The Man Who Did Not Move

My wife told me to sit down and I sat down, and that alone should have told me what kind of night it was going to be, since I am Marcus Hail and I do not sit when somebody tells me to sit, not in a boardroom, not at Adrien Cole’s table, and not in my own house with the port lit up under the terrace like somebody had spilled a jewelry box down the hill.

“Stay there,” Lisa warned me, “and don’t give me the face, Hail, because I have seen the face, I married the face, and the face has never once gotten you out of anything with me.”

She had on the black lace, and the heels were still on, and the lace with the heels on means she is not planning on being asked anything, she is planning on telling. She stood in the doorway with the hall light behind her and her hair down and one hand flat on the frame, looking at me in my own chair like a woman deciding whether to keep a purchase.

“I’m staying, Lis. Look at me. Look how hard I’m staying, there is not a man on this hill staying harder than this right now, and somebody said something about a drink a while ago and I have been sitting here like a good boy and there is no drink.”

“Mm.”

That is her whole vocabulary when she wants it to be, one syllable, and it has ended more of my speeches than any board I ever faced.

Lolita Dawes came in behind my wife, and Lolita is the woman who lives with us, in the house and in the bed, in the champagne satin from the boat party, cut to the waist in the back, with the hoops she sleeps in and the key on the shoelace she will not take off for anybody. She came in the way she comes into any room, which is the way a waitress comes into a dining room, reading every face before anybody has said a word, since a waitress is what she was when we found her, on a two-lane outside Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and my wife had decided about her before my steak was gone. She read me in the chair and she read Lisa in the door and she laughed, the loud one she does not manage.

“Lord, y’all started without me,” she hollered, and put a hand on her hip. “I’m in here in the good dress, I did my face, I did the whole thing, and this man is already sitting down looking like somebody took his car keys and told him to wait by the phone. Lisa. Look at him. Look at his face.”

“I’ve seen the face.”

“Nobody started anything, Carolina,” I told her. “I got told to sit, so I’m sitting. I asked for a drink, so look where the drink is. That’s the whole story so far, and I’d like to know the rest of it, since the two of you clearly know the rest of it.”

“You got a drink.” Lisa pointed. “Right there. Look at it.”

And there it was, on the little table at my elbow where it could be seen and not reached without leaning, which is a thing she does, and she knows it gets noticed, and it goes unmentioned, which is my part.

Lisa crossed the room to the chair, not fast, with the heels going on the stone and the lace doing what lace does when a woman with a body walks in it, and she did not come to me the way she comes to me, which is like a wife, with a hand on my shoulder on the way past to something else. She came to me the way Lolita comes to me. She put a knee on the arm of the chair and a hand in my hair and she pulled my head back against the leather and looked down into my face from close, and she said, low, in the voice she uses in bed when it matters, “Hands on the arms of the chair, Marcus. Where I can see them.”

“Ummm.” A laugh got out of me, the short one. “Okay. Okay. What are you two up to. No, hold on, y’all are up to something, I can see it on both of you, this is some nasty shit, isn’t it. This is about to be some nasty shit, I can tell by the dress.”

“Hands, Hail.”

“Lis, come on, I have been interested in you since the Clinton administration and my hands have never once been the problem in this marriage, you can ask anybody, you can ask her.”

“Don’t ask me,” Lolita called from the door. “I like his hands.”

“She likes my hands.”

“I know what she likes,” my wife answered, and she did not move her own hand out of my hair, “and I know what you like, and I know where those hands go the minute you get interested, and tonight they are going on the chair. Hands.”

I put my hands on the arms of the chair.

My wife does not do a show in a bed. She decides, and then she is thorough. The show was Lolita. That was the split, and the split was mine, and the two of them had been in the room the night it got said out loud, which had not crossed my mind until that chair.

So when Lisa put her mouth on my throat with her hand still in my hair and ran the other hand down the front of my shirt without undoing a single button, just tracing where they were, slow, the way a woman does when she wants you to feel every one of them go undone later, the only honest thing in me came out into her hair. “Okay, what is this. Lis. What is this, tell me what this is while I can still follow a sentence, because I can feel the sentence going.”

“You know what it is,” she murmured against my neck, “and you’re gonna sit in it, and you’re gonna find out whether you like it, which is a thing you have never once in your whole life had to find out, Marcus, because you have always been the one running the room, every room, since you were a boy, and tonight you are not running anything. Tonight you are the room.”

“I don’t run the room.”

“Hush.”

“Okay.”

“Hush, Marcus.”

“I said okay.”

“Baby,” Lisa said then, over her shoulder, not to me, since she calls one person on this earth baby. “Come tell him what it is. I’m busy.”

“She busy?” Lolita asked me.

“She says she’s busy.”

“Okay. Okay. Dayum. Alright then.”

Lolita went to the terrace doors and opened them, and the night came in off the port with the boats and the money and the lemon tree, and she stood in the open doors with her back to the whole of Monaco, the way she does, back to the view and eyes on the people, arms folded under that satin, and she took her time, since she had the floor and she knew the floor was hers.

“You remember what you told that table up in Greenwich, Marcus? Fancy people, big long table, that man at the end who don’t talk, and the pregnant one with the fork who talks for him. You remember what you told all of them a man needs?”

“I told that table a lot of things,” I reminded her, “I was in good form that night, and for the record Adrien was listening to every word, which is more than that man does for most people, so if we’re going to do this, let’s at least do it with the facts.”

“What a man needs, Marcus.”

“She asked you a question, Hail.”

“I heard the question. I’m getting to it.”

“Get to it faster,” my wife breathed into my throat.

“A man needs three things. That’s what I said. Three things, and I was very clear about the distinction, okay, I was extremely clear, because Cherie Amore made me be clear, with that fork, in front of my wife, in front of everybody, and I enjoyed every minute of it, which is a separate problem.”

“Things,” Lolita repeated, and she said it to Lisa, not to me, the way you repeat a thing a child said. “He said things. Mm-hmm. Three things, Lisa, and a woman for each one. One to argue with you. One to fuck.” She let that one sit on the stone a second. “And one who shows up when the money gone and the car won’t start and your mama in the hospital. And he said it like a man reading off a menu, Lisa, he said it like he was ordering, and I swear to God he pointed at the bread basket when he got to the last one, I was sitting right there, I watched the man point at the bread.”

“I did not point at the bread.”

“You pointed at the bread,” my wife told my throat, and bit it, not hard, and then harder.

Lolita went out of my sight for a moment after that, since my eyes had closed on their own, which they do not do, and when they came open again she had moved, not to me but to the little table, where she picked up my whisky and drank out of it, looking at me over the glass, and set it back down a little further from my hand.

“That’s mine,” I objected.

“Was.”

“Lis, she’s drinking my… she is drinking the drink I was told I had. In front of me. While I sit here.”

“He’s gonna cry,” Lisa reported into my neck.

“I might. I might cry. Nobody in this house would stop me.”

“So we been talking, me and her,” Lolita went on, like a woman who had not just drunk my whisky, “in the kitchen, Marie-Jo gone home, house to ourselves, while you was off at your Thursday doing whatever it is you do at your Thursday, and we figured something out.”

“Talking about what.”

“About you, Hail,” my wife purred. “What else we got.”

“I was in Nice, Lis. Come on. You both know what I do in Nice.”

“You were at your Thursday,” Lisa corrected, and that was the first cold thing in the room, one degree, and it went by fast and we all let it, since nobody wanted it yet.

“And what we figured out,” Lolita went on, and she came and stood in front of the chair, between my knees, close enough that the satin touched my trousers, and she did not touch me, “is you got all of us wrong. All of us, Marcus. You got her down for the one who shows up and me down for the one you fuck, and you got Cherie Amore down for the one who argues with you, which, mister, you got a whole wife sitting right there in your lap who has been arguing with you since Stamford, since a couch with a spring in it, I have heard the stories, and you went out and found somebody else to do it with a fork.”

“Nah,” I argued. “Nah, Cherie argues better, Carolina. Cherie argues like a woman who read the contract.”

“Cherie argues fancier,” Lolita corrected me, and she looked at Lisa, not at me. “I ain’t never seen Cherie Amore win one. I done watched your wife win about six since breakfast.”

“Seven,” Lisa counted.

“Seven. My bad.”

Lisa laughed, once, low, into my neck, the one laugh, and it came through my skin before it came through my ears.

I mean, I knew. Sitting there with my hands flat on the arms of a chair because my wife said so, one woman biting my throat and the other standing between my knees telling me I had my own life wrong, a man knows. They had taken my hands on purpose.

“Look at his hands, Lisa,” Lolita pointed out, and nodded down at them. “He about to talk and he can’t. He don’t know what to do with himself.”

“That’s why they’re on the chair, baby.”

“Y’all took my hands on purpose,” I complained.

“Mm-hmm.”

“A man can’t run a room with his hands pinned, Carolina. He can only sit in it. That’s the whole trick, and you two came up with it in my kitchen, with my whisky, while I was in Nice working so there could be a kitchen.”

“Then sit in it,” Lolita told me, sweet as pie.

“So tonight,” she went on, and she sat down on the stone floor between my feet, in the satin, with her back against the inside of my knee like a girl at a cookout, and looked up at me with the hoops catching the lamp, “she is the one you fuck, and I am the one asking the questions, and you are the one who answers them, and if the answer is good she keeps going, and if the answer is bullshit she stops. And you don’t move.” She shrugged one shoulder and the satin went with it. “That’s all. That’s the whole game. Lisa thought of it, don’t look at me.”

“You helped,” Lisa reminded her.

“I helped a little.”

“I did think of it,” my wife admitted, and undid the first button. “I thought of the chair. She thought of the floor.”

“I did think of the floor.”

“Whose floor,” I asked them. “That’s my floor. That whole floor is my floor, I had that stone put in, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead. Y’all have fun on my floor.”

“We are,” they said, both of them, at the same time, and that was worse.

“This is not a game, this is an interrogation with a dress code, and the lawyers are prettier, I will give you that, but it is still an interrogation.”

“Mm.”

“That’s not an answer, Lis. You know that is not an answer. You do it on purpose, you have been doing it on purpose since the Clinton administration, and it works every time, and I hate that it works.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting,” my wife informed me, and undid the second button, and put her mouth where the button had been a moment before, on the skin.

So there I sat, with the woman I had been married to for most of my life undoing my shirt like she had never seen me in one, slow, with her teeth in it, and my hands stayed on that chair, and the whisky stayed in the corner of my eye, and my hand stayed off the whisky.

“First question,” Lolita announced from the floor. “Why me.”

“Why you what. That’s two words, Carolina, that’s not a question, that’s a word and a half.”

“Why me, Marcus. Not why she wanted me, I know why she wanted me, she picked me, I watched her do it, I watched that woman watch me carry a tray all that fall before you ever once looked up off your plate, so I know her reason.” She tapped my knee with one finger, twice. “I want yours.”

“Carolina.”

“Don’t Carolina me. Answer the question.”

Lisa had my shirt open to the belt and had stopped, with her hand flat on my stomach, waiting, and the waiting came through her palm. The question was Lolita’s. The answer was for my wife.

“Okay. Okay, you want it? You carried four plates up your arm without looking at them,” I told her, “and some guy at the next table said something to you that would have gotten him fired in any building of mine, and you set his plate down in front of him without a sound, and it was the right plate, and you never changed your face. And the thought was, that woman is wasted in here. And the thought after that was…” The hands wanted to move, and stayed. “The thought after that was, she could go somewhere. Put her somewhere. It is not a pretty answer, but you asked, and you are sitting on my floor in a dress that came out of my account, so.”

“You thought you could put me somewhere,” Lolita repeated slowly.

“I did. And I would think it again, same restaurant, same steak.”

“Lisa, you hear this?”

“I hear it,” my wife confirmed. “I was there. Keep going.”

“So where’d you put me, Marcus.” Quieter. “Where am I.”

“I…” Nothing came. “I don’t know anymore.”

Lisa’s hand moved.

“That’s not a thing that gets said in this house,” I told the ceiling, since my head was still back. “Not by me. About anything. Ask her.”

Lisa’s hand moved on my stomach, down, under the belt, flat, not grabbing, just there, and her breath went out against my chest, and Lolita looked at me from the floor with her face doing something that had no name, and then she laughed, the loud one, and dropped her head against my knee.

“Good answer,” she decided. “Lisa. Lisa, that was a good answer, you can keep going on that one.”

“Was it.”

“It was. Go ’head.”

“I was getting there, baby,” my wife protested. “Give me a minute.”

The belt went, and the buckle hit the stone, loud, and Lolita said “Ooh, Marie-Jo gonna hear that in the morning,” and Lisa said “Marie-Jo has heard worse out of this room,” and I said “Marie-Jo has heard worse out of me,” and nobody argued, and that was the end of the talking for a minute, since Lisa came down off the arm of the chair onto her knees on the floor beside Lolita, in her lace and her heels, both women on the floor of my bedroom between my feet, and that is a picture a man buys a villa on a hill to arrive at, and the picture had never had the part where he was not allowed to touch anything.

“Second question,” Lolita announced, and put her hand on top of Lisa’s, on me, through the cloth, and a sound came out of me that does not come out of me. “Who’s Hartford?”

“Who’s what?”

“Hartford. On your phone. Thursday man. Who is that.”

Everything in me went still.

A man who moves all the time has one tell, which is when he stops, and both of them saw it, from the floor, with their hands on me.

“There it is,” Lisa noted. Not to me.

“I see it.”

“Told you.”

“Hartford is a lawyer.”

Lisa’s hand did not move. Lolita’s did not either.

“I do not discuss my lawyers with my shirt open,” I said, and heard myself say it, every word of it standing up straight, the way they stand up when there is somebody across a table from me, and there was nobody across a table from me. There was my wife on the floor.

“Hartford calls on Thursdays,” Lolita pointed out, “and lawyers don’t call on Thursdays, Marcus, lawyers bill on Thursdays, and I been in this house long enough to know what day the phone goes and what your face does when it goes.”

“Carolina, I am telling you.”

“You telling me a lawyer.”

“A lawyer.”

“Mm.” That one was Lisa’s.

“Bullshit answer,” Lisa ruled then, flat, to Lolita, not to me, like the pair of them were working the same shift. “Stop.”

Lolita took her hand off. Lisa took hers off a moment behind, slower, palm dragging, and sat back on her heels in the lace and looked up at me, and it was not a bed look. It was the kitchen look. The one from Stamford, with the numbers between us.

“Don’t give me that look,” I warned her.

“What look.”

“The Stamford look. The spreadsheet look.”

“Then don’t give me a lawyer, Hail.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Okay, okay. Now I get it. Now I get the game. Answer about her, get my wife. Answer about Hartford, get my wife. Don’t answer, sit here with the shirt open and the belt on the floor like a guy in a hotel waiting on room service that is not coming.”

“Look at him, Lisa.”

“I’m looking.”

“Look at his face.”

“I’ve seen the face.”

“You married the face.”

“I married the face,” my wife agreed, and did not smile, and was smiling.

“You said it,” Lolita told me. “Not us. Said it real clear. So I guess you do get the game.”

“Then ask me something else. That’s the game, right? Come on, Carolina, ask me something else, ask me anything, I am a man who plays the game in front of him.”

“That’s the only question I got, Marcus.” She did not look up. “You know it. So does she.”

And then the phone went.

It was on the table by the whisky, face up, where it had landed when Lisa said sit, and it lit up on the glass and buzzed against the wood, and buzzed again, and stopped. My eyes stayed on my wife on the floor and my hand stayed off the table and the not moving sat in my shoulder like a held weight.

Lisa looked at the phone, and then she looked at me, and she had seen me not look, and she filed that away the way she files things, without her face doing anything in the slightest.

“Go on, Lis,” I coaxed. “You stopped. You were doing great, I was about to answer something, I could feel an answer coming.”

“You stopped,” Lisa countered, “a long way before I did.”

“Sitting in a chair, Lis. Been sitting in a chair all night, at your instruction. Haven’t stopped anything. A man who is not allowed to move cannot be accused of stopping, that’s just logic, that’s just”

The phone went again.

It lit the whisky glass gold from underneath, and this time it did not stop, it kept going, the long one, a call, and the three of us listened to it buzz against the wood like a wasp in a jar. Lolita had gone still on the floor against my knee, not my kind of still but hers, the waitress kind, the kind that is listening to a room get wrong.

“Somebody want you bad,” she said, to the floor.

“Somebody always wants me, Carolina.”

“Not like that.”

Lisa stood up in one movement, off her knees, in the heels, the way she gets up off anything, and she reached across me for the table, and my hand closed on her wrist.

Not a grab. The way it goes around her wrist in a crowd, at a curb, and it held there in the air between her and the phone, and the phone buzzed, and quit, and Lisa looked down at my hand on her arm and then up at my face, and did not pull.

“Marcus.”

“Leave it.”

“Hail. You’ve got your hand on me.”

“Leave the phone, Lis. Leave it where it is and come back down here and I will answer the first one again, any way you like, as many times as you like.”

“I didn’t tell you to move your hands,” my wife reminded me, quietly, “and I am not going to say it twice.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, you did. Twice now.” And did not take my hand off my wife.

Lolita had turned her head on my knee and was reading, my hand, the phone, my face, around and around, with the satin off one shoulder and the key on the shoelace moving in the hollow of her throat when she breathed, and she did not say one word, which was the loudest she had been all night.

The phone lit once more, a message this time, short, on the glass, in that window where the screen shows you the first line before you have decided to read it, and from the chair it could be read upside down, and my wife could read it standing over it, and so, probably, could the woman on the floor, who reads everything.

Still no?

My hand let go of Lisa.

The lean, finally, the one lean she had set the whisky up to make me take, and my hand went past the whisky and turned the phone over on its face, and went back on the arm of the chair where she had told me to put it, and nobody in that room had anything on their face that could be used.

“Who is it,” Lisa demanded. She did not sit. “Marcus. Who is on that phone.”

“Lis.”

“Who.”

The whisky came up off the table in my hand, the first thing all night that nobody had handed me, and it went down, and over the rim of the glass there was my wife, getting the look Lolita had given me over the same glass earlier, and she did not get an answer.