Flirting In Cars

by Alisa Kwitney

  “What are you saying, that I should change my tastes to suit the house?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just…this is so peaceful. So comforting. You want a nice landscape or a portrait…but on the other hand, you’re right, you have to be you.” Bronwyn took a deep breath. “Oh, listen to that.”

  “Listen to what?” Mack had driven home an hour earlier, Maya and the boys had gone to sleep, and aside from the faint sounds that old houses always make, sighing as they settle themselves for the night, everything was quiet.

  “Exactly.” Bronwyn curled up on Zoë’s bed. “You know what? I could move here. The boys could go to a normal, stress-free preschool, I could hang here with you—we could even get a dog!”

  “It’s a nice fantasy, but I don’t intend to stay here next year.” Zoë turned her back on her friend as she pulled off her shirt and unhooked her brassiere. “The plan was always for us to give Maya a kick-start and then return to Manhattan.”

  Bronwyn looked bemused. “You know, for some reason I always assumed that even though you said you were coming back, you’d wind up loving it here.”

  Zoë shook her head. “There are things I love about it, but I’m a city girl.”

  “And I suppose I am, too. But maybe we could share the place for the summer?”

  Zoë pulled on the black silk underwear she’d been wearing since the weather changed. “That’s a nice idea, but how would your husband feel?”

  Bronwyn gave a contemptuous little laugh. “He might not even notice. I mean, how often does Brian see the boys and me, anyhow? And he could always commute on weekends.”

  “You don’t think he’d miss you not living in the same city during the week?”

  “I doubt it. He’d probably be relieved.” Bronwyn looked out the window, with its pretty gingham curtains that clashed with Zoë’s embroidered Middle Eastern pillows and her postmodern artwork. “Hey, look, it’s starting to snow.”

  They both peered as the first flakes began to tumble down, silvered by moonlight. “Maybe it’s a mistake to expect men to be real partners. Our brains are different. Our way of processing information is different. What do they say, men compartmentalize, women synthesize? I know I could raise children with you and not feel like I’m sharing a home with a complete stranger. I wouldn’t have to explain to you what intimacy is. We could work side by side, raising children together, cooking meals and then watching old movies in the evenings. Who needs men?”

  Zoë dragged a brush through her hair, temporarily smoothing out the thick waves. “Well, they do have their uses. And Mack actually does some of that stuff with me. Hey, want a late-night cookie?”

  “You bet.” Bronwyn followed her down the stairs. “You know, it stands to reason that the completely inappropriate guy likes to cook and cuddle on the couch. He cuddles, right? Besides being a sex god?”

  Zoë opened up the kitchen cabinet and pulled out a box of chocolate chip cookies.

  “He’s a cuddler.” She bit into her cookie. “And he’s also…I don’t know about sex god, but let’s just say that when it comes to physical intimacy, he has a lot of range.”

  “I think I’m jealous.” Bronwyn took a cookie from the box. “I want a boy toy, too.”

  Zoë laughed. “He’s not exactly a boy. Or a toy.”

  “So what is he, your soulmate? You get into long, heartfelt talks about carburetors and fan belts?”

  “He’s a little deeper than that. Besides, what do you and Brian spend your time talking about, the meaning of life?”

  “We used to, back in the day. Look, I’m not saying I have a great relationship at the moment. But if you don’t start out with a common frame of reference, then what’s going to happen when the shiny new rubs off?” Bronwyn gazed out the window, where the lawn was now covered by a thin veil of snow. “I say, enjoy the sex, but don’t lose sight of what this is, and what it isn’t.”

  “You’re making it sound like this is just about sex.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Look, Mack and I may not be built for the long haul, and he may not know who’s being skewered in the pseuds page of Private Eye, but he’s not some stupid redneck I’m screwing for fun.”

  “Zoë, I may not have had it in a long time, but I do remember that good sex is never just about sex, any more than a great restaurant experience is just about the food. But you’re a forty-one-year-old international journalist, and he’s a twenty-something car buff who probably hasn’t read a novel since high school.”

  “Thirty-something. And not everyone’s a reader, Bron. There are different kinds of intelligence.”

  “Oh, please.” Bronwyn closed the box of cookies. “He’s a fling, Zoë. And if you start believing there’s more to it than that, you’re going to be pretty damn disappointed when he leaves you for some blond checkout girl at the local Stop and Shop.”

  As if this were the cue for some unseen stage director, the lights went out, the refrigerator giving a long, last whine before subsiding into silence.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened?”

  “It must be the snow. I think Mack left a flashlight in a drawer somewhere.” Fumbling around, Zoë banged her knee. “Ow!”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Okay, found it.” Zoë turned on the flashlight, illuminating her friend’s worried face.

  “How long before the lights come back on?”

  “I don’t know, Mack said it can take anywhere from five minutes to overnight. It used to take longer, but I think they’ve been working on the lines.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I guess we go to sleep.”

  “I can’t just go to sleep. It’s too early. Besides, I always need to watch some TV or read something before I nod off.”

  “I don’t think that’s an option.”

  “What if the twins wake up? How will I ever find my way to them upstairs? What if they need something from the kitchen?”

  “I think we’ll all just have to make like the pioneers and sleep until it’s light,” said Zoë, who had gotten used to the fact that the country didn’t always provide one with a multitude of alternatives.

  “Jesus. How often does this happen?”

  “I think Mack said it’s gotten better in the past few years.”

  “No wonder your car boy’s so good in the sack. There’s nothing else to do around here during a power failure.”

  Zoë didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking, The reason Mack’s so good in bed is because he pays attention to everything that isn’t said out loud. She felt a flash of intense irritation with Bronwyn, knowing that all that talk about moving to the country had been just that—talk. But she refrained from saying anything, not wanting to start an argument in the dark. There was a faint scuffling sound, and Bronwyn gave a sharp squeal of alarm.

  “What was that?”

  “Probably just the cat.”

  “Are you sure there wasn’t just someone at the door?”

  Zoë wasn’t sure. Funny how you never noticed how much sound even a quiet house made, she thought, until the electricity died and you became aware of the stillness. It must have been much harder to sneak up on people in the old days, before you had all the distractions of modern life. Zoë felt her way to the door and opened it, letting in a rush of cold air. “Hello?” It was still snowing outside, the brickwork now a shimmering blanket of white. The moonlight made it easier to see outside than in.

  “Any ax murderers out there?” asked Bronwyn, coming up behind her.

  There was a thump as Claudius jumped from a low stone wall and streaked into the house.

  “I think maybe I will be able to sleep.” Bronwyn yawned. “All this tension is making me tired. You?”

  “I’ll be up in a minute.” Zoë remained by the open door, wondering how much of what she’d been feeling with Mack was due to the isolation of her current circumstances, and not quite convinced that someone besides the cat had been standing by the door, lis
tening to the end of their conversation.

  Twenty-five

  T he problem with romantic relationships, Mack decided as he drove to Zoë’s house, was that you were never in the same one as the person you happened to be sleeping with. With Jess, he’d been in a comfortable, friends-with-benefits situation, while she’d been in a frustrating dead-end affair with someone who wouldn’t commit. With Zoë, he’d been in a serious, mind and body connection that had left him thinking about taking the next step, while she’d been entertaining herself with the hired help. There are different kinds of intelligence, she’d said to that pissed-off friend of hers, and then the friend had said, “Oh, please,” and Mack had waited, knowing he should announce himself and walk in, but needing to know what Zoë would say when she didn’t know he was listening.

  And she’d said nothing. Her friend had dismissed him as a meaningless fling, and Zoë hadn’t denied it. Sure, he could pretend that she would have defended him if the lights hadn’t gone out, but she’d already taken two beats too long to respond. And then the friend had summed it all up perfectly: No wonder your car boy’s so good in the sack. There’s nothing else to do around here. Making it perfectly clear that Zoë had explained what he was good at.

  It was what Adam used to call a reality disconnect. “It’s not just that we don’t share the same view of the world as these guys,” he’d said one night. “We don’t share the same world.”

  “Bullshit,” Mack had replied. They’d been crammed up together in the rear of a Humvee, pretending they weren’t lying ass to ass in search of a little warmth. Outside, the wind was whipping and wailing, filling the armored vehicle with the surprising nighttime chill of the desert. “Reality is reality. If a dead body is lying on the ground, it’s a dead body, no matter what I think it is.”

  “Yeah, right. So if you go and burn that dead body, because it’s just a bunch of meat that’s going to rot and spread germs, then you’ve taken a reasonable action—in your reality. But in someone else’s reality, you’ve just desecrated the corpse of their brother, and you’ve broken a serious taboo.”

  “So we have different customs, we see things differently. But there’s only one reality.”

  “Because reality is created out of actions, and not perceptions? But who is perceiving the actions, and interpreting them?”

  Impressed, and feeling a little outclassed, Mack had tried to make a joke out of it. “Jesus, man, you’re a fucking philosopher.”

  “Yeah, well, what else are you going to think about when you’re facing the distinct possibility of being blown up every day?”

  “I don’t know about you big-city intellectual types,” Mack had said, adhering to the script their friendship had been using for more than a year, “but thinking about sex works fine for me.” He’d waited for Adam to say something back about ignorant rednecks, but his friend had remained silent for so long that Mack had assumed he’d gone to sleep. And then, out of the blue, Adam had asked, “You ever get scared?”

  “Sometimes, sure.”

  “Lately, I got this feeling, like my luck’s run out.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I keep thinking, What if this is it? The last night. The last day.”

  Adam had rolled over, his face inches from Mack’s. “You never feel like that? You never think, So many things I haven’t done?”

  “Sure I do. Everyone does. But you have to shake it off.”

  Adam had paused. “What if I can’t?”

  The silence stretched on, changing the meaning of their last spoken words. Mack had felt a clench of excitement in his stomach, mingled with repulsion. And, somewhere mixed in with it, curiosity. For a moment, he had thought he might actually do it, might close that small, crucial distance, just to find out what lay on the other side.

  What had stopped him, in the end, had been the fear that what they had, their strange friendship that was unlike any friendship he’d ever had before in his life, might change into one of those godawful things where the other person feels something for you that you can’t reciprocate.

  “I have to take a piss,” he’d said, rolling away, and when he’d come back, Adam had been faking sleep. The shit of it was, it had been ruined anyway. Something had shifted between the two of them, because they both knew that there was a reality disconnect. What Adam had felt for him was not what he had felt for Adam. And if his friend hadn’t died, they probably would have wound up drifting further and further apart.

  If he’d known that Adam was going to die, he wouldn’t have left the Humvee, of course. It was funny, thinking back about what Bill had said at Thanksgiving. Maybe he was right about Mack. Everyone thought that when you knew you could die at any moment, everything had so much more meaning. And it did, but it also had so much less. So what if your last meal was beef stew? So what if you let a friend touch you? When you dealt with death all the time, you could feel how easy it would be to let the things that defined you just fall away.

  Mack looked to his right and suddenly realized that he’d arrived at Zoë’s house without being conscious of the past few miles. Great. If your body’s driving and your mind’s not engaged, that’s a recipe for disaster, he always told his students. Mack slammed the car door, zipping up his down vest. It felt like it might snow again, although none had fallen yet.

  He knocked on the door. “You ready?”

  “That we are.” Zoë came out, wearing a woolly white hat and a big fringed scarf, and it occurred to him that she wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t kissed her, because Maya was around, and he couldn’t have kissed her anyway. “Did you have any problem with your power? Because our lights went out last night.” He wondered if she was testing him.

  “We didn’t have any trouble. Your power back on now?”

  “Everything’s fine now,” she said. He made no comment.

  “How are we going to fit everyone in one car,” asked the friend, who was carrying one twin and holding the other by the mittened hand. “I need help with the car seats.”

  “It’s only a two-minute drive into town,” said Mack. “Can the boys sit on your laps in the back?”

  The friend gave him a hard look. “No, we could not. There is snow on the ground.”

  “No problem.”

  “Excuse me, but when I say there is a problem, there is a problem.”

  “No, I meant, I’ll take care of it. Look.” Mack took the two car seats from the porch and wrestled them into place. “If Maya can sit on a grown-up’s lap in the back, then we should be fine. Do you mind being a little squashed for a few minutes, Maya?”

  “Nope.”

  It took a few more minutes of searching underneath thighs for seat-belt buckles, and then they were ready to roll, Mack acutely aware of Zoë beside him, and of her friend in the back. Her best friend. Maya touched the back of his hair. “It’s so long now. You going to cut it, or would that make you lose your strength?”

  “I don’t think it was the hair cutting that sapped Samson,” Mack said, keeping his eyes on the road. “I think he was just upset because Delilah let him down.”

  “Maya, don’t distract him,” said the friend.

  Mack wondered if she even knew she was jealous. Not that she had any reason to be. Clearly, she was the person Zoë felt she could talk to, the one she dreamed about moving in with. He wondered if he would still want to screw around with Zoë after her friend had gone back to the city and Maya had returned to school. Would it feel better or worse to be physically close, now that he knew that was all it was? Maybe it was better to make a clean break.

  They parked at the edge of town and walked to the grassy park below the clock tower, where a crowd had already gathered. Yesterday’s snow hadn’t melted away, and Arcadia looked like an old picture postcard, the doors of its Victorian gingerbread houses hung with winter wreaths, living room fires visible inside a few Colonials. A few people waved at him, and he saw Deanna from the diner and waved back. Despite the frigid air, Mack felt a pri
ckle of nervous sweat on his upper lip as they moved closer into the press of bodies. Not a bunch of strangers here, no potential terrorists, these are your neighbors so fucking hold it together. Mack forced himself to keep inching forward, ashamed of the way his heart was pounding. When he glanced back at their group, he saw that Bronwyn was struggling to get one of the boy’s mittens on his hand while balancing the other boy on her hip.

  “You want me to take one of them?” Not that she deserved help, but if he was taking care of someone else, he knew the panic would subside.

  “Thanks,” she said, giving him a genuine smile for once. Mack propped the kid on his side and pointed to the fire engines idling around the corner.

  He turned to the boy, who was all huge eyes. “You like parades?”

  “Yeah!” The little boy bounced up and down, and Mack said, “Steady, now,” tightening his grip. He could feel his own pulse slowing down as he scanned the crowd.

  “I didn’t know the town had this many people,” Zoë said, putting a hand on his arm.

  Mack flinched, then tried to hide his reaction by readjusting the kid. Zoë’s hand fell away; she thought he was rejecting her. Maybe he was. “Some of them are weekenders.”

  “Okay, everybody, move back,” said a hearty voice, amplified by a handheld loudspeaker. Mack scowled, recognizing Jim Moroney’s lying face under the big fake white Santa beard. He’d stuffed a pillow under his red-and-white tunic, not that he needed to, and was having a swell time telling everyone where to go. “That’s it, folks, we need to clear the road now.”

  “Santa,” said the little boy in Mack’s arms.

  “Satan,” Mack corrected him.

  “Satan! Satan!”

  Luckily, someone chose that moment to blast out a recording of “Jingle Bells,” drowning out the kid’s squeals.