B008J4PNHE EBOK (26 page)

“Why do you ask?” He noticed the small stack of his business cards on the lobby banquet table and scooped them up, dropped them in his jacket pocket.

“I’m in the business.”

Sam nodded. She was in the Business.

He gave her his widest, fakest smile. If the smile had been an e-mail, the subject line would have read,
Hey man, ever thought about trying pheromones?
That he had been considering having sex with this woman suddenly seemed like a skid on black ice. He had plowed into a snowbank and come to with nothing worse than a bump on his head, but he might as easily have been killed. She worked in the Business. Sam wanted nothing to do with the Business. He had his health to consider.

“I produce,” said Tess. “Television, mostly. Have you ever seen
Secrets Only Dead Men Know
? The true-crime show? That’s where I am right now.”

“Wow,” he said. In his chest, his heart became a rubber ball, skipping back and forth, gathering speed.

“Are you okay? You looked peaked. Have you been thinking about poetry again?” As she spoke, Tess casually rearranged the bust of her purple strapless dress.

Sam was momentarily distracted. Her breasts were not large, but they had a pleasing definition, the pale tops, and below, neat and purple-bundled, like a pair of bindles. “Wow,” he repeated.

Tess followed his eyes to her cleavage. When she looked up, her cheeks were reddening, and she smiled at him, albeit a tad nervously. “So, are we going to get that drink?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” Sam said. The rubber ball hit funny—caught a rib, maybe—and ricocheted under his armpit. The resulting cramp felt like a hand pinching him from the inside. He exhaled tightly. “Can you wait here a sec? I’m just going to run into the bathroom.”

“Great,” Tess said, and her smile widened. There was a chip missing from her right canine. Sam thought it was lovely, mischievous and sweet, the kind of detail that made a face worth remembering. He hoped it didn’t embarrass her.

He returned Tess’s smile. “Don’t move an inch.”

“Hold on.” She reached out and pressed the back of her hand to his cheek.

The movement should have startled him, but it didn’t. He watched the hand rise up to his face and didn’t move, didn’t flinch, as her cool skin touched his warm skin, and the bones of her hand pressed lightly against the bones of his face. The intimacy of the moment was as comfortable as it was uncanny; although he didn’t know her, he felt like he did. Here was someone he could talk to. Here was someone he could watch
Dog Day Afternoon
with. Sam closed his eyes.

His chest opened, and he could breathe, and he knew he was being craven and that he should stay with her, that he should move closer, not away. She wasn’t on a wall in a corner of some museum; she was right here. Tess was right in front of him, touching him, telling him to stay with her, wanting him to stay with her—which was exactly why he needed to go.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

He opened his eyes. She was frowning. There was a hook of hair stuck to her forehead that he wanted to brush away. Jesus, did he really, really need to go, because it wasn’t just Tess wanting him to stay with her; he wanted it, too. He could have reached out and fixed her hair, no problem.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’m okay.”

“Can I ask you something?” She didn’t take away her hand. It stayed there against his cheek, cool and butterfly-light. “You won’t tease me?”

“No.” Her earnestness made him want to cry and laugh and kiss. “I won’t.”

“You really weren’t disappointed by the Segway?”

“No. I mean, I haven’t driven one, but I read somewhere that ‘you just have to think the direction you want to go in.’ That sounded pretty great to me.”

Tess nodded. “You’re not okay, are you?”

“I told you. I’m fine. Truly. I’ll be right back.” Sam lifted his hand to hers, gently drew it aside.

Sam descended to the restrooms in the basement. He pushed into the men’s, walked past the marble counter, the three urinals, and the three stalls to the far end. Set high in the wall was a broad, deep-welled, frosted casement window.

He pondered the window from underneath. Sam had his father’s height but only a fraction of the old man’s bulk—just a soft tire around the middle—and he thought he’d squeeze through fairly easily. The problem was that the bottom of the window ledge started at the top of his head. There was no way he could pull himself up.

The obvious solution was a chair that he could step up onto, but to get one, he would have to return to the lobby, where Tess was waiting for him, which would defeat the purpose.

And what was the purpose? To escape from the pretty, passive-aggressive, sad-eyed girl with the sweet chipped tooth and the lovely bindle-like breasts, because he didn’t want to say to her face, “I’m sorry. I really like you, I really feel a connection with you, but the thing is, I can’t be with someone I like. It’s too stressful for me. Expectations frighten me. And you work in television, which is right next to movies, which is another thing that is upsetting to my tender condition”—was that what it came down to?

Yes, that was pretty much what it came down to. He didn’t want to make up an excuse and lie to Tess, and he didn’t want to tell her the truth. That left a back exit.

In a nearby stall, someone coughed, gave a pained sigh.
“Gas, gas, quick, boys!”

Sam rapped on the stall door. “Little help, here.” He heard the man inside fumbling with his pants, a belt buckle clinking. The toilet flushed once and then a second time. A moment or two after the first flush, there was a noise like a snorkel being cleared.

The stall door swung open, and the old poet who had officiated the wedding staggered out. The stench that followed him was pure rot, the smell of hot compost.

The weddingographer took an involuntary step back.

With his eyes half closed, the poet studied Sam. He pursed his lips.
He swayed. His academic gown was stuffed partially into his trousers. The elderly gentleman cleared his throat and recited,
“ ‘As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ ”
He reached for the handle of the stall door and gently drew it shut behind him. “I am dying,” he said. “I am dying.”

“I know,” said Sam.

“The wife, the dog, and finally—me.” The poet examined his fly.

“You got it,” said Sam, meaning the fly.

The poet regarded him with a deep frown. “Look, what do you”—he made an incantatory wiggle with his fingers—“need?”

Sam put a hand over his mouth and nose as he pointed to the window. “A boost.”

“Very well.” The elderly gentleman took a few mincing steps to the wall beneath the frosted window. He squatted a little, making a cup with his hands for Sam to step into.

Up close, the frailty of the man was evident: hands knotty and liver-spotted, blue veins thick at the temples, a vibration at the knees.

“That isn’t going to work.”

The poet straightened, shrugged. He turned to face the door.

“No, no.” Sam put his hand on the poet’s shoulder. “If you could, you know, get down on your knees.” He indicated the floor, which was tiled, and not visibly unsanitary. “I could step up on your back.”

The poet took a whistling breath. “I am seventy-eight. Seventy-eight.” He shook his head and contemplated the spot Sam had indicated on the floor. He put his index finger to his mouth and ran his late wife’s Band-Aid over his lips. The silence between them was underlined by the hush of flowing water.

“Please?” Sam patted the man’s shoulder, which felt like bare bone through the cloth of the gown.

With a small wheeze, the poet bent his knees, lowering himself into a true squat. His legs wobbled in his tuxedo pants. Once again, he cupped his hands for Sam to step into.

“I told you, that’s not going to work.” Sam pushed down lightly on the old man’s shoulder.

“Fucking come on!” The poet swatted ineffectually at his supplicant. “I don’t want to get on the floor. People defecate here. It’s awful. It’s awful. Don’t make me.”

“Please,” said Sam.

The poet flapped his hand some more before it gradually settled at his hip. “You’re in trouble?”

“Yes,” said Sam.

“God. Good God.” The old man grunted and pitched forward onto his hands.

“Thank you,” said Sam, and planted his right shoe on the base of the elderly man’s spine, pushed off—hard—and caught the bottom of the window well with his elbows.

Beneath him, there was a squeaking inhalation, a gasp, and a thud of body against tile. “Ah!” cried the poet.

Sam pulled himself forward, flicked the lock tab, and shoved up the window. He dragged himself through, out into the humid air and onto the wet cobbles of the alley that ran the rear of the Stables.

Once he had gained his feet, Sam crouched to look down through the open window. The poet was lying facedown, limbs splayed. He looked like a corpse waiting for its chalk outline. A slight rise and fall at the back of his gown at least indicated that he was alive. The problem: the sound of flowing water was matched by visual proof that the old man had inflicted significant damage on the toilet; a dark tide spilled from beneath the stall door, brackish tributaries forming in the caulking between the tiles.

There was something hypnotic in the movement of the sewage filling the caulking, reminiscent of a Tetris game. The water moved closer and closer to the poet’s body. A few soupçons of excrement were visible on the surface of the dark water.

“Thank you,” Sam said. “Look, are you going to be okay? Because I have to go. You should get up. Goodbye. I’m sorry.”

There was a groan from the body on the floor, which the wedding-ographer chose to interpret as permission to leave.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Tess had jolted Sam, put him to flight, frightened him badly with her blatant empathy, and there was nothing he needed more than to be elsewhere immediately. He made it only halfway up the alley before he pivoted back. As much as he wanted to get away, he couldn’t abandon an old man to drown in dank water.

That was the difficulty of commitments, promises, favors, and their like. Only the most basic transactional relations, such as casual sex or purchased sex or watching things on screens in the company of male
friends, could be considered truly safe. The result of Sam’s brief dalliance with Tess was typical. She had wanted more from him than he could provide, so in order to dodge her inevitable disappointment, he had fled. To make good his escape had required the poet’s help—Sam was the one wanting something then—and for that, a remittance was demanded. If he did not go to the man’s rescue, the poet’s fate would belong to him.

It was fucked up, and it made Sam resent Tess for her interest, and the poet for his assistance, and himself for being so careless as to fall into a position where he didn’t have a choice.

 ■ ■ ■ 

This was the essential point that Sam had wanted to make one afternoon not so long ago, when he had appeared uninvited at the door of the apartment of Mina’s boyfriend, an eighteen-year-old named Peter Jenks. It was not a happy thing to find yourself locked into a situation at any age, but this was especially true in one’s formative years; fatherhood, for example, was the locked room of locked rooms.

That Sam had discovered the presence of a boyfriend in Mina’s life through somewhat scurrilous means—he had tossed the contents of her iPhone while she was not present—was secondary to the seriousness of the matter. Once you were a father (or a mother) well, you were completely on the hook, forever and ever.

Young Peter Jenks’s parents were doctors, and the family resided in an expensive West Side building in sight of Central Park. A few days subsequent to his meeting Polly for hot chocolate at the City Bakery, Sam made a visit to Peter Jenks that coincided with the pre-parents, post-school hours between three and six. He told the epauleted doorman to call up and say that Peter’s future brother-in-law had arrived.

When Peter answered the door, Sam grabbed him in a bear hug. “Peter!” Next, Sam invited Peter to show him to the television; there was something the young man needed to see.

In the living room, side by side on the Jenks family’s extraordinarily comfortable gray suede couch, the two of them had viewed the award-winning movie about the demented paralyzed man who badgers his saintly wife to fuck strangers until she is sacrificed to a gang of depraved sailors.

As the final credits rolled, Sam asked Peter, “What’d you think, champ? Uplifting, right?”

Peter Jenks wore a dress shirt and a narrow blue necktie. Sam inferred that he was seeking to make a hip art-school impression, but what he looked like was a miniature guidance counselor. During the part of the movie where evil children pelt the saintly wife with stones, Sam was gratified to notice how Peter slumped down in his seat, visibly depressed, and stayed in that position until the movie finished.

Young Jenks scratched his head as he weighed Sam’s question. “I don’t know about that.”

“Sure you do. How’d it make you feel?”

“Pretty bad, honestly,” Peter said.

“Great,” said Sam.

“Why is that great?” asked Peter.

“Because, Peter, having you watch this movie was the nicest way that I could impress upon you not only the importance I place on my sister’s well-being, but how wise it might be for you to begin to carefully assess your options. Mina is seventeen. You are eighteen. One year makes a big difference.” Sam pointed a finger at him. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Do you understand?”

Young Jenks rolled his eyes and nodded—and shifted a little farther down the couch, away from Sam.

“Lovely,” said Sam. “What’s with the stupid tie, by the way?”

Peter crossed his arms over the tie. “It’s the style. I don’t think it’s stupid.”

Sam shrugged; he wasn’t convinced. “I’m going to go now. I’m glad we talked.”

Peter asked, “Is this a joke, man? Because—”

Sam cut him off. “Don’t have sex with my sister. Not a joke. Do not get her pregnant. Don’t do it. The nasty little man who made this movie? I have all his movies on DVD. If I find out that you fucked my sister, I’ll make you watch every single one of them. And if you get her pregnant, I’ll make you eat every single one of them.”