Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Pete Miller has always been good for a healthy perspective. Not because he is particularly wise or insightful, but because he’s a comparative constant in my life. He’s a marker. In the second grade, the recess duty teacher told us in no uncertain terms to stop walking on top of the monkey bars. I listened. Pete Miller did not listen. The first day he was sent to Principal Lapp’s office. The second day, he slipped and broke three of his teeth. Poor Pete. We had a mutual friend who once confided that he thought Pete was a few beers short of a six pack, which I always thought was unfair. Pete always had a full six-pack. He just lacks the little plastic thingy that holds them all together.

  He certainly was not much of an academic performer. Had I been his teacher rather than his classmate, I would have suspected dyslexia almost instantly. He had to repeat the eighth grade and started high school a year behind his peers. Every class with which Pete struggled, I had already mastered. He always had a relaxed and affable way about him and was able to fit in socially without much problem. And yet, while girls liked him, they did not aspire to date him. In his Junior year, Pete Miller was suspended three times, twice for possession of alcohol and once for fighting. We all knew that Pete would be the first of us to go to jail. While most of our gang was starting a second year of college, Pete was serving six months for possession. By the time we were out of college and starting careers, Pete Miller was working as an equipment manager of the Buckeye Putt-Putt off of North High Street near Tuttle Park. Twice divorced. No kids. Pattern baldness and a middle-age beer gut settling in a good ten years early.

  I have bumped into Pete Miller from time to time over the years. Always liked him. Always makes me laugh. Always makes me feel a little better about myself. That should make me feel sad and pathetic and just a little bit mean, except that it is impossible not to measure ourselves against our peers. It is a completely natural impulse and there is no reason not to take note and to be thankful that better choices and even pure dumb luck have led to a better life. It’s not like I have engineered these handful of chance encounters. It’s not like I have done anything in those ten-minute, street-corner exchanges to focus on our differences or to make him feel bad. I have never acted superior. I have never sought him out just to feel better about myself.

  Well… until now. God, I am a shit.

  The Tuttle Park Buckeye Putt-Putt is hopping with business. Families mostly. Kids scamper along the make-believe wilderness trails swinging miniature clubs like bludgeons. Parents shout warnings that are largely ignored. A few younger couples on dates are in line to buy hotdogs and soda and something pink on a stick. The air smells of sugar and boiled meat.

  I walk around for a few minutes, thinking that I am bound to just bump into him in a way that approximates our prior haphazard encounters. There will be the inevitable what brings you here question and I decide that I am scoping the place out for a birthday party. My niece. My friend’s niece. Soon to be six. Twelve. Eight.

  When I don’t find him I look for someone to ask. At the sixteenth hole a family of five are clustered around the tee. The girl is throwing a tantrum that has something to do with shoes. The two boys are sword fighting with their clubs. The woman tends to the tantrum. The man stands, arms crossed, waiting.

  The wait has something to do with the man in the red and orange vest. He is twenty yards down the fairway on his hands and knees. I cannot see his face. His head is deep within the open maw of the mechanical lion. He is in up to his shoulders, bracing himself on his left hand as his right hand moves around in the dark fiddling with what should be, anatomically speaking, the lion’s uvula. The teeth are perfectly white, conical daggers set in rows that are part of opposing semi-circles of yellow metal, intended to open and close together as playful obstruction. The rows of teeth are now locked into the open position, encircling the man’s neck. His hand emerges and feels around at his knees until it finds a wrench. He bangs the wrench against something stubborn inside. The vest is riding up his back along with his shirt. His jeans are starting to sag uncomfortably low. I’ve seen Pete enough in the locker room to recognize the pallor of that skin.

  “Hey, Pete!” I yell, cupping my hand to my mouth. The dad pivots my way for a look. “Maybe you should stop frenching the lion and let these nice people play through.”

  Pete Miller crawls backwards and extracts his head and stands up and turns around with his hands on his hips and looks at me to reveal, first, that he does not think my comment was particularly funny and, second, that he has grown a goatee and now wears dark framed eye glasses. And third, that this is not Pete Miller.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” I say. “I thought you were someone else.”

  He swats in my direction with his free hand and turns his back. He reaches out and seems to scratch behind the lion’s ear. There is a clank and then the jaws of the lion begin to close and then open again. The boys stop sword fighting and jockey for position behind the tee. The person I thought was Pete Miller slips the wrench into his back pocket and steps over the waist high wall that encloses the sixteenth hole of the Buckeye Putt-Putt Wild Safari. He eyes me warily as he approaches. I figure it is the suit and tie that gets me the time of day.

  “Sorry,” I say again. “I’m a friend of Pete Miller.”

  “Yeah, I kinda figured,” he says. His vest has yellow stitching that spells out the word Carl in perfect script.

  “He around today?”

  “Naw.” He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Boss is always gone this time of year.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. Costa Rica this time. Lucky bastard.”

  “Costa Rica?”

  Carl starts counting on his fingers, each streaked with black grease.

  “Last year, New Zealand. Year before, Fiji or some damn place. Year before…”

  “Really. Pete Miller?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Miller. The owner. Black Porsche. Hot wife.”

  “No, no. Pete Miller. Equipment manager. Blue Ford. No girlfriend.”

  “Yeah. That’s him. Used to be equipment manager. He owns the whole shebang now. All eight Putt-Putt courses.”

  “No shit? Really?”

  “Yeah. He’s a partner in the driving ranges and the pro-shops too. That’s where the real money is.”

  “Pete Miller.”

  “Yeah, man. Pete Miller.”

  “How in the hell…”

  “Married into the family. Candy inherited everything and wants nothing to do with managing. She’s into horses. Lucky bastard. They had a company barbeque up at the ranch. Dude, you should see that woman ride. No saddle and wearing a skirt. Fuck!”

  This last syllable comes out in a hoarse whisper. He clenches his fist and his shoulders hunch forward in an involuntary spasm. Evidently, the visual memory of the boss’ wife riding bareback is too much for Carl to handle and still maintain his composure. There is a spark of fear in the man’s eyes when he remembers that he has no idea who I am.

  “Hey, I’m just clowning around. Don’t get the wrong idea or nothin’. They’re both real nice people. I shouldn’t have said…”

  “Don’t sweat it, Carl. I won’t say anything.”

  He is surprised at the sound of his own name and I can see the fear spike double. I tap my chest in the place where my name would be if I were wearing a Buckeye Putt-Putt safari vest. He looks down and then smiles and blushes.

  “You want to come to the office and leave him a note or something? They get back in about a month.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Want me to give him your name. Tell him you stopped by?”

  “No. I was never here.”

  “What’s you name?”

  “Thanks for the help.”

  A woman with a bent club has a question for someone wearing a vest. I disappear before she can finish. I drive off trying not to think of Pete Miller; trying to assure myself that the Pete Miller I have known my whole life just happens to have a boss whose name… fuck. This is a cruel, cr
uel world. We are but a cheap, twisted reality show for a small, petty God without quality cable programming.

  There is a burning in my chest. Now I know how the poor guy in Alien felt as he ate his last meal, right before the baby space-penis-with-teeth made its appearance and skittered across the table. Only the thing that will, any second now, burst through my ribcage and cover my windshield is a savage and fully formed humiliation that will make the young alien seem like a harmless kitten. The world will pray for aliens when they get a load of this thing.

  I am driving the wrong direction, back into Columbus. Somewhere behind me, well upstream, beyond the Outerbelt mote of the 270, where the 215 and the 71 start to lose their parallel affections, somewhere back there in the inconsequential grayness, is a condominium I do not deserve. It bellows my name into the afternoon. It is hungry.

  I pull off onto Goodale and circle the park. There is a sharp, nerve-jarring vibration in my chest and my entire body seizes, waiting for what happens next. Again, but longer.

  “Hello?”

  “Dave? It’s Mae.”

  …

  “Dave?”

  “Oh. Hey.”

  “Whatcha doin?’

  “Uh, not much.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “What?”

  “What. The arraignment.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “Glenda.”

  “Of course, Glenda. You could have told me.”

  “You’ve got your own life, Mae. How’s the big case going?”

  “Brutal. But I’m not talking about the case. How are you?”

  “Not guilty, that’s how I am.”

  “Let’s have dinner.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I’ve got some time.”

  …

  “Dave?”

  “I’m really … you know, I’m really okay, Mae. I don’t need…”

  “To eat? You don’t need to eat? Come on. Man-up, Dave.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Leoni’s.”

  “What time?”

  “They’ll be full unless we go early. Five-thirty.”

  “Five-thirty?”

  “What… a lot of meetings? Cricket match? Come on, baby. Lasagna.”

  I turn around, executing a perfectly illegal u-turn in the middle of the road and head back up to West Russell where I can enter Goodale Park. I need a place to stop and think because there is no way I can simultaneously digest this development and operate an automobile. I pull into the park and follow the lazy little drive until I reach an empty play area with a wooden Jungle Jim fortress thing. I pull in and cut the engine.

  The wooden Jungle Jim fortress thing has two turreted towers. Ladders go up; slides come out. The towers are connected by a stretch of monkey bars. Pete Miller pops back into my head because monkey bars always remind me of Pete Miller. Pete, the once reliable cautionary tale. For I, too, had been using the monkey bars like a sidewalk that week. Had I not had the good sense to heed authority, I too might have lost my front teeth. It was Pete who had flown too close to the sun, not me. Poor Pete. Now, suddenly, I am Pete’s cautionary tale. Tanned, relaxed, freshly blown, Putt-Putt King Pete, with a hot wife, a black Porsche and a horse trailer full of cash. Poor fucking Pete. I wonder if he will read the newspapers after he returns from Costa Rica. Hey, he will say to his naked wife as she washes his car, I know this guy. That’s Dave. I went to school with him. And he will show her the front page photo of me in shackles and an orange jumper and he will shake his head and his wife will soap her breasts right there in the driveway and express disgust at the sight of a man who, apparently, allowed himself to become so drug addled that, according to authorities, he killed and ate a child violin prodigy.

  It’s always the quiet ones, Pete will say.

  I am able to make Pete go away only by tossing my increasingly feral brain the red meat of Mae Chang calling me baby and asking me out to dinner. I do not know what this means. I only know what I want it to mean. I want it to mean that I have been wrong. I want it to mean that I have misjudged; that I have tumbled away from her only because I have thrown myself into a piteous, self-flagellating, self-defeating free fall. I want it to mean that I have allowed myself to be seduced by baseless suspicion and my own low self-esteem; that I have assumed and believed the worst of all possibilities. I want it to mean that I have consigned myself to a hellish surreality all my own making; a surreality in which Mae is secretly, desperately looking to escape me; a reality in which she has wakened as if from a bad dream and realized that I am her greatest mistake; but a surreality that is only a figment of my own twisted imagination and that Mae has never, ever perceived. And now my chest has vibrated with her longing and it is me who is waking, and I am awake and rubbing the long night from my eyes and all is as it ever was. Dave and Mae. Mae and Dave. That is what I want to believe this means.

  I sit and think and stare with empty eyes at the wooden Jungle Jim fortress thing rising like a common wart out of the circle of gravel. I work hard at believing what I want to believe. I have no reason, really, to doubt Mae’s explanation about Shepp. Shepp does have a younger sister and he has been talking about trying to find her a job in the legal field. And it was Mae who had raised the subject of Shepp and their afternoon drink; she had raised it willingly and without any reason to believe that I had seen them. It was me. I was the problem. I was the one who had turned an innocent meeting into an illicit rendezvous. Didn’t Mae deserve better than for me to assume the worst at every opportunity? Hadn’t this woman hung in there? I mean, really. Mae could have just about any man she wanted, and hadn’t she chosen me? Hadn’t she endured it all – my relative impecuniousness, my unglamorous calling, my too-successful sister, my concussive brother, my presumptuous mother, my politically liberal sensibilities, my pothead proclivities, my wholly unrelated indictment on felony drug possession charges, not to mention the looming suspicion among the Ohio law enforcement community that I am a pedophilic psychopath? Hadn’t Mae always taken my potential on faith and chosen me in spite of everything? Sure, there had been break-ups, even a stormy breakup precipitating a dramatic extrication of herself and her personal belongings from my home. And, sure, there had been an ensuing physical separation that was still more or less in place. But wasn’t all of that just … static? Texture? Ripples on the surface of the lake? Wasn’t the substantive relationship still intact? Why else would she be calling me baby? Why ask me out to dinner? And why suggest Leoni’s, the place it all began? Shouldn’t all of that counsel optimism? If not about my life in general, then at least about my love life?

  Yes. Yes it should. Come on, Dave. Get your shit together. Optimism, optimism! Man-up, Baby.

  Leoni’s has grown since our last visit. It always seems to be larger. There is always another room jutting farther out into the back lot. Capacity is ever up, parking is ever down. In the early days, Leoni’s was a single room, under-lit and over-burdened with Italian kickshaw: beads, sepia photographs of the old country and of stern matrons-in-aprons, still-life renderings of grapes and vineyards, and heavily waxed Chianti bottles. When I was a new teenager, a full house at Leoni’s was fifty. When I took Amy Volker to the Senior Prom, the new addition had been open a week and Leoni’s was seating one hundred at a time. By the time I was back from Tulane and scoring an improbable second date with Mae Chang, Leoni’s had built on another room and increased its capacity by another fifty. That was back when Mae was still aiming for law school and I was still talking big about a college professorship and of writing books that someone like Howard Zinn might blurb as Gutsy! and Revelatory!

  I follow the hostess from the Leoni’s of my youth – perfectly preserved right down to the yellowing lace curtains, through the many doorways of its evolution, and into the present day. I am shown to a table for two in the center of a large, windowless square room with a high ceiling, lined with red leather booths that surround a sea of squa
re tables identically dressed in white cotton and topped with cloned arrangements of salt, pepper, olive oil, a small hurricane candle and a glass bud vase with two silk daisies. The walls are papered in a kind of velvet eggplant with artificial tomato vines filling the corners and artificial grape vines pretending to proliferate from the ceiling, perhaps with the ambition of softening the fluorescent lighting.

  Dean Martin – who was born Dino Paul Crocetti about two hours from here in Steubenville, Ohio, and who is now resting somewhere beneath Beverly Hills – provides his dulcet assurance that I am in for an authentic Italian experience. His assurance, however, is difficult to hear. Even at five-thirty the place is packed with people. If I were to close my eyes it would sound for all the world like Dean Martin serenading his way across the floor of a stock exchange.

  I sit and wait and read the menu. Mae is late, but not by much. The surrounding din dampens perceptibly and I know instinctively that she is in the room. Pale yellow blouse, pleated and plunging and full. Hair in loose open curls that bounce with her step. She wears a black skirt just above the knee. Her legs sing more than move.

  …Hearts’ll play, Tippi-tippi-tay, Tippi-tippi-tay, Like a gay tarantella.

  She follows a very pasty, non-Italian looking man with a bottle of wine to the table. I stand as he pulls out the chair for her. She slips her thighs beneath the tablecloth like it’s a bed sheet. I sit. She thanks the non-Italian who adjusts the napkin draped over his wrist and lights the nub of wax in the hurricane. He promises us a waiter and bows as if to royalty. His eyes catch mine as he turns to leave, sending me the silent, urgent message I have come to expect in such restaurant encounters when I am with Mae: if I were not gay and attracted to you, I would envy you and want to steal your date.

  She looks at me with her chocolate eyes and her perfect Epcot Center face – that marvel of bioengineering that can only be the product of a multiethnic marketing conspiracy – and I cannot blame the gay non-Italian for his sublimated mal-intent. She does beg to be stolen.