A Little Voice
She has this smell that sinks into everything: her clothes, the sheets, the guest towels. And I am convinced it's all over me too because sometimes I can smell her when I am far away and I am not thinking about her; when I don't want to think about her. Teresa's smell, like hotel soap: clean and flowery like she was taught to smell. The times I've cheated on her have been in hotels; in mid-grade holiday Inn's, $114.99 midweek, where I looked at my self in the mirror in ultra bright bathrooms and practiced my "I'm just running late today" and "I am in and out of meeting all day so don't bother calling the office" speeches. The small round carefully wrapped soaps, that don't smell until you open them up, sitting softly unused with other offerings on a terry clothe, as the other woman undressed in front of the bed. Hotel beds it always seemed to me have the smell of apathetic cotton. Their blankets and sheets jaded from their duty. It's a 35 minute drive from the hotel parking structure to our drive way, from work it's 20 minutes from work. Always leave the hotel early, just in case she notices, not that she would, but I want to be sure. Her smell always gets me on the drive home, never in hotels, always on the way home. Teresa says that smells are signs. She says that there are always signs everywhere. She says there are little voices but I was just never taught to listen because Here we separate ourselves from the dead and listen too much to doctors and psychologists. But how is a familiar smell like a little voice? It's really just her damn crazy superstitions I know that... just backward folklore.... I really do know that, but god... sometimes I swear she knows things she is not suppose to know and I don't know how to explain it anymore. I used to be able reason my way out of all these supernatural things she surrounds herself with. Her best friend the psychic who works with mexican taro cards- just generalizations and lucky guesses. I'd explain her dreams in which her grandmother, who died in the big earthquake in Mexico city when she was a little girl, visits with warnings. "That just your subconscience", I'd explain to her rolling eyes....I used to laugh them off but lately I just don't know. I can't explain it. She's sleeping, Curled up on the sofa in that damn sweater again, I know it. It's 6:45, I'll be home in 8 minutes. She got home at 6:15, got the mail, walked in, took off her shoes, turned on the evening news reports and feel asleep in that cream colored sweater bought second hand because " Algo no mas me dijo " she starts "something just told me to go in, you know, a little voice." Only... she's wearing it for like the third time this week and it makes me not even want to touch her. It came just the same as a lot of other clothes in a plain plastic bag from that small 50's vintage store off of 6th Avenue. At first it was just the same with a foreign smell like cardboard boxes and old women. She had sat small on the corner of the bed, held each item out to me: paisley green shirt that buttons down the back, a deep blue slip with old thick lace and the cream colored sweater that was what had caught her eye the minute she walked in. I am sure she loves it be cause it looks like something her grandmother would wear in the black and white photographs she keeps in the living room next to the little ceramic figurines and candles There is something very wrong with that sweater. It defines the gravity of her smell and I don't know why. It's like it refuses to be hers and shit that scares me because that never happened before. All the other things in the bag long ago resigned to her smell. The slip went first: as she tried on and it hugged against her body like it was made for only her. Oh god she was gorgeous with that deep blue pressing against her brown skin. It felt so nice as I pressed against her, it felt like nothing. It was hers from then, filled with the smell of her skin, as her warm body pressed back through it and on to me. The sweater stands abstinent, even though she's worn it so many times now. It's not so much that the smell is foreign that bothers me, it's that it's slowly grown familiar. I know the smell so well....it's a smell that isn't clean or warm like blossoms. It's residue of harsh expensive perfume that tries so hard that with french tipped acrylic nails it digs in and holds on. I keep thinking that something in her knows that the sweater bothers me and that she's just waiting for me explode. That this is some passive aggressive way to get me to admit that I fucked up. What if somewhere in her gut or from a dream she just knows what I did and in her quite way is letting me know. But she doesn't seem to notice the foreignness of the smell and I try so hard not to let on that something's wrong. How would she know that smell...that smell from gold tinted bottles with something gaudy like a crystal swan glued on the side? Karen who was just like me. Her good posture like a swan, and perfect pronunciation like crystal. She did not believe in anything other than herself. I keeping thinking in my head when I met her, as I first touched her, as I had sex with her in the hotel room so premeditated the bed had no head board - that we made sense. Karen made a lot of sense while nothing else made sense. When the consequence of Teresa's all devouring smell first occurred to me. Karen wore suits and organized the money in her wallet. Ones in to twenties in a crisp procession. Karen was average, not too exciting or too arousing or too anything. Her name short with no crazed evocation of long dead virgins or saints, Karen with no middle name, probably named out of a baby book. But now it's not about sense. It doesn't make sense to me now that Karen's smell would come back like this because of a little voice. That her smell created in some french lab and sold at Nordstrom would come and haunt me like this while Teresa lies there so perfectly still. I keep thinking: what if somewhere inside Teresa knows and has forgiven me and this is just her quiet way of showing me- no rage, no tears. I don't want her to forgive me. I want her grandmother to come to her in a uncomfortable dream, leave her transparent ghost state and show her what I've done. I want her best friend to throw down the cards that scream to her third eye. I want her to look across the table with all the cards laid out in some ancient aztec pattern and for her to say " Ese puto!" To say "That fucker " I don't want her forgiveness or ignorance. I want her to scream. I want her to break the little glass things that decorate the living room. I want her to fling them at me. I want her to cry with anger and hate from the depth of her chest. I want her to slam the bathroom door shut with one hand as she dials a million numbers in to the cordless phone with the other, connecting to her mother in deep mexico and weeps spanish so fast in to the phone that I don't even catch the bad words. Maybe then with her in pieces instead of in a peaceful sleep I'll feel something, I'll feel for the first time in so long and regret it all. Then I can tell her it all. Tell her that I was wrong and that even though it doesn't make sense her smell means everything to me
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