Sure enough, the guys started in on me. Eugene wanted to know if she was a moaner or a screamer. Dave asked if we had set a wedding date, and if we were registered at any of the doughnut shops. Ruben laughed with the rest of them. But whenever we were alone, he said I should ask April out. He said that she wanted me and that it would be a waste to not go for it. I told him I didn’t even like her. “Fuck like,” he said. “What’s like got to do with anything?” He wouldn’t leave it alone. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d be working the floor and he’d be running up and down the aisles looking for me, whispering at me through the shelving that pussy was a gift from God, or cornering me with his cart to tell me that I had a duty as a man. We hadn’t said ten words to each other in years, and here he was getting all worked up about my duty as a man. I never liked Ruben. Who was he to tell me about being a man? Who was he to tell me anything?
* * *
She asked me about my running. I told her. I kept it simple, sticking to my regimen, telling her what I do and not getting near why I do it. She was playing with her unlit cigarette while I talked, flipping and catching it in her hand. But she was listening. So I told her she could do it, too, if she wanted. She was about my age, maybe younger, so it wouldn’t take long to get a routine going, and to see results. She just smiled and shook her head. She put the cigarette she was playing with in her mouth and lit it. “I lack discipline,” she said. “Which is something you’ve got a lot of.” She blew a thin stream of smoke above her head and swatted at it to keep it away from me. She was right. It was something I had a lot of.
Another time she brought it up again. She asked about my regimen, and it turned into this interrogation. She wanted to know what time I got up every morning and how long I stretched for. She wanted to know how long I spent on my calves, on my thighs, on my neck. She asked what direction I headed in when I ran and what streets I turned on and whether I took the same streets back. She stood above me with the sun at her back and fired her questions at me. I answered every one of them. It was kind of a game, like a lawyer and a witness, and I let myself get caught up in it because I thought she really wanted to know about what I did, that the details of my regimen, and my absolute knowledge of them, were bringing her around somehow. I was wrong. She bent down all of a sudden, real quick, and leaned in close. I could smell her hair. I could’ve looked down her blouse if I wanted to. And she said, “Well, maybe discipline is something a person can have too much of. Don’t you think?” And the way she was looking at me, I realized she wasn’t interested in running at all. I didn’t say anything. She straightened up and checked her watch and walked back inside. Lunch was over.
She was looking at me like she knew something about me, as if you could know a person just by looking in his face. She thinks she knows me. She doesn’t know anything about me. I’ve looked at my face. You can’t see anything in it.
* * *
Here’s something about me. I was running around the lake one afternoon when this woman fell into step alongside me. She ran well, with her legs in full extension. She clipped along in smooth, even strides, her shoulders slack and her arms relaxed, swinging in little arcs along her rib cage. There wasn’t a single wasted motion about her. She ran with me. We didn’t say a word. After four laps around she tapped me on the shoulder. She smiled and said thanks. I watched her pull off and head down a path toward the streets. I went to the lake regularly for a few months after that. I never saw her again.
When you run, you aspire to an economy of motion that has only one goal: to optimize the intake of oxygen so that you can keep running. Anything that impedes this one goal must fall away.
I don’t remember the woman’s face anymore. All I remember is the way she moved, the way everything about her was contained and effortless and perfect. Sometimes I imagine her alongside me when I run, and I try to match my every movement to hers. Our shoulders jostled each other when we rounded the turns that day. Her hair was in a single braid, a thick rope of hair that swayed across her back. You could hear it swish against her windbreaker. The rhythm of it paced us both.
When I told Dot about this woman, I remember her sighing and shaking her head, telling me to just let it go. If more people did that, she said, if they just left each other alone, there’d be less disappointment in this world. I’ve realized that everything Dot ever told me, all of her advice for me, came from somebody I didn’t know much about. I knew her husband was dead and that she had other kids besides Phil. They came up in passing when we talked. She never said anything bad about them, but she never said anything good about them, either. I didn’t know if she had any grandkids. I didn’t know what she did outside of work. I didn’t even know where she lived. Dot never smiled. “Bad teeth,” she told me once. But I remember her smiling when she told me this—the only time I’d seen her do that—and her teeth were fine. She didn’t sleep well, so she was always tired, and she moved around the office carefully, hanging on to the edges of desks and cabinets. She was a small woman, but she moved with this weight in her, like her gravity was different from everybody else’s, as if it took everything she had just to get across the room or to get through the day.
When I told Dot about the woman at the lake, she said as long as I was happy, why chance it with anybody else? Why risk what you’ve got for something you may never have?
* * *
So we went on a date. April caught me after work and asked if I wanted to buy her a drink. She gave me directions to a place she knew. “Turn right here,” she said. “Left up there.” She used her unlit cigarette as a pointer. She said she liked my car. It’s a ’69 Olds that belonged to my father, and he took good care of it. Change the oil every three months, he’d told me, wash it every other week, catch all the rust spots before they spread—do that and a car will last forever. That’s what my father taught me. April said that’s a good tradition to have, keeping the family car in shape.
The bar we went to was on a frontage road that looped north of the airport. It reminded me of every other bar I’d ever been in, with carved-up tables and wobbly chairs and ratty love seats against the wall. There were TVs mounted in the ceiling corners, all of them on, and a jukebox going, and people hooting around the pool tables in the back. And there was the smell of the place. I read somewhere that smell is the most primitive of the senses, that it can trigger memory more strongly and deeply than any other sense. This bar had that smell, and it all came back to me. Just because you change your life doesn’t mean you don’t miss things.
We sat at the bar, and the guy behind it knew April by name and gave her the usual, a vodka gimlet. I had orange juice. I wanted a beer. I admit that. But I didn’t have any beer that night. Beer had nothing to do with it.
She handed her cigarettes to me and told me to ration her. “I’m cutting down,” she said. And then she just started telling me things—where she was born, where her folks were born, what they did for a living. She had three sisters and two brothers, and she told me what they all did for a living. Some of what she said I never would have guessed. She was married once. She called her ex-husband The Mistake. And she had a kid somewhere, who she never saw because The Mistake was such a dick. But she thought about the kid all the time. She was learning how to crotchet, taking a class in it at the extension college. And she was a big reader, mysteries and true crime. “You know, crap,” she said. Then she ordered us another round and said, “Okay, your turn.” So I told her where I was born, where I went to high school. I told her about my folks being dead and what I’ve done to the house, fixing it up. I didn’t have much else to say after that. But again, she didn’t seem to mind. She asked me a few questions—what did I do in high school, what did I do for fun. When I couldn’t answer, she just asked me for a cigarette instead, and held it out for me to light, and thanked me.
The bar was getting busy. Everybody was coming up and saying hello to her. Her life seemed filled with people, crowded with them. Somebody shouted her name from the back, where t
he pool tables were. “Come on,” she said, “let’s play.” I told her to go ahead. “Come on,” she said again. “One game.” She put her hand on top of mine and said she’d teach me. But I told her to go play pool, and I guess she got the way I said it, because she held her hands up. “Okay, Okay,” she said.
There was a baseball game on the TV. Two guys next to me were watching it, and whenever anything happened, they hollered and banged their fists on the bar. One of them kept elbowing me accidentally and apologizing for it. Sure enough, he knocked my orange juice over. He apologized again and bought a round. He sent April’s drink to her. He told me that April was a great gal. I looked over at where she was, and when she got her drink, she bowed to us, and me and the guy next to me waved back. I watched her back there. She was having a good time, getting drunk. They all were. I turned back to the TV.
After a while I felt something on my leg, and when I looked down, I saw April’s hand, sitting there on my knee. She leaned on it and slid into her barstool. “I won,” she said. She leaned into me and laughed. Her hair was against my face. She was asking how we were doing, how things were going with us. I told her: “Fine, things are fine.” She was saying that she liked me, that she liked the shy ones. She was telling me this with her mouth next to my ear. I could feel her breath. I looked over at the drink she had put down on the bar. The glass was smeared with her lipstick all around the rim and halfway down the side.
So I told her about the guys making fun of her behind her back. She stiffened up, then pulled away to look at me. It was like she’d sobered up immediately, as if I’d just come into focus in front of her. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. I didn’t expect that—that she knew. I asked her how she could let them degrade her like that, how she could think so little of herself. “Why do you put up with it?” I asked her. And she smiled her little smile and said, “Same reason you do.” Then she grabbed her cigarettes and her drink and went back to play pool with her friends.
We didn’t talk anymore after that. I sat at the bar and waited for her to finish her game so we could get out of there. I watched TV. The baseball game was over. I don’t remember what was on after that. But I remember watching something, and drinking my orange juice, and eating the ice.
* * *
It was raining outside. The streetlights had just come on, and you could see the drizzle swirling down around them. The weather was strange that summer. There’d been a funnel cloud a few weeks before. I remember reading about it bouncing around the downtown area, blowing out windows and tipping over newspaper racks, trying to touch ground, they said, trying to become a tornado.
April was drunk, and walking wobbly. My car was a block or so up the street, and by this time it was the only one there. A chain-link fence separated it from an airfield. All the cargo companies were up here, and some of their planes were out, roaring around the tarmac, their lights flashing through the mist.
When we got in the car, I asked her where she lived. She looked at me from her side of the front seat, all woozy, but giving me that look she gave me that day on the dock. She slid over toward me, and it seemed to take a while. The seats in an Olds are bench seats, and long, like sofas. And when she finally got to me, she said my name and kissed me on the mouth. I admit that I let her. I let her because I’ve never heard my name said the way she was saying it, and because it’s been a long time since anybody’s touched me. Her mouth just slipped onto mine, and it was nothing like I’d imagined, and I let myself get all caught up in it, in this feeling that you’re part of a world with other people in it, and that you matter because somebody else seems to think you do. Her mouth was soft and warm. But it reeked of cigarettes and fruity lipstick, and when I opened my eyes, there she was—April from work, with her face up against mine, telling me how we were two of a kind and how we needed to do something about that, her and me. She put her hand on my neck. I felt it hover there, small and light. I smacked it away and I gave her a shove. She ended up on her side of the seat, holding her hand like I’d hurt it. Who was she to say we were alike? There’s nothing of her in me. So I did something about it, about her and me. I pushed the seat back and got her down on it. She may have been yelling, but I’m not sure anymore, because it got really loud with the rain coming down hard and the planes outside roaring around like they were coming right on top of us. I kept one hand on her mouth and I started working down there with the other one until she stopped struggling, and she just lay there and let me finish. When I was done, she eased out from under me and slid back to her side of the seat. She sat there for a minute with her head against the passenger window, like she was listening for something in the rain outside. It was really coming down now. And when she started putting herself back together, I told her to tell me where she lived.
She sat smoking her cigarettes the whole way. When we got to her apartment building, I waited until she got inside okay. Then I cracked all the windows to air out the car for the drive home. Then I drove home.
* * *
She was late the next morning. She came in with her wrist taped up. She told the guys she sprained it falling out of bed. They loved that. She’s still friendly with them, but doesn’t talk to me anymore. For a while Dave was coming up, putting his arm around me, and asking if the honeymoon was over, if the bloom was off the rose.
She doesn’t talk to me anymore. But she doesn’t avoid me, either. At lunchtime she still comes in and out through the back lot and up the dock. I’m at my usual spot, and she’ll go up the steps, then stop and light a cigarette before going inside. She looks right at me the whole time.
So I eat my lunch in my car. It’s at the far end of the lot, back where the busted pallets are piled. From where I’m parked I can see her come in. I can see her walk past where I used to sit. My not being there doesn’t faze her at all. She just gets on with her life. When she’s gone, I get out and grab a few minutes on the dock before going back to work, a few minutes of sun at least, before it moves over the building, and then only until the fall. By early winter the sun’s too low and doesn’t hit the dock at all.
* * *
I’ve started a new routine. On the weekends I go up into the mountains for a long run. I’ve got water bottles stashed in hiding places up there. I drive up and replenish them once a month. Above the tree line the roads end in cul-de-sacs, and from then on it’s nothing but fire trails that switchback through scrub and grass and rock. I take it easy getting up there, but once I hit the trailheads, I pour it on. I pound up that grade and I don’t ease up until I reach the plateau.
I go all day in those mountains. I’ve gotten lost up there. Sometimes I don’t get back until after nightfall, so depleted, so close to the brink, that it takes everything I’ve got to just hang on and make it home. I’m weaving and staggering along, and I’m laughing. People have pulled over and gotten out of their cars to ask if I’m okay. They think there’s something wrong because sometimes I can’t stop laughing. But there’s nothing wrong. Sometimes that’s just how good I feel.
Somoza’s Dream
He is scuttling through the dark. His bare foot steps into something cold and slick. His leg shoots forward. He skids. The ground beneath him is suddenly gone. Synapses fire, nerve bundles twitch, and he is falling. Muscles spasm in myoclonic response. His legs jitter under the sheets. Dinorah, lying next to him, crabs away. Then an alarm, sharp and jangly. He stirs, and his tumble ceases. He reaches for the clock, kills it. Through eye slits, a vast room takes shape in the chocolate dark. Drapes as thick as hides cover ceiling-high windows. Morning light bleeds in. He snorts, hawks, swallows. He awakes, knows now where he is. His room. This world. Today: Wednesday, September 17, 1980.
The Presidente-in-Exile rises.
In the bathroom, post-shower, post-shave. He steps on the spring scale. The needle flutters shyly below one seventy-five. Not bad. He gives his belly a small-caliber-gunshot slap. “Not bad at all,” he says.
In the dressing room, his fingers gl
ide through a kelp of neckties, fondling the Zegnas, stroking a yellow jacquard. He snaps it out, runs it through his collar. He speed-dials Bettinger, puts him on speakerphone, confirms their appointment while finishing up the knot—nine sharp, Van Damm’s office at the Banco Alemán. “The fix is in, Tacho,” Bettinger says. He pads to the shoe closet, selects a pair of burgundy loafers, Russia calf Henleys. “The bitch is prone,” Bettinger purrs. “Knees up and ready for fucking.” He drops the shoes to the carpet, kicks them parallel, steps daintily into them. He slips the heels with an ivory-handled shoehorn. Bettinger is prattling on. The Presidente-in-Exile secures his cuff links. He moves to the dressing-room window, looks down into the courtyard two stories below, dingy and penumbral in pre-morning light. He can make out the white Mercedes parked under the eaves of a tree, a palsy of branches like crone’s hands poised above the vehicle. His eyes adjust, and he can now see the pink turds of sticky blossoms splattered on the roof and windshield. Bettinger is detailing financial arrangements—float risks and laundry fees and yield guarantees. He smarms and panders on speakerphone like an obscene caller. The Presidente-in-Exile cuts him off and speed-dials Gallardo. He can hear the phone ringing below, in the quarters over the carriage house. He slips a titanium clip over the tie’s face, secures a matching tie bar under the knot. When Gallardo picks up, he tells his driver to stop parking under that fucking tree and to get that shit cleaned off the car now.
Orientation Page 5
