The Mailman

by Bates, Jeremy

  The man went to the woman and began to dry-hump her with exaggerated, comical movements. She laughed and slapped him playfully. He slid his hands inside her robe. She turned her head sideways, still laughing. Then he dropped to his knees. His face was level with her vagina, and good God, was he...? Yes, he was.

  When he stood, he was fully erect.

  Now Jade did turn away.

  Blushing fiercely—but feeling wickedly alive—she went back inside.

  Chapter 4

  She slept fitfully that night and woke early, before dawn. She climbed out of bed without waking Mick and went to the kitchen, where she made two coffees and brought one up to Mick. This lured him into a sitting position. He took the mug, heeding her caution that it was hot. He squinted at it for a long moment but didn’t seem to want to take a sip.

  “Do you feel okay?” she asked.

  “Maybe one too many whiskeys last night.”

  “One?” she said coyly. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  In the kitchen again she scrambled three eggs and fried several strips of bacon. She was buttering a slice of toast when Mick entered, dressed in a Polo shirt and chinos, his hair wet. Despite the shower, he looked tired and haggard, every one of his thirty-eight years. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice.

  “How much did you drink after dinner last night?”

  “Too much,” he said as he sat at the table.

  She set his breakfast in front of him. “Maybe you should stay home today?”

  He shook head. “Too much to do. On top of everything else, I have to also find a rental house for The Tempests. They’ve been living out of a fucking storage shed.”

  While Mick wolfed down his breakfast, Jade nibbled a piece of toast topped with honey and cinnamon. Leaving half the eggs on his plate, Mick got up, snatching his briefcase from the chair next to him.

  “Thought you were hungry?” she said.

  “I’m late already.”

  Out back they went through their morning routine: a kiss on the cheek, a wave, Mick asking her what she was going to do with her day.

  Instead of one of her sarcastic replies, she said, “Grocery store. We need bread and some other things.”

  “Can you pick me up some razors? I’m on my last one. Thanks, hon.”

  With that, Mick ducked into the Corvette and rolled down the driveway. Jade followed the car until it turned right on the street and accelerated away. Her eyes fell on the mailbox down at the end of the driveway. She recalled the fantasy she’d had the night before in which she encountered the mailman out here while she was dressed in a sheer nightie and nothing else. This made her conscious of her frumpy housecoat, her messy hair, and the caked makeup she hadn’t bothered to remove before going to bed. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet.

  She glanced up the street. Empty.

  Holding the throat of the housecoat closed tight, she returned inside.

  ♀

  Jade washed the breakfast dishes, then found the motivation to get out and do some weeding in the backyard. She got into the work, building up a light patina of sweat, and soon she was feeling good to be outside in the fresh air, using her body, doing something other than the usual house chores. When she finished for the morning, a large pile of uprooted weeds stacked on the grass nearby, she noticed a smudge of dirt on her arm—only on closer inspection it turned out to be a plump, bloodsucking leach. Disgusted, she took off her gloves and went inside and poured salt on the thing, watching with an odd satisfaction as it let go and squirmed in what must have been agony. She flicked it into the sink, then ran the water, washing it down the drain.

  The clock on the wall indicated it was ten thirty. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down in front of the TV. Today she stuck with The Price is Right from start to finish. One of the contestants in the front row was a sailor in a white uniform. He was young, clean-cut, fit, and he made her think of the mailman. He made it all the way to the showcase showdown, and Jade found herself routing for him to win. His opponent, a chatty blonde woman from Kentucky, passed on the first showcase (which included a trip to Spain and a new car) and instead ended up bidding on luggage, a dining room set, and a grandfather clock.

  Didn’t she know how to play the game? You never pass on the showcase with the car.

  In the end it didn’t matter because the blonde ended up overbidding and the mailman—sailor, Jade, sailor—won.

  She flicked off the TV. She stood, feeling antsy, like she was wasting time. She never understood this feeling when she had the entire day to do nothing. Maybe wasting time wasn’t the right expression. Maybe wasting her time was better—because it wouldn’t be long before she was fifty, then sixty, then eighty, then in a box, and she’d have nothing to show for her time on this planet, nor would she have contributed to it in any meaningful way.

  Jade frowned. She didn’t want to think about this. She had a load of laundry to put in. She also had dusting to do. But suddenly the house felt too small and claustrophobic and she didn’t think she could spend another minute in it.

  Shrugging on a wool jacket, she left through the front door, not bothering to lock it behind her.

  Chapter 5

  Mick spent most of the morning back and forth on the phone with Fred Taylor. During due diligence, the attorney had discovered that The Tempests’ drummer had a semi-outstanding rape charge in West Hollywood, while the singer had served jail time in his hometown in northern England, and there were still warrants for his arrest there for stuff like grand theft auto, assault, jumping bail, etc. None of this was a deal breaker. Just a headache to clean up—and an expensive one at that.

  When Mick hung up after the latest call, he sank down in his chair with an exhausted sigh.

  The phone immediately rang.

  “Yeah?” he said, picking up the receiver.

  “Tony’s on line two,” Genie said.

  “Tell him I’m busy. I’ll get back to him.”

  He hung up again. Tony Scallini was the A&R rep at Warner. No doubt he wanted to know what all the other reps who’d contacted him this morning wanted to know: Had Chrysalis really signed The Tempests? So far the general consensus seemed to be that Mick was crazy. The band was going to implode wildly and take his career down with them.

  Yeah, well, we’ll see, won’t we? he thought, trying to knead away the migraine from his forehead with his fingertips.

  The framed photograph of Jade that stood on his desk caught his attention. She was glancing over her shoulder, her blue eyes alight with surprise, as if she hadn’t known the shot was coming. He’d taken it at least five years ago, back in New York. They’d gone to an off-Broadway show, got tipsy at some Russian restaurant afterward, and back in the apartment, in a drunken haze, had burned through an entire strip of film.

  They’d had some good days in New York, hadn’t they? They’d lived in a shoebox apartment, and he’d been making half of what he did now—but it had been fun, they’d been happy, Jade had been happy.

  Which wasn’t the case anymore. Jade never complained about the move to LA, but Mick knew she didn’t like it here. He saw it in her eyes every day, a pain and loneliness she tried to keep hidden. He did his best to cheer her up when he could, but he wasn’t really around all that much to do this, was he? No, he wasn’t. And lately, with him working most weekends…

  When had they last spent time together? Just them, with none of his work associates? When had he last taken her out for a nice dinner? Or a show? Or a simple stroll through a park?

  When had he become such a bad husband?

  The phone rang again.

  Making a spontaneous decision, Mick got up and left his office. “I’m going to be out for the rest of the afternoon,” he told Genie as he passed her desk. “Take names, numbers, do your thing—and tell anyone who wants to know that I’ll be gone until tomorrow.”

  Chapter 6

  Mick had bought Jade a brand-new silver Volvo 240 shortly after the
y’d arrived in Los Angeles. It was her first car. She had never had a driver’s license and hadn’t needed one in Manhattan. But Los Angeles wasn’t Manhattan, she had learned very quickly. It wasn’t a walking city, especially when you lived in an isolated neighborhood like Laurel Canyon.

  Turning south onto Fairfax Avenue, Jade drove past looming billboards and sawdust bars and dilapidated stores selling old furniture and a fair number of homeless people before she reached the Vons she frequented. She pulled into an empty parking spot out front and entered the supermarket.

  As she strolled the aisles with a basket in one hand, a sense of tranquility washed over her. Supermarkets always made her feel at ease. She didn’t know why. Because they were familiar to her? Because they were the same wherever you went?

  She selected a loaf of soft white bread, a package of pasta for dinner, two bell peppers, a bag of mushrooms to go in the spaghetti sauce she planned to make, and a can of diced tomatoes. She had a nagging sense she was forgetting something, but she couldn’t think what.

  Two people stood in front of her in the checkout line, an elderly woman paying for an assortment of fruit with change from her purse, and a man in paint-stained overalls.

  The checkout girl made small talk with Jade, but it wasn’t natural, and after the awkward exchange of mundane observations a strained and heavy silence ensued.

  Outside, Jade placed the groceries in the trunk of the car, but she didn’t get in the vehicle herself. She didn’t want to return to the house yet. There was nothing waiting for her there except boredom. She would go back and dust the shelves and put on a load of laundry and perhaps play the piano or read her novel. If she didn’t fall asleep, she would then prepare dinner, which she would likely end up eating alone, because Mick wouldn’t return until late.

  Jade looked around, taking stock of her options, then crossed the street to a place called Canter’s Deli. She hesitated in front of the doors—she wasn’t really hungry—but she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She entered. The fifties-style diner was doing a brisk lunch business, and she was lucky to get an empty booth by the window. When a peppy, pig-tailed waitress came by, Jade initially ordered a tuna salad on rye and an iced tea. But then she changed her mind and asked for a root beer float, grilled cheese, and French fries. Comfort food at its best.

  While she waited for the meal to arrive, she studied the other customers around her. They all looked happy, or happy enough. But was this really the case, she wondered? Were they really happy with the direction their lives had taken? With their spouses and their children and their jobs? Or were they putting on a show every time they stepped out of their houses? Did they in fact feel sad and trapped and lonely? Did they lay awake at night wondering where the years had gone, where their youth had gone? How they had ended up where they were and how different it all could have been?

  Abruptly Jade thought of the X-rated show the neighbors had put on the night before. Who would have guessed they had such a wild sex life at their age? The way the husband spontaneously went down on his wife, right there, in the kitchen! Jade hadn’t believed stuff like that happened except in the movies. Mick had never been passionate like that with her, not even when they first began dating—

  “Excuse me?”

  Jade glanced up from her musings. For a moment she didn’t recognize the man standing next to the table, smiling down at her. Then she did, and she wondered what the heck was going on.

  “Yes?” she said, surprised at how collected she sounded.

  “I, uh, I think I saw you yesterday,” he said. “I mean, I said hi. You said hi. I was on my route…?”

  “You’re the mailman,” she said, the statement sounding idiotic in her ears.

  She glanced past him, expecting someone to be pointing and laughing, expecting this to be a joke. Because it was fine to see the mailman on his route, just as it was fine to see your doctor in his office, or your teacher in her classroom. That was all perfectly ordinary. What wasn’t ordinary was for them to cross the invisible boundary into your personal, everyday life.

  Nevertheless, Jade knew this was no joke. Because who would have organized it, and why? She might have built the mailman up in her head, she might have had an erotic fantasy about him, but nobody knew this except her.

  This was a random encounter—bizarre, yes, but random nonetheless. That was all.

  “Yesterday was my first time on the route,” the mailman said. He was just as handsome as Jade remembered, even more up close, with his thick, windswept hair, tanned complexion, and white teeth. “Real nice houses up there in the hills. You have a nice house too.”

  “Thank you. My husband and I moved there last year.”

  “Are you having lunch with him now?”

  “No. He’s at work. I was just at the grocery store. I don’t usually eat here. I’ve never eaten here. But I thought I’d try something different—” She closed her mouth, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. She was making a fool of herself.

  The peppy waitress came by. Her mascara-rimmed eyes ate up the mailman, who wore tobacco-colored corduroy pants and a black crew with the sleeves rolled up, both garments molded to his frame, not leaving much of what they covered to the imagination. “Menu?” she asked.

  “Ah, no,” the mailman said. “I was just waiting for my own table and saw, uh…”

  “Jade,” she said. And then she heard herself add, “Would you like to join me?”

  He smiled. “Hey, why not? Thanks, thanks so much.” He sat and said to the waitress, “Just a cheeseburger with onion rings, please.” He continued to smile at Jade. “I’m Ronnie.”

  “Hi, Ronnie,” she said.

  “Hi, Jade,” he said. “Is that a root beer float?”

  In the tall glass mug, the vanilla ice cream had melted into the soda, leaving the cherry and some whipped cream floating atop a fizzy brown mess. “Yes,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve had one since I was a kid.” She folded her hands on her lap and fiddled her fingers nervously. “I, um… Today’s your day off?”

  “Nah, I just finished early. Usually I’d get another route to make up my eight hours, but there was nothing available.”

  “I didn’t know mailmen got switched around like that?”

  “It’s called pivoting,” he said. “See, the mail, it changes every day, the distribution of it. If I had a fixed route, some days when there wasn’t much mail it might only take me four hours to complete it.”

  “That would make for an easy day.”

  “Except I get paid by the hour. So if I want a full eight hours, I get sent to help out on another route that might have a lot of mail that day. It’s a fair system. But the real reason the post office does it like this is because it saves them paying somebody with an unusually busy route, that might take him ten hours to complete, it saves them paying him overtime.” He shrugged, and she caught a whiff of a minty, juniper-scented cologne. “But you don’t really care how the mail works, do you?”

  “It’s interesting,” she said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s dull as hell. But hey, I don’t mind saying that. I’m not a mailman. Like a real mailman. I’m an actor, or an aspiring one. That’s the adjective they use, right? I’m only delivering mail because I need to pay the bills, and it beats waiting tables. All you need is a driver’s license and a good driving record.”

  “So have you acted in anything before?” She ate a French fry. It was cold.

  “Nah, not really,” he said. “Not yet. Mostly I’m getting work as an extra right now. It’s not so bad. You get to sit around most of the day, you get a free lunch, and you get a hundred bucks for it.”

  “I think you would make a very good actor.”

  “You’ve never seen me act.”

  “Well, no. But you’re… You don’t look like a mailman.”

  “What do I look like?”

  Her first impression of him hadn’t changed: he looked like a young movie star, slotting somewhere between a pretty-
boy James Dean and a rugged Steve McQueen.

  “I, well, I don’t know,” she said, too embarrassed to speak this comparison out loud. “Not a mailman though.”

  “I suppose I should take that as a compliment. But, hey, enough about me. What about you? What do you do?”

  “Me? Oh, I, well… I don’t really do anything, I suppose.” She picked up another French fry, set it back down. “I mean, I stay at home. I’m a housewife.”

  “Taking care of the kids?”

  “We don’t have any children.”

  “Ah, right…”

  Ronnie looked away, as if having no children was something she should be ashamed of, and Jade thought maybe this would be a good moment to excuse herself, tell him she had to go, end this bizarre Monday morning misadventure. But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to leave. Not yet, anyhow.

  Ronnie said, “It’s a nice area, isn’t it? The canyon? Got quite a reputation for musicians living up there. Your husband’s not a musician too, is he?

  “He used to be in a band. But that was a long time ago. He works at a record label now.”

  “On the other side of the desk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s working for the label instead of the label working for him.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.”

  “Bank manager.”

  “Excuse me?” she said again.

  Ronnie the Mailman nodded at a well-dressed man passing by the other side of the window. “I bet you that guy’s a bank manager. He’s got the suit and the look, and there aren’t many office jobs around here. But there’s a Bank of America branch down the street. So he probably works there. Can’t see him at the counter, too old. So probably the manager.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Yes, I think you could be right.”

  “Your turn.”

  “My turn?”

  “Her?” He nodded at a woman in a tight red dress following a dozen feet behind the man. “What does she do?”