by Ruthie Knox
Such was the position of the machine in the passageway between the bar’s two rooms that May had to squeeze herself into the narrow space between the wall and one side of the game to spectate. But that was fine, because she had a prime view.
She leaned against the wall, beer in each hand, and shamelessly ogled Ben.
They’d decided on a best-two-out-of-three tournament, and she’d played first and lasted five minutes. He’d been playing for half an hour.
He worked the game the same way he did everything—intensely. Physically. He put his whole body into it, bracing his hands on the glass, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.
She’d finished her own beer a long time ago. Now she was drinking his, which he’d given her to hold, and she was getting a nice buzz in her head from the alcohol and an even nicer buzz all over her body from the sheer visual pleasure of watching him shoulder into a play, biting his lip as he concentrated on handling two balls at the same time.
Was this as dirty as she seemed to be finding it?
Ben grunted and bumped the machine hard with his hip. He hit some kind of fancy bonus something-or-other. All the lights started flashing, bathing his face in blue and white. May just kind of glazed over.
She was going to sleep with him tonight.
“How’d you get so good at this?”
“There was a pinball machine at this dive bar near the apartment my mom rented in Ashland. I used to go play a lot after my parents split up.”
“So these are vintage pinball skills?” She leaned closer to watch the ball swoop up a ramp, around the curve, lighting a path as it rolled. She’d never thought of pinball as particularly pretty, but this Tron machine was beautiful.
“I play with Connor sometimes, too,” he said. “Especially in the past year or so.”
“Pinball is your refuge from divorce.”
“I guess.”
“Better than strong spirits and cheaper than hookers.”
He flicked her a glance without lifting his head. She watched the smile spread over his face, slowly cracking his solemnity. “Did you drink my beer?”
“I might have.”
“You gonna go get me another round?”
“I can. But it’s possible that I’ll drink that one, too.”
“My wallet’s in my back pocket.”
She could have plucked his wallet out with two fingers, but where was the fun in that? It wasn’t every day you had a good-looking guy bent over a pinball machine, vulnerable to your advances. She patted both pockets as though she wasn’t sure where to find his wallet, then dipped her whole hand in to retrieve it. She might have groped him a little.
“You want the same thing again?”
“Yeah. I barely got to taste it last time.”
“You got it, sailor.”
He was still playing when she returned. She didn’t have a free hand to give his wallet back, so she left it in her own pocket.
“You want me to give you a sip of your beer?” she asked. “I can hold it in front of your mouth and tip it. I worked in a nursing home in high school, so I have excellent invalid-feeding skills.”
“That’s sexy, but I’ll get a drink after this ball’s over.”
“You said that last time.”
“If you drink both those beers, I’ll have to carry you home.” He rocked forward and made a terrible face at the machine, but his attempt to move the ball with the force of his emotional intensity must not have worked, because he said, “Fuck!”
Two seconds later, he straightened and reached for his glass. “You’re distracting.”
“Don’t blame that on me. That slow flipper action was all you.”
“You shouldn’t insult a man’s flipper action.” He brought the beer to his mouth and took a long, deep drink. When he gave it back to her, he had foam on his upper lip. She watched him lick it off. “It’s sacred.”
“You think everything is sacred. Even your hobbies are life-and-death.”
“What hobbies?” He handed her the beer and pulled back the plunger, compressing the spring tighter, tighter, until he deemed the amount of coiled force just right and released it.
Slam. The ball rocketed up the machine and shot into play.
Tension, force, impact, release—every loose ball was its own miniature orgasm.
And Ben’s really good at it.
Her full-body hum got a little louder.
“You’re kicking my ass,” she said.
“Yeah, but you make a good groupie.”
“I’ve already done the groupie thing, thanks. I passed on the chance to make it permanent.”
“You felt like a groupie?” he asked. “With Einarsson?”
“How would you feel if all of a sudden you were getting asked to barbecues with people whose careers you’ve been following since the eighth grade?”
“Trippy.”
“Totally trippy. And like I didn’t remotely belong there. I never knew what to talk about, so I just talked about football. I was like that sabermetrics guy—you know, the baseball statistics one? Except for the Green Bay Packers. The other girlfriends teased me for it.”
“Which made you feel even more like a groupie.”
“Kind of. I felt like their mascot, sometimes. As if they were all grown-ups, tolerating the fangirl who’d wandered into their midst.”
“Not with Thor, though, right?”
“No. He liked how into it I was.” She gazed at a knot in the paneling opposite her, the tight whorl of its grain. “I think it was that Dan’s job was so huge and important, I had to be his number-one fan. As though, if I wasn’t his biggest cheerleader—his emotional support system—there wouldn’t be room for me in his life. So I guess I signed up for it.”
“Didn’t he give you anything back?”
“He gave me what he could.” She sipped her beer and let the admission unfurl behind her tongue, taking its final shape. “It wasn’t good enough.”
There. That was the reality of what had happened between her and Dan. He was an NFL quarterback, and she was a nobody. But even so, their relationship hadn’t been good enough for her. She’d tricked herself into not seeing it, ignored all the signs, until finally his proposal had bludgeoned her with the truth—and even then, she hadn’t entirely understood.
It had taken her four years to get it. Four years and a long weekend in New York City wearing different clothes and cowboy boots and being the version of herself she’d always secretly wanted to be.
The lesson of New York.
The good news, she supposed, was that she could go home and begin again and know. She could find a partner who would ask about her day, encourage her when she needed encouraging, listen to her describe the mundane details of her life with the same attention she gave him when he told her about his.
It wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Hardly a fantasy to want what so many people had. Just a hope for a certain kind of reality.
Ben didn’t say anything, and she gazed at the play of shadow and light over the vulnerable bare skin of the inside of his arms. The crease where it would bend. The shapes of his shoulders and neck, the breadth of his chest.
Compared to Dan, Ben was a small man. The unfamiliarity of his size made his body more exotic to her. She wanted to see him with his shirt off. To run her hands over his chest and arms, to feel his flat stomach pressing against hers.
She wanted to know him now, while she still had the chance.
“What happened with your restaurant?”
For a long time, there were only the sounds of the pinball machine. The lights and chimes and electronic blips, and the paddles smacking the ball back into play.
“I turned into Dan, I guess.” He glanced up. “Worse than Dan.”
“It seems like it’s a lot of work running a restaurant.”
He peered at the machine as though it would tell him what to say. “I came back from Europe planning to work my way up through the best restaurants in New York. I w
anted to learn everything I could and get my own kitchen as fast as possible.”
He glanced at her. “Now, to be clear, these are shit jobs. The pay is shit, the work is shit, and they own you. No sick days, long hours on your feet, burning the hair off your arms at the grill or sweating to death at the pasta station.”
He hit another special bonus thing that required him to launch a fusillade of paddling. May traced the shapes of his arms with her gaze, every tendon and sinew taut. All that effort, thrown away on this pointless thing. This game.
In the lull that followed, he looked down at his hands. “The scars are from back then. Prep cooking, grill station, pasta. Hazard of the job.”
“That’s awful.”
“It’s just the life. You have to really want it, or you might as well find some other career.”
“You wanted it.”
“I wanted it as bad as anybody.”
With three hard whacks of the paddle, he lost another ball. All the fun had left his playing, replaced by that restless aggression she’d gone to such great lengths to avoid. May felt a pang of guilt, a stomach-flipping premonition.
But it was only pinball. They had to have this conversation—for her peace of mind, but also because she had a strong hunch that he wanted to talk about it. He needed to.
“So what happened?”
“Take over this flipper.” He released the ball and reached for the beer with his free hand, his eyes cutting back to the glass. “Now, now! C’mon!” With a quick grab, he put her hand on the button. May punched it in time to prevent the ball from falling down the drain.
“Good save.”
He took a long drink, watching the game in his peripheral vision and effortlessly knocking the ball back into play when he needed to. May felt like a kid in the front seat of her grandfather’s car, asked to take the wheel so he could fiddle open his pack of Salems. “This is weird to do left-handed.”
“Good sobriety test. How drunk is May? Can she work one button without falling over?”
“I’m not going to fall over.”
“You didn’t have any dinner.”
“You’ve been stuffing me full of food. I could stop eating and live for a month on stored fat.”
He laughed. “I’d like to see you try.”
She wanted to be offended by that, but she couldn’t work up the requisite indignation. “Yeah, I’d probably give in the second you cooked me something.”
“I’d tempt you with an eel pie.”
“Yuck.”
“Don’t knock it. You haven’t tried my eel pie.”
“And yet somehow I’m not tempted.”
“If you tried it, you’d be more than tempted. I could tie you naked to my headboard and have you begging for it.” He slanted her a glance that made her flush all over. “Oops. Did I say that out loud?”
She elbowed him in the stomach and then had to scramble to catch the ball on her flipper.
“Slick,” he said.
“Thank you. So are you going to tell me the rest of this story, or did you intend to keep distracting me until I forgot all about it?”
“I thought you might want to hear more dirty thoughts.”
“No, that visual’s going to last me for a while.” She snapped her flipper and flung the ball up to the top of the table. “Carry on.”
Ben shook his head and took another drink, but he obliged her. “So Sandy had family money and connections, and she was even more ambitious than me. We opened our own restaurant less than a year after we met—with a hell of a lot more fanfare than our wedding, actually.”
“What was it called?”
“Is called. She’s still got it open. Sardo.” Ben’s eyebrows sank into their chevron of concentration. “Here, I’ve got this.” He took her button back. When the ball dropped toward him, he caught it and balanced it on the tip of his flipper. He bounced it there, toying with it, and then sent it back into play.
“The best part was planning the menu. I’d been thinking about it for years, testing recipes. I did a kind of heated-up Sardinian theme. Lots of seafood, homey pasta, and chile peppers, because I like them, and because nobody was doing much with chiles then.”
“It sounds great.”
He smiled, a quick flash of teeth that did nothing to warm her. “The food was great. But once we got the place off the ground, it was a fucking nightmare. I hardly slept. I didn’t even really eat. All I cared about was getting good reviews. Being the best.”
That didn’t sound so great.
“The worst part is, I was so deep into it, I just thought it was life. This was my identity, you know? This thirty-year-old guy with stress-induced hypertension, popping anxiety medicine and yelling at my staff all day long.”
His volume dropped. “I think I sort of got to the point where I’d forgotten there was any way to communicate other than taking orders or giving them. My dad was always giving them. Every kitchen I’d worked in for eight years, I’d been taking orders. I liked being the one in charge for a change.”
Ben let the ball fall down the drain and looked up at her. “You really want to hear the rest of this?”
She wanted to touch him. Put her hand on skin, on his arm, to tell him she was already on his side, and he didn’t have to close himself off like that. He didn’t have to defend himself against whatever he was afraid she would think or say.
“I do.”
He took a few steps away and leaned against the wall, as far from her as he could get in the tiny space they were sharing with the pinball machine. After polishing off the beer, he set it on the glass and crossed his arms.
“It’s not an excuse. I can’t excuse it. All I can say is that before you own a restaurant, you have no idea how much work it is. Any restaurant is, but especially if you’re as obsessed as Sandy and I were with getting those goddamn Michelin stars. You have to be completely consistent every night. Same food, same presentation, exactly as perfect as it was the night before. It’s like putting on an opera in a phone booth—there’s never enough room or enough time. You’re constantly under pressure, and I’m the director. I’m the one who has to bring it off, you understand?”
What she understood was that he’d cared deeply, and he’d suffered for it. She understood that he’d chosen a particular sort of life for himself, and then he’d let it consume him.
And that probably he’d wanted to be consumed, or he wouldn’t have done it.
When she nodded, he said, “So the kitchen was crowded, because it was always crowded, and Friday’s the worst. Sandy’s got these assholes with cameras right in my face, screen testing me for a two-bit cooking show she was all excited about. I kept telling her I didn’t want to be on TV—it was all I could do to handle the kitchen—but she insisted that this was how we were going to make it big. She had a talent for the money stuff, the marketing. I mean, that’s obvious, right? Look how far she’s gone since she got rid of my sorry ass.”
Another little smile, cynical this time.
“The kitchen was supposed to be mine, though, and these guys were fucking up the rhythm. The grill guy kept burning shit or sending it out undercooked. When I lost my temper and yelled at him, the TV producer was like, ‘Do that again, we want to get it from another angle.’ As if I was this cartoon character, you know? A caricature of myself. And I was—actually, I just lost it.” He met her eyes. “Imagine that.”
May moved around the pinball machine to stand in front of him. She slid her hand down the inside of his arm to touch the skin at his wrist and gripped his hand. A risky move, but he would either take her comfort or reject it. She had to offer.
He looked down at her, his expression tolerant. “I have a temper,” he said, with a hint of humor. “You might have noticed?”
“Just possibly.”
“You know, when I was younger, I never got mad. I was one of those colorless, invisible kids. Teachers forgot my name. Never said much. Never felt much. That’s what most of my memories are like—
kind of washed-out and vague. Except for the farm. I can still smell the farm. If I were artsy, like you, I could paint what the lake looked like from up on top of the chicken house. I can hear the bees and remember what the handle of the big honey extractor felt like in my hand, and I don’t remember ever being angry when I was doing that. I remember my parents being angry. But I was okay, I think. I had this way of removing myself.”
She saw him again as she’d imagined him on the Brooklyn Bridge. That skinny adolescent Ben, shoving his feelings into his pockets, pushing them down with his fists.
He’d had years to practice. A whole childhood spent learning how to feel nothing.
“And I don’t think I was too bad in college, either,” he said. “You could ask Connor. In Europe, and then back here in the city, working in other people’s kitchens, I didn’t have the luxury of being pissed off. But once I was in charge—once I had a little power, and people working under me—well, by then I’d worked under a lot of chefs in a lot of kitchens, and most of them are assholes. You can’t run a restaurant with finesse. Everybody’s crammed together, bumping into each other. There aren’t any windows, usually, and you’re in there together for ten hours or longer, cut off from the rest of the world, busting your balls. Somebody’s got to run the place.”
He shook his head. “And this is going to sound weird, maybe, but that was how Sandy wanted me to be. The kitchen version of myself. Right after she got hired on where I was the sous chef, I got ticked off at one of the prep cooks and dumped a whole bunch of his work in the garbage, yelling at him to do it over again until he got it right. She saw it, and half an hour later she asked if I wanted to get dinner later. She liked it when I was like that. At first anyway.”
“I hate it,” May said.
“I know. You should. I hate it, too.”
She felt herself soften in relief. He reached out his hand to catch her hip and hold her in place. “But the thing is, I don’t completely hate it,” he said. “There’s this … righteousness to it. I’d never felt that way before I started running a kitchen—like I could be a pissed-off, self-important bastard, and that was fine. It was my kitchen. I was entitled to it. Have you ever felt that way?”