’d have two nights with central heating.”
“I like it here.” He speared some pasta. “But Juliette, if you’re that cold, you should go. There’s no reason you should stay and suffer.”
“We could keep each other warm,” she said, pushing her bowl away.
“Juliette.”
“Stop saying my name.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are we ending things, is that it?”
He felt a rush of relief, then annoyance that she’d beaten him to it. “I need to.”
She shrugged. “There’s really nothing to end.”
“This is nothing? I guess it’s true you risked nothing. I didn’t.”
She took his hand and turned it over and kissed the inside of his wrist. Humiliatingly, he blinked back tears.
She was in the lobby reading the newspaper when the manager emerged from the recesses beyond the front desk carrying a fresh lemon cake. She made them dense and bitter, with a sticky, tangy glaze. “Warm enough?” she asked, proceeding into the kitchen.
“I am now,” Laurel called. “Thanks.”
“I see you’ve been enjoying the springs.”
“I love swimming, I love heat, I love solitude.” What else do you love? she thought. Buttercups?
“But don’t you feel,” the manager said as she reemerged, “that one experiences solitude most precisely in the company of others?”
“I lose myself with others.”
Cinnamon toast, melancholic piano riffs?
“I’m the person in a group always listening, asking questions,” Laurel continued. “It’s with women, what I’m describing. I’m very submissive with women.”
The manager rested her hand on the back of Laurel’s chair. “What do you need to be submissive about?”
“The fact of being another woman, I guess.”
She wondered what would happen if she took her hand in her own and said tell me how to be, if the manager had been waiting with perfect patience to anoint her new acolyte and with that question Laurel would ascend. Instead she returned to her room and texted Seth to ask if he was getting much writing done.
Sadly no, he replied.
Why not? she wrote.
Ellipses danced on her screen.
Robot writing fingers failing. All is discord, he texted.
“What’d she want?” Juliette said.
“Nothing.”
“Did you tell her you’re hers again, only hers?”
He had a quick, threadbare impulse to jab Juliette with his elbow. “You know what? I’m leaving too.”
“I thought you liked it here,” she said.
“I do. But I’m married.”
“It’s funny, you men, you take everything too seriously. You take yourselves too seriously, that’s why.”
They packed in silence, and Seth closed up the house. He stripped the sheets and left them in a lump on the floor, shut the lid of the pellet stove, placed the key in a basket on the kitchen counter, and locked the door behind him. Though he did not mean to, he pulled out of the driveway right behind Juliette and followed her car all the way home. He couldn’t bring himself to pass her. They reached Claremont in an hour and a half. He felt a little pang when she turned off the street they were on to the street that led to her neighborhood. She did not honk like he hoped she might.
When he let himself in at home, he half-expected to see Laurel there, but of course she was in Desert Hot Springs, where he would have to return to fetch her the day after tomorrow. He walked to the bedroom, lay down on her side of the bed, and pressed his face to her pillow. A vision of her came to him, her head thrown back in laughter. Imagine this, she said, thrusting the Claremont Courier into his lap. It was open to an obituary. Meredith Hickey née Caruso, it read. Imagine making that decision, she said. Willingly becoming a Hickey. She looked lovely laughing, unaware of herself, and he thought if only she could’ve always been unaware of herself what a beautiful woman she’d be. Then the vision flipped up its tail like a cellophane fortune-telling fish and her face betrayed that crucial self-consciousness that was beauty’s enemy. Laurel with her deadlines and licorice bridge mix, Laurel with her novels and oversized sleep T-shirts, Laurel with old aspirations he could hardly name. To do a different kind of writing. To live a different kind of life. Maybe he’d put them out of his mind to save her feeling like he was tracking her failure, or maybe it was his feeling for her, in which case he couldn’t fess up to it, wasn’t supposed to have it. Who was she, to occupy disappointment so easily?
The actor had turned on the timer to activate the jets and the water roiled and swirled, white froth icing the surface, bubbles clinging to his arms. She went in and under, where she was buffeted by sound like a diced carrot in a pot of boiling soup, and came up gasping.
“You’ll explode,” he said.
“I know.” She was smiling. She would be friendly, she decided. It was okay. She and Seth had gotten married at city hall. A few months later they threw a party at which Laurel didn’t drink because she was newly pregnant. The thought that she was pregnant—that was where life began. But she had a miscarriage and six years later she got pregnant again and had an abortion. She did it right away. Seth agreed.
The actor drifted as if propelled by the turbulent water closer and closer until she could feel his leg against hers, the silky slip of his skin. “Are you okay with this?” he asked. The jets shut off and she straddled him and they looked at each other and laughed. With one hand he undid the drawstring of his trunks and with the other plucked aside her suit. The water was clear again, as if they sat in the belly of a magnifying glass, and he pulled her onto him and she remembered how last year she and Seth had ridden in an aerial tram to the top of Mount San Jacinto. The glass car stopped halfway up and swayed back and forth, the engine heaving against its bulk. They were so exposed! The climb was two and a half miles and only as it happened was it possible—the second it stopped the mechanical world stopped too and they hung among the elements, the raw parts of nature, sky, sun, mountain, cloud, which appeared through the rounded windows as figures of emotion rather than matter if only they could break through to them and live among them properly, without distance. But they were not natural beings, they dangled in midair, gawking at the obdurate blueness. She placed her hands on the actor’s shoulders and leaned in close. His breath was puffing into the hollow of her throat. She let elation drain through her.
He threw himself into his writing, first with coffee and then with a small glass of aquavit. It all came back to him, Robespierre and the Feast of the Supreme Being, descending a papier-mâché mountain in a toga, Trump’s ride down his golden escalator, Sam Nunberg saying We could have had women in bikinis, elephants and clowns there. . . . It would have been the most gloriously disgusting event you’ve ever seen. False deities come to earth to govern by persuasion, cruelty, farce, force. He needed to work this out. Why hadn’t he worked this out in Joshua Tree? Fucking really wasn’t that rarefied an activity. He wished Laurel would text again to ask how the writing was going so he could say it was going, at least, and he was sorry he’d been flippant with her earlier, and tomorrow they’d stop for a date shake on their way home.
She was returning her dirty breakfast dishes to the trolley outside the kitchen window when she saw, in a room whose doors were wide open, the manager giving the actor a massage. She had avoided knowing which room was his but now she came closer and there he was, dressed in cloth shorts, lying on a folding table on his stomach while the manager chopped at his back with the sides of her hands. She said something and he turned over and she kneaded his calves and feet. His head lolled.
“You can come in,” the manager said.
She entered the room and went to stand beside him. His eyes were closed, his eyelashes like black threads.
“You can touch him if you want.”
“I’m not going to touch him.”
The manager’s kneading slowed and then stopped. “You eat with your eyes only?” she said.
Again she remembered the view of the Coachella Valley from the tram. According to the brochure she was given when Seth bought their tickets, the palms that grew on the valley floor were surrounded by a system of sand dunes that lizards swam through to escape from predators. The lizards had shovel-shaped jaws, and scales on their feet to give them traction. Still they were being crushed by the tires of off-road vehicles. She fished the brochure from her pocket and opened it for Seth at the top of the mountain. She enlisted his sympathy.
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