I had been with women. A few? Many? I don’t know how to gauge. But I couldn’t recall any of them laughing for real. Bar laughs, sure. But none like this one: sincere, resonant, as we sat cramped, pleasurably, between two beds that had held countless fake laughs (and other things fake, as well). I had woken up with a few women, too, but wanted to wake up with none of them.
My work didn’t generally offer any contact beyond distant applause and hang-around folks wanting to whine about their problems after speaking engagements. And the road after each gig was one long flat note, slightly off key. The radio helped a little but didn’t listen — callers spouting out opinions on politics and sex and the state of America, music that only reminded me of the past and made me lean forward in the car seat, urging the automobile onward, hoping the future unfurled something different.
I tried to talk to myself. I played my own motivational tapes, but I only ended up telling myself how full of shit I was.
I’m a “searcher.” I’m an INFP. The Jungian principles of psychology and all of the tests that have sprung from Jungian archetypes say that INFP means I’m introverted, intuitive, a feeler, and I’m perceptive. Less than 1% of the population is supposedly this way, and in a world so built on facts and figures, well, we, the few, the “searchers,” are considered just plain fucking weird by most.
There’s nothing in the Jung-inspired tests about sarcasm, but we have to be unique somehow, right?
Jung said that every personality has to have three things: a way of perceiving the world, a way of making judgments, and an attitude with which to approach things.
Well, I perceive the Midwest to be full of whiners, I judge whiners to be bad, and my approach is to give them a line of motivational shit in the hope of shutting them up a little bit.
Searchers supposedly also have sympathy and empathy.
But now I found myself in a motel room floor, between two very inviting beds, and with a woman I hoped never shut up. A woman that I was laughing with, a woman whose lips tasted like liquor and cherry lip gloss, lips that seemed to make me drunker than any shots of whiskey I’d ever turned back in my life.
I felt like somebody other than myself, and a thought — someone else’s also and a cliché at that (you can always feel clichés, at least I can, because they cause brows to wrinkle in ignorant profundity) — came to me suddenly: It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have —
Ooh, Fooni’s robe fell open a little, revealing one of her breasts, and she was telling me about her cat, Valdosta, who had traveled with her for over a year since she found him, stray, in southern Georgia. He’d run off in Ohio, and she’d never seen him again. I was trying unsuccessfully not to stare at her breast, small and round and sexy-smooth, when the wind whipped up devil strong, and it sounded like it slammed something immensely heavy against the door. The door rocked against the bolt lock, and it sounded like it cracked somewhere.
Fooni’s back went straight, and she let out an ooh-aah like some women will when you first slide inside them during lovemaking, a surprised sound as when men are gentle, not the grimace of a woman burdened with a man who goes at it like a bull that had been penned up too long.
“Jesus,” I said. “It sounded like somebody got slammed against the door.” I stood up and walked over. “I’m going to take a look.”
The wind was still whistling but not as severely. Fooni scooted back against the night table between the beds and pulled her robe closed. I undid the chain and pulled the door open, stepping outside in my jeans and work shirt. I saw nothing right or left. I glanced at the outside of the door and saw an indentation the size of a baseball. Something had hit it. I gestured toward it, but Fooni looked confused and unaware; she was looking at the door but not looking at it.
I held my index finger up to her — just a sec — and stepped out onto the landing, pulling the door closed behind me.
I thought whatever it was might have gone under the railing and down onto the cars, and my Blazer was down there among them. I leaned over and looked down. My Blazer was off to my right, but it appeared to be okay. As did the cars directly below, one of which I guessed was Fooni’s.
Before I turned to go back in, something caught my attention. Beyond the chain-link fence at the back of the parking lot was a field, vast and sprawling.
A cornfield.
About Brady Allen
