Still, Mike had more than his status as her boss to recommend him: there was his attentiveness and his work ethic, his luxuriously abundant hair, the way he kept focus on the details both big and small. His briefcase was like an emergency kit on how to be a grown-up, filled with work papers and tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, wet wipes, a travel-size toothbrush. He was prepared for every eventuality. He himself was covered with $2 million in term life insurance, a line he’d mention in his sales calls, but on this New Year’s Eve, Mary Beth realized that he’d never mentioned who the beneficiary might be. She suspected an ex-wife out there, somewhere nebulous, one day to be surprised by a sudden windfall. There were always these warning signs, but then, there were always enough positives to overlook the questionable things she already knew, a pair of acrimonious divorces (at sales conferences, he liked to joke that his next wife should be named Plaintiff, just to save the time), the house bereft of furniture save for giant televisions and leather sofas, a refrigerator filled only with beer, mixers, and condiments, the appearance and disappearance of twentysomething women who worked for six months, tops, as Mike Renfro’s “personal assistant.”
Calling him a boyfriend made what she was doing here feel illicit and ill advised. Nor was he on some inevitable path to becoming her fiancé. Calling Mike her date was inadequate; he was one of the few constants in her life since the morning eight years ago when she answered a Dallas Morning News advertisement for an entry-level sales position and found herself being talked into taking the job as his office manager.
In the few awkward months when she referred to Mike as just a good friend, he’d courted her intermittently with small gifts, trinkets from his every business trip. Any weekend he spent at his condo near Galveston, Mike always returned with boxes of saltwater taffy. Mary Beth mentioned once that she preferred the peppermint-flavored pieces, white with red stripes, like some hybrid toothpaste. After his next trip, Mike put a box in the reception area and another at the front desk for the rest of the women, but not before liberating all the peppermint pieces, spiriting them into a sandwich bag that he left on Mary Beth’s desk. She told him, “The taffy was great. But next time I want fudge, two boxes. One for here and one for home,” and he had remembered that too, showing up a month later with a pound each of light- and dark-chocolate fudge and a bonus pound of peanut butter. They opened all three boxes and mixed the pieces together so that Mary Beth could take home a little of each. Between the two of them, they ate nearly a pound, leaving Mary Beth with a sugar- and salt-loaded tongue that could not be satisfied even after three glasses of water.
Then, somehow, they were dating. Now her presence in Salt Lake City made her feel as if she had not been courted but defeated, her resistance poked through by his persistence and ardor. She liked the physical pleasure of being around Mike too, both the lovemaking and, more recently, the reassuring way his solid frame dominated her bed. She liked the feel of a man next to her, especially now that Gabriel was no longer a toddler appearing in her doorframe in the night, seeking the solace of his mother and her queen-size bed. Just once Mary Beth wished Mike would stay for breakfast, for all the rituals of a family, but what Gabriel might make of that she did not know. Her son had no idea what to call him either. Mike insisted on being called Mike, whether he was talking to a six-year-old or to a client, but whenever Mike arrived to watch a movie or take Mary Beth and Gabriel out to dinner, the kid still referred to him as Mr. Mike.
She decided that New Year’s Eve was exactly the time to put labels on things; they could stay up all night if they had to without worrying about waking up the kid in the next room. They had become a regular thing, but usually just on Thursday and Saturday evenings. Their interactions occurred almost exclusively on neutral turf; the only times she’d been to his house fell under the pretense of her professional duties, and that meant she had a hard time picturing her son roaming the bland suburban expanses of Mike’s house. In Mike’s list of personal and professional obligations, she had no idea where she fell. She knew too his upcoming calendar, and there wasn’t much room in there for her, for Gabriel. She wasn’t even sure how much she would see of him in January, given Mike’s other plans: a trip to his mother’s (the first in twenty-one months), a sales conference in Houston, a Hawaiian vacation (apparently, he hadn’t thought of inviting her).
So if Mike wanted something more, starting at midnight he was going to have to ask for it. They had no excuse not to take some time and figure out where Mary Beth fit in, or whether she was going to fit in at all.
Mike lived in the city of his own future, a city designed with a distinctly Renfro-centric vision. Mary Beth saw herself demanding a bit more, wanted more of his presence, his attention. She clicked the television set off and reflected that it had been the better part of a decade since she spent this holiday in the arms of a man, her hair done and nails polished, since she had crossed the threshold of midnight somewhere other than on her sofa in front of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. Mike was free to tell the world about her. She was happy to have an evening where she allowed her wants to come first. It seemed so obvious that she shook her head at the thought. How little she’d allowed herself since her divorce. And that part could start now, she thought, so she said to herself, Fuck the briefcase. It was a holiday, for God’s sake.
5
BY THE time Richard successfully hailed a cab outside the news bureau, he’d listened to seven messages, each shorter than ten seconds, all expressing reactions best summarized as holy shit. The first message came from his booking agent, a blunt rejoinder that Monday would almost certainly begin with a call from the chairman of the sentencing-reform coalition terminating his contract; the last was his agent calling back with the information that the group had already called with the announcement that they would seek a legal remedy to keep from paying Richard the $12,000 he was still owed.
From the television studio to his Adams Morgan home, a little more than three miles, a cab normally took fifteen minutes; tonight it took that long to travel just five blocks. He ditched the taxi and walked through the busy intersection of Connecticut and Florida, deciding against a pit stop into the corner market for a celebratory six-pack. He’d get a few hours’ head start on his New Year’s resolutions, the austerity program he’d been cultivating and refining for the past few months. Besides, he had precious little to celebrate.
He turned onto his hilly side street only to be confronted by a pair of women emerging from a pricey sedan. Georgetown students, Richard thought, based solely on the value of the car. The first girl, dressed in black cigarette pants and a spangly top that fell off one of her shoulders, pointed at Richard with her silver evening clutch, then stopped her friend with a violent yank at the elbow. They leaned together, whispering, and then the two of them gave him an enthusiastic wave and started to cross the street toward him.
He could not get used to being recognized on the street, even though it happened maybe once a day. Being familiar or even, he supposed, quasi-famous, meant that Richard could never be forgiven the sin of a bad mood, so he geared up to be the television version of himself, chatty, open. He was aware that it was television which had conveyed to him this authority; in bars, he was often called upon to settle arguments over things he knew nothing about, like who was the left fielder for the ’79 Phillies, or who played bass in Mott the Hoople. And that authority, Richard knew from experience, attracted a certain type of girl, one of Washington’s army of fit, ambitious, pencil-skirted young professionals. They all were organized, styled, and well coiffed, and walked as if they were late for a meeting that had started ten minutes before. Like the two now marching toward him.
He responded with a quasi-military salute, which he immediately regretted. The wave should have allowed him to make a quick exit, but leaving meant showing the two girls which building he lived in, and now he worried about the fact that his name was lettered on the directory panel next to the security buzzer. So he waited for the pair to c
atch up.
The first girl lurched toward him, demanding, “So where are you headed tonight?”
But Richard was not headed to some glamorous undisclosed location, the kind that got written up in the Style section of the Washington Post; he wanted nothing more than to shed his suit, relax in a sweater and venerable chinos. Every sincere invitation he had received for New Year’s meant an event where the hosts expected him to arrive as the televised version of himself. In other words, work. This holiday season, Richard had backed entirely out of the social swing, even skipping the three-week period of lavish and decadent Christmas parties thrown by the lawyers and the lobbyists he knew because, in his heart, he felt he was just too old for the false camaraderie of two a.m. What Richard liked most about Washington was that he finally understood the way it worked; sooner or later the city defeated everyone’s idealized view of it and became an elaborate game of playacting. Friendships, even romantic relationships, lasted in predictable increments, two years or four, like election cycles. With Cadence, it had been two. And she had not returned his last four phone calls.
He didn’t have the courage to say all that, so he settled for the modified truth. “I’m headed upstairs for a glass of wine and a steak lovingly prepared on my George Foreman grill. At midnight, I’m going to call my sister and wish her a happy New Year, watch the ball drop, make a wish for peace, and then at about 12:02, I’m going to bed.”
“Peace? That’s very political. But not very exciting,” said the one in the spangly top, but both girls wore a look on their faces that said they did not believe his story. The head tilt and the hip that she thrust toward him implied a confidence that said she was older than he thought, late twenties. The friend, a streaky blonde in a navy-blue dress that skimmed the ground, thrust a business card at him. “My cell number’s on there. We’re going to some place around the corner called the Red Room.” She showed him the open palm of her right hand and flexed her fingers wide. “Five of us. All extremely fuckable. Wherever it is that you’re really going, if you want to join us for a drink later, you should call.”
The girls left in a wake of chatter and the competition of two close-smelling fragrances (Richard thought of limes and burning firewood). He watched as they trotted around the corner to the Eighteenth Street bars that specialized in retro music and pink drinks. Richard thought he heard one of them say something about how he looked different than on television, and the other agreed, saying, Taller.
The girls were right. It wasn’t a very exciting plan. A glass of wine and a steak, alone.
But Richard wasn’t interested in flirtations, even those of attractive strangers. He imagined any number of excuses for bumping into them later that night; the New Year provided an opening for us to admit our longings, even if it was just the simple desire for the tradition of a midnight kiss.
His building seemed empty. No sounds of parties, no one in the hallways. Inside, the colonial moldings, plaster walls, and black-and-white deco tiles in the kitchen and bathroom always made Richard think that his bachelor quarters had been cobbled together from the rooms of a once-grand house. In the living room, a monstrous overstuffed sofa stood like an island. His queen-size bed, an antique Queen Anne dresser that had belonged to his grandfather, and a dilapidated pine armoire that hid a television and a DVD-CD-player combo, were his only other items of furniture, as if minimalist decor were the most logical side effect of divorce. Richard could not look at his apartment—inside or out—without thinking of it as the home of a man living in temporary internal exile. He was a dissident.
Inside, he turned on the television and had the momentarily disconcerting feeling of seeing himself on screen, an edited highlight of his stunt being used to tease the news at the top of the hour.
He opened a bottle of wine and thought honestly about not even bothering with a glass. He would be the only one to know. There should be two glasses, that much was obvious; the holiday season felt like a weeks-long reminder of how adrift, how uncoupled, he was. There should be, he knew, more. It felt as if the only gifts that Christmas would ever deliver to him were reminders of how much was missing: a spouse, a family, a dog, a home. He hadn’t bothered to put up a tree, and the wreath on his door was a gift from a producer at one of the Sunday-morning news shows. It was the end of another year in which he’d tried his best to ignore the season. On Christmas Day, he’d forgotten to call his sister, and the only holiday cards that showed up in his mailbox were from casual acquaintances looking to promote their law practice or their candidacy for Ward 2 city council. The photos on the cards became advertisements for a life he would not get to lead, no one in his bed, no fireplace, no elderly family dog wheezing contentedly at his feet, no child to watch in the anxious race to tear open every Christmas present with maximum destructive force. Alone at a time when the world told him again how he should be celebrating.
The wine he drank, a highly tannic California Cabernet, from the first sip tasted corky and left a fine silt at the lip of his glass, on the edge between simply not good and turned. It served him right. His ex-wife used to complain about his behavior, his constant introspection, as if he were some long-suffering character in a Russian novel. He thought the changes he’d made in the last year had conquered it, but the malaise (what else would he call it?) returned. His wine had turned. He thought about tossing it, but it was from a decent vintage and the bottle had cost something on the order of sixty dollars, and unless it had gone completely vinegar, he was going to tough it out. Petty crimes deserve petty punishments. So much around him had turned to acid in the past few years.
He powered through the wine because he’d given up everything else. In the past three years, he’d cut down on bourbon; at midnight, it would be exactly a year since his last borrowed smoke. He justified the wine on the basis of its alleged heart-healthy antioxidant properties. He knew too that he’d finish the bottle tonight. Already, on his tentative list of resolutions, this would be the year to cut out the wine, learn half a dozen different and flavorful ways to prepare steamed or broiled fish, walk to the office three days a week (these are the foxhole prayers of a man just beginning to fear his own death). He would learn not to be such a sentimental sap.
These desires for himself were not solely his; they had been his girlfriend’s too. He went to the trouble to dig out a yellow legal pad from under the morass of bills and unread magazines on his desk and wrote down his first official resolution: he would not call his ex-girlfriend, Cadence Willeford, not tonight, not in the New Year. Maybe it was easiest to let Cadence and her demands, her thrills, settle into the fond memories of the recent past.
But that wasn’t going to be his strategy. He had his legal pad and could add to his list of resolutions throughout the evening, but already he sensed a theme. He was trying to mold himself into the imaginary man she’d been demanding.
To wit, she said how the constancy of Richard’s presence, their suffocating weekends, had left her feeling “close to overwhelmed.”
“Not quite overwhelmed,” Richard had repeated, and she laughed.
“Not quite. As of now, I think I’m not overwhelmed, just whelmed.”
A few weeks after that, she’d called time out.
While he waited for the grill to heat, he emptied the refrigerator of its hoard of abandoned takeout containers. Awash in the flicker of the refrigerator’s defective automatic light, he added a codicil to his resolutions: eat more fresh fruit, broccoli three times a week. He scrubbed the toilet, the tub, and wiped down the bathroom floor. He coated the insides of his oven with a foaming cleaner that made his kitchen smell like a swimming pool.
Then he filled two big bags with trash: year-old utility bills, unreadable taxi receipts, junk mail, a dozen delivery menus, the plastic wrap that the dry cleaner used to protect his laundered shirts, scores of ancient and unread magazines. His pack-rat tendencies meant that even his hall closet was filled with old clothes: a bespoke tuxedo purchased at a thrift shop during his sophomor
e year of college; a pair of red twenty-year-old Puma Clydes still grass-stained from mowing the lawn of a house he no longer owned. He took some well-frayed oxford shirts, a pair of too-small khaki pants, some stained undershirts, and a hideous blue parka that advanced fiber testing might have dated to the high school era, stuffed them into an old nylon bag, and headed out into the night.
The temperature was nearly sixty, record heat, a good omen for the New Year. Along his street, he walked past partygoers who lounged in summerlike fashion, enjoying cocktails on the front stoops. He passed living room windows flung open. Early revelers shouted down at him from adjacent rooftops. He crossed a vacant lot to a clothing-donation bin that looked like a lime-green dumpster, and tossed the whole pile, blue bag and all, through its swinging metal door.
The truth was that he wasn’t meant for change. He longed for the familiar, specifically the presence of Cadence Willeford, who had excised herself from his life seven weeks ago, a decision that he still did not understand. To say that he’d been stunned was to underestimate the impact. He’d thought they were on an easy path to a future. She thought he needed to make changes.
The discussions still percolated in his memory, variations on a fugue of things he needed to improve, correct, revise. Which gave cleaning his apartment such significance. End of an era and all that. The first step felt obvious. He needed to remove everything from the apartment that reminded him of Cadence. Everything needed to be new. He’d been searching for a word to summarize her chief complaint, and as he opened his refrigerator door to remove a nearly month-old carton of 2 percent milk that had congealed into a curdled mess, it came to him. He’d been stagnant.
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