Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Can I help you?” A girl roughly the size of an American refrigerator. He ordered a Big Mac—what else?—a Coca-Cola—what else?—French fries and apple pie, carried the orange plastic tray to a small plastic table and peeled the foil away to expose the burger. His first thought was that it didn’t look big enough, it was squashed, pelletlike, the meat gray and incidental; was this really a Big Mac or had they given him something inferior? Then his own thoughts sickened him—greed, individualism—and he lifted the thing to his mouth and jammed half inside.

  He couldn’t taste anything at first, could only think that it would never go down, he would choke to death on this gray sweetness, dry and sticky; he tried to swallow, his throat straining, seizing to push the clotted mass down its slender duct. Finally the lump evacuated his mouth with a tearing sensation, eased into his throat like a rat moving through a snake. He ate a French fry, breathing hard, sweat on his face, then shoved the second half of Big Mac into his mouth, loosening its airless compression with a slug of Coca-Cola, his body braced for the surge of rage that would galvanize his dead insides when this affront reached them, an explosion that would shove it all back up. But nothing happened. He sat there nibbling French fries, watching light trucks big as houses slip past on Alpine, the Walther inert at his ankle, feeling the lump of food dissolve and become part of him, its cells mingling with his own cells, dividing to make new cells—the cells of a person who had eaten at McDonald’s. Then he crumpled the rest of his meal into the foil, a shiny McDonald’s wad, pushed it through the plastic slot of the garbage bin and stood beside it, unsure what to do next.

  He walked outside. Rockford, Illinois, flat and colorless in winter. He was among runways of concrete and woodchips and highways, for no reason. By sheer accident. He could be here or anywhere. Michael West had lived amidst danger for many years without ever panicking, had absorbed the possibility of fear, drawn it in. But standing by himself in the parking lot outside McDonald’s, he felt a first intimation of terror: of the land, the crushing gray sky, the bloated strangers everywhere. Of facing this new world alone, without an enemy.

  Ellen waited in her Lexus outside the low-lying medical complex where Gordon’s office was, heat and radio on: “Baby Stay with Me Tonight,” a song whose unabashed cheerfulness made her snap her fingers. The sky was soft and white. Snow? She hoped.

  Now that she’d done it, called Gordon at his office using Charlotte’s telephone (as if that would provide some sort of camouflage); now that he’d agreed (albeit stiffly) to meet and talk things over, a delicious calm had befallen Ellen. Getting the kids off to school, promising Harris she would sprinkle cured kudzu over the salad tonight (he’d been asking for weeks) for a little ad hoc market research—why had these things seemed so unmanageable before? Yesterday, she’d bought lingerie at Lord and Taylor—black, Gordon loved black, but the inky flora that glutted her drawers from their year of trysts was nubbled and stringy by now; she’d worn it to the hospital, to play squash, tennis. She’d worn it to church.

  There he was. Leaving the building, striding toward her through the parking lot, not smiling, but then, these were anxious moments, climbing into each other’s vehicles in public. A miracle—would he really get in? He did, bringing cold and steam. “Ellen,” he said, kissing her cheek politely, the way he kissed her at cocktail parties, this man she’d screwed in bathrooms, closets, toolsheds, basements, splayed over flights of stairs, in cars (they would drive to Rock Cut Park, hardly speaking in their hurry and compulsion), in attics, outdoors in summer (just one time, it made them too nervous), in motels where they’d paid cash, and once, insanely, in an empty banquet room adjacent to a wedding reception they both were attending with their spouses. Some distillation of these memories assailed Ellen now that Gordon was so near, the smell of his aftershave, his antiseptic soap, and she was stunned by a fillip of nostalgia so sharp it felt like pain. Her hands shook as she backed out of the parking lot.

  “How are you?” he asked, running a hand through his fading blond hair. “How’s Ricky?”

  “Off the chemo since May. Now we have this agonizing year of tests …” She was driving, nervous. She didn’t want to talk about Ricky, kind as it was of him to ask.

  “Should we grab a cup of coffee?” Gordon suggested. “We’re right near Aunt Mary’s.”

  Ellen glanced at him, startled. Aunt Mary’s was a public place, a place they very well might see someone they knew. “Actually, I was thinking,” she began, knowing already that it was the wrong suggestion, even as it vaulted from her, “we could drive out to Rock Cut and take a walk before it gets dark.” She’d imagined them holding hands in the cold. Imagined it starting to snow.

  “I don’t have time to go that far,” Gordon said.

  They settled for McDonald’s, on Alpine Road. Already the sky was fading into dark. As she waited for Gordon to bring the coffees, Ellen felt an ache of dissatisfaction; the setting was wrong, without atmosphere or romance—and yet, she reminded herself, watching Gordon’s tall Nordic profile as he waited in line, their attraction never required those inducements. Had crashed forth in far less auspicious settings than this one.

  The tray looked small in his hands. Silly. McDonald’s was a place where everyone looked silly. Gordon sat, gathering his unwieldy knees under the table. They stirred their coffees. Something had changed about him, Ellen decided. There was a new composure, even buoyancy. She wondered, fleetingly, if he had begun an affair with someone else.

  “So,” he said. “You’ve had a hell of a time.”

  “Is it that obvious?” she said, dryly.

  “I didn’t mean that.” He smiled, eyes winking inside their pale lashes. Ellen knew he didn’t mean that, so why had she said it?

  “It’s true,” she said. “For a long time, everything stopped.”

  “How could it not.”

  The coffee was sour, too hot. Ellen set down her cup. “I think I was—abrupt. At the time,” she said. “With you.”

  “I understood,” he said simply. He was making it all very easy. The problem was that Ellen hadn’t come here to apologize, or be forgiven.

  “Anyway,” Gordon said, “soon, hopefully …”

  “Yes. Spring.”

  “And then you can relax.”

  “But Gordon.”

  And now he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked away from Ellen, to her left, a tiny seizure of apprehension unsettling his face. And in that moment she saw it all: that Gordon had his old life back again—his old life minus the thrilling, crushing abstraction of another life he would rather be living. That no one had replaced her. The opposite; Gordon regretted what had happened between them and was determined not to repeat it. And at last Ellen recognized the new quality she’d noticed in him today, and put a name to it. Relief.

  “Gordon, I miss you,” she said.

  “It’s rank, but I have to get home pretty soon.” Even saying it, Ricky heard the lack of conviction. Wedged in the front seat of the truck between Paul (driving) and Prezioso (smirking), Ricky aimed his unhappiness out the window as they headed south on Alpine. Smallwood and Catalani had it worse, stuck in the open back with the yowling wind and the boards, Ricky’s Tony Hawk included, which he hoped they wouldn’t have the nerve to touch.

  He was afraid to go to the cathouse, but saying so was not an option, or else Jimmy or God forbid Paul might think there was something wrong with him because of the chemo. Jimmy had implied it. And Ricky didn’t know; was he normal? Two years ago he’d seen a girl at the hospital wearing a pink T-shirt and a stiff blond wig, crying. Lisa Jacobs. She’d walked out of the girls’ room, her face soaked and tired and gentle in a way that seemed beautiful to Ricky. Lisa snagged in his brain. For months she made him look forward to the treatments; he shook, sometimes, at the thought of seeing her. Lisa had the bad kind, the kind in your nervous system. She had a younger sister named Hannah and two Siamese cats. Her parents were divorced, and her hair, when she’d had it, was dark brown. “I’
m a cancer blonde,” she’d said, and laughed a little harshly. Ricky hadn’t seen Lisa in months, and he had a bad feeling about it.

  The windows of the “Glamour Health and Fitness Center” were covered with moth-colored lace and ringed with white Christmas tree lights. The little sign in its door said “Open.” It did seem pretty small, Ricky thought, for a health club.

  Paul parked up the block, and Smallwood and Catalani clambered from the back and surged around the windows.

  “R. and me’ll go first.” Paul.

  “Someone else can.” Himself, hollowly.

  “All of us, c’mon!” Mark, blundering in the door like a big cold dog.

  “… if you want to see them really laugh.” Paul. And as always, a blinding nimbus of truth surrounded the fact, once he’d said it. “Anyway, R. needs the experience.” This last with a barely perceptible wink—at him, Ricky thought. Or had Paul been winking at Jimmy, saying something else?

  Ricky assumed a smooth, mellow face that told the world this was all exactly in line with his expectations. He glided out of the truck, heart detonating in his chest, and sauntered beside Paul to the Glamour Health and Fitness Center, whose door, not too surprisingly, was locked. Paul pushed a little pink doorbell lit from underneath, and a buzzer sounded. Paul shoved open the door.

  The place was softly lit, pale pink walls and a short white counter where a bored-looking lady was sitting on a tall stool. She wore a magenta leotard top and was tan, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and a little bit of acne on her cheeks and an upturned nose and shiny red lipstick. She looked either part Spanish or part Chinese or maybe both. “What can I do for you?” Coldly, but with a husky voice.

  “We’re here to work out.” Paul, grinning weirdly.

  “Sorry. It’s members only.”

  There was a pause. Paul looked at the lady and the lady looked at Paul.

  “And.” Paul. The word floated in front of the lady, majestically suspended, but when she didn’t react, it boomeranged back around at Paul. “So, uh. How do we join?”

  “The club is full.” She had an accent from somewhere. China? Spain?

  “We won’t take up much space.”

  “Not this gentleman.” The lady eyed Ricky, and he sensed a squint of humor somewhere in her face. “You, mister, you’re taking up space already.”

  “Well, that’s just peachy, because Ricky here is the eager beaver.”

  Ricky gaped at Paul, who had never in his experience sounded so retarded. It was a painful thing to witness.

  “Ah. So.” The lady turned to Ricky, and he was momentarily distracted by the question of whether she had just spoken to him in Chinese. Then he inclined his head in a slow, easy nod. He was trying to picture kissing this lady or even doing it with her, but the effort strained his imagination to the point of blankness. She was a lady, like the ones you saw at the Piggly Wiggly stacking their carts with pints of Jell-O salad.

  “He’s my brother.” Paul blurted this for no apparent reason. Ricky averted his eyes in distress.

  The lady climbed off her stool and came closer. She wore a wraparound skirt that waved a little in some hot, invisible breeze. “How very sweet. Looking out for little brother.”

  “I’ll pay extra.”

  She ambled to one of the windows, lifted the moth-colored lace and glanced outside. Satisfied with what she did or didn’t see, she turned to Paul. “Pay for what?”

  “Whatever you normally do.”

  “Kid like this? I take him to the zoo. See the lions.”

  “Whatever you wanna call it.” Paul sounded easy, but underneath that ease Ricky felt something edgy, fluttery, a CD skipping—not nerves (Paul didn’t have nerves), but a kind of excitement, now that they were close. And as often happened when Ricky abandoned himself to the scrutiny of Paul’s state of mind, he briefly forgot his own existence.

  He was startled when the lady turned to him. “Eager beaver. How come your brother does all the talking?”

  “He’s my spokesman.” A swipe of laughter from Paul made him grin.

  “One-oh-oh. Take it or leave it.” Paul.

  “With you watching, is that the grand scheme?” The lady, and Ricky turned on Paul, not liking the sound of this one bit. It was a test—a test for sure!

  “At ease, bro.” Paul, shrugging him off. “She’s the perv.” Smiling. But underneath it, Ricky felt the neon vibration of Paul’s anger.

  The lady watched them. She was going to say no, Ricky thought eagerly, and assembled his pose of stoic disappointment.

  “Okay, Mr. One-oh-oh. Let’s see what you got.”

  Paul hesitated, then produced an impressive wad of bills from his back pocket. He peeled off tens and dropped them onto the white countertop.

  “Tacky.” She raised her thin eyebrows at Paul, then slowly smoothed each bill flat before counting it, making him wait. Ricky felt the struggle between them the way he felt it between Charlotte and his father, himself in the middle. His heartbeat clicked in his ears.

  “Say bye-bye to little brother.” The lady buzzed open the door so Paul had no choice but to exit. Which he did, oddly docile now, flashing Ricky a salute as the door swung shut.

  She pressed a button with one long red fingernail and spoke into an intercom. The place was so small that Ricky faintly heard her voice arriving in another room. “Anita,” she began, then spoke rapidly in another language that he soon determined was not Chinese but Spanish. “This way, sweetheart.” She beckoned him with a finger up a narrow flight of stairs to a second floor: several doors along a snug, dim hallway. She led the way into a small room lit duskily in pink, containing a bed, a closet, a sink. She shut the door and pushed in the lock. “Have a seat, dear.”

  Ricky looked around, saw one place to sit—the bed—and sat. “Uh … excuse me,” he said, but the lady didn’t hear; she had opened the closet and what sounded like a drawer within it.

  “Ma’am?” Oh, shit, don’t call her that!

  “Maria.” She was still inside the closet. “For Mary, mother of God. What kind of music you like?”

  “Don’t care.”

  She emerged from the closet to peer at him. “Eleven years old, you don’t care about music?”

  “Thirteen.” Then he realized it was a trap; she’d only been guessing.

  “So. What kind?”

  “Smashing Pumpkins.” A miserable mumble.

  “Don’t have.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Aerosmith?”

  She put on some horrible CD—Ricky despised Aerosmith, Steve Tyler’s voice made his skin itch—but even now, with the music sawing away at his eardrums, Maria was still rummaging in that closet. For what? Some kind of … equipment? Ricky counted slowly (a hospital trick) to relieve the tension mounting within him—then, unable to contain it, he leapt from the bed, flung open the door (which unlocked when he twisted the handle) and bolted into the hallway.

  “Hey!” Maria, startled, but already Ricky was scrambling down the hall, wrenching the handles of other doors and finding them locked (hearing—or did he imagine it?—muffled sounds of surprise from inside). At the end of the hallway there was another flight of stairs, up, up, Ricky gobbled them two at a time using hands for speed, Maria behind him now, cursing in Spanish but trying to keep her voice down. At the top of the stairs Ricky stood wondering where the hell to go next when he spotted a weight room, door open, just a few machines hunched in dim blue light, and he threw himself underneath a small freeweight bench and curled there, panting, stoned, freaked. And then he thought of Charlotte. She filled his mind: her face, her eyes. Calming him down. “You won’t die,” he heard her say. “You’re well.”

  The lady was in the room now, breathing. “Listen to me. I see you under there and I’m not gonna do nothing, okay? Let’s just mellow out, here, okay?”

  Ricky rolled from under the freeweight bench, already sheepish. He sat on the floor and looked up at Maria, who gingerly took a seat on the b
ench as if he were a feral cat. “Look, your brother hired me to babysit you, and that’s all that’s gonna happen here, okay?”

  “Babysit.” He was offended.

  “Sure. We’re a health club, but we do babysitting on the side.”

  Ricky gazed into her face, trying to decode the array of messages he sensed issuing from it. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Joy to the world.” Maria exhaled a long, rickety breath, and he knew he’d scared her. “I got a boy your age, he doesn’t like babysitters either.”

  He thought she was kidding. “My age?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Does he … like Aerosmith?”

  “He’s more into metal. Nine Inch Nails, that kind of thing? Breaks my ears.”

  Ricky pursed his lips to keep from grinning. “Cool.”

  He followed Maria back downstairs. Somewhere he heard a toilet flush, and was aware of people around him, at close quarters, people he couldn’t see.

  Back in the little room, Maria pointed to a deck of cards on the bed. “That’s what I was looking for. You know gin rummy?”

  “Sure.” A hospital game.

  They sat on the bed at right angles from each other and began to play, using the mattress as a table.

  “Your brother, he’s begging for a smack across the head.” Maria.

  “He’s not really my brother.”

  “Then for the love of God, avoid him. Gin.” She threw down her hand, swept up Ricky’s and began shuffling again.

  “He was acting weird tonight.” Embarrassed for Paul.

  “So, be your own man! Don’t let him play you. Don’t be his pet.”

  Ricky bridled. His pet?

  “Oh. Wait.” Maria set down her cards and fished in the pocket of her skirt. Looking at her downturned face, the little roll of flesh caught above her waistband, Ricky felt something move in his belly, a warmth that seemed alive, like an animal prowling his insides on clawed, tiny feet. He had a blurred vision of lying down beside Maria, surrounded by her arms and her smell. When she tried to hand him fifty dollars, carefully folded, he gazed at her and made no move to take it.