Let's Do

Let's Do

let’s do
Estelle hadn’t meant to sleep with the interviewer, but here she was, underneath him, watching his furry back heave and shudder. It was 3:30 on a Tuesday. The afternoon light leaked through the dank hotel drapes. She hadn’t really looked at the room until now, as the interviewer labored and she urged him along, cheerleading him to the finish line, slapping his ass now and then. Whatever would help. The room smelled like smoke and beneath its slick bedside table, Estelle spotted a Frito, something missed by the maids. A strange constellation of stains marked the ceiling. She hated hotels, hated knowing of other sad couplings on this bedspread, the women paid or plied or taken by force, the men poking urgently at anything warm. She tried to remember the last hotel she’d been in: it was years ago, an old roadside motel on a cross-country trip with her husband, Paul, who was now moving out. It must have been Wyoming. The sky 63 had hung low with angry black clouds and they were lost and exhausted, and when they saw the neon-lit “vacancy” sign, they both sighed. They had been young and in-love enough to laugh at the cobwebs, the fusty pictures of flowers outlined in yarn. They had slept under a quilt sewn from old dresses, curling into each other like puppies, or socks. She had all but forgotten about that trip. A little sound escaped her throat. “Good?” breathed the interviewer. His tongue probed her ear. “So good,” Estelle said, raking her nails up his back. She glanced at her watch, though there was no reason to, nowhere that she had to be. By now, her husband was probably home from work, packing boxes, waiting for her to return so he could claim this lamp, that chair. Or he might be unpacking at his new apartment , the first floor of a Queen Anne in the crumbling heart of the city. She hadn’t seen it but he had described it in detail, the paint peeling like eggshells, the shutters askew. A fixer-upper, the kind of place she’d embraced when they first started out. Back then, Estelle had been the kind of girl who looked forward to things. There had been a voice in her head, the voice of countless Girl Fridays, primed for adventure, greeting opportunity with a melody: Oh, let’s do! Let’s do a picnic, a midnight swim, cow-tipping , marriage! Let’s do our own wallpapering, drive our way out West! Then, there had been no reason to decline. Any wrong turn could be a lark, every misstep alighted in madcap charm. Let’s do our kitchen in purple, buy a used German car! Error was burnished by college tries. Time had been blank and simple as a clock face, open, forgiving, its hands returning and returning her to beginnings. Now everything laid bare the machinery of habit and regret. New shoes led to bounced checks, new neighbors to hedge squabbles . Even her favorite police drama contrived freshness by turning all its characters into vampires. Why even try? There was no 64 let’s do let’s do 65 mystery in the bedsprings creaking beneath her. No surprise in the interviewer’s final, triumphant thrust. The only surprise, really, was that she was here. Estelle was too old and too smart to do this—pushing forty, several years out of law school. Until today, she had almost forgotten about the lower regions of her body; everything below the waist seemed like a chaotic country she had long escaped and tried never to recall. And she had no interest at all in the interviewer, with his bird legs and his money clip and his way of summoning waiters by snapping. He rolled off of her, pulling the sheet over his penis, now lifeless , a wrinkled balloon. Her breasts were carpeted in fallen chest hair. She made herself watch as he reassembled. He bent over for socks. He wiggled into his briefs, snapped the waistband. He placed one thin knobby leg in a pant leg, hopped, placed the other. All the while, Estelle felt nothing. But on the horizon, approaching, there was a shadow: a mood was amassing like a rank of soldiers. An old and urgent sorrow would overtake her any minute. She fixed on the interviewer as he buttoned...