Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Richard made efforts too. A phone call on every occasion he could remember. They had stopped sending Christmas presents to each other years ago, though he managed small, DC-specific presents for his nephew, a Washington Capitals jersey, a T-shirt that said FBI. Sometime in the next few days, Richard would send her a tape of the broadcast, and she would watch him talking about the injustice of the week, sounding the alarm against some unseen evil.

  His theatrics made good television. In a thank-you note for the yellow tie, he’d told her that he’d never forgotten a line from a media-studies class in college (she hadn’t known they taught such things in Williamsburg in the early eighties), that television meant appealing to the lowest common denominator; any idiot, Richard said, could understand the theater of the absurd. She wondered if he meant that she was an idiot. She was used to the feeling, just as she was used to being underestimated by the men in her life.

  That was certainly his reaction to her pregnancy. “What are you going to do without a husband?” he’d asked, as if thousands of women didn’t raise children without help. Since her husband had gone missing, Richard delved into the literature. He called her with worrisome statistics on preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, mailed photocopied journal articles to her and her obstetrician, flew in for the delivery to feed Mary Beth ice chips, and help her pad slowly up and down the hall. Richard was capable of great gestures. He often forgot her birthday but never Gabriel’s, sending along remembrances with various postmarks, springing sometimes for overnight delivery to ensure they arrived on time: football cards, an extensive set of Legos large enough to build an entire model community, miniature license plates from each state Richard visited. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the license plates meant more to her than to her son. She looked forward to the videotapes, to his infrequent mail, which came every three months or so; she recognized the arrival of a new plate by the heft of its envelope. She kept them all in her kitchen, used double-sided tape to affix them to the front of her yellowing refrigerator. Seventeen so far.

  But this morning Richard MacMurray was not a priority, and she literally shook the thought of her brother out of her head. Now, she needed to figure out where she stood with Mike Renfro.

  Why, after all these months of dating, did she still think of him by his first and last names? Even in their most intimate moments, she looked at him and thought Mike Renfro. He had no nickname, no diminutive. Mike had never called her anything more affectionate than MB. And she’d gotten a strong sense all morning, as she watched the city recede behind her into the periphery of the mountainous basin, and again at the curb of the passenger drop-off area in front of terminal 2, and as she waited to board her flight in the order demanded by the gate attendants, how she fell in among competing priorities: she was not at the top of Mike’s, or anyone else’s, list.

  In 26C, on the aisle, Mary Beth deposited her carry-on and adjusted herself into the seat, happy that the plane was half-empty—she counted about eighty other intrepid souls. This counting of hers was a hobby, making guestimates of how many people filled the ballroom last night (four hundred) or were waiting in line for a chair on the ski lift Friday morning (eighteen).

  With so many empty seats, Mary Beth felt entitled to spread out her magazines and claim the whole row for her comfort. She took out a leather portfolio containing the random fragments of work she had needlessly carried with her on vacation. The portfolio was stamped in gold with the logo of a large company that provided diversified financial services, a broad spectrum of solutions that meant term- and whole-life insurance, retirement plans for individuals and small businesses, long- and short-term disability. Each time Mary Beth looked at the logo or at the bar graphs and pie charts within, the tables of tobacco- and non-tobacco-based premiums, the actuarial predictions of longevity and quality of life, the accidental death and dismemberment plans and their graduated payment schemes—$100,000 for one arm and one leg, or both arms or both legs, $50,000 for one hand and one eye—she was reminded that she made her living as part of the machinery that tampered with the mathematics of death.

  Being in this seat, for example, was a bona fide ten-thousand-to-one shot, completely unthinkable. Her son was six years old, and she’d never had a vacation without him until this ridiculous holiday weekend, where a man took her a thousand miles away apparently for the joint purposes of not asking her to marry him, not asking her to help pick out their new house. Whatever his intentions had been, the vacation was now over, and she’d been unable to contrive a way to make him actually say what he wanted. She’d chastise herself later for being so gullible, for letting such mundane fantasies creep into her thinking unrecognized, for craving the regular stability that she wanted for herself and her son, for thinking that anyone other than her would feel responsible enough to want to provide it. She was disappointed at herself for wanting such predictable things, and even more so by the fact that it had taken her so long to realize it. The entire chain of events that had brought her here—all the way back to that Monday morning seven years ago when she learned she was going to be a single mother—was unthinkable. She’d never told Gabriel about how hard she’d tried, in the first years of her marriage, to have a child. Maybe when he was older, she could have a conversation in which she explained the intrusive tests, the blood chemistries that seemed to happen biweekly, the ways she’d tracked her monthly cycle, even the unsympathetic doctor who’d told her that she had an inhospitable womb, a comment he’d apparently forgotten once she’d actually conceived. She’d overcome a recalcitrant husband, fibroids, an obstructed ovary, countless minor issues consigned to the marginalia of her medical records. Which meant that she still labeled her pregnancy a happy accident, the kind of long odds better suited to lottery jackpots and sweepstakes winnings.

  The captain’s voice on the public address system interrupted Mary Beth’s reverie, telling Mary Beth and the other passengers that a small problem with the onboard computer was “a-okay” and their flight was number one for takeoff. The scheduled time for departure was ten minutes past. Mary Beth bided her time reading the directory of entertainment choices in the back of the magazine, thinking how Burt Lancaster films were never shown on airplanes. She wanted to sit in a cabin full of men in ties, women with hats; she wanted to rack up enough miles to earn platinum status, get upgraded to the front of the cabin, where she’d sit next to a cavalcade of stars, B-grade celebrities. Her brother liked to regale her with stories from his own travels, of run-ins with quasi-famous seatmates: the former Nixon aide who found Jesus in prison, the actor who played the bumbling spy Agent 86, a baseball player most famous for swapping wives with a teammate. Now air travel had all the glamour of a bus ride.

  As the plane lumbered to reach V1, the speed required for flight, Mary Beth silently chanted the introduction to a pair of vague prayers, stumbling in the middle passages of both the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary. The words themselves were so familiar that she could not pinpoint her mistake, could not remember when the modern church melded trespasses into debts, only that she relied on prayer at each takeoff and landing to assuage her nerves. There was only the gentle rattle of normal turbulence once the landing gear retracted and the plane began to climb above the Great Basin, out toward the flat expanse of the Great Salt Lake.

  22

  TWO PEOPLE thinking simultaneously of the same unsatisfying kiss.

  Near the point where the outskirting suburbs of Salt Lake City began to dissolve into high desert, west of the airport, Mike drove fast, fifteen miles per hour over the limit, headed for a rendezvous with a real estate agent who, it turned out, was a cousin of Sherri Ashburton, Mike’s cocktail waitress from the night before. He remembered the name because he’d written it into his log of possible sales leads, made a note to follow up next week. The state seemed filled with these sorts of tangential relations, people who all knew each other, who shared a sense that the land itself was a special place. These small, happy coincidences Mike would tak
e as additional proof that forces he did not understand were pushing him toward Utah as his obvious next stop.

  He allowed himself any number of delusions that day: that he had enjoyed a perfect holiday weekend of revelry, that the adventure with Mary Beth that had for so long been on the periphery of his mind as a possibility had just begun. He could persuade her to come to Utah. The kiss had been nothing more than a hurried contingency, a duty she needed to perform before she returned to her son. And he was willing to permit that feeling, for now, the idea that he did not have to be first among all her obligations. It would be only a few hours before he would realize exactly how wrong he was. Nothing in his life could prepare him. He had built an entire miniature empire on anticipating every contingency for each prospect, and soon he’d be confronted with proof that it was a skill he could not use for his own benefit. That’s what would burn in him, the knowledge that she’d been saying good-bye the entire time. Mike could not anticipate how, in just a few more hours, he would end up dazzled and beaten, remembering how Mary Beth had given him a kiss at curbside, that solitary benediction placed on the forehead, as if she were purposefully avoiding the contradictions and intimacies that came with open mouths, choosing instead to give him this promise in the form of a kiss Mike Renfro would always consider to be filled with meaning because of its felicity, its grace, its finality.

  And now, as her flight barreled above the Utah flats, headed to its cruising altitude of thirty-seven thousand feet, Mary Beth fixated on the kiss because it had been so perfunctory and meaningless. How often in her life she had wanted more: more passion, more commitment, more of a sense of destiny. Her college girlfriends used to debate what was worse, a life without passion or a life without security; what she had learned in the intervening two decades was that you could have an abundance of either one, but if the other was lacking, you were still basically bankrupt. She’d allowed herself the luxury of pretending her getaway had been a romantic vacation, which came with the luxury of looking forward. Mike was the eternal optimist; it came with his profession. He was always on the debit. She could hear him saying, No prospect was ever truly lost, which meant he would never see her departure in the same concrete terms as she was beginning to, the start of one era, the end of another. That’s what her kiss with Mike had been, a dividing line. She’d felt in her body and in the purse of her lips a kiss that felt defensive, one of custom and obligation, erected as a stop sign, chaste, motherly, and final.

  23

  PEOPLE MILLED together at the New Year’s Day party with the randomness of charged particles. Sarah Hensley didn’t even use the word party. Instead she welcomed guests by recounting how Mike Renfro, the owner of the house, had given her his blessing: Why don’t you just stay at the house? Have a few friends over, watch the Rose Bowl on the big screen. Sarah and her friends planned on taking full advantage of both Mike’s hospitality and his absence. Already, his sterile, modern kitchen was sullied with huddles of empty beers; ashtrays overflowed with Soviet-colored muck; three-quarter-empty cocktails were riddled with wounded slivers of citrus and dissolving cigarettes.

  Sarah Hensley’s only official duty on New Year’s Day was to keep an eye on her coworker’s kid. After spending two-thirds of the weekend trying to decipher the whims of a six-year-old, Sarah figured that today Gabriel Blumenthal could entertain his own damn self.

  He sat in the midst of forty meandering guests, petulantly reminding them to step over the cadre of stuffed bears he had nestled among the ancient, comfortable blankets piled on the floor of the great room. No one paid him much attention. On the concrete patio that abutted the great room, Sarah’s friends sunned themselves, sleeping the dulcet sleep that came from too many margaritas in the early-afternoon sun of a freakishly warm January day. The poolside stereo churned out power-chord and hair-extension rock music ten years out of vogue, Sarah’s guilty and ironic pleasure.

  Another dozen people reclined inside on a passel of leather couches, staring up at the final minute of a lopsided bowl game. Between plays, the director cut away to a shot of the announcers in the booth eating Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Down on the field, two linemen hoisted a coach onto their shoulders before their other teammates could douse him with the Gatorade bucket. Which meant that what the linemen had intended as a Gatorade shower for the coach instead became an avalanche of sticky ice poured down his butt and over their teammates’ heads. As the color commentator drew up the error on the Telestrator, he laughed and said, “What did you expect? They’re big, dumb oxes, these linemen, every one of them. I should know. I played nose guard in college.”

  Like half the other women at the party, Sarah wore a swimsuit. Hers was a demure navy-blue bikini, and over that, she wrapped a flirty white terrycloth robe that fell open at midthigh. In between bouts of hot-tub frolicking, she elbowed her way through clusters of friends to retrieve a beer and found herself leaning over a small, mirrored tray striped with parallel lines of cocaine. Sarah considered her own reflection—a hint of wind and sun, her nostrils appended with a five-dollar bill—then looked around the house to ensure Gabriel was not watching before hoovering up two quick bumps of someone else’s blow.

  All morning, people had introduced themselves by their association—I’m a friend of Jane’s. We met in Mike’s box out at the stadium. You must be Tim’s girlfriend. Aren’t you the guy who broke his wrist at Shelby’s house? We’ve got room for one more here if you tell me who you work for. I play doubles with Terry on Tuesday nights. A young man resplendent in a beer company T-shirt and baseball hat stepped next to her. She tried to place him, tried equally hard not to let her face betray that she did not recognize him.

  “Great party. And great house. I like the decorations,” he said, picking up a beer bottle that sat on its side. “Early American decadent. But the house ought to have a name, in black metal letters over the gate. Like a real ranch. Very casual and ironic. Rancho Relaxo.” He handed Sarah a bottle of Mexican beer and said, “Carter Lundy, at your service,” turning on a high-watt smile.

  After a quick handshake, Sarah realized how she knew Carter Lundy. Ever since she had moved to Texas, she had been part of a group of young professionals who rented a beach house in Galveston. The five-hour drive made less and less sense each summer, but Sarah did it anyway; there was nothing sadder than being the oldest single girl at the bar. Still, occasionally she led the procession in her ancient Volkswagen convertible, the top down and an Igloo cooler packed with cold beer nestled in the Beetle’s backseat, all the while thinking she was too old for this kind of collegiate debauchery.

  The romantic arrangements of those weekends tended to be temporary at best, and there was something temporary about Galveston too, its history, its architecture, its cast of characters. Every couple of decades, the town took it in the teeth from a hurricane, which meant, voilà—there was Dan Rather floating by in his yellow slicker, saying how nothing matched the destruction of the 1900 storm, when they’d had to weigh down the bodies and bury them at sea, only to have them float back up to the beach. Each time since, they rebuilt the island with bigger and better Kwikie Marts and Dairy Queens, T-shirt shops and all-you-can-eat fried-seafood emporiums. Sarah tried to remember if Carter had been part of the original beach house crowd—twenty-five-cent tacos and twenty-five-cent Bud Lights Friday night till midnight!—the Vegas-style justifications: What happens at the beach stays at the beach. Yet she could recall only fuzzy particulars: Carter worked for another insurance agency, but he had the gift, like Mike Renfro, of remembering names and birthdays and generally making people feel like they wanted to be around him.

  She put it together as a question. “Galveston, right?”

  Carter tapped his beer bottle against Sarah’s and said in a mock British accent, “Cheers, then.”

  Sarah laughed. She worked her way around the kitchen collecting bottle caps and abandoned plastic cups.

  Carter picked up a plastic trash bag and followed, holding it open for her. When she th
anked him, he touched his forehead with his index finger, a gesture Sarah interpreted as Gary Cooper–esque, the taciturn cowboy tipping up his hat to better see the lady.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling the belt of her robe loose, “you can buy a girl a drink before kickoff.”

  Sarah motioned for Carter to sit at the end of the sofa, then draped herself over the sofa’s arm, letting her legs fall across his. On the floor, Gabriel played with a model truck and a stuffed brown bear, alternately running over the bear or having it stand up and kick over the truck, an irradiated giant rampaging through a small town.

  “So, what’s the kid like?” Carter pointed. Sarah brushed his hand down from her upper thigh.

  She had a theory—one that she might articulate once the child was out of earshot—about his future: he would become a socially addled adolescent, unable to shake his awkwardness. She pictured him participating in elaborate role-playing games that used sixteen-sided dice. “I don’t know. He pretty much does his own thing. His mom calls every four hours to remind me what to do next, what to make for dinner, when to put him to bed. But the kid and I negotiated an agreement.”

  “An agreement?” Carter fiddled with the dingy end of the belt from Sarah’s robe.

  “Not to tell his mom. I let him do his thing. He’s on a kick, Vienna sausages wrapped in Pillsbury biscuits. He showed me how to make them, and as long as I watch the oven, that’s what he wants for dinner. Three days in a row, it’s been Vienna sausages and Cheez-Its for lunch and dinner.” Sarah munched her way through some mixed nuts, then held up a Brazil nut, staring at it before throwing it back in the bowl.