The Office of Historical Corrections Page 3

  “Sorry this is getting a little out of hand. I guess you’ve seen worse though. JT says you used to photograph strippers?”

  Rena imagines Dori imagining her taking seedy headshots. Her photo series had hung for months in an LA museum, and one of the shots had been used as part of a campaign for sex workers’ rights, but Rena isn’t sure the clarification will be worth it.

  “Kelly used to dance, you know,” Dori says. “She was the first adult I ever saw naked.”

  “Kelly?”

  “In the yellow. My cousin’s best friend. She used to steal our drill team routines for the club. We used to watch her practice, and sometimes on slow nights she would sneak us in to drink for free.”

  “I didn’t think you were much of a drinker.”

  “You haven’t heard the rumors about pastors’ daughters? Thankfully, I’m not much of anything I was at sixteen. Except with JT. I thought we’d be married practically out of high school.”

  “Why weren’t you?”

  “He went to college. Then he went to grad school. Then he went to Togo.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Here,” Dori says. “Always here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There is a shrieking and then deep laughter from the other end of the bar. The blue bridesmaid, whose left breast is now dangerously close to escaping her tank top, has been joined by reinforcements, and they are dragging over a man from the table across the bar. He is muscled and burly, too big to be dragged against his will, but plays at putting up a fight before he falls to his knees in mock submission, then stands and walks toward their table, holding the bra above his head like a trophy belt. He tosses the bra on the table in front of Dori and tips his baseball cap.

  “Ma’am,” he says to Dori’s wide eyes, “excuse my being forward, but I understand it’s your bachelorette party, and your friends over here have obliged me to provide you with a dance.”

  For a moment Rena thinks this might be orchestrated, this man a real entertainer, Dori’s friends better at conspiracy than she would have given them credit for, but then the man wobbles as he crouches over Dori, gyrating clumsily while trying to unbutton his own shirt, breathing too close to her face and seeming at any moment like he might lose balance and fall onto her. Dori looks to the bartender for salvation, some sort of regulatory intervention, but the bartender only grins and switches the music playing over the bar loudspeakers to something raunchy and heavy on bass. The bridesmaids begin laughing and pulling dollar bills from their purses. Before they close a circle around the table, Rena sees her chance. She is up and out the door before anyone can force her to stay.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s a short dark walk back to the hotel, where the bar is closed and its lights are off, but someone is sitting at it anyway. Rena starts to walk past him on her way to the elevators but realizes it’s one of the groomsmen. Michael from DC. He was on her connecting flight, one of those small regional shuttles sensitive to turbulence. He is tall and sinewy, and before she knew they were heading to the same place, she had watched him with a twinge of pity, folding himself into the too-small space of his plane seat a few rows ahead of hers.

  “Early night?” Rena asks as she walks toward him.

  “Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a bachelor party with a pastor present.”

  “Cake and punch in a church basement?”

  “Scotch and cigars in a hotel penthouse. Still boring as all get-out. JT and I lived together in college, and he used to tell me he was from the most boring place in the country, but I didn’t believe him until now.”

  “So you thought you’d liven Indiana up by sitting at an empty bar with a flask?”

  “You never know when something interesting might happen.”

  “At least you got to change out of your rainbow color. Or were you guys not assigned colors?”

  “We only have to wear them tomorrow.”

  “Men. Always getting off easy.”

  “Easy? Do you know how hard it is to find an orange vest?”

  “Ooh, you’re orange. Have you spent much time with your bridal counterpart?”

  “Only met her briefly.”

  “See if you can get out of her what she did.”

  “What she did?”

  “You have seven color choices; you don’t put a redhead in orange unless you’re angry at her. Girl is being punished for something. Must be some gossip.”

  “So far most of the gossip I’ve heard at this wedding has been about you.”

  “I only know one person here. Whatever you’ve heard isn’t gossip; it’s speculation.”

  “Fair enough,” he says. “You want to finish this upstairs? Less to speculate about.”

  So now there will be something to gossip about. Maybe it will put Dori’s mind at ease if Rena appears to be taken for the weekend. Michael tastes like gin and breath mints, and he is reaching for the button on her jeans before the door is closed. Rena affixes herself to his neck like she is trying to reach a vein; she is too old to be giving anyone a hickey, she knows, but she is determined right now to leave a mark, to become part of the temporary map of his body, to place herself briefly along his trajectory as something that can be physically noted, along with the smooth and likely professionally maintained ovals of his fingernails, the birthmark that looked almost like the shape of Iowa, the very slight paunch of his unclothed belly. She clasps a fist in his hair, which is thick and full, but they are at that age now, a few years older than the bride and groom, youth waving at them from the border to an unknown territory. Rena can tell that if she saw Michael again in two years, he would be starting to look like a middle-aged man, not unattractive or unpleasant looking, but it has snuck up on her, that time of her life when age-appropriate men remind her of her father, when you go a year without seeing a man and suddenly his hair is thinned in the middle, his beard graying, his body softer. So she is saying yes please to right now, to the pressure of his palm along her arm and his teeth on her earlobe, and she is surprised by how much she means it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sleeping in someone else’s bed doesn’t stop the nightmares. Rena observes this almost empirically—it has been a while since she has spent the night with anyone and a very long while since she slept soundly. It is her job to go to the places where the nightmares are. It is not a job a person takes if full nights of sleep are her priority. Plus, weddings are not easy. Rena has missed a lot of weddings by being strategically or unavoidably out of the country. The only time she was actually in a wedding, she was the maid of honor. It was her little sister Elizabeth’s wedding, autumn in Ohio, a small ceremony, a marriage to a man both of them had grown up with, Connor from the house around the corner. Connor who used to mow their lawn and rake their leaves and shovel their snow. Rena’s dress was gold. Her mother worried about the amount of cleavage and her grandmother said, Her baby sister’s getting married before her; let her flash whatever she needs to catch up. For a week before the wedding, her sister had been terrified of rain, and Rena had lied about the weather report to comfort her, and the weather turned out to be beautiful, and her sister turned out to be beautiful, and Connor turned out to be the man who, a year later, suspected Elizabeth of cheating because he’d seen a repairman leave the house and she’d forgotten to tell him anyone was coming that day, and so he put a bullet through her head. She lived. Or someone lived: it was hard to match the person in the rehab facility with the person her sister had been.

  Rena has not been to visit Elizabeth in three years. Her mother says Elizabeth is making small progress toward language. She can nod her head yes. She can recognize again the names of colors. Rena’s sister was a middle-school drama teacher, a job she had chosen because pursuing a theater career would have taken her too far away. When Elizabeth w
as in college, Rena had come to see her in Antigone on opening night, and though the show was not only in English but staged, at the director’s whim, to involve contemporary sets and clothing and a backing soundtrack of Top 40 pop, Elizabeth told her afterward that she had memorized the play both in English and in its original ancient Greek, which she had taken classes in to better get a feel for drama.

  There had been signs. Rena had been too far away to see them, her parents maybe too close. Connor had threatened her before, but her sister did not say she was afraid of Connor. The whole week of the wedding, her sister said she was afraid of rain. All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.

  * * *

  —

  That Rena wakes up screaming sometimes is something JT knows about her, the way she knows that he is an insomniac and on bad nights can only sleep to Mingus. There was a point at the hotel when they stopped sleeping in their own rooms and then when they stopped sleeping in their own beds, and even now she cannot say whether what they wanted was the comfort of another body in their respective restlessness or the excuse to cross a line, only that they never did cross it, and that tonight, before JT’s wedding, she does not want to wake to a strange man holding her while she cries. It is 4:00 a.m. according to the hotel clock. She dresses in the bathroom and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her. Her room is one floor down and she is ready to pass the elevator and head for the staircase when she sees JT in the hallway. All weekend he has been put together—clean-shaven, with his hair gelled and slicked into place—but the JT she sees now looks more like the man she met, like he has just rolled out of bed. He seems as surprised by her as she is by him, and his face relaxes for a moment as he grins at her and raises an eyebrow.

  “Where are you coming from?” he asks.

  “Where are you going?” Rena asks. She is fully awake now and taking in the scene. It is four in the morning. There is a wedding today. The groom is standing at the elevator with a duffel bag. Something has gone wrong.

  “I can’t do this,” he says.

  Rena thinks of Dori, surely sound asleep by now, Dori with two years of wedding Pinterest boards, Dori almost certainly having rescued herself from the sweaty ministrations of the would-be stripper and then making her friends feel better about having upset her.

  “You can’t just leave,” Rena says. “You have to tell her yourself.”

  “I’m going to call her,” he says. “I’m going out of town for a little bit.”

  Rena moves herself between JT and the elevator to look him in the eyes. He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad. That he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper.

  “When I met you we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”

  “I was scared,” he says. “You were calm. You were so fucking calm it calmed me down, and that was what I liked about you.”

  “It’s not my fault you’re a coward,” Rena says.

  “You know,” says JT, “I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”

  Rena flinches. She imagines slapping him, first imagines slapping the version of him inches from her face and then closes her eyes and imagines slapping the him from the photograph, slapping the useless mask right off of him. He wants this fight. People would come out of their rooms to see her shouting in the hallway, see a parting quarrel between old friends or old lovers or JT and a woman nursing an old wound. Excuses would be formulated; they would all calmly and quietly go back to sleep. JT is giving her a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him. She walks past him to the staircase and hears the elevator ding before the door closes behind her. The window in her room faces the parking lot, and she sees JT cross through the lot under the flush of the lights and disappear into his car. She sees the car flicker to life before he drives off, and she watches for quite some time, but he does not come back.

  * * *

  —

  Rena falls asleep with the curtains still open, and in the morning the sun through the windows is dusty and insistent as the banging at the door wakes her. Her body, groggy from sex and drinking, is temporarily uncooperative, but the noise continues until she is able to rally herself to open it for Dori and Kelly, the yellow bridesmaid.

  “JT is gone,” says Kelly. “He’s not answering his phone.”

  Rena lets the other women in and pretends not to notice them scanning the room for any indication of her duplicity. She reminds herself that she is unhappy with JT and that this is not her fight.

  “I ran into him in the hallway last night,” Rena says. “I didn’t think he would really go through with leaving.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” Dori asks.

  “That seems like the wrong question.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “Ohio,” says Rena. The word has rounded its way out of her mouth before she has time to consider why she is saying it. But now that she has said it she keeps going. She invents an empty cabin belonging to one of JT’s friends overseas, a conversation about JT’s need to get his head together.

  “OK,” says Dori. “OK.”

  She sends Kelly downstairs to stall the guests and gives Rena fifteen minutes to get dressed.

  * * *

  —

  The address Rena has given is a three-hour drive from where they are in Indiana, mostly highway. Dori buckles herself into the driver’s seat, still, Rena notices belatedly, in her pre-wedding clothes—white leggings, a pale pink zip-up hoodie, and a white T-shirt bedazzled with the word bride.

  “I really am sorry,” Rena says.

  “You didn’t tell him to leave, right?”

  This is true, so Rena lets it sit. She is quiet until Billie Holiday’s voice from the car radio becomes unbearable.

  “What do you want?” Rena asks.

  “From you?”

  “From life.”

  “Right now I want to go find my fiancé before we lose the whole wedding day.”

  “Right.”

  At a traffic light, Rena’s phone dings and Dori reaches for it with a speed that could be habit but Rena recognizes as distrust. The text, of course, is not from JT.

  “Michael?” Dori says. “Michael, really?”

  Rena grabs the phone back. Hey, says the text. You didn’t have to take off last night.

  Dori’s relief at knowing where Rena spent the night is palpable. She turns to Rena with the closest approximation of a smile it seems possible for her to manage at the moment and asks, “So what was it like?” Rena understands her prying as a kind of apology. They are going to be friends now; they are going to seal it with intimate detail the way schoolgirls would seal a blood sisterhood with a needle and a solemn touch.

  “It was fine,” Rena says. “Kind of grabby and over pretty quick. We were both a little drunk.”

  “I had to teach JT. It took a few years.”

  “Years?”

  “God, I did a lot of faking it.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have taken as long if you hadn’t faked it?”

  “That, darling, is why you’re single. If I hadn’t faked it, he wo
uld have moved on to a girl who did.”

  “So she could have waited a decade for him to not marry her on their wedding day?”

  They are at the turnoff for the highway, and Dori takes the right with such violent determination that Rena grips the door handle.

  “My wedding day’s not over yet. We could have JT back in time to marry me and get you and Michael to the open bar.”

  “There’s an open bar?”

  “We’re religious. We’re not cheap. Besides, my mother always says a wedding is not a success if it doesn’t inspire another wedding. There’s a bouquet with your name on it. Cut Michael off of the gin early and teach him what to do with his hands.”

  Dori is technically correct about the timeline; it is early, the sun still positioning itself to pin them in its full glow. In the flush of early morning light, Dori looks beatific, a magazine bride come to life. Rena has no idea in which direction JT actually took off, but it is possible that he has turned around, that he will turn around, that their paths will cross, the light hitting Dori in a way that reveals to him exactly how wrong he has been, and Dori will crown Rena this wedding’s unlikely guardian angel. Until Toledo, there will still technically be time to get back to the hotel and pull this wedding off, but Rena saw JT’s face last night, and if she knows anything by now, she knows the look of a man who is done with someone.

  As for Michael, it doesn’t really matter what she says about him; Dori is spinning the story that ends in happily ever after for everyone, the one where two years from now Rena and Michael are telling their meet-cute story at their own wedding. But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend. In her early twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her. But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?