After I’d run my shoes and my belt and my carry-on through the X-ray and suffered the indignity of the wand, I turned around again for my customary blown kiss from Diane, but she was gone.
The captain just said that we’re making our final descent into Seattle, and here’s what I’m thinking: When I bought that dog, I punched my own ticket out of Diane’s life. She doesn’t want me, not really. She wants a companion who won’t challenge her, who won’t make her deal with his moods or feelings, and she wants someone who thinks everything that tumbles out of her mouth is golden. She wants someone who’s cool with living in Billings. Guido’s her man, on all counts. I can’t possibly compare.
I’m going to miss her. I’m going to miss those moments, increasingly rare, when she makes me laugh uncontrollably, like the story she told about a patient who was carping to go home. She told him that soon enough he’d be playing footsie with his wife, remembering a moment too late that he was a double amputee. I’m going to miss sidling up to her on a cold night and sleeping in a warm embrace till morning. I’m going to miss the way she could make me feel like the sexiest man on earth, which I most assuredly am not.
It’s going to be lonely for a while. Maybe for longer than that.
I think I’ll get a cat.
* * * * *
QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE ART OF DEPARTURE
THE SECOND ROUND came, and soon after the third followed, and his anxiety grew. He stirred the Jack and Coke with his forefinger and stared across the table at her.
“We love our house,” she said, her head swiveling between the friends flanking her. “But it will be too small soon.”
She looked at him and greeted his gaze with a sneer only he saw. “Isn’t that right, hon?”
His jaw dropped as if to speak, but his words found no room.
“Oh, Laura,” said the friend on her left, the brunette. “That’s so exciting.”
He dropped his finger back into the drink and stirred it again, and she talked some more.
She hooked her arm in his as they walked to the car. He clenched his elbow tight to his ribs, and she let go.
“Kiss me,” she said after they were inside. Her breath vaporized in the cold, and the liquor stink of it blended with the smell of leather from the seats.
He gave her a quick peck on the lips.
“No,” she said. “Really kiss me.”
He leaned in again, and she cupped his cheeks in her hands and pulled his mouth to hers. Her tongue slipped between his lips, pressing insistently at his teeth, until finally he opened them. He tasted the vodka on her breath and smelled the smoke in her hair.
“We need to go,” he said, pulling away.
“We will,” she said, and she moved in again.
“Later,” he said. His hand pressed against her shoulder to guide her into the bucket seat.
After a few blocks, she said, “Do you want me to come over to your side of the seat?”
“It’s slick out tonight.”
“I could, you know.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to?”
“I need to watch the road.”
Her drunken lovemaking was, by turns, fierce and haphazard. She licked his face and slithered her tongue in his ear. When she moved to the other side, he reached up and swabbed her spit away. She lay back and invited his mouth to find her, and he did so by rote. The most preposterous memory stepped to the front of his mind. Sam Kinison, the manic comic, had a routine about oral. “Lick the alphabet,” Sam the Man said. So he did. She writhed and grasped at his head, and then, as the moment neared, she turned him on his back and rode him until it was done.
As she draped across him, he looked for patterns in the ceiling.
“It was good?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s been a while.”
“Yes.”
“I think we should do it again.”
He said nothing.
She reached for him and found him flaccid. “Oh.”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
She turned away and ground her backside into him. He patted her shoulder and waited for her snores.
The exchanges began as a lark. He’d been surprised to hear from her, and after the catching up and the back-and-forth bragging about this and that, they started trading richly detailed imaginations of how things might have gone had other choices been made.
It began with her telling about some reading she had done in the area of quantum physics. He knew nothing of quantum physics, but she made it sound interesting. She said that for every option taken, the consequences of the opposite choice emerged in another universe. Somewhere, she wrote, she had turned back on the Jetway fifteen years earlier and stayed with him. Somewhere, they were having coffee, talking about books and making passionate love in the afternoon.
As each new message built upon the one previous, it came with a caveat: This is just for fun. It’s not real. It’s just us inside the computer. For a while, maybe they had believed it, or tried to. He wasn’t trying very hard anymore.
While his wife slept upstairs, he sat at the computer, the electronic glow illuminating him in the darkness of the basement. He coaxed the browser to life and pulled up the email account that she didn’t know about.
New messages (0).
“Damn,” he said.
He rapped out a note.
Somewhere, Alternate Ross didn’t go to a bar tonight with his wife’s friends, who he doesn’t know and doesn’t like. I hope he was in bed, keeping Alternate Lisa’s feet warm.
He hit send. He waited a while. Maybe she would see it and write back.
He punched in the address for the sports news site and scanned headlines. A few minutes later, he returned to his email.
New messages (0).
He signed out, logged off and went up the stairs, taking care to walk on the edges lest they give him away.
The light brushed across his face, rousing him. He opened one eye and saw her robe on the bed. He pushed himself off the mattress, his muscles barking at the imposition.
In the living room, he looked out the window at the morning. Her car sat in the driveway. The kitchen and dining room, filled with the muted pastels she had chosen, stood empty and quiet.
He went to the basement. She was at the computer. Warm water filled his veins.
“What’s up?”
She swiveled around in the chair. “Hi, hon. Just balancing the checkbook.”
“Industrious, aren’t you?”
“No, just bored.”
“I’ll leave you to it.” He turned to go upstairs.
“Hon?” she said.
He stopped.
“Yeah?”
“Your last five paychecks.”
“Yeah?”
“They’re smaller.”
His jaw tightened. “Insurance premiums rose again. And I bumped the 401(k).”
She looked at him.
“Oh, and I’m giving a bit more to the United Way. Seemed like the right thing to do, with us having so much …”
She smiled.
“You’re a good man, Ross Newbry,” she said. “But we don’t have that much.”
“We have enough.”
“Don’t worry, hon,” she said. “Things will pick up again soon. I’m sure of it.”
She turned to the computer. He went upstairs to a breakfast he no longer wanted.
For a long time after the messages commenced, he felt guilty about the way they would distract him. It wasn’t really cheating (was it?). He wasn’t stepping out on her, and he knew two guys just in their circle of friends who were carrying on brazen affairs. So what if he had a little text-based entertainment on the side? He was a good husband (wasn’t he?), and she was fortunate to have him (wasn’t she?).
He still loved her. He was sure of it. Pretty sure. He had moments when he thought his heart would spring a leak, he felt such adoration for her. A toss of her head would remind him of that fir
st year together, of passion that sent them speeding into bed, onto the couch, atop the kitchen table in frenetic lovemaking. It had been a while, though. The past year, in particular among the decade they shared, had been rough. Her career—if you can call selling catalog jewelry a career, he often thought—had taken off just as his stalled. The bonuses had dried up. He moved from a corner office to a glass cube in the middle of the room. No more views of downtown Billings from a fourth-floor perch. Now, he had only a boss—a twenty-six-year-old, climbing-the-ladder punk he had trained and whose hot breath he increasingly felt on his collar.
She had the leverage. It’s not something they talked about; nobody who has leverage talks about it. Nobody has to. Leverage insidiously changes the balance of things when you’re not even looking, and even when you are.
She wasn’t a naïf. She knew what she wanted, and she aimed to have it. His desires, he increasingly worried, weren’t part of the equation.
After dinner, he crept back down the stairs and called up his email program. He had long since abandoned fear. She couldn’t sneak up on him. The floor above his head had a hundred, maybe a thousand, spots that groaned under foot. And if he didn’t hear that, surely he would hear her on the stairs before she could see what he was doing.
“What are you doing down there?” she called down from the kitchen.
“Checking my team,” he said. He’d never played fantasy football, but he had concocted and maintained an elaborate lie about his nonexistent squad, which was having a hell of a year with Brett Favre at quarterback.
New messages (1).
Thank you for warming my feet. I bet Alternate Ross and Alternate Lisa did more than just warm up, though. Why don’t you tell me about it?
Through his sweatpants, he grasped his present erection between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a few quick rubs, and then he started typing.
“I’ve marked a few I think we should look at,” she said the next morning as she pushed the real estate section across the table to him.
“Isn’t this premature? This is a great house.”
“I think we need to start looking. If we find the right one, maybe we can move in the spring.”
“The spring?”
“Yes. I want to get this done.”
“I don’t understand the big hurry,” he said.
“It’s not hurrying, Ross. It’s just planning.”
“Planning for what?”
“Don’t be obtuse.”
“I’m not.”
“We can’t live here forever. It’s too small.”
“I love this house.”
“Ross, you silly man. You can love another house, too.”
He found her online, a rarity given the time difference.
He typed out a message: Hey beautiful. Can you chat?
Hey right back at you. How are you?
Frazzled.
Frazzled how?
The same old.
You hang in there. I’m here, whenever you need me.
I need you always.
That’s not what I mean, silly.
I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be needy.
Be what you need to be.
I need to be with you.
You are.
No, I mean for real.
For real, for real?
Yes.
The next message was slow in coming.
You know I would love that, but that’s … that’s a hard thing. For you. For me. For reasons we both know.
I know.
I know too. Damn.
Maybe someday.
Maybe.
I love you.
I love you too.
The snow went away by March, and so did they. He stood among their boxed-up life in the living room of the new place under the Rims, slicing through tape with his car key.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It is.”
“Do you love it?”
“I will.”
She moved close, slipping into his arms. He kissed her forehead.
“I’m going to run back to the other place real quick,” he said. “I think I left something down in the basement.”
“What?”
“Just some old CDs I had squirreled away. Nothing big. I won’t be long.”
“Hurry back. Lots of boxes to unpack.”
In the basement closet, he dug out an old T-shirt, a box of photos from the Cayman trip a few years earlier, and a couple of old Squeeze CDs, holdovers from his college days. Jesus, he thought. I’m ten years gone from there, and what can I show for it?
He trudged back upstairs, again sticking to the edges, mostly out of habit. No stairs or wooden floors in the new place. He would have to scope out new ways of posting a sentry.
He slipped into the bathroom. He stood at the toilet and attended to business, all the while scanning along the counter and the tub to make sure nothing had been left behind. In the wastebasket, something caught his eye.
After zipping up, he knelt down for a closer look.
He reached into the basket and pulled the white plastic stick out and turned it over in his hand. The blue plus sign told the story.
The car carried him in wide loops around his new neighborhood, buying him time to think, even as thinking gave him no good answers. Twice, he reached for the cell phone, to call her and demand to know what was what. Twice, he set it back down. There was nothing she could say that he didn’t know, or that would change his mind.
He glanced at the digital clock in the dashboard. 2:24 p.m.
He pointed the car toward downtown, toward the bank he lined up for this day, toward the cash he had been setting aside for this reason. He could get to Denver with the clothes on his back. A parking lot somewhere could hold the car for a long time before anybody would figure it out. And by then, it wouldn’t matter.
And in Sydney, many hours away but really not so far at all, Alternate Lisa would take him in. He just knew it.
* * * * *
THE PAPER WEIGHT
GILCHRIST SUSPECTED it would be bad when The Drone called him at home before nine in the morning. The eggs burned while The Drone ripped through half of the OED just to tell Gilchrist that he should clear his schedule for a meeting at eleven. Gilchrist’s long experience with the guy suggested there wasn’t a detour or digression he wouldn’t take, especially if he were somehow, probably by accident, in the general vicinity of a point.
An hour later, when The Diploma didn’t even say hello at the coffee pot, the picture became clearer. Kevin Gilchrist hadn’t honed his bullshit detector just to ferret out the lies of politicians and other professional windbags. Something big was going down, and from the pallid looks on the faces of The Drone and The Diploma, Gilchrist guessed that whatever it was would land on him.
Just before eleven, The Drone came out of his glass office and signaled Gilchrist to step into The Diploma’s much larger adjacent office, also glass. Gilchrist had been the one who coined the term “the glassholes” as a collective for The Drone and The Diploma, a moniker so enthusiastically embraced by his colleagues that the name—and Gilchrist’s role in promulgating it—inevitably made it back to the two people who were supposed to be out of the loop. The transgression hadn’t come with punishment, per se, but Gilchrist didn’t think it was an illusion that his ass, and his copy, had been hurting a lot more lately.
“Kevin, come on in and have a seat,” The Diploma said. The Drone closed the door and sat down in the chair nearest The Diploma’s desk.
Gilchrist looked along the wall behind The Diploma and found the reason for the nickname. There, framing twenty-eight-year-old William Pennington’s head, hung his undergraduate and master’s diplomas. He had graduated summa in 2003 from the University of Kansas with a major in journalism, and then he went on to the University of Missouri and picked up a master’s, also in journalism, two years later.
These facts about The Diploma caused Gilchrist to despise him on several
levels.
First, he had only four years of honest-to-goodness, in-a-real-newsroom experience. And in those four years, he had kissed enough of the right asses to be running the whole shooting match at the Herald-Gleaner, which, back in the days when people actually read newspapers, had been a pretty damned good one.
Second, the guy went to Kansas and Missouri, for Christ’s sake. If one were to equate collegiate sports with politics, it would be a little like defining oneself as an abortion-rights Republican from Alabama. (Gilchrist had begun to suspect that The Diploma didn’t care much for sports. On the odd occasions when he would join a newsroom bull session, uniformly uncomfortable moments for everyone, The Diploma would put on a serpentine smile and slink away when talk turned to whatever game was in season.)
Third, The Diploma had a master’s degree in journalism, which Gilchrist figured to be about as useful as a screen door on a battleship. Journalism—real journalism, the kind practiced by Gilchrist and those who had come before him at the Herald-Gleaner—didn’t happen in a laboratory. It wasn’t theoretical. It was real. It happened outside the glass walls, on the street, among people whose stories demanded to be told and among people who, as a matter of course, would lie, equivocate, prevaricate and falsify to keep somebody like Gilchrist from discovering the truth. The Diploma came out of Missouri with big ideas about databases and web hits and social media, none of which meant a damned thing to Gilchrist.
And then there was The Drone, Mike Lindell. A decade older than The Diploma, he didn’t have any fancy sheepskins. He was a Montana boy, born and raised in Billings, schooled first at Northwest College in Wyoming and then later at Eastern Montana College. Gilchrist had shared a newsroom with Lindell for more than a decade and more or less tolerated him, but it was only in the past year that their stations had changed, to Gilchrist’s considerable dismay.
The Diploma arrived the previous spring and immediately set about finding a managing editor, a right-hand man. A few people in-house put in for it—some of them damned good, like the region editor and Gilchrist’s boss, Ann Benjamin. But one by one, as they came to figure out what the job would entail, they bowed out. So, too, did the handful of candidates who emerged from outside the office.
Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure: Short Shories Page 10