Precarious

by Al Riske

  They laughed and ordered a third bottle of wine. They were celebrating Annie’s move to Whitefish, her new job and new apartment (less than two miles from his own).

  Charlie said, “Why didn’t you and I get married when we had the chance?”

  “We were too young.”

  “I know. But I was crazy about you.”

  “We fought all the time.”

  “I know.”

  “I wanted you to say something that night at the church.”

  “I wanted to. I didn’t even know you were getting married.”

  “One word from you and I would have broken it off,” she said. “I’d done that before.”

  Charlie nodded. He didn’t hold it against her.

  “I was sure you wouldn’t want me,” she said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I wasn’t a virgin anymore.”

  “And you thought that would stop me?”

  “Hey, you wouldn’t even date a smoker back then, let alone … damaged goods.”

  Charlie shook his head. “And that cost us twenty years.”

  “Look at it this way: We would have made all the same mistakes, with each other.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “This is better.”

  Skittish

  THIS IS THE low point of my life so far. I’m 29, almost 30, and I’m working in a bookstore in Bakersfield—a chain that has strict rules about what we can have on our shelves and how long it can stay there before we send it back and get something else. Something someone will buy.

  I spend my days tearing the covers off paperbacks and mailing them to the various publishers. Just the covers. Saves on postage. The depressing part is that I’m left with all these faceless books that have to be destroyed. It’s against the law to give them to anyone, and who would want them? I mean, technically, you should still be able to read them, no problem, but I’ve tried it and it’s no good. Like talking to someone who has no face.

  Even if you’re a good person it would be hard to talk to someone with no face. You’d avoid it if you could.

  That’s not why this is the low point of my life. It’s the low point for a lot of other reasons. The big one, though, is that Jerry, my boyfriend—ex-boy-friend, I should say—comes into the bookstore tonight and just starts talking. No hello or anything.

  I walk away but he follows me from aisle to aisle as I put new books on the shelves and rearrange old ones, the ones browsers have moved to random places, to get them back into alphabetical order. In biography, I’m momentarily confused until I remember that, here, the books are arranged by subject, not author.

  I suppose the real reason I’m out of sorts, though, is because I don’t want to hear what Jerry is saying. Certainly not here. I’m a private person. I don’t want to have this conversation in a bookstore with half a dozen quietly browsing (and listening) customers.

  We end up across the sales counter from each other. For a long time we say nothing at all, and finally I blurt out, “Jerry, I told you I don’t want to talk about it.” Which is kind of funny because we weren’t talking about it anymore.

  I notice my coworker, Paul, off to my right. He looks down at his inventory sheet.

  Jerry backs away, smiles.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you later, Sasha.”

  His voice sounds all sweet and he smiles again and waves, but I just narrow my eyes. I pretend my face is made of stone. I give nothing away.

  Once he’s out the door, I turn away, fold my arms and stare at the floor.

  “What was that all about?” Paul asks.

  I try to stay tightlipped about the whole thing, but there’s hardly anyone in the store now—just a teenage boy in the photography section and a shopgirl by the magazines—so a couple of gently prying questions from Paul is all it takes. He’s really nice and kind of cute. (Too bad he’s so young.)

  “He came in to tell me he has my dog and is planning to keep her.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me beforehand—just went to my place while I was gone and took the dog.”

  “Who does he think he is?” Paul wants to know.

  Paul, named for the apostle, is a practicing Catholic and seems to genuinely care about people. I was a Catholic myself once, but only briefly. I don’t do mass or confession anymore, but I know God is inside me. There’s no other way to explain how I’m able to get up each morning.

  “It was his dog to begin with,” I say. “He gave her to me.”

  Then I have to explain about me and Jerry and the dog—a beautiful retriever/lab/setter mix Jerry had never really wanted. That’s why he gave her to me. He said he wanted me to have Jules because he could see how much I loved her, but the truth was he could no longer be bothered to walk her or feed her or do anything but kick her when she got underfoot.

  “I love that dog,” I say. But I hear no emotion in my voice, which is weird, and I find myself staring at the floor again. Jules is my dog. She loves me.

  “Maybe I should let him have her,” I say finally. “Then I’d never have to see him again.”

  “From the sound of things, the dog is this guy’s last hold on you,” Paul says.

  I nod dumbly. He doesn’t know how right he is. I’m moving next week and haven’t told Jerry or anyone else where I’m going.

  Paul is still talking. ‘He probably has no real interest in the animal; it’s just something to hold over your head. Like: I’ve got her now; what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t want to hassle with him anymore. He’s a pea-brain, a prick, an ass …” When I can’t think of any more names to call him, I stop. Then I add the ironic kicker, “He says he still loves me.”

  In my mind I can still see him smiling and waving. He gets away with so much because of that smile.

  When I blink, I see Paul shaking his head, so I say, “Hard to believe, huh?”

  “He has a strange way of showing it.”

  “I know. He seemed so sweet at first. Still does at times.”

  It’s that smile of his. And I guess I went for the muscles as well. He works out all the time and is very strong, which always made me feel safe … until it didn’t.

  “Don’t,” Paul says.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t try to work it out.”

  I shake my head and notice my hair is falling all over the place, so I pull it back and replace the scrunchy ponytail holder. As I do, I catch Paul watching me, but just as quickly I pretend not to notice. I don’t know what it is about my neck. Guys are always kissing it or wanting to kiss it. It’s my best feature, I suppose.

  “Still,” I say, “I hate to give up the dog. He’ll only mistreat her.”

  I can still see Jules, the day I first met her. She kept circling around me, wanting to be my friend, but staying just out of reach. If I stretched out my hand she would scamper back three steps, then slowly start circling again, afraid of being caught, afraid of what might happen then.

  “Better the dog than you,” Paul says.

  He’s right, I guess, though that doesn’t make it any easier.

  Paul touches my arm. I move away.

  Precarious

  ELAINE’S SOFT VOICE and evident shyness make people think she is somehow innocent, even at forty-six. Casey knows better. Not long ago, in the upstairs bedroom of a South San Francisco townhouse, she had him flat on his back, hands pinned above his head, the yellow sheets cool at first against his bare skin.

  “My wife will be home any minute,” he protested.

  She just laughed.

  THE THING ABOUT Elaine is she knows men just can’t help themselves—they’re drawn to shapely legs and breasts and bottoms. Should a man fail to notice these things, she will point them out for him.

  Her own body is not perfect. Her chief complaint is that her legs are too short, her bottom too big—and she’s right—but it’s those things that melt Casey’s heart when he watches her get out of
bed and get dressed.

  He knows for a fact that Elaine has seduced nameless strangers, spanked her husband, and taken another woman to bed just for fun. He knows because he was there—he was those other people.

  PEOPLE ARE INVARIABLY surprised when they find out Casey Ford and Elaine Taylor have been married for two and a half decades. It’s been happening for years now, and they still get a kick out of it. It means that, if you don’t look too close, they seem younger than they really are. What gets annoying, or at least awkward, is when people ask why their marriage has worked out when so many others have failed.

  The problem for Casey is he’s not really sure why it works—and they’re hardly at a high-water mark just now.

  ELAINE CAN BE jealous and stubborn—even irritating at times. She leaves her stuff scattered everywhere and tends to throw herself into projects that keep her up all hours of the night.

  Some of that is charming, some of it is not.

  The sex can be very very good, but it’s not always. Sometimes she’s in the mood and sometimes she’s not. Lately there have been times when Casey is just too tired.

  He knows that this has surprised and frustrated her. So now she knows what that’s like.

  HE MET ELAINE—dark-haired, olive-skinned Elaine with the jaw-breaker green eyes and dimpled smile for which there is no antidote—when he was still a virgin, a nice Christian boy at a small college in the Midwest. They started dating, and fourteen months later, they were married in a small church to the sound of rainwater dripping into a bucket below a slow leak in the chapel’s ceiling.

  She is still the only woman he’s ever slept with—a fact he has shared just once, over prosciutto and melon with a small circle of friends. The reaction was stunned silence.

  A YEAR LATER, he still gets asked about it, indirectly.

  “If you could spend a night with Liv Tyler and no one would ever find out about it, no one would be hurt, would you do it?”

  The question comes from Dan Kreitzberg, an old friend who was at the table then and still seems amazed.

  “Life isn’t like that,” Casey replies. “There are unexpected and unintended consequences to everything.”

  They are having lunch in an old-style diner with vinyl booths and have been talking about the Bertolucci film Stealing Beauty. (Dan’s wife liked watching it because it was filmed in Tuscany; Dan liked seeing Liv’s underpants as she frolicked in a short, swingy dress.)

  The check comes and Casey grabs it because he doesn’t have any cash and wants to use his credit card. “You can get the next one,” he says.

  Dan lets him take the check but hangs on to the other topic. “Don’t you ever want to try a different flavor of ice cream?” he asks.

  “Hey, listen, nothing beats vanilla.”

  “Vanilla? You can’t be serious.”

  “Think about it,” Casey says. “You can have it with hot fudge or caramel or butterscotch—anything you like.”

  But he will be the one to think about it.

  IN HIS CURRENT job, Casey works for a small San Francisco advertising agency where his new bosses are tone-deaf simpletons. Most of his friends, Dan included, have already abandoned ship. He’s thinking of doing the same until Caitlin O’Conner comes on board and takes the office next to his.

  On her first day, a Friday, she and Casey have lunch together. Other members of the creative team are supposed to join them but can’t, for one reason or another, so it’s just Casey and Caitlin in a noisy downtown bistro. They talk about food and music and books and places they’ve been—even their high school reunions.

  “The big news at our last reunion was that one of the guys in our class had become a woman,” he tells her. “I had heard that she was wearing a purple dress but never saw her. Then we all assembled for a massive group photo, and over my left shoulder I see this gorgeous woman in a purple dress. I say, ‘You’re not … ‘ because I can’t believe my eyes. She puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘Give me a break! Back there!’”

  Caitlin covers her mouth with both hands and laughs as Casey jerks his thumb over his shoulder, just the way the offended woman did.

  “We’re going to have to slow down,” she says.

  To Casey, it seems like an odd thing to say. At the same time he can see the truth in it.

  He looks at his watch. It’s nearly 2:30. They’re among the few customers remaining in the bistro, the hubbub of conversation replaced by the clatter of dishes in the kitchen.

  “Right,” he says. “We’d better get back to the office.”

  ON THE WEEKEND, Casey and Elaine drive to Half Moon Bay so they can sit back in their folding chairs and watch the waves—a series of slow, strong surges that crest, curl, and come crashing down, sending up black sand and white foam.

  In the distance, Casey notices three young girls walk across the sand and into the ocean. Two of them stop when the bigger waves reach their knees, but the third goes a little farther, high-stepping into deeper water, stretching her arms above her head and spinning as the waves flow around her thighs.

  All three girls are slender brunettes, their hips just beginning to flare, their breasts still small. Casey isn’t turned on, just fascinated. They could be sisters, but they all look the same age—way too young.

  All three are wearing two-piece swimsuits in various colors, but two have donned shorts as a coverup before coming down to the water from their blankets near the base of the cliffs. Not the one in the deeper water.

  She walks with a loose, lanky grace, her shoulders back, her arms out, hands just above the breaking waves. She spins often, always with her arms stretched over her head. Occasionally she comes in and runs four or five steps, prancing through the knee-high breakers, then wanders out again, pulling her hair back with her fingers, face tilted toward the sun.

  She’s so alive Casey can feel her heart beat from half a mile away.

  MONDAY, TOWARD THE end of his second lunch with Caitlin, in a tacqueria next door to the office, Casey mentions Elaine and how long they’ve been married. It doesn’t really fit into the conversation in any natural way, and perhaps that contributes to Caitlin’s shock.

  “You don’t look old enough,” she says.

  He is flattered, but that’s not why he said it. He said it because he despises men who hide their marriages from single women—and because he finds that most women are loath to interfere in a happy, longstanding relationship.

  In short, he feels that he and Caitlin have a certain chemistry, and it scares him.

  FOR NO REASON he can put his finger on, Casey has been thinking about Audrey Martin, a girl from his college days, before he met Elaine.

  It’s all a bit hazy now, but he remembers being invited to a party at her apartment—the upstairs of a small house off campus, with a 1/2 address and an entrance on the side. She gave him directions and said to be quiet because the owners frowned on her having men up there.

  When he arrived, there was music and then applause from a live album, something he had never heard before but really liked. There were plates of cheese and a big bowl of Chex party mix, open bottles of Cold Duck and little plastic cups. Audrey filled one and handed it to him.

  She introduced him to a couple of her friends, then wandered away.

  “So, Casey, how does it feel being the only guy here?” Michelle asked.

  He looked around; she was right.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You’re not uncomfortable?”

  “No.”

  He sipped the cheap sparkling wine and pretended to like it.

  Somewhere along the line, Audrey, a big-boned girl with smooth dark skin, told him she had just broken up with her longtime boyfriend—“He broke up with me, actually,” she said—and then someone asked Casey what he was studying.

  “Religion,” he said.

  He could have said journalism, which was also true, but he said religion. God knows why! He wasn’t planning on making a career out of it. He was just trying
to figure out what he believed in.

  Audrey said, “You probably go to church every Sunday, don’t you?”

  “Not really. I go sometimes.”

  He had mixed feelings about Audrey. Her tits were huge. She probably had to wonder if that’s all a guy was after. The weird thing, though, was that Casey couldn’t quite see himself going out with her because of her boobs. He wouldn’t want people thinking that’s all he was after.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I was going to jump your bones tonight, but I can’t now. You’re a good Christian boy.”

  “I wouldn’t let that stop you,” he said.

  He didn’t know why he said it. Maybe he just wanted the people around him to think he was more liberated than he really was. Maybe he was tired of being good. If she really wanted to jump his bones, well, would that be so bad?

  Then he wondered, Why me? Did he remind her of her ex, or was he the complete opposite? He wondered what the guy looked like and how he had broken up with her. How seemed to matter to him more than why.

  It was around then that Audrey’s guests starting leaving, smiling and nodding to her as they went out the door. When they were all gone, there was a long silence, with Audrey on one end of her off-white love seat and Casey at the other.

  He looked at her, but she only glanced at him, stared at the floor.

  Could he ease her pain?

  Could he say he wouldn’t turn around and hurt her just as bad?

  He scooted close, kissed her on the cheek, and left.

  AS THE WEEKS go by at the agency, Casey and Caitlin continually pop into each other’s offices to brainstorm or just to chat. They even trade e-mail frequently, despite being next door to each other.

  They have lunch together every day and when she agrees to have lunch with someone else, she apologizes to Casey.

  “Don’t be silly,” he says.

  “You can come with us,” she says. “We’re going to the Thirsty Bear.”

  It’s one of his favorite spots, so he agrees to join them. “But, listen, you can have lunch with anyone you want,” he says. “As long as I’m invited.”