Benediction

by Arnold, Jim

  But Paul ordered a pizza! He flew three thousand miles for melted cheese and bread. He tucked the blue pastel napkin into his collar a soon as he’d made the decision, waiting impatiently for its arrival.

  Countering his vulgarian selection, my piece of fresh grilled ahi under lemon oil next to a tiny, anorexic portion of spinach pasta covered with a touch of grated asiago was so pretty I would’ve killed for a camera.

  “Should we talk about Kelly?” he said, starting the game. I was surprised: The Kelly—was she or wasn’t she competent—discussion hadn’t been a recent topic, although apparently he hadn’t forgotten it.

  “I was just listening to a message from her.” I lied; there were no staff voice mails, as both Jason and Kelly knew I liked to feign unemployment on business trips.

  “You know, Ben, I don’t understand you people over there,” he said. You people, indeed. He made it sound like we were residents of Daly City or something. Management had tried to break up and discourage fiefdoms, and this was where we ended up.

  To be honest, I’d admit to having empire-builder tendencies myself. A little taste of power goes a long way, and one always wanted more. Same as with alcohol and drugs: more.

  “What do you mean, Paul?”

  “What I mean is, Kelly, and I think Jason, too—though I really see it more with Kelly—she seems to have it in for me and for my staff. Especially Kristin. I know she’d never dare pull that shit with any of the other divisions.”

  Casually, I forked up some of the perfectly done greenish pasta. “Please. That’s ridiculous. Quite honestly, you give her more credit than she really deserves for being devious. Some people are transparent, and that’s my read with Kelly.”

  He leaned in closer. “She’s trying to get Kristin fired—she makes her stupid fucking mistakes and then blames my staff!”

  Oh, yawn. This line of his was tiresome under the best circumstances, and I certainly didn’t fly across the country to discuss this bullshit. Concurrently, I had the strange and sudden desire to suck some cock and began to scan the waiters and busboys for likely candidates.

  “What are you looking at?” he said, apparently noticing my intense eyeball movement.

  “Mustard. I need some mustard.”

  Paul shot me the oddest look. I then realized the fish was almost gone and there was only a tiny bit of pasta left.

  “I can be rather unusual when it comes to food.”

  Let the fat fuck think what he would. Our waiter, cute in that northeastern preppy way, but straight and probably not doable under any circumstances, dropped off the check. I covered it with my hand. I was going to be big about this—even though both of us would immediately put it on an official expense report.

  “You didn’t ask for the must—”

  “I changed my mind.” I turned and removed my wallet from my back pocket. There was a girl at the next table with a much older—and from the looks of him quite wealthy—man. There was something familiar about her. She didn’t seem like a New Yorker, not quite put together enough, without the big-city makeup and really expensive but sexy pointy shoes.

  I knew May-December must exist somewhere, but my first honest thought was that she was probably a working girl. Then it dawned on me who she was—a dressed-up Dallas from the Slog. My second thought concerned her panties, wondering whether she had anything on under that black cocktail dress and whether they were pink like the ones I’d been privileged to see that day at the bar. Dallas and I had this intimacy, surely, even if she didn’t know outright that I’d been watching her crotch with a tourist’s fascination as I lost my sobriety.

  I’d been good and hadn’t had anything to drink with Sutcliffe. I deserved at least one or two glasses of expensive wine on Safe Harbor, but shit, I had no idea what was popular or trendy these days and certainly was not willing to embarrass myself in front of him.

  Paul noticed me staring at Dallas. “Somebody you know? Can’t imagine she’d be your type, Schmidtster,” he said.

  “I think…she’s from San Francisco,” I said. “A dot-com kid living in SoMa—I know I’ve seen her around—maybe at Peet’s, maybe Trader Joe’s.”

  “I hate that fucking yuppie grocery store. Never go there.” He sniffed. Yeah, I thought, it sure shows, buddy, around that equatorial middle.

  Dallas cocked her head in my direction, smiled and silently mouthed “hello.” I glanced around back to see who she was looking at and brushed my nose against the pebbled amber glass room divider.

  Mr. Cute but Undoable Waiter returned with the credit card slip and since he was undoable got an exact 15 percent tip, and that was only because Safe Harbor was really paying for it.

  Something dark with an agreeable scent brushed against my right side. Dallas was now in the empty chair next to me. Paul looked both surprised and pleased. She lightly touched my forearm.

  “That guy I’m with is such a fucker,” she said, tossing her hair away from her right eye. “You don’t mind if I sit here for a while, do you? I know you from the City, right?”

  Paul chuckled. “Ben was just saying how we all shop at Trader Joe’s. Small world! I’m from San Francisco, too.” He lied. Sutcliffe was from a boring part of Santa Clara, which might be redundant, and his wife shopped at Safeway or maybe Whole Foods if she was feeling liberal that day.

  “Ben…yes,” Dallas said. I was sure she raised an eyebrow in response to Paul’s idiocy.

  “And you’re Dallas?” I said.

  “Good memory. Edmund’s heartbroken you haven’t been back to see him.”

  “Oh, God. Edmund.” I hadn’t finished eating long enough ago to ensure the mental image of Edmund in his jockstrap wouldn’t make me puke, so I clicked the slide viewer back to the preferable image of Dallas in black.

  “What are you doing in New York?” I asked her.

  Paul cleared his throat and glared at me. I stared back, feigning boredom. “Oh. Dallas, this is Paul. We work at the same company.”

  “Hi, Paul,” she said, then winked at him. She returned her attention to me. “Richard’s here on business, and I’m his diversion. But—he’s being an asshole and is going back to the hotel, and he gave me the night off.”

  * * *

  Somehow Dallas got me and, to my horror, Paul on a subway headed downtown. They sat and I stood, frustrated at not being able to hear them above the alternating clackety-clack of the tracks, the sad kid practicing his rap behind me and the low, intense rumble of the brakes as the train anticipated each station.

  She was practically in Paul’s lap. So this was her thing: older men, older fat married men, in Paul’s case. Or men who were well fed and looked like they had some money. Paul made a good salary. I’d assumed it was close to mine, perhaps more. Maybe lots more.

  Dallas wanted to party and convinced us to accompany her to some club she knew about at the northern edge of SoHo. I was sure we wouldn’t get in. After all, she may have been the right age, but Paul and I were both over forty, wearing suits and generally not cool.

  On a block of dark and imposing old gray buildings there was a single crimson light above a door, no number or sign, a black velvet rope, and two enormous guys whose day jobs must have been enforcing city sanitation contracts. There was no queue.

  I didn’t dare look up at the glow above the building, as this was now an empty space previously filled by the twin towers.

  We were inexcusably early, but Dallas knew of what she spoke, and moments later we found ourselves, despite the wrong clothing, the wrong age, all the wrong everything, in a hollowed-out black space infused with the glorious aroma of last night’s—or this morning’s—spilled drinks and vomit.

  She looked around disapprovingly, her nose slightly elevated. There were a couple of deep red banquettes against the wall, a long black bar to our right, and a pulsating blue light of some kind in the back, promising more surprise. I saw the outlines of what might be three other people in the entire space. They very well could have been employees
.

  “New York’s a late town,” she said.

  Paul looked at his watch. “It’s already eleven. Amanda and I are usually in—well, anyway, it is late.”

  San Francisco rolled up its streets ungodly early for a “cosmopolitan world-class city.” I couldn’t even imagine what the situation was in Santa Clara. Why he was reminding us of this, and of his wife, was an even stranger phenomenon, I mean—hello, Earth to Paul—it seemed Dallas was horny and Paul was quite honestly the only straight man anywhere in her immediate vicinity.

  “Look, there’s no people here at all,” she said sadly, like a youngster at Christmas who opens package after package only to be serially disappointed. “We’ll get a drink, figure it out.”

  It was her suggestion, so it would have been rude to complain. We were in a banquette, which floated like a planet in an endless sea of black, and a sparkling glass with that clear martini liquid inside was in front of me. I sipped at it. Dallas sat between Paul and me, and I imagined we could be some On the Town trio, updating the classic. Maybe without the singing. I tried to figure out the specifics for a mercifully short moment when Dallas announced, “I have some X and I think we should do it.”

  Now I knew—she was the angel sent to rescue me from the strict and boring finger wagging I’d found in AA—and trouble with a capital T.

  I adored her.

  Paul sat there with his smoky mouth agape. There was that unmistakable look of fear and desire on his face that told me he was game even if he gave lip service to the contrary.

  “You mean…ecstasy?” he whispered disingenuously.

  The part of my brain, long out of use, that calculated time effects of drug taking and the various excuses needed to be manufactured for the Other Life sputtered to work.

  The ASMA conference was not really something I had to attend. Safe Harbor knew we were registered for it and had already paid the fees. The company also never required any kind of written report on these yearly “training” excursions. Quite frankly, the software engineers in charge could have cared less about marketing tutorials—in other words, the only thing preventing me (and Paul, by extension) from having a nice, drug-fueled New York vacation at our bosses’ expense was my own guilty conscience.

  The little brownish tabs she showed us in the ladies’ room had been stamped with a Mercedes logo. They did have that look of illicitness I remembered—X had not been a popular party drug when I had given all that up years ago, but it was comforting to know the illegal drug trade hadn’t changed all that much.

  Dallas held three tabs in the palm of her hand. I took mine and downed it with no outward hesitation at all.

  Damn, this was fun.

  I was with a college-age chick doing drugs in a club channeling 1979. She smiled and gave me a knowing nod, like we were on a frequency closed off to Paul. She took hers, then licked her lips.

  Sutcliffe just stood there. He’d loosened his tie, then finally undid it, so now it draped over his shirt like a scarf, an incredibly unattractive and stupid look. He was scared. I got the irony of standing there with Paul Sutcliffe, that son of a bitch who wanted me fired, in a dank women’s bathroom in SoHo where he was afraid to take a teensy-weensy little pill. I wished I’d had a gun.

  “Go ahead, Paul,” I said. The upper hand was mine. He was going to have to take the X or risk whatever nasty gossip I could come up with about our trip.

  The look he gave me was classic, one of those I-hate-you-but-you’ve-got-me-in-a-corner-and-I’m-never-going-to-forget-this-you-asshole glares. He took the tab from Dallas and swallowed it, grabbed my drink away from me and washed it down with whatever vodka and spit was left in the glass.

  * * *

  We’d been dancing for some indeterminate amount of time when I realized my jacket was missing. Maybe it was back in the booth—wait, was it even the same club? A few more people, not many, inky blackness with satellite orbs of light sprinkled about, Dallas’s face, her eyes closed and face upturned, a mask bobbing on a stick. Paul danced too, his shirt open, showing his wet, fatty, hairy man boobs, a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like Peter Lorre—clutching, so he wouldn’t drop it.

  I smiled at that and giggled, because Paul was like a weasel, those parts Lorre always played. No—better, a rat child, but a fat and sweaty one, and this was our movie now. I looked at the ceiling and realized that not only could I not see the cameras, but this film Dallas, Paul and I now starred in was infinitely finer than the one I’d made with Karen. It was all so…

  Apparent!

  We pulsed to some Euro-techno-house thumping thing and my eyes filled with tears. Even though my journey seemed to have taken me to another dark club, back to drugs, with one person I didn’t know and another I didn’t like, I saw the simplicity of a bookended proposition: This really wasn’t much different from my life at, say twenty-one.

  As much as people think they might change as they age, maybe it’s all just an illusion and they’re better off holding on to that core, that kernel of golden basic truth—everyone wants to be someone else and if at all possible, high.

  Oh and my, my, my; just then I felt a wave of pleasure wash over me. My body was one giant penis. Tears streamed down my cheeks and washed away whatever resistance I’d held on to, and I gave myself over to the reality that I wasn’t the guy I’d hoped to be. I was just the same guy I’d always been; he’d been locked away somewhere, desperate to get out, and now it was happening!

  Paul appeared to be coming on to the drug, too. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Life probably wasn’t all that pleasant for a straight man like him who had to conform to all these expectations and what the fuck did I know about it anyway? I’d always assumed they chose a really boring life, but maybe that was all the possibility he could imagine without some major and highly unlikely psychic upheaval.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, over and over, following the beat, though it was hard to hear amid the sensations of staccato air bursts against my ears, hot air, like sonic strobes. Dallas smiled at him or at nothing and danced the same boxy, sexy step over and over without moving from her little spot.

  She wrapped her arms around my waist and drew me close. I felt her heartbeat through her hands on my flanks, faster than mine, and funny how it matched the thump thump thump of the music exactly. The enormous speakers that hung in the corners above breathed on their own, oracled mouths blowing an urgent message down to us.

  “What are you doing?” I got that much out; then she pressed in closer, her breasts flattening against my ribs, that softness curious and at this moment not revolting in the least, though even with the drug I longed for those familiar harder slabs of hairy pectoral muscle. My Jake. My Eric…

  “Isn’t this…amazing?” she said, and rested her soft face against my neck. I felt Paul’s heavy wet forearm across my shoulders and the heat of his massive body against us. “Yeah, yeah,” he whispered; then he moved into the dance with us, the three of us connected, swaying, alone on the dance floor of this club, unfashionably early still—horribly embarrassing to New Yorkers: tourists on drugs.

  * * *

  Dallas took us many places that night—how many clubs I don’t remember—but oddly, she seemed to know a lot of people for someone who lived three thousand miles away. The joints appeared basically all the same to me—black pearls in abandoned brick blocks with a dose of someone’s idea of fleeting fabulousness within. We were tolerated, indulged at some places more than at others. Paul had a lot of cash for tips, and that helped. I figured I fit in better since I was gay and thin, as opposed to Paul, who was neither.

  We danced as that threesome at each club, none of us drinking anything but water now, Paul amusing me with his chain smoking, even though I chewed through every straw I was given. We didn’t have to talk, as we knew one another’s thoughts. Dallas had since favored Paul as the guy she wanted to adhere to, which I accepted and realized was the best thing, even though it did, honestly, hurt my feelings. Not that I was e
ver going to entertain the idea that I would fuck her.

  But still.

  We slid out of the last club into the cold, pinkish Manhattan dawn. Delivery trucks had already lined up in the crosstown traffic on Houston, and their idling exhaust made me gag.

  We huddled closely in the back of the shared uptown cab, the forced hot air drying out my nose.

  Something almost imperceptible had happened between Dallas and Paul that did not bode well for the tryst I’d been expecting, and I was sad for them. Sad for me, too; sad for all of us, really, as it seemed we’d been subconsciously working to this point of connection, implicit through the night, from the time Dallas presented us with her ecstasy challenge till now, as we were lulled by the squeaky, rhythmic taxi seat.

  Tears filled my eyes again, but I wasn’t going to cry over it; come on. I didn’t know where Dallas was staying, whether it was at the St. Regis with that Richard guy or whether she had resources beyond that, secrets she hadn’t shared.

  Once we got out of the cab it actually felt like December, a northerly wind ripping out of the park, blowing same-day-tailor flyers and discarded Starbucks cups past our ankles. I never did find my jacket and shivered in the cold. Dallas hugged Paul first, then me.

  She said, “Well.”

  “Quite a night,” I replied, wanting this to be over. “Look me up back in SF, OK?” I glanced down the street to the east and squinted into the morning sun. The Archer canopy fluttered.

  Dallas hugged Paul again, and I couldn’t help noticing that he got a kiss, which I had not. I wasn’t quite sure why this irritated me, but then I remembered something—that’s right, there was something to worry about. That nagging, familiar, almost comforting feeling of always having something to fret over was back. My slide viewer clicked into view, and, of course, there it was. Cancer.

  “Foamy coffee with some chocolate shit on top is what I need,” Dallas said. “Gotta figure out what to tell Richard.” She walked off slowly and didn’t look back.

  Maybe it was her abrupt exit that pushed Paul into panic mode.