Painting on a Motel Wall
We drove from L.A. up I-5 through the Central Valley. The freeway unspooled in a straight line, and it was like being motionless, suspended inside the throbbing of the engine. My beloved punched a cassette into the tape deck. Patsy Cline’s sultry voice, lending cinematic weight to this imperceptible forward progress. I closed my eyes.
At a party. It sounds cliché I know. She wore a black cable-knit sweater too big for her, the sleeves hanging down to her fingertips. A spray of acne scars gave her face an interesting texture. I was certainly thinking about the times when I have been most vulnerable. As if the pages of my Norton anthology would flutter like a moth’s wings.
Something happened in my stomach, a curling and uncurling. I felt awkward and incredibly femme. I could describe it as “precarious,” a sensation like being wrong-footed. Like trying to catch your balance in hopscotch, reaching down for the pebble.
We fell instantly into intimacy and told each other everything. But what I said aloud was something about the time, the hour of the day, the season. And what she said dropped me into stillness. We danced and the mix was ’70s disco and somehow it suited the vibrations of that night.
The party ebbed. Guests drifted out and the music shifted to a smokier ambience. The host dispensed the last formalities of the evening. Later he would collect the empty glasses and bottles, empty the ashtrays, set the throw pillows aright, in the stubbornly poignant wreckage of a morning after a party.
As dawn graced the narrow Santa Monica apartment, I slipped out the door with my beloved, our fingers touching, into the provisional daylight.
We drove north toward San Jose, the only trace of Los Angeles a brown smudge along the horizon behind us.
At a diner she stirred her coffee with her finger, swirling a cloudy spiral of milk. Echoes of the music lingered in my ears like the afterimage of a flash bulb.
By tacit understanding we never spoke about our pasts. I gathered or perhaps intuited that she lived in exile. Her splendor being the splendor of a prince in rags. As for me, growing up I was a very ugly child. I have scattered my past to the ravages of time – photographs, letters, yearbooks. I even set fire to my Norton anthology.
It’s probably OK. If I listen too much to the storm inside my own skull, the whole edifice begins to crack.
But now, here, my beloved was driving, thumb hooked carelessly on the steering wheel, thermos of coffee in her other hand.
The car broke down around three in the afternoon. She glided it to a stop on the shoulder and we sat listening to the radiator pop in the baking silence. Overhead the sun lens-flared across my vision.
We strapped on backpacks, abandoned luggage and car. The landscape gray-gold and sandy yellow, totally monotonous and fractal. Semis roared past in great blasts of heat and dust.
We checked into a motel and woke in a strange bed in a room with fake cedar paneling. The television was on, the volume muted. One of those old black-and-white sitcoms like Father Knows Best.
Sunlight filtered around the edges of the curtain, layering motes of dust on the television, the coffee maker, the painting of a sailboat tacking in the wind. The longer I contemplated that painting the uglier it became. But secretly I’ve always liked the kitsch of artwork destined for hotels, lobbies, waiting rooms. They speak to my desire for the utilitarian. This painting did not really depict a sailboat; it depicted the concept ‘painting on a motel wall.’
We spent three days together and for three days my cell phone rang.
We slept through daytime hours. We got up as light was fading. We made coffee, the on/off switch glowing a soft red orange, the trickle of coffee hissing into the carafe.
Using a strap-on my beloved penetrated me until I pulsed. My lashes wet. I’ve always hidden myself. But the treasure map was right there.
Outside, dusk glowed darkly, soothing the pebbled concrete paths that soaked up heat throughout the day.
Moonlight shimmered on the swimming pool. The bite of chlorine. We fed dollars into the vending machine.
The lock softly clicked, admitting us into the coolness of the room.
The television forever flickered. Images of death and terror disguised as ads for smiling teeth and dewy skin.
I loved the spangle of scars across her cheeks. I loved her strong fingers. I submerged myself into her moisture. With the television silenced we read aloud to each other from Lunch Poems and I remembered how I once knew the casualness of writing.
We gobbled up vast quantities of time, eons in which glaciers ebbed and receded around us.
Here’s where I should start to tell a story, in this middle section when no forward progress is happening. I could tell you about the time I was crowned Miss California, not by any pageant governing body, but placing a tiara onto my own head and sashaying before the closet mirror in a vintage gown. I gushed to my adoring fans. For the talent portion, I belted out old Cure songs.
If I have a talent, it’s for these sorts of melodramatics.
Here’s a memory:
The brisk efficiency of the nurses. How the lights on the freeway made everything seem unreal. How I never cried.
My beloved knew all this. She knew how to strip it from my skin so I lay new and glistening.
I had questions. Such as:
What is the basic definition of trauma. Is being fucked a form of therapy. Did we come to know each other. Which memories are true. Which stories are self-serving. What do I fantasize about. Where do poets congregate. What’s on TV. Do women exist in relation to Patriarchy. Does this motel room exist.
Maybe time really did stop. Maybe I’m there still.
Maybe I’m the sailboat. Tacking in the wind. Expressing the idea: ‘Woman in a motel room.’
I’m the heroine of this story. And I will tell you about how we checked into the motel on a hot desert afternoon, obtained the room key from the front desk where the glug of a water fountain dispensed a cold stream into a waxy paper cup to quench my thirst from the face of the sun its brow never clouded, and stepped into the room that smelled of carpet while the air conditioner clicked its heels thrilling into the “on” position.
When my beloved stripped naked she lost some of her cool because her skin was hot. I could trace lines with fluttering fingertips, sweating in the A/C. Our nakedness was the thinnest of partitions.
I can’t be healed, I’m a vessel that’s cracked in a hundred places, but my feminine self bears my scars like my fluttering heart. If I crack a thousand times I’m the more beautiful for it.
The sailboat isn’t really moving. That’s the nature of paintings — they seem to be caught in some other plane of time. This highway, outside our motel room, was an infinite line and we a point equidistant from both ends. Trucks roared past in the night. The desert life was silent, as silent as the infinite stars that scar the face of the sky.
I shivered.
We opened the curtains to let the moon paint us with its phosphorescent brush. My beloved lay half in light, half in shadow. I lowered myself closer, bathed in her luminance, until I became a paint stroke dabbed onto the canvas by the thumb of the goddess.
We crowned ourselves king and queen, draping garlands of flowers over our shoulders, voluptuous in the perfumed air.
Inevitably, the desert will encroach upon us all. But a trickle of fresh water can bloom into an oasis.
And when I thought myself arid — just then, quietly as a mouse’s claws scrabbling on the sand under a bone-white moon, just then stole into my heart my intolerably femme heart a voice that whispered —
and I whispered a reply.
Veronica Wasson (she/her) is a trans writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Mulberry Literary, Same Faces Collective, Yellow Arrow, and The Plentitudes.