Valentine’s Day
This past Valentine’s Day, I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the Motel 6 there, just off the I-40. You might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway (who would?), but Nola and I have been married for fifteen years now, and romance is just part of the continuum—sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold, and we certainly don’t need a special day or place for it. We’re not sentimentalists. We don’t exchange heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside, and we don’t go around kissing in public or saying “I love you” twenty times a day. (To my mind, couples like that are always suspect—really, who are they trying to fool?) Besides which, we were there to pay a visit to Nola’s father, who’s in his eighties and living in a trailer park a mile down the road from the motel, which made it convenient not only for seeing him but for strolling into Old Town, where there are a handful of bars and restaurants and the junk shops my wife loves to frequent, looking for bargains.
Were we slumming? Yes, sure. We could have stayed anywhere we liked, but this—at least when we’re in Kingman—is what we like, and if it’s not ideal, at least it’s different. The local police creep through the parking lot in the small hours, running license plates, and once in a while you’ll wake to them handcuffing somebody outside one of the rooms, which is not a sight we see every day back in California. Plus, there are a couple of lean white bums living in the wash just behind the place, and they sometimes give me a start, looming up out of the darkness when I step outside at night for a breath of air, but nothing’s ever happened, not even a request for spare change or a cigarette.
The afternoon of Valentine’s Day, after we’d visited my father-in-law (and treated him to lunch at Denny’s, the only place he’ll eat), Nola went up the street to cruise the antique emporiums and I made for the local bar, figuring we’d meet up there for a drink when she was done, then walk over to the Mexican restaurant for margaritas and enchiladas. This bar, which I’d been to before, is a cavernous place that was part of a now defunct hotel, and it features a high tin ceiling, a long, pitted bar top, three pool tables, and a jukebox that plays the hits of the sixties and seventies at hurricane volume. The front door stands perpetually open, so as to brighten the place up a bit with the best kind of light, the light that doesn’t cost anybody anything, and across the street is a web of train tracks that guide an endless procession of freight trains through town. Glance up from your beer or your gin-and-tonic and more often than not you’ll see a moving wall of freight cars rattling by.
The important thing to emphasize here is that this isn’t an unfriendly place, despite the neatly inscribed message over the urinal in the men’s room that says “Fuck you, liberal pussies,” which I choose to take as ironic. And I wasn’t unfriendly myself, happy to sidle up to the bar alongside the mostly middle-aged regulars and order a Jack-and-Coke, though normally—that is, back in our little coastal town in California—I would have had a Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita hills or a nice, full-bodied Zinfandel from Paso Robles. This wasn’t the place for Pinot Noir, and I’m not knocking it, just stating the obvious. Beyond that, I was content to bend over my phone (I’d been engaged off and on all day posting on a financial forum run by the company I used to work for) and wait for Nola to tire out and come join me for a Valentine’s Day drink, which in her case would likely be a gin-and-tonic, a drink that nobody, whether they were in Kingman or Irkutsk, could screw up.
There was a woman sitting at the deserted end of the bar, four stools down from me. I’d thrown her a reflexive glance when I came in, but chose to give her her space and sit one stool over from a knot of bearded regulars in plaid shirts, shorts, and work boots. This woman—late thirties, lean as one of the bums in the wash, jeans, running shoes, her face older than the rest of her, and a little rainbow-colored cap perched atop her dark, cropped hair—wouldn’t have been attractive to me even if I were in the market, which I wasn’t. But I was there without my wife, it was Valentine’s Day, and the single glance I’d given her must have meant more to her than to me, because three minutes later, before I’d had even a sip or two of my drink, she was standing beside me, so close we were practically touching.
“My name’s Serena,” she said, trying for a smile she couldn’t quite arrange.
“Brandon,” I said, and, because she was right there in my personal space, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I took her hand and shook it in a neutral way.
“Brandon?” she echoed. “What kind of name is that?”
“Just a name.” I shrugged. “It’s what my parents gave me.”
“I have E.S.P.,” she said.
by T. Coraghessan Boyle, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
This past Valentine’s Day, I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the Motel 6 there, just off the I-40. You might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway (who would?), but Nola and I have been married for fifteen years now, and romance is just part of the continuum—sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold, and we certainly don’t need a special day or place for it. We’re not sentimentalists. We don’t exchange heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside, and we don’t go around kissing in public or saying “I love you” twenty times a day. (To my mind, couples like that are always suspect—really, who are they trying to fool?) Besides which, we were there to pay a visit to Nola’s father, who’s in his eighties and living in a trailer park a mile down the road from the motel, which made it convenient not only for seeing him but for strolling into Old Town, where there are a handful of bars and restaurants and the junk shops my wife loves to frequent, looking for bargains.
Were we slumming? Yes, sure. We could have stayed anywhere we liked, but this—at least when we’re in Kingman—is what we like, and if it’s not ideal, at least it’s different. The local police creep through the parking lot in the small hours, running license plates, and once in a while you’ll wake to them handcuffing somebody outside one of the rooms, which is not a sight we see every day back in California. Plus, there are a couple of lean white bums living in the wash just behind the place, and they sometimes give me a start, looming up out of the darkness when I step outside at night for a breath of air, but nothing’s ever happened, not even a request for spare change or a cigarette.The afternoon of Valentine’s Day, after we’d visited my father-in-law (and treated him to lunch at Denny’s, the only place he’ll eat), Nola went up the street to cruise the antique emporiums and I made for the local bar, figuring we’d meet up there for a drink when she was done, then walk over to the Mexican restaurant for margaritas and enchiladas. This bar, which I’d been to before, is a cavernous place that was part of a now defunct hotel, and it features a high tin ceiling, a long, pitted bar top, three pool tables, and a jukebox that plays the hits of the sixties and seventies at hurricane volume. The front door stands perpetually open, so as to brighten the place up a bit with the best kind of light, the light that doesn’t cost anybody anything, and across the street is a web of train tracks that guide an endless procession of freight trains through town. Glance up from your beer or your gin-and-tonic and more often than not you’ll see a moving wall of freight cars rattling by.
The important thing to emphasize here is that this isn’t an unfriendly place, despite the neatly inscribed message over the urinal in the men’s room that says “Fuck you, liberal pussies,” which I choose to take as ironic. And I wasn’t unfriendly myself, happy to sidle up to the bar alongside the mostly middle-aged regulars and order a Jack-and-Coke, though normally—that is, back in our little coastal town in California—I would have had a Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita hills or a nice, full-bodied Zinfandel from Paso Robles. This wasn’t the place for Pinot Noir, and I’m not knocking it, just stating the obvious. Beyond that, I was content to bend over my phone (I’d been engaged off and on all day posting on a financial forum run by the company I used to work for) and wait for Nola to tire out and come join me for a Valentine’s Day drink, which in her case would likely be a gin-and-tonic, a drink that nobody, whether they were in Kingman or Irkutsk, could screw up.
There was a woman sitting at the deserted end of the bar, four stools down from me. I’d thrown her a reflexive glance when I came in, but chose to give her her space and sit one stool over from a knot of bearded regulars in plaid shirts, shorts, and work boots. This woman—late thirties, lean as one of the bums in the wash, jeans, running shoes, her face older than the rest of her, and a little rainbow-colored cap perched atop her dark, cropped hair—wouldn’t have been attractive to me even if I were in the market, which I wasn’t. But I was there without my wife, it was Valentine’s Day, and the single glance I’d given her must have meant more to her than to me, because three minutes later, before I’d had even a sip or two of my drink, she was standing beside me, so close we were practically touching.
“My name’s Serena,” she said, trying for a smile she couldn’t quite arrange.
“Brandon,” I said, and, because she was right there in my personal space, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I took her hand and shook it in a neutral way.
“Brandon?” she echoed. “What kind of name is that?”
“Just a name.” I shrugged. “It’s what my parents gave me.”
“I have E.S.P.,” she said.
by T. Coraghessan Boyle, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
