Free Fast Lanes by Jayne Anne Phillips

move. Sooner or later you’ll see your chance.”

Counting

     
1. Hungry
    H e is twenty-six. His lover is an aging dancer who no longer lives in New York. She writes to him of Mexican coastal towns. She says they are bathed in a fierce light. The ocean frightens her.
    In his room, a bed and one round table. Photograph of an elephant graveyard in Kenya. The animals knelt there on their knees. He has little food but he is seldom hungry. Lately, when his friends drive away, the dog whines to go with them. Not to be left alone with him.
     
2. Landing
    H e is haunted by speckled windows of taxis. They had taken a cab home late. They were drunk and had no money. Driver’s hand open beside her face. She explained a quarter was all she had, she’d thought she had more.
    At four A.M. cars down the block were shells. The driver looked at her. What the hell, get out.
    It was a starry night. The driver gone, he felt her near him. Blank windows of the buildings were a color he could not explain. Shadowed grey, sides of oxen. If he touched the glass panes, he felt they would move back slow beneath his hand. Old walls. Inside, the tilted rooms. And wooden stairs beaten by shoes.
     
3. Samsara
    T o cry is to resign yourself, she said. That’s why you are bitter. You have accepted so little.
    She was washing dishes in the sink. The pipes were frozen again. The toilet was backed up so they used bathrooms in restaurants or down the hall when someone was home. She had to heat water on the stove to wash her underwear. Her fingers through the wet silk seemed to waver, her smooth nails that were colored dark mauve as the privates of animals. Her knuckles were crossed with tiny cracks.
     
4. Ambergris
    T hey met at a used book store near Union Square. She was looking for Zola’s
L’Assommoir
. She said it was a textbook on revenge. Her eyes were thinly lined with black. Lustrous.
    She was a dancer and she trained her own company. The Zola was a prose she could imitate in form. You train them in revenge? he asked. Revenge, she said, is a way to learn desire.
    He could smell a musky oil on her skin. Ambergris. The sleeves of her shirt were creased and she was thin. She wore a toy watch around her wrist on a narrow ribbon. Her pants were overlarge and khaki. He imagined her in a bathtub. Her make-up running, her eyes coming clean. Her shoulders. I supposed we were born with desires, he told her.
    She laughed. We are born with nothing, she said.
     
5. Mosquitoes
    T hat first summer they sold their cars, rented a shack in Vermont. The floors slanted. They had no screens for the windows. Mosquitoes made shadows on the wall. Blood suckers, she cursed. Smears of blood on her arms. Insect squat on legs that are just one hair.
    There was a hard edge to their fucking. She was immersed. She felt forgiven and she led him where she wanted to leave him. But he held her, knew how to use his hands. Knew weapons and how to use them. The third week he found a rabbit in a trap and killed it, one blow, with a hammer. Suffering, he said.
    Heat storms. Dead still before the flash. An oak splintered, fell crushing the side roof. At daybreak the loud saw startled her. She watched him cutting branches, his face set hard. He worked slow, gained an angle for the teeth. Sliced the tree in lengths and split each piece. Exposed to the heart, the damp white wood had the look of flesh.
     
6. Poor
    H e consistently destroyed his manuscripts. She insisted on keeping what was left in a safety deposit box.
    Her dance company had disbanded. There was no more money. They wore the same clothes for weeks, sweaters she swapped for in junk shops. Those months they ate the dollar breakfast at McCrory’s. The bride dolls were feverish in their cellophane. Outside the broken drunks lined up. Her face was taut.
    You’re a pretty boy, she said. Why don’t you hustle old men.
    One of the drunks leaned blind into the window. Yellow stubbled jowls. He breathed on his hands. They saw