The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  These lobbies all look alike: blue and silver, carpets with a pattern, a de trop glass elevator and a fountain in the shape of a dolphin or cherub. The staff behind the desk even starts to clone from city to city. The lounges are always done in maroon, with round leatherette chairs that look like teacups and spotty highball glasses.

  “What can I get you?” the waitress says. Are they called waitresses or barmaids these days? She is wearing a silver plate over her left breast that reads MARY LOUISE.

  “Well, Mary Louise,” I say, sounding as pleasant as possible, “what do you recommend?”

  “Number one, I’m not Mary Louise. I’m wearing her apron because mine got stolen last night along with my car and my house keys by my no-good motherfucker of a boyfriend. Number two,” she pauses, “this is a bar. Our specialties of the house are whiskey straight and whiskey on the rocks. So do you want to have a drink or are you just wasting my day like every other sorry asshole in this place?”

  I look around, but I am the only customer. I decide she must be distressed over her misfortune of the night before. “I’ll have a gin and tonic,” I say.

  “No gin.”

  “Canadian Club and ginger.”

  “Look mister,” the girl says. “We’ve got Jack Daniel’s and a faucet of Coke. Take your pick. Or come back after the truck delivers more stock today.”

  “Well, I see. I’ll have Jack Daniel’s, straight up.”

  She flashes me a smile—she is sort of pretty, actually—and walks away. Roach clip earrings swing in her ears. Roach clips. Rebecca taught me that. We had been walking on a boardwalk at the beach and I picked up this long, trailing feather-and-bead creation. I was trying to place it as an Indian artifact, or a new tourist item from over the border. “That’s a roach clip, Dad,” Rebecca had said casually, taking it from me and throwing it into a trash bin. “You use it to smoke pot.”

  The waitress comes back with my drink and fairly tosses it onto the table so that it spills in a clear amber puddle. Rather than face her wrath, I mop it up with a napkin. HOLIDAY INN! the napkin says, in embossed gold letters. The waitress climbs onto a bar stool and rests her cheek on her hand. She stares at me.

  I take a sip of my drink and try to put this woman out of my mind. I do not normally look at women, they tend to confuse me. But this one is different. Not only is she wearing those feather-type earrings; she also sports a red leather skirt that barely covers her buttocks, and a studded bustier. Her stockings, which are white, are covered with fat black polka dots that stretch over the muscles of her thighs. She is wearing far too much makeup, but there is an art involved; one eye is done in violet, the other in green.

  I try to think of Jane in such a get-up and I laugh out loud.

  The waitress gets off her stool and walks up to me. She points a red fingernail at my throat. “You listen to me, pervert. You get your eyes back in your head and your dick back in your shorts.”

  She says this with such hatred, with such conviction, although she does not know me, that I feel obliged to reply. She has already turned on her heel when I say, “I’m not a pervert.”

  “Oh yeah? Then what are you?” She does not turn around.

  “Well, I’m a scientist.”

  The waitress spins and sizes me up. “Funny. You’re better looking than those polyester pants types.”

  I look down at my trousers. They are wool, summerweight. The waitress snorts, a laugh. “I’m just yanking your chain.” She pulls a compact mirror out of I don’t know where exactly—it looks like her pantyhose—and bares her teeth. When she finds a spot of lipstick she rubs it vigorously with her thumb.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your car,” I say. “And your boyfriend.”

  The waitress snaps the mirror shut and stuffs it, this time, into the crevice of her bustier. The pink plastic edge juts out a bit from between her breasts. “He was a louse. Thanks.” She looks in the direction of the front desk, and when she decides that nobody is paying attention, she swings her leg over one of the leatherette chairs nearby and sits down. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all.” I have always wondered about women like her, the kind you find superimposed on X-rated videocassettes or packages for sexual aid devices. There have been several women for me other than Jane—two before and one during the marriage, for a brief stint, a diver on one of my marine excursions. None of them, however, acted or looked like this. This waitress is more than a woman, she is a specimen. “Have you worked here long?” I care nothing about the answer. I just want to watch the way her lips move, fluid, like coagulating rubber.

  “Two years,” she says. “Just during the day. At night I work in a twenty-four-hour mini-mart. I’m saving to move to New York City.”

  “I’ve been there. You’ll like it.”

  The waitress squints at me. “You think I’m some Nebraska field girl,” she says. “I was born in New York. That’s why I’m going back.”

  “I see.” I pick up my drink, and swirl it around. Then I dip my finger in and run it lightly around the edge of the glass. When my fingertip reaches a certain level of dryness the friction causes a sound to moan out of the glass. A sound that, frankly, reminds me of my whales.

  “That’s cool,” the girl says. “Teach me.”

  I show her; it isn’t difficult. When she gets the hang of it her face lights up. She gets three or four more glasses and fills them to varying levels with Jack Daniel’s. (Why tell her it works with water, if I can get a free drink?) Together we create a melancholy, screeching symphony.

  The waitress laughs and grabs my hands. “Stop! Stop, I can’t take it anymore. It hurts my ears.” She holds my hands for a second, looking down at my fingers. “You’re married.” A statement—not an accusation.

  “Yes,” I say. “She’s not here, though.”

  I do not mean anything by that; I am just stating the facts. But this girl (who I imagine is closer to Rebecca’s age than mine) leans forward and says, “Oh, really” She is so near that I can smell her breath, sweet, like Certs. She lifts herself out of the chair and creeps forward on the table, led by her hands, which reach over the boundary of decorum and grab the collar of my shirt. “What else can you teach me?”

  I have to admit that I have a vision of this waitress naked, with a tattoo somewhere unspeakable, telling me in her rough and husky voice to do it to her again, and again. I see her in my safe aqua suite in this Holiday Inn, reclining in her leather bra and her polka-dot hose, just like a cheap movie. It would be so incredibly easy. I have not told her my name, or my profession: it would be an opportunity to be somebody else for just a little while.

  “You can’t leave here,” I say. “You’re the only one working.”

  The waitress wraps her arms around my neck. She smells of musk and perspiration. “Just watch me.”

  I have been given two room keys. I slip one out of my pocket, along with a five dollar bill for my drink. She deserves a hell of a tip. The key hits the rim of the whiskey glass, and rings. Then I stand up, like I imagine very suave men in Hollywood do, and without turning back or saying a word I walk to the bank of elevators in the lobby.

  When I am inside the elevator, with the doors closing, I lean back and breathe quickly. What am I doing? What am I doing? Is it infidelity, I wonder, if you are pretending to be someone that you aren’t?

  I let myself into the hotel room and I am relieved by its overwhelming familiarity. There is the bed on the left, and the bathroom behind the door, and the thin sanitary strip around the toilet that the maid leaves every morning. There is the folding stand for luggage, and the room service menu, and the wavy patterned curtains made of some flammable substance. Everything is just as I have left it, and there is some solace in this.

  I lie on the bed, my hands at my sides, completely naked. The air conditioner, making the obligatory hum that all hotel cooling units do, stirs the hair on my chest. I picture the face of this waitress, her lips moving down the length of my body like wa