Motel Girl: Stories

Motel Girl

Motel Girl

Stories by

Greg Sanders

 RED HEN PRESS | Los Angeles, California

Motel Girl

Copyright © 2008

by Greg Sanders

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book design by Mark E. Cull

Cover design by Greg Sanders

Arrangement by Ben Mesirow

ISBN: 978-1-59709-111-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007943501

The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts partially support Red Hen Press.

Published by Red Hen Press

First Edition

Acknowledgements

Some of the stories in this collection appeared in the following publications, to which the author extends his thanks: American Hoverfly in Essays & Fictions; Garage Door and Mr. Hallucinosis in Mississippi Review; Motel Girl in Blue Cathedral; The Sculptor and Lemon in Time Out Neonlit; Choco in Pindeldyboz; Port Authority (Part I) in LIT; PS2 Mouse Adapter in Opium Magazine; The Cure in 3:AM Magazine; The Gallery in The Crucifix Is Down; L. in Epiphany Magazine; Grey in The River Reporter Literary Gazette; The Seep in WV Magazine; I Am an Actuary in Pink Cadillac.

For my parents—who gave me freedom.

Choco

He spent twenty-two years in the Moscow Circus, part of a troupe of dancing bears. When at last he no longer wished to perform for children, to walk on his hind legs like an absurd biped, he revolted and was put up for adoption. I was twenty-eight when I took him in. I had no children and no husband and thought, let me see if I can do some good in this world. As one of the smaller bears, he was considered manageable and so adoption, rather than being sent to a zoo, was feasible. The agent in charge of finding homes for these retirees assured me that circus fatigue was common among dancing bears and should not be taken as a sign of the animal’s impertinence.

As a freelance translator, I am often hired by the circus to accompany foreign schoolchildren during their visit to the ring. It was in this capacity that I had come to observe the bear regularly, and watched as he gradually lost his focus. He would drift away from the other dancing bears, ignoring the trainer’s long stick, or he would butt another bear, knocking over the troupe like dominoes, making the audience laugh, but not his keepers. He was done for. The circus paid me a small stipend for his upkeep. They’d named him Choco for the rich, deep-brown color of his coat.

You develop a keen sense of hearing when you walk with a bear in Moscow. People whisper, filthy beast, when they think they’re out of earshot, even though I kept him very clean at first, shampooing him with scented soap from London. I wanted to be a good mamma, yet I was on a tight budget. My friend Aleksei and I would buy fruit from Moyerova, who had a kiosk on Tverskaya Street. Aleksei had a Soviet-era Geiger counter that he used to determine if produce was grown on the lovely green plains close to Chernobyl. If he got a reading, I would buy the fruit from the old lady for a few rubles less and then feed it to the bear. Though Aleksei sometimes objected to the practice, it did not seem to bother Choco. Being a bear, he remained as strong as one. For a time.

Choco was a small European brown bear, weighing no more than a human adolescent. If he pulled hard on his rope, it was usually because he spotted a small, brightly colored car that reminded him of the one he had been trained to follow around inside the circus ring. In that act, a clown would pop up out of the sunroof of the little car, see the bear trotting along behind him, feign befuddlement and terror, get back into the driver’s seat and the car, with a few induced backfires, would be unable to accelerate out of the bear’s range. Finally, the clown would get out and run off and Choco would get into the driver’s seat, and by some circus magic, drive the vehicle out of the ring. The audience always erupted, sometimes giving a standing ovation. So, when he saw a brightly colored Mini or a Fiat 500, he would fall into his old role and attempt to run toward it with me in tow. When no one appeared out of the vehicle’s roof, he would stop pulling on the rope and turn to me with a mystified gaze.

My Dear Nadya, my brother wrote to me from Kyrgyzstan, where he was helping to negotiate a cap manufacturing deal for the Gap, Inc.

You should meet a boy, and you won’t do so with this bear attached to you. Will you give the bear a sense of independence so that you can leave it at home or send it out to the playground on its own? You must enjoy more freedom from your pet and find yourself a man. I have a friend, a painter, who loves animals. He says he is especially fond of bears. He saw you, sister, at the last New Year’s Eve party at the Rutkoveski’s. He was out by the woodshed smoking a cigar with his father. You went for a walk with the bear. They watched you under the moonlight. The father commented on your pupechka. His son commented on your long hair, which he said would be wonderful if not worn with such scorn, tightly bound above your pretty head. (And why, I must ask, were you not wearing a hat!) This was my first hint that the two of you might be a match. ‘But the bear,’ he asked, ‘is she ever without it? It’s such a curious way to live.’

My friend’s name is Vitaliy and when he came inside he said a few words to you and was prepared to ask about, and even caress, the bear, but he said you simply filled his glass with vodka and informed him that you must ‘walk the animal,’ even though you had just done so. Do you remember him? He embodies that rarest of contradictions—a man brutish in looks but gentle in nature. I am attaching his phone number herewith. Please consider calling him. He is handsome in his way, makes a good living and, as I said, is a skilled artistic person. I have also taken the unprecedented step of sending him your phone number without your approval. So if Vitaliy calls, do not be shy. At least let him speak to you?

But while my bear was identified as a distraction, as a usurper of my romantic energies, just the opposite was true. Without him I would have vanished years ago. I would have become invisible, as so many have in this city. My brother would not have written; his friend would have taken less notice, if any.

It was because of the animal that I had, for example, my friend Vadim, a cataract-inflicted veteran of The Great Patriotic War who had an ancient bear named Doda that was nearly as blind as he. We would meet in the park and Vadim would gum indecipherable words to me as our bears looked at each other like prisoners of war.

And there was, as I mentioned earlier, Geiger counter Aleksei, a classmate from my university years who was so shy as to be incapacitated. His eyes seemed always on the verge of tears. Broad menisci of liquid poised on his lower lids were ready to burst should anything at all go wrong. I am allergic to life, he would say when someone wondered about the state of his eyes. He was diminutive, with a diminutive paunch, but otherwise well-built, like a gymnast who enjoys beer.

It would have been difficult for Aleksei to express his affection toward me if we did not have Choco between us. The animal was both a distancing element that made me approachable and a recipient object for his admiration and love of me. It was easier for Aleksei to gently groom the bear, to talk like a baby to the bear, to look deeply into the bear’s large brown eyes than to do these things to me. But I understood his intent—even if he did not. Aleksei’s caring for the bear as he would really like to care for me sometimes meant that he cared for the bear with more intensity than I did. If I had to choose one creature to live, I would have chosen Aleksei over the bear. But I often wondered—would Aleksei have chosen me or the bear? I once asked him this after we had been drinking. He hesitated, rubbing his moist eyes with the back of his little hands.

Nadya, he said, I cannot imagine one without the other.

One week after I received the letter from my brother, his friend Vitaliy called.

You know I saw you only that one night at the party, he said, yet I am still intrigued by certain aspects of you.

Such as? I asked.

Your figure, for one, he said.

He went on a little too long, but I didn’t mind hearing that voice come through the yellow telephone receiver. He spoke slowly, without much inflection, stumbling at times, but underneath it all he was self-assured.

Later that week he picked me up in his old Lada coupe and we went to his sister’s for dinner. Afterward he took me to a fancy coffee shop that had just opened at the Bolshoi, and then I said I needed to get back to the bear.

Always you and the bear, he said, placing a roughened hand over mine. His irises were an opaque green, like cold, plankton-rich waters. His pupils were very small, as if I were giving off a great amount of light. He drove me to my building without protest, though he was silent for many minutes. For this man, who seemed to have had no company for months on end, this silence was worse than pleading. Even after so short a time I had become accustomed to hearing his deep voice, to getting confused by his meandering speeches. It was as if he was used to talking excessively, yet only to himself. At last we arrived at my building.

I began to gather myself to exit, but as I watched his heavily ridged face sag with disappointment, I said, Well, why don’t you come inside with me? Meet the creature you have heard so much about.

When I opened the door to the bear’s room, its resident came toward me. I patted it on the snout and it pretended to take a swipe at me.

Sweet thing! I said, so that Vitaliy could see there was no danger in it. You sit here and watch the television, I said to him, and I’ll go take the beast for a quick walk. There is liquor over there.

When I came back he was relaxing in the chair with an empty glass and a bottle of vodka on the table in front of him. He was ugly, as my brother had promised, yet there was something exquisite in his bad looks, or in the way he managed them. He had given up. He could do nothing about them. But those oceanic eyes. You could swim through them like a whale and not be hungry for a long time. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was alarming about the rest of Vitaliy. He was tall and a little bony, but you could see from his complexion that the blood was getting around with vigor. He was as un-bearlike as you could get, which was a nice change.

I filled his glass with vodka and we shared it, then did it again. We watched a television show about caviar. We learned that beluga sturgeon can live one hundred years, grow to ten meters in length, and weigh 800 kilos. When the female is about twenty-years-old she starts producing the valuable roe. We were silenced by the image of a massive, primordial fish being clubbed into unconsciousness on the back of a trawler. In the next shot she was being slid down a chute into a small factory. This was the processing plant. She was incised with a scimitar-like tool and two hands, reaching into her body, removed her egg sac intact. She was still alive, quivering, as the procedure was being performed, but she would soon die. Was such cruelty possible? I led Vitaliy into the bedroom.

When we were a little way into it the bear began to grunt in its room on the other side of the wall. I knew Vitaliy couldn’t hear it, but I did, like a mother attuned to the nocturnal sounds of her infant. Then it began to knock against the wall in imitation of what it heard.

Your friend, Vitaliy said.

My friend, I said.

He’s jealous, Vitaliy said. I could hear its claws breaking through the plaster on its side, then pulling at the lath boards.

This is unusual, I said.

I can’t concentrate anymore, he said at last. Will you please do something?

But suddenly the bear was silent, as if it knew we were no longer making love. Soon Vitaliy was ready again, but you can guess what happened when we started up. The bear would have none of it. It was no good. From then on we had to go to Vitaliy’s place to make love.

He lived in a large loft of a warehouse where scenic backdrops of operatic and theatrical productions were painted. Vitaliy was regarded as a master of this art and was given his living space, gratis, by a consortium of theatre producers who admired him and depended upon his skill. In addition, he acted as a security guard for the entire warehouse—whose other vast rooms housed costumes, lighting equipment, props, and the machinery that made seas churn and singers levitate. He had a double bed and a washbasin, but to bathe properly he had to use the utility room in the basement where the artists cleaned their brushes and other tools of the trade.

Scenic panels were stacked two and three deep against the walls of his room: the Eiffel Mountains, medieval London, a frozen battlefield strewn with Napoleonic corpses, the Manhattan skyline, even a Martian landscape. His bed was in a corner of the room where he had placed two large panels from Denyevski’s Moonlit Moscow. Above his headboard St. Basil’s cathedral gleamed with freshly fallen snow. A small moon, bearing herself with Russian humility, appeared in the top-left quartile, with fine clouds, like a silver gas, reflecting her light. It was Vitaliy’s greatest piece, yet it did not carry his signature. Only individuals entrenched in theatrical arcana knew the name of its creator. When the great Belgian soprano, Edmée Bethean, performed her last aria, this very panel had been on CNN for all the world to see.

I began to spend more and more time with Vitaliy, keeping him company while he painted in the evenings. I did what I had to do for the bear, but its maintenance had now become a chore. We would still buy fruit at Moyerova’s, still stop in the park to see Vadim and Doda when possible, but it was all rushed, disingenuous, on the clock. Now when small, brightly colored cars drove by I would simply tug on his rope and shout No! permitting the animal to relive not even one moment of its glory days. Before long, the poor beast began exhibiting lethargy; the cause of which I presumed was depression. I tried to alter my schedule and tend to him early in the morning if I knew I’d be with Vitaliy on that night. But more and more often it would be Vitaliy who, preferring me well-rested, would lift his long body out of our warm bed at six in the morning, drive to my flat, walk and feed the bear, and then return to me with the smell of the animal on his clothing. It was not a situation that could last. I had messages on my answering machine from Aleksei. He missed seeing the bear. When could he visit it? The creature had begun acting out in its room, defecating without schedule, and vomiting. On a clear Sunday afternoon in the park it even attempted to maul the harmless Doda.

* * *

One evening, when Vitaliy had a tight deadline and had to work through the night, I went home to sleep in my own bed. Late at night I was awakened. In the darkness I heard the bear whining as if it were having a nightmare, the strange, otherworldly grunts coming through the wall. On it went into the sunlit hours. In the morning I had a terrible thought and called Aleksei, telling him he must come over at once and to bring his Geiger counter.

He arrived, freshly showered and cologned, with an ivory-handled grooming brush to which he had tied a ribbon.

I want to let the bear know I haven’t forgotten him, he said, even if others have forgotten me.

Come and see your papa, I said to the bear.

He came slowly out of the dark room, dazed, his head hanging low and moving in little arcs. Bits of soiled newsprint from his bedding were stuck to his hindquarters.

"What happened to you?" Aleksei said, rubbing the animal’s snout.

Vitaliy had planned to come by after presenting his latest panels to the consortium, and now he came