Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  He wasn’t thinking about anything other than how he could muster the strength to say what he needed to say to Cadence; when her hands found his under the table, he realized she was content to wait until he discovered some way to say it, and she wouldn’t permit an interruption. She dismissed the waitress by showing the palm of her hand.

  “When my mother died,” Cadence said, “I was in the middle of moving here. I’d just bought my first place, and it was supposed to be a celebration. I had friends waiting with champagne and pizza, and I was at my old apartment, on the phone with my father. He’s telling me how I have to come home to Pennsylvania, and there are three men in my apartment tapping their feet and waiting for me to hang up so they can take the chair I was sitting in.” Eons ago.

  The waitress brought the check, and Cadence paid cash. “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked Richard. “At the very least get out of here? Have you eaten? It’s always good to eat something.” He answered each thing she said with an affirmative nod, and she pulled him toward the door.

  Out on the avenue, traffic was stopped by a minor accident, a bus having broadsided a taxicab, apparently after sliding through the traffic light at very low speed. There did not seem to be much damage to the cab, and nothing was visibly wrong with the bus. The passengers milled around the sidewalk like they were in a church social hall on Sunday morning, preformed groups of two or three closing ranks to keep out strangers. But they seemed in good spirits, as if dancing in the falling snow.

  Cadence and Richard stopped in front of a diner where they had eaten together often, ordinary dinners, late-night cravings for milk shakes, and morning-after breakfasts. At their first breakfast together, Cadence had slid the remainder of her hash browns onto Richard’s plate without asking, and he was thinking of that moment, how effortlessly beautiful she looked with her hair balled up under a baseball hat, wearing his white T-shirt, everything about her perfect, down to the playful way she licked ketchup off the blade of her knife, and he knew at that moment he would keep that memory forever. Maybe that was his first inkling of falling for her, of falling in love, wanting the night to hurry up and be over so that he could watch her again, even just her usual, yogurt and fruit and one cup of coffee, black. That morning had smelled of spring, the fragrant blush of fruit blossoms that somehow settled on the city on a Saturday morning in late March.

  “Here?” Richard asked, and moved to the door.

  Cadence reached across her body to take him by the arm and pull him back into the flow of pedestrian traffic. “No, not here.”

  The crowd on the sidewalk forced them to walk single file, and before Richard realized where they were going, they were standing in the circular driveway of Cadence’s building. She took out her keys, handed them to Richard, and fumbled in her purse for something else, saying, “Let’s order in. We can talk upstairs. Spring rolls and chicken with lemongrass, maybe?”

  “Garden rolls,” Richard said.

  “I never remember the difference.”

  The first time Richard set foot in Cadence’s apartment was the day she moved in, when the weather had not yet fully committed to summer and a surprising thunderstorm brought bone-cold rains, as if it were still March. The night before the move, they had fought over something inconsequential, and Cadence had released Richard from his role in the day, told him not to bother, then enlisted an army of her friends to help with the rental van, the carrying of furniture. Richard decided to help anyway, but the heavy lifting was finished by the time he arrived. The shower in her bathroom was broken, the water pressure just a trickle; he bought a new diverter valve and whittled the afternoon away installing that and a new showerhead. After he finished, Cadence slipped into the shower and then leaned out of the bathroom, carefully hiding herself behind the door, to wave an invitation. Richard joined her, washed her hair, inscribing circles on her back with one of those nylon puffs that came with the body scrub she liked to use. They ordered pizza, watched a rerun of Saturday Night Live, and slept. The second time was seven months later, the night after Cadence had explained how things were not working out. She’d left Richard a telephone message, a short list of all the items she could remember leaving at his apartment (a pair of gloves, a hairbrush, and a blow-dryer, no mention of the Polaroids) that she wished returned. He’d shown up at her door with a small paper bag filled with her sundries and had been allowed inside long enough to accept the return of a handful of CDs, two books, and a neon-green fleece scarf; she handed the items over without even a perfunctory comment, as if they were artifacts from an era of agony.

  This was the third time.

  It occurred to him how strange it was that they’d spent most of their relationship at his apartment or in bars and restaurants.

  Inside her apartment, Cadence turned on the hall light and excused herself to the bathroom. When she returned, she undid her ponytail, using her fingers to rake through her hair. She lit a pair of stocky candles on her glass-top coffee table and turned on the stereo, a classical piece Richard didn’t recognize. She patted the couch, and Richard dutifully sat next to her.

  “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  Richard said, “Maybe later. Nothing right now.” He picked up a disposable lighter from the coffee table and flicked it maybe a dozen times before she took it out of his hand and put it on the corner table farthest from his reach.

  She turned so that they were facing each other. Her legs were folded beneath her, and their knees grazed each other. “It’s okay, it’s just me,” she said. “When are you leaving?”

  “I’ve got a ticket for the morning. 9:40 a.m.”

  She searched for something consoling to say. “I’m just sorry you have to go through this by yourself.”

  “I’ve done a lot by myself in the last few weeks.” She grimaced a bit, and Richard added, “I’m sorry.”

  “No. That’s fair.”

  “I probably could find a nicer way to admit that I’ve missed you. But I have. I do.”

  “Of course. Me too.” Their hands were touching.

  Richard said, “I’m not quite ready to leave.”

  “I’m not kicking you out,” she answered.

  Richard reclined against the back of the couch, and Cadence came over to him, sat in his lap facing him, half on top of his body. He pushed some of her straying hairs behind her ear.

  “I didn’t think you were. But I don’t want to leave, period. I was hoping I could stay.” Cadence was quiet, and Richard started to say something more, whatever his anxious mind could come up with, but instead Cadence smiled and pressed her finger to his lips for a moment. Their faces were nearly together.

  They kissed a few more times before Cadence stood and slipped her shirt over her head, then led Richard by the hand to her bedroom, where they fell together out of what Richard hoped wasn’t habit, convenience, or, most of all, pity.

  Cadence let herself collapse facedown onto the mattress; Richard straddled her, reached for her arm, gave it a gentle twist. But the angle was awkward and she yelped a little, so Richard eased up on the tension. She rolled over underneath him, laughing, and said, “If you’re going to go for the pain, we might as well get out the handcuffs,” and Richard smiled because this was a woman with whom he had shared just about every kind of bedroom adventure; he took her wrists together and raised her arms up over her head, moved in on her unprotected mouth and neck. He let go of her arms, and she eased out of her bra, pulled his shirt over his head without undoing the buttons.

  Richard knew what was going to happen.

  He knew what was going to happen because he was returning to familiar territory. There was no need for any posturing or ritual storytelling and especially not the negotiations that had reduced most of the sexual contact he’d had in the era between his divorce and Cadence to sad transactions. He liked that when he had told Cadence about his slight dominant streak, she’d only laughed and said, “Maybe because you are a man,” and when he asked what she mean
t, she added, “It means that you like fucking.”

  Through her actions over time, Richard had learned to translate that discussion. It meant that Cadence enjoyed ceding control occasionally, which, given the mildness of his own proclivities, was enough. He’d suffered enough awkward and mechanical lovemaking for a lifetime. He always dreamed of being a libertine, but what he realized with Cadence was that he did not dream of opportunities missed or strange and exotic behaviors or newer and less inhibited partners. He dreamed of intimacy, of not just doing everything with Cadence, but of telling her everything as well.

  Her mouth tasted of beer and bar nuts, and he swore he could discern the thin and inoffensive film of xylitol, the sweetener in her omnipresent sugarless gum. He was thinking of the past too, how in the first days of their relationship, lunch had meant sneaking home to frantically immerse himself in her, the kind of fucking performed by a man grateful for the opportunity, who still sees all things female as somewhat exotic and on the verge of extinction.

  On a good day, they had ninety minutes. In that block they would manage to fuck, inhale some insubstantial snacks (he particularly enjoyed when Cadence’s mouth tasted of a sliver of a Granny Smith apple smeared with peanut butter), and fuck again—the second time always more like a thrill ride, if only because Cadence could let go. Any of the residual shame that either of them felt, those mutual fears at letting out whatever secret things either desired, those passive and desultory ways in which lovers endure the uncomfortable, all of that was gone. Fucking her meant adrenaline, and there wasn’t a bar across his lap to keep him from being ejected from the ride.

  During intermission, he knew that Cadence would slide into the nook made by his shoulder and upper arm and, contented by the sound of his breathing, allow her hands free purchase across the expanse of his chest. He thought of it as a miracle—not that humans did these remarkable things to each other in the privacy of the dark, but that he in particular had been invited to participate in love’s wild gift. He knew too the difference between men and boys and that to boys (or even to the childish version of himself that persisted well into his twenties), the eye always searched out any imperfection, sought to enumerate it, to add it to the list of potentially disqualifying attributes. Now that he was a man, he could say honestly that he relished imperfections; equally he knew that Cadence would never believe him if he attempted to articulate his appreciation. Richard chose to love the small scars on Cadence’s breasts from a late-childhood battle with the chicken pox; he chose to love the tiniest archipelago of moles that arose in the center of her back, each no bigger than the stray dot made by a pen. He chose to love the irregular bumps around her areolas, and the hairs that found their way into his mouth, and the rough edges of her fingernails as they dug into his shoulders, and the way her left breast was maybe 5 percent bigger than the right; he loved every part and needed no further evidence of her body’s exquisite and purposeful design than the way it felt in relation to his. He had learned these thrills early, in the era of concealed secrets of lingerie and the decadence of mussed hair and smeary mouths and the satisfaction of watching her return to her office wearing different underwear than she had worn that morning.

  She had been an ambassador sent from a faraway land to teach him how to be human again, and his greatest pleasure had not been skin on skin or even watching her ecstasies but the fabric of the intimacy they built; he loved how she could laugh and make love concurrently, and the way in which she used his boxer shorts to clean both of them after the act. He loved the long stray hairs that took purchase in every crevice of his body and that he found hours or sometimes days afterward, or even the way in which he made himself late for whatever appointments he had in the afternoon by the simple act of lacing his fingers behind his head and watching Cadence move around his apartment. What else was love if not the recognition that we were all deformed, scarred by our pasts, and chose to love each other anyway?

  There was passion fueled by the added gas of grief.

  He knows what is going to happen. He knows the way in which this woman’s finger fits to his lips, telling him not to speak, because she has asked this of him before. He knows too the way her lips fit his, an embouchure with the gentlest suction and glide, and how preferable this particular sensation is to the sensation generated by the other women who have kissed him, or who have allowed themselves to be kissed. He knows this kiss because it has been repeated without number, because the uncountable repetitions coincide with the placement of her hand on his cheek.

  Being present requires that Richard no longer think of himself and Cadence in the past tense, because he looks now at the immediate future, and the immediate future is the merging of their breath, the galvanic rhythm of the two of them together, his hands on her hips and the litheness with which she steps out of the remainder of her clothes, the shy fumblings and the more aggressive ones, the thrust and parry of fingers and, yes, the darting of tongues and the chime made by his brass belt buckle as it falls to the hardwood floor and the pleasing sound of his hands as they smooth across the shoulders of a woman who is incontrovertibly beautiful. Richard is grateful again, because he has arrived at the moment wherein the two of them cleave to each other in the darkness, steady hands and the ship no longer rudderless, this is safe harbor, and the voice in his head relents for once and does not need to speak, does not need to predict what will happen next, and when it is over, only Cadence will sleep, his Cadence, and the light is out.

  54

  SHE KNEW he would need reassurance. He was a lovely man and the best fuck she had ever known, and over a glass of wine she once told her closest girlfriend that what made Richard a great lover was that he knew the exact moments to make things all about himself. She used the word lover, and it felt pretentious coming out of her mouth; in so many ways she still felt like an awkward fifteen-year-old girl mustering the courage to reach for her boyfriend’s fly. Richard knew when and how to take command of the moment, and that Cadence was aroused by that assertiveness even though it went against everything she had been taught; it wasn’t the self-actualized message for which she, as a post-feminist career woman, was supposed to be a standard-bearer. Sometimes she liked to be fucked, and sometimes, she liked for the guy who had just fucked her to get up and leave.

  Richard wasn’t going to leave. He’d taken a beachhead here among the extra pillows, and God only knew where his other shoe had ended up, and now he wanted to talk about his sister, and Cadence felt she owed him an effort at conversation.

  “It was nice, wasn’t it?” Richard asked.

  Cadence propped herself up on the pillows and pulled the sheet to her chin. Somehow she hadn’t noticed his turning the light back on, but turning it off now meant getting out of bed and making the walk diagonally across her enormous bedroom, and she didn’t want to face the cold, so she stayed put. “The whole thing? Very nice. Best in a long time,” she said, and then winced at her own words.

  Richard sped past the reference to other lovers. “Best in class. Best in show. It’s good to know the talent is still able.”

  The talent. As in, The talent is waiting in the green room. The very language of the contract he’d signed for Don Keene earlier that afternoon. Talent agrees to maintain a visible presence in the community. Talent agrees to maintain his weight in the prescribed range. Talent agrees that any material change to his physical appearance without the express written consent of station management shall constitute a breach of this agreement. He still hadn’t told her.

  “The talent has always been blessed with certain abilities,” Cadence said, and then decided to brave the cold and turn out the light. There were no coded messages in showing Richard her naked ass. She was still as embarrassed as a teenager at the way she inflamed men, Richard especially. On occasion, he liked to confess little things both vulgar and sexy; depending on her mood, they either gave her a racy and Taser-like charge that kicked her body into another level of arousal, or, more often, annoyed her into chan
ging the subject. If nothing else, Richard had learned how to read her well enough to know when not to make the jokes.

  As she walked to turn off the overhead light, she liked knowing that he was looking, that his eyes went to her legs. She stifled the urge to turn around or bend over or make little teasing and lascivious gestures with her tongue because the air of Richard’s grief had returned, expertly defusing the sexual charge she had been feeling.

  The light was out.

  “You’re waiting for me to say something,” she said.

  Hearing her say it was like diving off a dock and into a frigid lake. Her voice had taken over his. How to explain such a frightening prospect? She nestled against his shoulder and wrapped one leg over his for warmth. Richard wanted the room to fill with sound, any sound but that of their voices. He rummaged in the sheets for the TV remote, and the set snapped on to images of the crash, amateur footage from earlier today of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which crashed on approach…, and Cadence reached over to take the remote from him and turn off the set.

  “I swear, if you tell me that everything is going to be fine, I’ll be sick.”

  “It’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Cadence admitted, “but I’m obligated to, contractually.”

  “I hope all this”—Richard patted the bed—“wasn’t out of some sense of duty.”

  Cadence took her leg off his and rolled onto her back with a loud exhalation that Richard translated as Jesus Christ.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a hard day. Hard to even remember what’s normal. I don’t know what’s expected of me except that in the morning, I’m expected to fly to Dallas and pick up a six-year-old kid who by some accident of birth is my nephew but is in reality nothing more than a short stranger, and by the time the return flight touches down, we’re supposed to have bonded. Instant father.”