Leona's flight with Alan

I keep just writing parts I feel like writing instead of in sequence. I think maybe that's healthy. I think maybe reading Ann Beattie again makes my dialogue a Walt Disney'ish "Apprenticeship" of her Noel Coward.


“So how balanced are you?” Alan asked. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he was adjusting the position of the shoe on his knee, so that it would not tip.

“Which is how balanced, again?”

“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever and ever.”

“Which is what I’m saying,” Leona said. “That’s not a situation I would wish on anyone.”
They were having the conversation they always seemed to be having, and he was doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. Someone in the room over was smoking and the scent seemed to be seeping in. She smelled it more and more.

“Whatever,” he said, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed, tumbling over and landing to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers he had kept half-tucked beneath every bed he occupied in the past two weeks.

“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” she said.

He flipped on his side, peeking over the rumpled duvet to see where the sneaker had landed. He giggled, and then said, in the high, overeager voice of a child. “You’re smothering me?”

“This is the situation,” she said, pointing at the shoes. "It's like a Ouija board."

“Riiiiight,” he said. "It's the situation if you were a shoe. And if I drop you.”

“And if you were a shoe.”

“Which we’re not.”

“Right—because we have agency.”

“Right,” she said, “Which is why the forever and ever situation can never take hold.”

“Right,” he said, “Because someone will always move first.”

“Yeah,” she said, “Or you’ll lose your job. Pretend your dad gets sick and you have to get back to LA.”

“Mmmmm. I really want those curly fries they serve on Southwest,” he said. She gave him a look. He said, “I know I don’t take these things seriously.”

“Ugh,” she said, “Neither do I. Which is the whole problem—right?”

“If it’s not a problem with you, it’s not a problem with me,” he said. And he rolled to the edge of the bed, slipping his feet into his slippers, standing up, stretching with a crack of knuckles. “I’m going to go get us some ice.”

In the hallway, a woman with extraterrestrial eyeshadow gave him a long stare. Her bathrobe was open at the collar and he peeked—breasts like mangoes, mushrooms, whatever grew toward the ground, he couldn’t remember how things grew. Potatoes grew under the ground, tomatoes grew on vines. Mushrooms were natural—a fungi—a different kingdom. The word he had wanted was mangoes, but there was something bizarrely exoticised and racist-sounding about a mango, even though most every country ate them now. The slippers were thin enough that he could feel the carpet beneath his feet—swish, swash. Its patterning showed zillions of monkeys, climbing zillions of rope ladders, woven of plants in endless patterns of locking diamonds. It was good to be in a hotel like this, it was nice, and nice to hold a bucket of ice, and nice to see the woman in the bathrobe with the hallucinatory eyeshadow. When they’d first started traveling like this, absorbing the stench of the hotels, all the other patrons always seemed to be traveling in schoolgroups; there had never been any icebuckets. Back in the room, she was maybe taking a shower, maybe reading—he had a few minutes. Past the ice-room, a second hallway veered to the right—more numbers listed on the doors: 1305, 1307. A roomservice tray, half-finished, left-out. He leant down and plucked a half sandwich, chewing it for a few bites before putting it out on the next tray. Hopefully there weren’t cameras there, watching him. He was a very sloppy guest. The hallway ended on 1349. The year of Columbus, he thought, and then remembered that was definitely not it. He seemed to be losing his grasp on his knowledge.

When he walked back, holding the ice-bucket, stopping to fill the ice-bucket, and continuing back to the room, he noticed the monkeys in the carpet—they were upside down now, having not been designed to be seen from the angle of departure, and he remembered how he composed the clever phrase he would use to tell her about it when he’d come back in the room. But when he came back in the room, with the ice-bucket, having just eaten the bites of that sandwich—chicken avacado—was when he realized she was gone. Her purse was still there, her phone, wallet—with the money inside, he later recognized—and a half-eaten cookie on the bedside table, the mark of her chapstick on the glass of tepid tea. The one note: A business card, left facing the door on the bright, creased white duvet of the still made-bed.

“Leslie Bennet,” was the name on the card. A mobile phone number had been circled, and in hand, writing said, “Call me.”

Alan sat on the edge of the bed. He flipped the card—its reverse was blank—and put it down on the bed. He didn't feel like calling. It could be a prank, a ruse, she could have just left a card on the bed and stepped out--maybe to deal with the woman next door who had been smoking. In the room was her stuff and the blank TV. He
turned on the TV. There were a few channels but there was nothing on. In a minute he would call the number, but for a moment, he just needed to do this. He could still smell her in the room—a citrus shampoo, worn sneakers, the damp bindings of the rain-soaked books she had carried with her. On TV, the newscaster smiled. He turned the TV off. He gave the number on the card a call, and flipped it over. With a complimentary hotel pen, writing on the blank side, he wrote down the time. An instinct he did not know he had told him he would need to remember this moment, and to try to trace it back from here. It had started at 12.04, in a town not West still of Jacksonville, East of the Union Jack bar they'd stopped in ironically and spent too much time uncomfortable under the uncomfortable flags. He thought, as a priest bemoans the death of a child who dies a virgin, of how she would now never make it to Graceland; It was a place he himself had no interest in going to, but its loss now struck him as a specific tragedy—palpable as dropped fruit.