Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “No,” Matty said finally, with a grim edge to his voice. “I didn’t know. How would I know?”

  “Because I just told you.”

  The bases were loaded now, the Indians’ pitcher having walked Cabrera. On one of the digital signs over center field the word THUNDER appeared to wriggle and squirm. The stadium filled with the noise of banging and clapping, transfigured into a four-acre drum. Cellphone cameras rose from the crowds, held high and higher to record whatever might be coming from ten thousand vantage points at least, in an immense surge of preservation. Inside that volatile rowdy bowl it felt as though only two people remained seated.

  Matty had to shout, “So where you guys gonna move?”

  It was so brazenly self-serving, the question caused Talmadge to flinch. But the flinch was not without other origins. “That’s the thing,” Talmadge shouted back. “She’s saying we’re not moving.”

  “What the fuck, dude? You gonna raise a baby in a squat?”

  “That’s kinda what I said.”

  “And she’s not open to, like, going to a clinic—”

  Talmadge cut him off, knowing just where he’d been headed. He’d visited the same clinic in his own mind. “No chance, man. She wants this baby.”

  “Go out diving for baby food?” Matty said, veering back. “Dude, I seen enough to tell you you’d have better luck finding Ho Hos.”

  Giambi was up to bat, and after two balls and a strike, the crowd settled into an eager hush, holding its breath for him.

  “I hear you, man, I do,” Talmadge said. “You know how she is. You said it yourself.”

  Matty grunted, looking almost satisfied to no longer be on the defensive. “And you think I’m the fucked-up one.”

  “And the worst part, man,” Talmadge went on, with a squeak to his drawl, “is that I can’t fucking talk to her about it. She’s always going on about the way her dad did things. The way he raised her. But her dad, man—he’s batshit crazy! Everyone but Micah thinks he killed her mother! He got hauled into court when she was a kid for, like, child neglect or something.”

  “Like I said,” Matty muttered.

  “Yeah, well.” Matty was over-hammering the point. “You’re fucked up too.”

  Matty disliked Micah. This was clear and maybe always had been, as much as Talmadge longed to deny it. That wink he’d given Talmadge, that very first Thanksgiving night: It’d signaled he would play along for however long Talmadge needed, that he’d be there when this fever broke. But what did Matty know? He’d never been in love, as he freely admitted. He’d never even had much in the way of a girlfriend, so far as Talmadge knew. All his feelings were aimed inward. But then who else did Talmadge have? He’d whittled his allegiances down to two, and just one if you discounted Micah: the wild kid from Mahwah who’d cradled Talmadge’s head above a Deaton Hall toilet one long-ago night, after Talmadge had mixed two hits of blotter with a couple ecstasy pills on top of bourbon, sponging the vomit from his lips and assuring him over and over again, as Talmadge bawled in hallucinatory terror, that he wasn’t going to die, to stop talking like that, that everything would be okay, that he wasn’t going to let him die no matter what. The memory sent a tremor of affection through Talmadge’s chest, and swishing the last warm remnants of beer in his cup he said, “I’m empty. Can ol’ Elwin buy me another beer?”

  “Ol’ Elwin’ll buy you anything you want, man.”

  Giambi struck out, retiring the inning and with his last whiff at bat sucking all the oxygen from the stadium, causing everyone to gasp and sink back into their seats as if felled by the toxic fumes of dashed hopes. A low mutinous grumble overtook the stands as Matty disappeared to fetch more beer. In the solitary interim Talmadge tried to unknot what he was feeling but found himself distracted by the legs of his seatmate which, now that she’d perched her feet on the armrest in front of her, thereby jackknifing her legs in Talmadge’s direction, were both obnoxiously and breathtakingly close. They were Ole Miss legs, he realized, though of an older and slightly distressed vintage: of that variety of shatteringly perfect limbs he’d come to know and ogle from his first day at the university, as seen on the girls navigating Sorority Row in their hiked-up Umbro shorts, the negligible variations in shape and skin tone melding into a burnished uniform gleam as they’d go power-walking up or down the hill in clutches of three or four, those legs like sharpened scissors cutting straight into the monkey recesses of his stupefied brain. In the languid sunlight the woman’s legs appeared not just shaved (they were) but sanded down to their lustrous core and then oiled to bring out the barely perceptible grain, like the mahogany gunstock of his grandfather’s .30-30. He wanted to touch the leg nearest him—mere inches from his hand, he could almost detect the 98.6-degree heat it was exuding, could almost feel the microclimate of her skin—as he’d been allowed to touch his grandfather’s rifle as a boy: with a sacred reverence and an awareness of danger that prickled the skin on the nape of his neck. He pulled his hand away, however, cursing himself and looking the woman up and down with a sneer that seemed callous but necessary. Micah had amazing legs, too, of course. She did. He loved the downy chestnut hair on them, the way the hair submitted to his tongue when he’d run his mouth down her lower legs leaving a slickly flattened row—

  Who am I? The question burst into his consciousness with such jarring suddenness that he glanced around to see if maybe someone else had just stabbed it into his brain. Maybe the announcer? But no, the announcer had another script before him as he broadcast the start of a between-innings race featuring a trio of people dressed as bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish. He chanced a quick peek at the woman’s lower thigh, as though it could supply him the answer. He wasn’t convinced it couldn’t. Maybe this was the question he’d meant to ask the skyline that night. Or maybe the skyline was no wiser and no more forthcoming than Dick Bertrand’s prized bug zapper. As usual he didn’t know.

  When Matty returned it was clear that he’d been pondering Talmadge’s situation; he wore a gently worried expression, and when he asked Talmadge how he was feeling it was with therapeutic warmth. “It’s just, like, this is for keeps now, you know?” Talmadge blurted, three weeks of desperation finding sudden vent. “I mean, look, I admire Micah’s principles more than I can even—” He stopped at that edge, because he did admire Micah’s fundamentalism, and he didn’t want to insult it with hyperbolic bullshit. “Go to hell, mustard!” they heard someone bellow, and both he and Matty glanced to the field where ketchup was leading mustard on a dash around the bases with relish far behind, the foam costumes bouncing atop stocking legs. “I mean, she’s right,” he said. “She’s totally right, dude. Her way of living—our way I mean. It’s the only moral way to even exist in the world right now.”

  Matty shook his head and looked away toward the field, where ketchup was now claiming an oversized check for charity and the Yankees were jogging out to claim their positions. “I don’t get how that matters.”

  Talmadge ignored this. “But you bring a kid into it,” he went on, “no fucking way, man. Right? Battle’s over. It’s one thing to take on these sacrifices, and, like, put your money where your mouth is—”

  “More like your anti-money.”

  “Fine, whatever. But you get what I’m saying, dude—removing yourself from the system, living below it or above it or whatever we’re doing. The whole anti-civ bit. You can do that when it’s just you, or just us—when you’re making your own choices about how to flip off the world. I mean, I believe in what Micah’s saying. She’s right. She’s a hundred percent right. You’d have to be a blind prick to look at the world and not agree with every damn thing she says.”

  Matty raised a protesting finger, which Talmadge also ignored. “But you bring a kid—a baby—into it? Uh-uh. You can’t hand those sacrifices down, you know? Maybe you can—write letters. March. Give money to, like, groups or someshit. Start groups, I dunno.” He hesitated, disliking the path he’d just gone down, before gathering the
force for the conclusion he’d been flailing toward: “But you gotta ease that kid into the world as it is.”

  Matty went quiet for a while, squinting into the sun dipping slowly into the upper deck above third base. “You tell her that?”

  “Yeah,” Talmadge said. “Of course. That was the epic throw-down we had Saturday night.”

  “I knew something was up. That’s why I broke loose.”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” In his voice was a choked urgency, a deep blue wretchedness that until this very moment he hadn’t fully unleashed. “She won’t bend. And that’s my kid.”

  The Indians were already down two outs. Matty leaned back in his seat, propping his legs over the open seat in front of him. Talmadge felt his chest heaving, and the sweat on his face was cold and still. When he brought his beer to his lips the cup was shaking; the harder he gripped it, the harder it shook. “Fuck,” he said, by which he meant everything, and Matty turned and gave him a hangdog look that felt as consoling as Matty taking his hand in his would’ve felt. “You’re gonna need some cash, you know. Doctors’ bills. Diapers. That sorta shit.”

  “I been thinking about it.”

  “I’m guessing you guys won’t be disposable diaper people.”

  “Fuck off, dude,” Talmadge said gently, with the faintest curve of a smile.

  “It’s not hard to get, you know. Same trash bags. Same dumpsters.”

  Talmadge wagged his head no, though his insides surrendered immediately to the idea. “It’s like I told her,” he said. “We can live pure and change the fucking world, or we can have this baby. But not both.”

  “I think you’ve nailed it, dude,” Matty affirmed.

  “Yeah?” Talmadge said, watching Matty purse his lips and nod contemplatively. They took synchronized sips of their beers, their heads turning in further tandem as a Cleveland batter knocked a pop fly out to left field, where Matsui nabbed it effortlessly from the sky, closing the inning. The woman beside Talmadge slipped off her heels and angling her leg toward him she flexed her toes in what remained of the sunlight. It was such an obvious violation of his space that she murmured an apology, which Talmadge accepted with a nod and then added, clumsily, “Go on and let those dogs loose.” On her face there was zero reaction, but the golden legs crept forward, releasing their ache into the oily heat of the stadium. The call of a roving hot dog vendor came drifting down from the stands above, as measured and ancient-sounding as a church bell tolling on a Mississippi Sunday morning: hawt dawgs, hawt dawgs, get yeh hawt dawgs heah. Rotating to search the stands, Matty asked, “You wanna vegan hot dog?”

  With a crooked smile Talmadge said, “Fuck off.”

  Matty stood, raising two fingers high in the air, as the Indians took their places on the field. “How you feeling, Herpes?” he shouted while waiting. Ortiz threw his head back, rippling his neck muscles in mutely indignant response, as Matty’s call sparked an erratic chorus to detonate in the higher seats: “Herpes! Herpes! Herpes!” Matty climbed up onto his seat, exhorting the crowd by raising his outspread arms high and then higher, an orchestral conductor urging mayhem with a wide cocky smile emerging from the top of that lavish black slab of a beard, looking “nuttier than a squirrel turd,” as Uncle Lenord would’ve put it, and as the crowd roared in beery, full-throated obedience, the chant spreading from section to section, Talmadge saw Matty glance down at him, to prod Talmadge into joining his choir. But he didn’t need to. Talmadge was already shouting.

  3

  SARA WAS AT LUNCH with her sister Liz when she said it. The restaurant, set inside the three-story Soho: Kitchen & Home department store on lower Broadway, was called ’Vore, though it didn’t bill itself a restaurant: A SUSTAINABLE CURATION, rather, at least according to the menu which was printed on FSC-certified post-consumer paper and stapled to squares of cardboard recycled from the store’s delivery boxes that (also according to the menu) would be composted at day’s end along with all the placemats, sugar-cane fiber napkins, and leftovers. Sara had ordered a “massaged” raw kale salad with Meyer lemon, black walnuts, and mint, joking to Liz that at least some part of her would be massaged that day, while Liz sent back her kasha and orzo with veal meatballs for being “kind of gummy,” confiding to Sara afterwards that she hated “to be a bitch but they’re composting it anyway.” Her backup choice, housemade falafel with garam masala and Long Island apricot, was also gummy, and though the waiter offered to compost that too, Liz reluctantly said she’d stick with it, and went about nibbling the edges like a martyr. She was fresh from hot yoga, her skin still weeping sweat despite the restaurant’s glacial air conditioning, and before Sara had even thought to reach for her water Liz had drained three glasses along with a watermelon-ginger-lemongrass “cooler” out of a Mason jar that, again according to the menu, had been reclaimed from a defunct Amish jammery in Middlefield, Ohio, not fifteen minutes from where Liz and Sara had been raised. They noted this in passing, thinking the coincidence might hold significance, but finding none settled languidly into inventorying their standard laments: Jeremy’s on-again depression (Liz blamed his job at the Rainforest Protection Network, noting that at the end of their recent ten-day vacation to Costa Rica, during which she’d barred him from both laptop and phone, he’d said, “Of course it was a great time. Only 1,370 species went extinct while I was gone”); the apparent futility of behavioral therapy for Aidan’s autism (“thirty grand a year to get the same kid coming out as the one going in”); and, on Sara’s end, the twined hardships of living with an increasingly frustrated husband and an increasingly reclusive teen daughter. “I swear,” Sara said, ribbons of kale speared on the fork hovering just below her mouth, “sometimes I think Alexis loves Dave more than I do.”

  This wasn’t what she’d meant to say. From across the table she saw her sister’s face warping with a mixture of confusion and concern. What she’d meant to say instead was, “Sometimes I think Alexis loves Dave more than me,” though even that sounded ambiguous as she realized upon correcting herself. “What I mean,” she re-amended, “is that it feels like she loves Dave more than she loves me. Sometimes. Oh hell.”

  Liz swallowed dryly and rearranged the napkin on her knees. She’d never been good at hiding her distaste for Dave, although Sara (who characterized herself as a “staunch independent” to mask her lack of interest) had always chalked the divide up to politics, to the Sunni-Shi’a split of the contemporary American electorate: Dave’s rigidity clanging against Liz’s. Cautiously, Liz said, “Maybe that’s because Dave isn’t the disciplinarian.”

  “Oh God he isn’t,” Sara agreed. “He’s like—her enabler.”

  “So it makes sense in a way. Of course Alexis seems drawn to him. Whenever you’re saying no, he’s throwing her a big life-ring of yes.”

  “That’s probably it,” Sara said, lifting the kale into her mouth and chewing it without registering any flavor. She knew this theory was insufficient—Alexis wasn’t really a discipline problem; Dave didn’t really have authority in parenting matters to begin with—but she liked its cleanliness. The muddier truth—that her husband and daughter seemed at times enjoined against her, a two-person cabal trading inside jokes and sneaky remarks and furtive glances—had a paranoiac smudge to it, and risked the impression that Sara was swamped with self-esteem issues: No one likes me, et cetera. Which she wasn’t; no more than the average American woman, she figured. “Teenagers,” she groaned, wanting suddenly to close this subject she’d so awkwardly opened. “Just you wait.”

  “It’s one day at a time, with Aidy,” Liz said, poking through her falafel for specks of apricot. “The challenge for us, I think, is going to be separating out what’s neurotypical—you know, hormonal—and what’s the disease. What’s normal and what’s not. Jeremy and I have been taking this online course, through UMass, on behavioral intervention in autism.” She posed this last bit as a question, as though the prestige of the program might be known to Sara; it wasn’t. “Well, I’m taking
it at least. Jeremy’s just going through the paces.” With a frown, she dug a finger into her mouth to pluck something from her back teeth. “I really should’ve sent this back too. What’s the deal? All the reviews made this place sound like nirvana.”

  “Mine’s good,” Sara offered.

  “Speaking of that,” Liz said, not clearly at all, “how’s the whole, you know, sex issue?” The leer on her face was the exclusive product of her Midwestern inability to broach the topic of sex without sniggering; neither her issue nor Sara’s was particularly leer-worthy.

  “Ugh, the same,” Sara said. “The pressure’s so intense that even when we do have it it’s not enough for him. It almost makes things worse, because then he thinks the next night’s in play. Let’s not even go there. You?”

  Liz shrugged. “He still claims it’s because of the antidepressants. Though he won’t ask his doctor for, you know, the other pills. For . . .”

  “Right.”

  “So nothing’s changed on my end, either.” She sighed, staring at her falafel as though it represented her gummy, send-backable sex life. “Still nada.”

  “If only we could trade husbands,” Sara said clumsily, regretting it even before Liz’s face warped again, this time from undisguised revulsion. She could see Liz picturing the scene the way Sara had once uncharitably described it to her—Dave entering the bedroom nude and hairy-bellied with his penis already stout and erect, having prepped it in the bathroom to signal his desirous expectation the way beach flags signaled surf conditions—and felt a stab of defensiveness, her imagination retorting by throwing up images of Jeremy asking meekly and creepily to rub her feet, maybe, if that was okay, just a little bit. Sara was about to claw back the remark when the waiter appeared tableside, wanting to know if everything was all right.