What Protects Me

Lisa Hail woke me with her mouth on the inside of my thigh, the way she does everything, without asking and without hurrying, with the whole house still dark around us.

My name is Lolita Dawes, and I was the waitress. That’s what I was when Lisa and her husband Marcus started sitting in my section at a restaurant on a two-lane road outside Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a married couple from Connecticut with money older than my whole town, out of the same Greenwich world as Adrien Cole’s house, where a woman named Zaira Lauron got taken up out of an ordinary job the same way I was about to be. The one time Zaira sat across a table from me she watched me the whole meal and never said a word about it, and I knew she knew exactly what she was looking at. The Hails sat in my section all one fall and then asked me, in my own dining room with the chairs up on the tables, to come live inside their marriage.

I said yes. That’s the short version, and the long version starts where every day in that house started, which was Lisa.

Nobody in my life has ever once woken me up nice. Mama woke me with the hall light. Ray woke me with the television. All them years of doubles woke me with a phone on the nightstand going off like a smoke detector. So the first morning that woman put her mouth on me before the sun was up, in Greenwich, in a bed the size of my old living room, I came up out of sleep swinging and like to caught her in the ear, and she laughed at me, low, the one laugh she’s got, and went right back to what she was doing.

That was the first week. By summer I’d learned to lie still.

She had the sheet pushed down off me and her hair loose and cool across my stomach, and she was taking her time about the road she was on, up the inside of one leg and across and down the other, with her hands flat on my hips to keep me where she wanted me. Lisa Hail doesn’t do one thing in a bed by accident. If her hands are on your hips it’s so you can’t come up off the mattress, and if her mouth is on your thigh instead of on your pussy, it’s so you’ll say where, out loud, in the word.

“Lisa.”

“Mm.”

“It ain’t even light out, and we got a plane.”

“The plane is ours, baby, it leaves when we get there, and I’ve been lying here awake since before light thinking about your thighs,” she murmured into my skin, and kept on with the road she was on like I hadn’t said a word.

“You been awake since before light thinking about my thighs and this is as far as you got?”

“I’m a careful woman.”

“You’re a slow woman.”

“Mm.” She bit the soft part of my leg, not hard, and moved up an inch. “Say where, then, since you’re in such a hurry.”

I said where. I said it in the word she wanted, and she put her mouth on my pussy, finally, and I quit having opinions about the plane.

The thing nobody who’s ever met that woman at a party would believe is that she’s slow. In a room full of people she decides everything in about a breath and you can watch the whole room rearrange itself around what she decided, and in a bed she’ll spend forever on one spot like a woman reading the same page of a book over and over just because she likes the page. She licked my pussy long and flat and easy with her thumbs holding me open and didn’t change one thing about it when I started making noise, and that right there is the difference. Every man I ever had took noise for a green light and went faster. Lisa takes it as proof she was right, and keeps on being right.

I got a hand down in her hair, which she lets me do, and put my other hand over my own mouth, which she will not allow.

“Take that hand off your face, Lolita, I did not get up in the dark for the edited version.” She said it without lifting her head, with her breath hot on me. “Nobody in this house is sleeping but him, and he can sleep through a hurricane.”

“Dolores is down the hall and that woman can hear a mouse breathe.”

“Dolores has worked in this house since before the paint was dry and has heard a whole lot worse out of me than she’ll ever hear out of you.” She slid two fingers up into my pussy slow, curling, with her tongue on my clit, the way she knows I like it and has known since the second week. “Hand, baby.”

I took my hand off my mouth and put it flat on the headboard instead, and said her name to the ceiling.

That’s the other thing nobody would believe, and it’s the whole reason I’m in this bed and not in my own. She learned me. I flinch at a cold hand, so she warms her hands on the coffee cup before she touches me in the morning, and when I asked her how she knew that she said, “You jumped, the first time, and I don’t need telling twice.” I won’t come with my eyes shut, so she talks to me, which she does for nobody else alive, I’ve asked her and I’ve asked him. And the place on my neck under the hoop is the place, and if she goes there first I’m done before she’s started, so she saves it. She was saving it that morning, and I knew she was saving it, and the knowing was half the thing.

Marcus came to the door with a pair of cups of coffee before the sun was up and stood there in his trousers and no shirt and watched his wife eat me alive in the grey light, and he didn’t say a word and he didn’t cross the sill.

He waits. That’s Marcus Hail for you. The man stands in doors.

I looked at him over the top of Lisa’s head with my hand still on the headboard and my hips moving on her mouth, and I didn’t look away, and I’d learned that part early. He wants to be looked at while he watches. It’s the only thing I’ve ever found that man wants that he won’t ask for out loud.

“Come here, you been standing in that door long enough,” I managed, finally, with my voice gone to pieces.

“In a minute.” He set one cup on the dresser and kept the other. “I would like to see her finish you first.”

“Marcus, put the cup down and come here to me before she kills me.”

“She is almost there, Lolita, and I have watched my wife do this for the whole of our marriage, and I know the look on your face from here.”

“You know the look on my face from the door.”

“I know it from the driveway.”

Lisa took her mouth off me long enough to say, “Hush, the both of you, I’m working down here,” and put it back, and went for the neck with her free hand finally, two fingers up under my ear where the hoop sits, and I came with my husband’s coffee going cold on the dresser and my hand white on the headboard and my whole body going up off that mattress in spite of her hands, and she rode it out with her mouth on my clit the entire time and didn’t stop until I pushed at her head, and then she stopped, that second, which is the rule in this house and the only rule I’ve watched both of them keep without fail.

I lay there with my chest going and the light coming up grey in the big windows.

“There she is, right on time, with her eyes open,” Lisa said, and wiped her mouth on my thigh, and reached up and took the coffee off him without looking, and drank some, and handed it to me. “You can come in now, Marcus, the show is over.”

“I was not aware it was a show.”

“You were standing in the door like it was a show.”

“I stand in doors, Lisa, you have known this about me since before the sofa.”

I said my husband. I heard it come out of my own head. He’s not my husband. He’s her husband, and I’ve been inside their marriage since the winter like a woman who moved into a house that was already built, and I still don’t have a word for what I am in that house that I’d say out loud to my own mother.

* * *

My name is Lolita Dawes, and I carried plates my whole working life in a restaurant with twenty-two covers on a two-lane road outside Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and that right there is the whole of my qualifications for a house like that one.

It’s more than it sounds like. A floor teaches a woman faces. Not what people say, folks will say whatever they need to say to get the check and get gone. Faces. A man who tips big and never once looks up at you ain’t being generous, he’s being watched by the woman across the table from him, and the tip is for her. A woman who reads your name off your tag and says it twice is fixing to send something back to the kitchen. A couple that comes in quiet and leaves quiet and keeps sitting in your section all fall is not there for the ham, and I knew that early, and I let them keep coming, and I’ve been trying to work out ever since whether that was me deciding or me getting decided on by somebody else.

Both, I think. Most things are both.

They came back after the leaves turned and asked me, properly, in my own dining room with the chairs up on the tables, and Lisa went and sat in a cold car for the better part of an hour so I could tell her husband no without an audience. I didn’t tell him no. That winter they flew me to Monaco with my shoes off, and I asked him every question I had off the back of a guest check, and the last one was the only one that mattered, and I asked it with one finger flat on the table between us.

I have the most to lose here. So what protects me.

And he told me the truth, which was nothing I could hold in my hand.

I went anyway. I’ve been living inside that answer since the day I came, in a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, with a woman who warms her hands before she touches me and a man who stands in doors, and the answer hasn’t moved, and neither have I. The money moved at the front, the way he said it would. The deed to the apartment over Mr. Pruitt’s brother’s garage came the week I left with my name on it and nobody else’s, and the key to that apartment hangs on a shoelace around my neck, where it’s hung since the day he handed it to me, and everybody in that house thinks it’s sentiment.

It ain’t sentiment. It’s the one thing in this whole arrangement that was mine before they ever pulled into the lot.

* * *

Marcus took his coffee back off me and sat down on the edge of the bed, on my side, and put his hand flat on my hip bone and left it there, which is his habit and the only one of his I’ve never once seen him use on his wife.

He doesn’t move the hand. He puts it down and waits, like a man setting a glass on a bar and letting it sit until somebody picks it up, and if you want more of him you take the hand and put it where you want it, and if you don’t, it stays a hand on a hip, warm and still, till you get up. Lisa told me once he’s never done that to her in all their married life, and I believe her, since she said it looking at the hand with a face I couldn’t read.

“We leave the house at seven,” he said. “Noé has the car at Nice by noon their time, and we are aboard by two if the coast road is kind, and it is never kind.”

“Mister, you just stood there and watched your wife do that to me, and the first thing out of your mouth is a schedule.”

“The second thing out of my mouth is that you are beautiful when she does that to you, and I have not got a word in my vocabulary for the sound you make at the end of it, and I have been looking for one since the first morning.” He didn’t smile. He never smiles when he says a thing like that, which is why a thing like that lands. “The schedule was the first thing because I am a coward about the second thing at that hour of the morning.”

Lisa laughed at him from the pillow, low, with her arm over her eyes.

“He practiced that in the kitchen with the coffee going, baby, don’t let him tell you different.”

“I did not practice it, and I resent the word.”

“You stood at the island with the coffee going and said it to the window, Marcus, I heard you through the floor.”

“I said a version of it to the window,” he admitted, “and the version was worse.”

“How much worse?”

“It had the word luminous in it.”

“Lord.” I took his hand off my hip and put it on my pussy, where I was still wet and still going, and held it there with my own hand on top of his. “Now say the better version, to me, with your hand where it is, and leave luminous in the kitchen.”

So he did, with his fingers on me and his eyes on my face, and he said it slow, the way he does, in that voice he uses for everything, and it was filthy and it was specific, my mouth and my pussy on his hand and the way my titties sit when I lie on my back and my nipples going hard under his wife’s eye and the sound I make, and the man said it the way he reads a contract, every word weighed and not one of them wasted, and by the end of it I’d come a second time against his hand with my knees up and his wife’s hand holding mine on the sheet.

Then he stood up, and went and washed his hands at the bathroom sink, and came back out buttoning a shirt.

That’s him. Both of them, really. Everything they do in a bed they do all the way, and then they get up and are dressed people again inside of a minute, and I’m still lying there with my hair everywhere trying to remember what day it is.

* * *

The clothes were laid out on the chair.

They’d been laid out every morning since I came, by Dolores, who runs the house, and I’d quit seeing it the way you quit seeing a picture on a wall. A dress for the plane and a sweater for the plane, a bag already packed that I hadn’t packed, shoes I hadn’t bought set side by side under the chair with the toes lined up like they were waiting on inspection.

I stood there with the sheet around me and looked at it a second longer than I had the day before.

“What is it, you’re looking at that chair like it owes you money,” Lisa said behind me, watching me look. She watches me the way Marcus watches a room, which is all the time, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“Nothing. Dolores picked the green again, and I was standing here trying to remember if I like green.”

“Dolores picks the green when you’re flying, baby, because you look like money in the green and you look like a nap in the blue, and she has opinions.”

“I got opinions too, I just haven’t been asked for one since I got here.”

“Then wear something else, baby, the closet’s full and the door isn’t locked.” She said it easy, from the pillow, and meant it, and I knew she meant it, and that wasn’t the thing.

“Name me one thing that’s in it.”

“In the closet?”

“In my closet. Name me one thing hanging in there that ain’t green or blue.”

She thought about it with her arm still over her eyes. “There’s a yellow.”

“You put the yellow in there.”

“Dolores put the yellow in there, and I told her to, and you have never once worn it, which is a sin before God.” She moved the arm and looked at me. “Wear the yellow, then.”

“I don’t know where the yellow is, Lisa. That’s what I’m standing here telling you.”

I couldn’t have told you what else was in that closet, and that was what had stopped me. A winter and a spring of a closet somebody else fills, and I didn’t know what hung in there. I knew the Bright Leaf’s walk-in cooler better than I knew my own clothes, where the butter was and where Dovey hid the good pie tins, and I could not have put a hand on one dress of my own in the dark.

I wore the green.

* * *

We were in the car with the gate closing behind us, Marcus up front with Dennis who drives the Greenwich car, Lisa and me in the back with her hand on my knee, high up, still, the way she leaves it in a car, and the whole green length of that town going by outside with its stone walls and its mailboxes with no names on them.

“Did you tell Carol Ann we’re gone,” Lisa said, to the window, not to anybody in particular.

“Carol Ann knew we were gone before I did,” Marcus said from the front. “She sent a card.”

“To the house we’re leaving.”

“To the house we are arriving at. It will be on the hall table when we walk in. It always is.”

His phone went at the top of the hill.

He looked at the screen about as long as it takes to read a name, and said, “Pull over here a minute, Dennis,” and got out, and walked down the shoulder of the road with the phone at his ear and his back to the car and his free hand in his pocket, and stood there by somebody’s stone wall talking.

Lisa watched him go.

She didn’t say anything and she didn’t move her hand off my knee, but her face changed, and I know that face. It’s the face she wears when a man at a party says the wrong thing to the wrong woman and she’s decided not to deal with it yet. Her eyes stayed on his back the whole time he was out there, and he was out there a good while, and when he turned around and came back up the shoulder with the phone in his pocket, her face went back to being her face a full second before he got to the car door.

I watched her watch him. It’s what I do, and I didn’t mean anything by it yet.

“Everything all right, or do I need to get out of this car,” she said, when he was back in his seat.

“Business.”

“Mm.”

And that was the entire conversation, and Dennis pulled back out onto the road, and Lisa’s hand on my knee didn’t move an inch, and I sat there in the green dress with the key on its shoelace under it against my chest and looked out at Connecticut going by and thought, well, Lolita.

Well.

Nobody had asked me one thing in that car, and nobody had lied to me in it either, and I was sitting between those facts the way I’ve been sitting between them since the day I came, with my hands in my lap, like a woman on a plane counting the seats.

By the time we got to the little airfield he had his hand on the back of his wife’s neck and she had her head on his shoulder and they were talking about the coast road and whether Aldo had opened the house, and the phone was in his pocket, and the whole thing had sunk back down under the morning like a rock into a farm pond.

“He opened it,” Marcus was saying. “He always opens it, and every year you ask.”

“I ask because one year he won’t, and I want to be the one who knew.”

“Lisa.”

“Mm.”

“The house is open.”

I took my shoes off on the second step from the top of the airstairs. Nobody ever told me to take them off. I’d worked that out the first time off a carpet and a smell, and I’ve done it every time since, and the woman with the shoes took them out of my hand and didn’t make a thing of the habit.

I didn’t count the seats out loud this time.

I sat down in the one by the window, and Lisa sat down across from me with her book, and Marcus sat where he could see us both, and the door came up, and we left.