Winners (8 page)

A
T HOME HE
finds Lou in the shower, bathroom door ajar. He steps through the steam to find her, his high-tops squeaking against the tile floor.

“Hey lovely.”

His wife pokes her head out, green eyes dull and happy in the heat. He pulls at the curtain to get a better look and then reaches with intent. What he wants to do, the idea is to lift his warm and soapy wife against the tile wall, hook her legs around and notch her heels into his lower back. Her wrists around his neck. He’d like to watch her mouth open, flashing teeth, water dribbling in and out of her mouth like a cherub fountain. It’s either that or spank her, bite her, call her filthy names. How else to get them out of these new gentle habits: can I? should we? do you want to?

“Hello baby,” she says.

He leans in for a wet kiss, copping an excellent feel but she doesn’t take it seriously. Maybe he would slip anyway, crashing both of them to the slick tub bottom, cracking heads and teeth. “I’ll be out in a minute,” she says, sliding his hands gently off her and pulling the curtain tight. “I’ll leave the water running.”

A minute can mean anything in Lou’s hands, and he heads back to the bedroom to do his push-ups and sit-ups. He can feel this Saturday in his arms and legs—the game, the quick march through the projects, his muscles tensed for danger all day long. Push-ups. Sit-ups. The wall-to-wall crushes down lush beneath him. Maybe I wouldn’t go home either if I were you, he thinks. A complicated business being Sam. Push-ups. Sit-ups. It’s push-ups again when she finally comes in, gives him the shower nod.

When he gets out she is clothed and scented, hair pinned up, body tucked into an expensive Italian-speaking dress of reds and yellows. Flowery, short, sexy, tight. Short. No hose. A pair of light-colored thin-strapped shoes he’s semi-sure he’s never seen before. She looks like summer and the evening’s in collusion, warm and still. That one hot day, that one warm night a year. No San Francisco girl would ever have bought a dress like that.

“Holy cow,” he says.

“It’s party time,” she says, smiling. There’s a little dance to illustrate. “Par-tay.”

“An e-party?”

She nods. “Did you forget?”

“It’s Saturday, it’s early for a party, isn’t it? Don’t the e-people know that?”

“E is for early.” She has laid out a shirt for him on the bed, unbuttoned and ready. Short sleeves, white and blue, with a little festive shine to it.

“E is for.” He tries to think of something clever.

“
Espa.com
,” she says. “No shit. I know what you’re thinking, but if you don’t come, who’s gonna laugh at the e-people with me?”

“We’ll laugh?”

“Oh yeah. It’s gonna be a regular all-star team, laughwise. Greed. Lust. Intrigue. Plus I have to go. And I wanna go with you.”

“I’ll just get drunk and grope you.”

“What more could a girl want.”

He sits on the edge of the bed and thinks of the rough skin of Sam’s ratty couch, crouching there low to the floor across town. “Well, you’re sure as hell not going anywhere looking like that without me.” That gets a smile. “You’d be snatched up by a dingo. Where is it?”

“The Mission.”

“The Mission. They used to look forward to raping and pillaging people like us. The Mission, in that dress.”

“What’s wrong with this dress.”

“Wars have started over women like you in dresses like that.”

“Oh goodie.” She’s happy with him. “I know you don’t believe me, but you’re smarter than all these people, you know that? You’re clever and tan and you’re mine.” She reaches out to adjust his shirt, evening out the tuck all the way around. She smoothes his collar, and pushes him gently back for an arm’s-length inspection.

“Okay,” he says, agreeing to something.

“And you’re looking really cute right now,” she says. “Healthy. Relaxed.” He’s awkward in the rush of compliments, forgetting to say something back. “Do I look all right?” she prompts him.

“You. You’re a story.” He doesn’t know what that means but she smiles anyway.

“A story,” she says. “I’ll take that.”

On Mission Street, the last scraps of sun cling to the sides of buildings. The neighborhood change of shift is not yet complete. Daytime Mexicans still hurry for final meat and fruit and fish while nighttime whites begin to fill the bars and taquerias. The Mission’s good old-fashioned shops are just closing, shutting their gates and doors on unlikely wares: wigs, mirrors, fishing tackle, billiards equipment, miniature wedding dresses. This is not his neighborhood and never has been, this land of the Mexicans and their neighbors, of storefront Jesus Te Ama churches and close quarter hand-to-hand commerce. For years the bloody liberals of the city and the likes of his angry bro have been crying foul, change, gentrification, ruin, but there in the middle of Mission Street it’s hard to see what they’re talking about. Everything seems as dirty and functional as ever. Still authentic and living and pocked with threat.

“There,” Lou says. “That must be it.”

A crowd is gathered on the sidewalk, stalled in a wide circle around a spectacle in progress. Ten feet long, in wild green and red and gold, a chain-linked Chinese dragon serpentines between the storefronts and the curb, as a watching crowd shifts like a wind-tossed flame to make room. The dragon ducks down low, almost scrapes its delicate crepe belly along the sidewalk before floating to face Shane and Lou. The dragon pauses. The huge head peers into their car, baring saber teeth. The painted yellow eyes seem wide with recognition. It shakes its mane roughly and veers away.

“Wow,” he says.

“See. Fun already,” Lou says, her eyes scanning the sidewalk for a familiar face.

The restaurant’s narrow entrance is the newest on the street, renovated into clean lines of ultramodern pseudo-deco that converge on a steel nubbed door of darkened glass and matted steel. What has gone before seems hard to say, but now the place shines out of the ratty block like a flying saucer dealership, gleaming with a grand surety that it is the future, and it will win.

Above the doorway hangs a large fabric banner that reads,
Espa.com
—World to World eBusiness Solutions.

At curbside stands the first valet parking dude Shane’s ever seen on Mission Street: a twenty-something in a shiny red zipper jacket waiting for keys. The valet’s jaw snaps with punctuation as he chews a real or imagined piece of gum. Shane tries to recognize him, chances are he went to Mission or Wash or Galileo, but the guy’s too young. A guy who went to school with Sam, if anything.

They wait behind the line of shiny SUVs until Shane hands over the car and follows Lou inside, where a long hallway drills deep into the city block. Lining the hall on either side, oversized flags hang ceiling to floor: Brazil, Germany, France, the U.S., Japan, China, Turkey. After Turkey some flags he doesn’t recognize, including one with a fat green tree perched between orange sky and earth. He doesn’t remember ever seeing another flag featuring a plant.

A woman stands amid tall metal vases sprouting three-foot-high sunflowers, beaming at them as they make their approach.

“Lou,” the gatekeeper coos as they arrive. She is tall and thin, with long brown hair, high society cheekbones, and small teeth. She uses every one of them as she expands to welcome them, like a friendly, handsome blowfish piranha. Her gums are plenty and healthy and pink.

“Candace,” Lou says. “You look lovely.” In her tight black skirt and fitted black blouse, Candace looks professionally fantastic, but lovely, he thinks, is the wrong word. Lou is lovely. Candace looks bored and beautiful and cold, like she might cause grave premeditated harm during sex.

“Oh, and you, what an amazing dress! It’s wonderful.”

“Thank you.” On cue, they both turn their beaming, congratulatory faces to his. “This is Shane, my husband. Responsible for both my sanity and my dress.”

“Really.” Candace seems to will her chilly blue eyes larger as she turns her attention to him. “What a brilliant man.” It is untrue about the dress but this is an old party trick of Lou’s, handing strangers a reason to try to like him, immediately.

“It looks great in here,” Shane says, trying to do his part. “I like the flags.”

Candace winces slightly, as if he’s let fly a medium-loud belch. “Yes,” she says, “the flags.” They turn to examine the flags together. People are coming in behind them and their hostess calibrates her smile again.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” Lou says to her in a warm stage whisper. Candace nods in agreement, and he pitches in an awkward little point-blank wave.

As they step through this second doorway a waiter meets them with a tray of lightly foaming fluted glasses, filled halfway. Shane follows his wife’s lead as she casually collects her champagne and steps into the crowd, which splits and recombines and bubbles loudly around them. A steady stream of waiters ferries crowded silver trays throughout the busy rooms and he manages a crab cake as one slips into range. He is brutally hungry. His champagne, he notices, is already gone. He looks around for a place to put his empty glass and then imagines spiking it into the ground, the soft explosion, the shards nipping at their ankles like angry fleas.

Lou leans in to him like she has sweet nothings to deliver to his ear, but it’s just a movement, an activity to avoid stasis. She is checking out the e-people. They are pale and skinny and young, dressed in new dark clothes. Their voices blend together in a comfortable, optimistic buzz, unhurried, unplagued by doubt, each one confident of being heard. How long has it been since he was at one of these? He used to follow her almost once a week before his injury relieved him of that duty and most others. Some of the same people must be here, though he recognizes no one. He feels incapable of remembering them. He can’t stop thinking: Why talk to them? Why get to know them? He already has his wife and friends and family and cannot shake the belief that all these brand-new persons are simply passing through. He needs to make an effort. He needs to grow up. He needs a drink.

Shane leads Lou to the bar, where she immediately cracks up the bartender who pours their drinks. She waves at someone across the way, her bare arm brushing against a young guy who takes one look at her and clears his skinny throat. The kid’s a journalist of some kind, maybe twenty-five but from his opening patter he’s worked for half the magazines that Lou leaves lying around their living room. They toss some names around while Shane tries not to gulp his beer.

“I had lunch with him yesterday,” the kid says.

“I once saw him eat a sandwich with a fork and knife.”

“Really.”

“Turkey. Cold. Off the record. He’s got something brewing, doesn’t he?”

“Oh maybe. What did he tell you?” He grins at her as if in no time at all he’ll be writing a knowing exposé or sliding his soft young hands up her short dress. Niggas be acting like bitches.

Shane winks at Lou: everything’s okay, go ahead and take this call. She winks back, thanks, and lets him go.

Outside, the courtyard is smoking. Twenty-somethings swap cigarettes in solidarity, leaning into the puffs like recent pros. There are far fewer women than men, and most of the women wear skirts but some wear pants, slightly loose and flared, flowing around their legs as they move. Pants that behave in unpants-like ways. Their clothes look highly flammable. They don’t shop at the Fit Right. What kind of job, he wonders, what does Debra do? What do these people do. His head feels large and shaggy as he takes in all that hair, freshly cut with shining, expensive scissors, the split ends fused, necks closely buzzed and rubbed with lotion. He is taller than most here, and the head-top view brings to mind a tournament golf course, richly fertilized and lovingly mowed. He pictures a barber moving between chairs in an office, cutting each person’s hair as they lash away at their keyboards, gazing deep into computers’ eyes, printing money.

The wall at the far end of the courtyard is as big and flat and smooth as a movie screen, and sure enough, high above the crowd, an enormous, silent graphic show is in progress, the blues and reds and yellows filtering the faces of the crowd through a strange, stormy light. He watches as a tower grows up out of the ground like Jack’s wacky beanstalk, grows and swells and then stops when words come flapping in from one side of the screen like a mad burst of bats, words in every language and even alphabets, breaking apart, the characters mixing and swarming into the tower. And then they emerge on the other side, calm, tamed, transformed into sentences and graphs and banners, and as the tower morphs slowly into the Eiffel Tower and then the Taj Mahal, the Tower of London, the leaning tower of Pisa, the sand castle church in Barcelona, the sentences organize themselves into colorful Web pages in languages to match the monuments. Finally the shape-shifting tower changes one last time, Coit Tower at last, with the bay behind it, and he watches as Coit Tower merges with the Web page, the bay drains and pools into the big blue letters of
Espa.com
. The Web page fades away until only the imaginary word remains, Espa, and there the film holds and dims and slowly fades to black.

No one else seems to be watching.

At the far end of the courtyard he passes a table covered in what seem to be high-end party favors. Hands are snatching at soft black wool berets, miniature electronic dictionaries in eight languages, handsome watches with three interior dials telling time around the world, Belgian chocolates, Chinese silk handkerchiefs, finely printed business-card-size world maps. A guy stroking one of the handkerchiefs catches his eye, raises his eyebrows with significance, but Shane moves away from the table quickly.

Back at the bar he finds Lou’s fellow vice president Richard and CEO Sloan. Rich must be just past thirty, but he looks older and heavier than the last time Shane saw him. His hand feels cold as they shake. Sloan looks the same as ever—soft, comfortable, patrician in his beautiful, textured dark blue shirt, loosely tucked.

“Shane.”

“Sloan. Rich. How’s it going.”

They nod and smile in unison.

“Have you been playing?” Shane asks Rich. They both look at Shane blankly. “Basketball,” he says.