Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Richard knew she was right. Cadence managed to make all the places she inhabited into a home; even her office, in a nondescript black glass building on upper Connecticut Avenue, had been outfitted with oriental rugs, posters from National Gallery exhibitions, a few framed photographs of her father, a Depression-glass vase that her assistant filled with cut flowers each Monday. His office felt temporary, and he’d been living in that state for four years.

  Maybe on Tuesday, he’d go look for a coffee table. He moved on to the bedroom, working methodically, and began folding the clean laundry that had sat unattended for nearly a week. He dumped his underwear drawer onto the bed, and from beneath a tumble of T-shirts yellowed with age and sweat fell a black vinyl envelope containing seventeen Polaroids of Cadence; the photos ranged from racy to what any court of appeals judge would be tempted to identify as hard-core pornography. But they were not like that to Richard. They were just another thing he had held on to, as if by this physical evidence that Cadence had once been a regular presence in his apartment and bed, she might somehow return, if only to claim the few items she had left behind: sweatpants, a bottle of eye-makeup remover, a nearly empty antiperspirant, a T-shirt advertising a five-kilometer fund-raiser walk, a collection of the metal clips and elastic ponytail holders she used to secure the flying tendrils of her hair, these photographs.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress and scattered the Polaroids beside him. His favorite fell out on top, the great plane of Cadence’s surprisingly tan torso from ribcage to hip bone, a spot that he loved to kiss. Even though he possessed other, more graphic pictures of her, some pantomimed from men’s magazines, this snapshot held the strongest erotic charge for him; twice in the past week he had looked at these pictures, and it was this tame one that still stirred his orphaned cock. That he was the only person who could know it was Cadence’s stomach made the resultant manual relief he’d given himself feel not just emptying but tremendously sad.

  There was something pathetic, he knew, in his compulsion to conceal these pictures like some pimply teen stashing Playboys under his mattress. Richard did not want the Polaroids to be a reminder of loss. He suspected that his immediate future would contain a conversation in which Cadence demanded the return of the photographs, with all the ceremony and enjoyment of a prisoner-of-war exchange.

  Now, on this New Year’s Eve, Richard could not conjure any solid recollection of the past seven weeks; Thanksgiving had passed both unnoticed and uncelebrated, and he’d worked on an amicus brief throughout the better part of a Christmas Day on which he’d had no invitations and his phone did not ring. The days became unremarkable, a hodgepodge of half-finished work, bookended by that one painful evening when Cadence had declared her need to, as she put it, reassess, and now by this last holiday of the year.

  His resolutions were simple: to address all of Cadence’s complaints, the things she had said to him about his diet, his general inertia, his professional tendencies to fly off the handle on live television, defending things she suspected that he did not truly believe. Lately it was getting more difficult to work himself up into the froth that television demanded. Had she seen tonight’s stunt, she probably would have turned off the set.

  He left the photos on the bed and stepped into the galley kitchen to tend to his bachelor supper. After throwing together a green salad with just a tablespoon of an oil-and-vinegar dressing, he checked his steak; even though he liked things on the cool side of medium rare, it needed another couple of minutes. Enough of a window to call his sister. That was part of the plan too. Keep up with the remnants of his family, remember every important occasion, every birthday. There were only two to remember now, anyway: his sister, Mary Beth, and his nephew, Gabriel. They would be at home, certainly. But after four rings, he found himself talking to the answering machine: “Hey, it’s your brother. You must be out and about. I just wanted to wish you guys a happy New Year and all that, swap resolutions. Oh yeah, I’ll be on TV tomorrow. The usual shouting match, right around three o’clock Eastern Time, between the bowl games. I’m breaking out a new suit, custom made. I finally have proper attire for the budding pundit.”

  He hated the sound of his voice, the lonely echo it made against the ancient plaster walls of his apartment. It reminded him of how he sounded on television, syllables reverberating in his earpiece, the tautologies he was well paid to parrot, as if what he said might find some meaning if only he repeated it often enough. He carried his dinner into the living room, took up residence on the couch, and dug into what he swore would be his last piece of red meat.

  For seven weeks Richard had tried to be hard-boiled about losing Cadence, as the breakup was reinforced by her refusal of dinner invitations that he’d meant to appear spontaneous, her abject unwillingness to reveal her simplest plans or whereabouts, the disappearance of his phone calls into her voicemail. She wanted, she said, a clean break. Time to think. Alone at the turn of the year, the point exactly where past, present, and future came together, he could no longer put up a stoic front. That was the real reason he wasn’t out celebrating. He wanted to call Cadence, use all his skills in oral argument, tell her how much he was willing to change for her. But he did not. He suffered, as he feared he always might, from a thickness of heart and tongue.

  6

  THE LOBBY bar of Mike and Mary Beth’s hotel—with its low-slung round tables topped with green felt, dark wood veneer paneling festooned with horseshoes, antlers, and framed posters of Ansel Adams photographs—was an anachronistic disaster. For a few years it had been a British pub, and when that idea went sour, only the dartboards stayed. Then the room had been known as the Capital Club and tried to pass itself off as the place where state legislators came to unwind. Now it was called the Canyon Room, but the decor hadn’t changed. The furniture had been accessorized with Navajo blankets and the barstools covered in recycled denim, the menu heavy on exotic grilled meats and Irish coffees spiked with crème liqueurs. It was a casual room, and, despite the holiday, only a few men, Mike Renfro and two others, wore suits. And those three men were the oldest in the room.

  When Mary Beth entered the bar, the first thing she saw was Mike, saying to a waitress, “The hardest part of my job is telling people the bad news.”

  Mary Beth stepped behind Mike and tapped him on the shoulder. He stood to greet her, taking her hands while announcing, “You look exactly right—perfect,” a compliment she accepted even though she suspected it was rote.

  “Perfect is a little much, but thanks.”

  “How about stunning?”

  “I’ll settle for passable. No runs in my stockings, no chips in my nail polish, and no stray lipstick,” Mary Beth said, whipping her tongue across her teeth. “And one of whatever you’re drinking.”

  “A pair of bourbons, with a little splash of branch water,” he said.

  The bartender shuffled a new drink in front of him, handed one over to Mary Beth, then topped off the bowl of mixed nuts. “Just what is branch water anyway?”

  Mary Beth said, “A Texas thing. Water from a freshwater stream. Or at least it’s supposed to be.”

  The bartender grinned. “The other day, some elderly guy comes in, maybe seventy-five, and asks for a highball. Hadn’t heard that one in a while. My old man used to call it that. A little bourbon, a little ginger ale.” The bartender busied himself with a dingy towel, wiping it along the bar rail, then folding it into thirds.

  Mike chomped through a couple of cashews. “I thought bartenders knew how to make everything.”

  “I’m not a bartender, I just play one on TV. I’m trying to make a few bucks while I study for the bar exam. And I like to keep it simple. When I was in college, I worked with a guy who refused to make any drink that wasn’t named after its ingredients.”

  Mary Beth said, “My father always told me never to drink anything with more than three ingredients. Bourbon, water, ice. Ice counted as an ingredient. Keeps things predictable. The way I like it. What happens when somebody o
rders something that you don’t know how to make?”

  The bartender pulled out a Mr. Boston bartending guide from beside the register. “I’ve got it covered. I believe in being prepared for any eventuality.” Mike noticed the plain gold band on the bartender’s hand. Married. Which meant he was a prospect.

  “Me too,” Mike said. “It’s part of my job. Insurance.” His hand went back into his jacket pocket, a nervous habit. He liked to turn the solid pile of business cards with his fingers, feel the embossed print, the way he used to fidget with his cigarettes back in his smoking days. Mike filched one card, a practiced movement, and laid it in front of his drink. “Mike Renfro,” he said, and the bartender wiped his hand on his leg before returning the handshake.

  “Warren Ashburton. My friends call me Ash.”

  “How long have you been married, Ash?”

  “As of tomorrow, seven months.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d tell anyone in your shoes, Ash. Any newlywed. If you’ve thought enough about the future to get married, you’ve already proven that you’re capable of making concrete plans. The smart ones always do. You’re off to a good start, education and everything, but you’ve got to make sure that you have that solid foundation, especially if”—and here Mike lowered his head, looked at Ash by raising his eyes—“the unthinkable happens.”

  Then Mike took a hit off his drink, held it in his mouth as if it were bracingly strong, another bit of practiced drama.

  The bartender raised his hand before saying to Mike, “Hold that thought. I need to get Sherri over to hear this.” Ash whistled gently and waved over the waitress, a blonde in a red brocade vest and short black skirt. She stopped gathering empty glasses from an abandoned table and, tucking her tray under her arm, headed over to the bar.

  The introductions went like this: Sherri told Mike that Utah would be a great place to get settled, start a family, once Ash the bartender passed the bar. “He’s going to work in the city, and I’m going to stay home with the family. Eventually.” Ash looked at his wife, a questioning glance that Mike noticed, but she kept right on. “Well, I am. We’re going to be pretty old-fashioned about things,” she said. “I’m not letting my kids be raised by babysitters and television.”

  Ash couldn’t resist chiming in. “That’s because Sherri knows what kind of trouble we used to get into after school. We spent most of high school making out in her parents’ basement. Me, I grew up on television. Smoked a lot of weed watching Bugs Bunny, specifically.”

  Sherri laughed. “We were so busy having fun that it took Ash years to muster up the courage to propose.”

  “It’s true,” Ash said. “Off and on through college, and then after I got out of school, I waited tables and skied for a few years. Sherri didn’t want to get married until I got serious. Her word.”

  Mike smiled. “Tonight is the perfect time to think about this stuff. New year, new plans. You get real long-term benefits from starting a solid financial plan now, when the sacrifices aren’t as noticeable. Being proactive about the future is a pretty sober way of thinking. It shows that you’re serious people.”

  Ash tapped on the marble bar top and pointed at Mike’s empty drink, and when Mike nodded for a refill, Ash said, “This one’s on the house.”

  Mary Beth thought the conversation looked like a sales conference. The bartender pulled at the front of his red Spencer jacket, then leaned forward to watch Mike scribble on a napkin. Mary Beth knew Mike’s spiel well enough to know that he was drawing a graph on a paper napkin, life expectancies, telling the two prospects some anecdotage. “Financially, it’s women who suffer the most when the unthinkable happens, especially women who do not work,” Mike said, “outside the home.”

  “And the sacrifices you have to make are always painful,” Mary Beth added.

  “Of course,” Mike answered. He tapped at the place on the napkin where he’d drawn a set of small parallel lines that moved off toward the napkin’s edge. “Your basic lifelines. One for you, Ash, one for Sherri. The only problem is that neither of you knows which line is which, and you can never know for certain which one is going to end first. Most people call what I sell insurance. But I call it assurance. Or, more accurately, reassurance.”

  Ash tugged at the cuff of his shirt. “I go first. It’s been decided. After a brief illness. After, say, fifty-two years of marriage.”

  Mike took a belt of his drink. “Do you ever play cards, Ash?”

  Mary Beth knew Mike was deep into his sales rap here; he could always be counted on to turn the discussion back to odds. He liked to tell his prospective clients—especially the young married couples who took him into their homes and stared expectantly across at him from a couch paid for on revolving credit—how life insurance was like gambling in a casino, except that you went to the table knowing the next turn of the card, the next roll of the dice. No insurance product yet had come to market that was capable of defeating inevitability.

  Insurance, in Mike’s eyes, was the only way to beat the house. Sometimes long-shot odds meant you were the only survivor; other times they meant you were almost certain to die. Mike Renfro talked to people about these things, showed them what side of the equation they wanted to be on. Part of his genius as a salesman was that he could talk to anyone about anything. His business depended on it. Early in his career he’d learned by listening how to talk to farmers about sorghum and the latest thresher attachments, knew instinctively who rooted for the Longhorns and who for the Aggies, talked with honest reverence to homemakers about the way his grandmother used to add a touch of real Vermont maple syrup to her oatmeal raisin cookies. But to Mary Beth now, there seemed something plastic and unforgivable about the charade.

  Mike pointed again at the two lines on his napkin. Then he drew an X in the middle of the top line. “Who is that going to be, Ash? You? Can you really be sure about that? Four days ago, I gave a widow a check for five hundred thousand dollars because the husband had the good common sense to plan ahead. Forty-two years old, and he dropped dead at his desk. His secretary found him, face down in a chocolate doughnut.”

  Sherri the waitress mumbled, “Jesus. Any kids?”

  “A boy. Eight,” Mike said. “At least now the kid has a chance. I can’t help but think where that family would be if it weren’t for that check. His mom can pay off the house and still have a little bit of a nest egg. Without that, their situation would be, well, unthinkable.”

  Mike merely shook his head when he said the word unthinkable, with enough emphasis that all of them knew he was saying that the unthinkable happens on a regular basis. And none of them could say when it might happen again.

  Sherri the waitress leaned back in. “This is a pretty morbid subject for New Year’s Eve. This is supposed to be a night of festivities. Maybe we could plan to get together on Monday.”

  Mike rapped twice on the bar’s wooden edge. “Would that it could always be like that. Take your time, get things squared away. After you’ve met all your goals, seen your children get married. That’s the exact problem I’m talking about, Sherri. People always put things off. The hard things, the hard discussions. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t think they’ll be the exception.”

  That’s when Mary Beth said, “But they never are. You never see it, anyway. Never.”

  She knew before Mike did that the prospect of a sale here was lost. Mary Beth imagined Sherri and Ash thinking about protracted illnesses, ninety-minute drives for chemotherapy, dialysis, losing a foot to diabetic gangrene, a sudden, shocking death by stroke. Mike was about to fold the tent too, she could tell. What little she knew about sales she had learned from him.

  Mike balled up the napkin, used it to polish small circles on the marble bar top. “Sherri’s right. No need to bring the party down. Not tonight.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s as good a time as any to make plans. Tomorrow is the only day I have off between now and spring break,” said Ash. “Otherwise, when
are we going to think about this stuff?”

  Mike reached for the check, threw down a pair of twenties. Then he pressed another business card onto Sherri’s tray. He said to Ash, “Thinking about this shit comes with being married, or at least it ought to.” Mike turned to Sherri and said, “When you guys are ready for action, you call me. I’ll help you out.”

  On their way out of the bar, Mike and Mary Beth did not talk. Instead, she clutched his elbow and wondered if he had taken her interruptions as an attempt to sabotage the sale. She was a little bit angry, and the feeling suited her. She steamed over his attention to work, his morbid insistence on reminding people of their own upcoming death, as if he could never see beyond himself. He viewed every marriage, every partnership, in terms of its eventual collapse. Mike’s philosophy of sales meant convincing people to buy life insurance by thinking about nothing except death.

  To Mike, twenty-plus years of selling insurance meant that the unthinkable always morphed into the inevitable. He would not even consider the alternatives. As they took the escalator down one level toward the raucous party sounds drifting out of the main ballroom, Mary Beth turned to Mike, and asked him, “Why don’t you ever draw more lines on that graph?” and when Mike gave her a questioning look, she continued. “In the whole time I’ve worked for you, all the times I’ve watched you close, you’ve never drawn a line on that graph for children.”

  Mike stammered the beginnings of a defense, but Mary Beth raised her index finger, and he fell silent. “Someday you’ll realize that scaring the shit out of people maybe isn’t the best sales technique.”