Page 5 of Dirty Diana
“The kitchen isdefinitelythe best I’ve seen today.”
“Do you cook?”
“Not at all.” Then, because I got the impression neither of us wanted the house tour to end, I opened the fridge and reached for the Coors Light. “I do appreciate the amenities.”
He smiled again and took the bottle from my hands, opening it with one of the many keys on his ring. The beer was cold and delicious and I handed it back, offering to share. “I’d get you a glass, but…” I gestured around the empty kitchen. “We could sit on my imaginary couch?”
He considered the invitation, or considered me, and while he did I pictured the Manga-style sound effect fordeafening silenceappearing over our heads. Oliver rolled the beer bottle in his hand. Then hewaved toward the wall where a couch should be. “I didn’t expect you to go for the cherry-red leather, but it looks nice in here.”
I laughed. “Matches the coasters you macraméd for me.”
We sat on the floor and passed the beer back and forth. The last of the orange sunlight dipped below the west-facing window, but neither of us moved to turn on a light and the room grew dim.
I ran my fingers along the neatly vacuumed rug. “You can tell the carpet was just cleaned. Thank you.”
His expression was earnest. “I have to tell you. I’m not really the broker. This building belongs to my parents. Connie, the woman who usually shows the place, had to pick up her kid, so I said I would do it.”
I was relieved that we both had something to confess. “To tell the truth, I can’t really afford this apartment. I have enough for the first month’s rent and the security deposit. But I can’t afford the last month’s rent up front.” I leaned my head against the wall. “Also, my credit is terrible.”
As I talked, his gaze flitted between my eyes and my lips. “Do you have a job? I mean, aside from painting?”
“I’m a waitress. At Momo’s.”
“That thirties-gangster-themed place? The place where they make the waitresses say ‘fuhgeddaboudit’ every time a customer says ‘thank you’?”
“That’s me.” I put up my hands, like it was a stickup. “You’ve been there?”
He shook his head. “I saw it on the news. The owner’s a sex offender, isn’t he?”
“Mmm.” I considered this. “That would make sense.”
“Well.” Oliver looked down at his lap. “I will now be dedicating my free time to finding you a new job.”
“Thank you.”
He leaned close, gently nudging my shoulder with his own.“Fuhgeddaboudit.”
—
Eight years later, when we moved into this three-bedroom house in our Dallas neighborhood, I was already pregnant with Emmy. We spent the next few months getting ready for the baby, deciding on paint colors and puzzling over IKEA instructions for her furniture. Oliver, who could make beautiful wood furniture from scratch, was as confused as I was by the assembly instructions. “That can’t be right,” he said, turning the pages upside down and back again. “Are we missing a piece?”
Then Emmy arrived, and so did sleepless nights and bouts of crushing anxiety, sandwiched between pure joy and unending loads of laundry.
Now Emmy’s six, and this room is full of plastic storage bins jammed with toddler toys she’s too big for, clothes she’s grown out of, and an enormous collection of Madame Alexander dolls that Oliver’s too afraid to tell his mother give Emmy nightmares. We’ve labeled the bins “DONATION” and we promise ourselves, again and again, thatnextweekend, we’ll clean them out. It’s now a running joke. At night, when we fall into bed and one of us is thirsty but too lazy to move, we’ll say, “If you get me a glass of water, I swear I’ll donate the bins.Tomorrow.”
What these bins don’t have in them is a single scrap of wrapping paper. I wind through two plastic towers to get to the closet at the back of the room. I turn on the overhead light and survey the shelves. I find extra blankets, a deflated air mattress wadded into a ball, and an old tackle box that holds spare paintbrushes. A few old canvases are stacked against the wall—an oil painting of bluebonnets, and a beach scene, both of which I painted in a night class years ago.
I make my way deeper into the closet. Behind the tackle box, I spot a battered red shoebox. I had forgotten it was in here. It’s sealed with painter’s tape, so I find a scraper and slice it open. Inside is an old minicassette recorder and two rows of minicassettes. Each cassette islabeled with a first name: “Jess,” “Claudia,” “Brynn,” “Theresa,” and so on. A familiar feeling returns—like I’m getting away with something. Underneath the shoebox is an old portfolio crammed with sketches, all portraits of the women on the tapes, intended to be paintings in a second book one day. They had been sketched hastily in thick charcoal pencil—the profile of a woman staring out the window, another reclining in her chair, her hand pulling at the back of her neck.
When I moved to Dallas, the editor I worked with on my first book liked to take me out to shoot pool and get drunk on light beer. Through heavy eyelids she’d pitch my own book to me, as if I’d never heard of it. “The perfect intersection of chronicle and art,” she’d say and I’d nod along, unsure what to add.
A few weeks after the book was published, she moved to Michigan and never returned to work. Her assistant, a young guy with a quiet voice, took her place, but he was shy and awkward and not up for meeting in person. I sent him some rough ideas for a second book and he told me the sketches were nice but too soft. “Try to find the grit. Reallyminefor it, you know?” The day Oliver showed me the apartment, I’d been mining, very slowly, for months.
Now I take the box of tapes out of the closet and sit on the floor between two storage bins, a space big enough to stretch my legs out in front of me, but small enough to feel hidden. I flip through the tapes, one by one. All these interviews I’d packed away and never returned to.
I pull out a tape labeled “Jess” and put it in the recorder. I hit play and hear her voice:
He was tall. And, like, that’sallit took for him to have confidence. That’s it. He was tall. Can you imagine? Women have to have their shit so buttoned-up to feel even a little bit good and I swear all it took for him was some height. Tall, good shoulders, and all of us girls were like “okay, yeah, I’d sleep with him.”
