Precarious

by Al Riske

  She smiles. “And you can have lunch with anyone you want,” she says. “As long as I’m invited.”

  IN COLLEGE, CASEY wrote for the student newspaper. He remembers going to interview the class president in his dorm room and finding Elaine there. He had seen her on campus, but this was the first time he’d been in the same room with her. She didn’t say anything the whole time, just sat in the guy’s desk chair and swiveled back and forth. Casey was acutely aware of her presence, though he did his best to concentrate on the interview. The sleeves on her turquoise sweater were too long for her slender arms.

  A year later, in line at the cafeteria, he asked her if she’d like to see a movie with him. “Sure,” she said. He didn’t sit with her then, but went to join his friends at their usual table. When he lifted his fork, he noticed that his hand was shaking.

  Another year went by and they were in bed together for the first time, in a lakeside cabin, crickets chirping outside. He said he wanted to be inside her and she said, “Okay.” He said he wanted to marry her and she said, “I’d like that.”

  SO NOW LUNCH with Caitlin is a regular thing. Expected. It even gets to the point where he tags along with her on errands.

  She’ll say, “I need to get my car washed at lunch.”

  He’ll say, “Want some company?”

  He accompanies her on shopping trips, too, which makes Elaine furious.

  “You went shopping with Caitlin?”

  “Yeah. So. What’s the big deal?”

  “You never want to go shopping with me.”

  “This is different,” he says.

  “How is it different?”

  “Because the alternative is eating lunch at my desk,” he says. He used to have friends at the agency before they all found better jobs, and now Caitlin is the only one he really cares for. “And there’s a time limit,” he adds.

  It’s a slight dig—a shopping trip with Elaine typically takes three to four hours—but he doesn’t say it to be mean. It’s just a fact.

  HIS BOSS MENTIONS Caitlin and his improved performance on his annual review and gives him a substantial raise.

  AT THE COFFEE machine the next day, Caitlin says, “People will think we’re having an affair.”

  This is not a reference to the review, which he has not told her about, but simply to the fact that they are seen together everywhere.

  “So I should stop spreading that around?” he asks.

  CAITLIN IS BRIGHT, funny, talented, and very sexy, with unruly hair that she tries to pull back but it just won’t stay put. He can easily imagine having sex with her and does imagine it—in the shower and at various times during the day, as if he were a schoolboy. Only now he knows what sex is like, beyond the clues that adolescent masturbation once provided.

  He is so much older now, but he is starting to experience, again, the delicious discomfort of being alive, the sensation that his skin is about to burst, almost. And there’s a bit of a surprise: He is no longer a tongue-tied teenager. He and Caitlin can talk about anything and everything. All his stories are new to her, and hers to him.

  CASEY TRIES TO work, but his mind wanders and he finds himself thinking about Petra Barros, another girl from his college days. It seems like he’s being bombarded with random memories these days, all kinds of things he hasn’t thought about in years.

  Petra stopped in the doorway one day, introduced herself to him and his roommate, and just started talking. She wasn’t a great beauty but she looked all right, and it was fun talking to her.

  “Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time,” she said. “I don’t want to wear out my welcome.”

  “Stop by anytime,” Casey said.

  “Oh, don’t say that. You’ll never get rid of me.”

  Later, she invited him down to her room to see some photographs she had in an album. She said he would be surprised and he was.

  “I bet you can’t believe I ever looked that good,” she said.

  The pictures had been taken about eighteen months earlier. She had put on weight in the interim.

  “They’re beautiful pictures,” he said.

  “My boyfriend took them. We broke up two weeks later.”

  As if that encounter weren’t strange enough, he soon found himself in an even more awkward situation. Petra came to his room and said, “I have this friend, an exchange student from Argentina. She’s very pretty. Would you like to go out with her?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “She’s lonely. I told her I’d find her a date.”

  “Why me?”

  “You wouldn’t regret it. She’s the kind of girl any guy would go for—long hair, nice figure, pretty smile. What have you got to lose?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “There’s just one catch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Now you have to find a date for me.”

  CASEY COMES HOME to find Elaine busy in the kitchen, wearing an apron over one of her nicest dresses. She sees the blank look on his face and says, “Kara’s coming for dinner. Did you forget?”

  “Right,” he says. “What can I do?”

  She stands on her toes and kisses him. “Why don’t you blend a pitcher of those yummy grapefruit margaritas? Kara loves those.”

  Casey nods and grabs The Martha Stewart Cookbook to check the recipe—it’s been a while since he’s made margaritas—and quickly gets the blender whirring.

  “It’s going to be weird,” Elaine says, “without Alan.”

  Alan Portman—bald, barrel-chested, and brash—was Kara’s husband, until a few months ago.

  “I didn’t think you liked him. He teased you all the time.”

  Elaine looks up from chopping a small bunch of fresh cilantro. This makes Casey nervous. One time she cut the tip of her thumb off and he had to drive her to the emergency room to have it cauterized.

  “Want me to do that?” he asks.

  She smiles (it’s a familiar question) and shakes her head. “I liked Alan,” she says. “He was annoying, but I liked him.”

  The doorbell rings. It’s Kara, of course, and a young man she introduces as Brett Seger. He has long black hair, a gentle smile, and a quiet manner. Casey pours everyone a drink and they all cluster in the tiny kitchen, where he and Elaine continue preparations for Steak Du-nigan, a favorite recipe from The Pink Adobe Cookbook.

  “Casey and Elaine have been married longer than anyone I know,” Kara tells her new beau. “What’s it been? A quarter of a century?”

  Brett laughs, but Casey and Elaine assure him it’s true.

  “Has Kara asked you to write about it?” Brett asks. “Everything is a story idea for this woman.”

  Kara elbows Brett—he’s teasing her and she blushes. Still, she looks at Casey over the rims of her glasses, eyes wide.

  He knows the unspoken question because she recently started working for a hip new website called chill.com, editing a section called “Naked.” He grimaces and shakes his head.

  “Come on,” she says. “Share your secrets with the world.”

  CASEY FIGURES HE’S been lucky. He chose well, but there’s no way he could have known how well—they were too young and it happened too fast.

  Maybe it’s all just chemistry. He knows he likes the way Elaine’s skin smells. Maybe it helped that they were so young and not set in their ways. But that could just as easily have backfired. They could have grown apart instead of together.

  Choosing not to have kids certainly simplified their lives. But that’s clearly not for everyone. Even they had second thoughts.

  They both like seafood, pineapple on pizza, and peanut butter ice cream. Woody Allen’s movies. Van Morrison’s voice. Saab convertibles. Apple computers. The writings of Truman Capote, Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff. But there must be just as many things on which they disagree.

  They know couples who fight all the time—and have been together nearly as long as they have. They must have thick skins, Casey figures. H
e and Elaine can too easily wound each other, so they try hard not to.

  IN BED, E LAINE asks Casey if he’s going to write the article for Kara. “I don’t know,” he says.

  He realizes, if Elaine doesn’t, that Kara isn’t interested in just the longevity of their marriage. She knows that Casey has never slept with anyone but Elaine—she was at the table the day he revealed that personal tidbit.

  Elaine snuggles under his arm and rests her head on his chest—a position so frequent and familiar that he feels the faint beginnings of what might be called repetitive strain if the whole ritual weren’t so relaxing.

  “You should,” she says.

  He shrugs, which makes Elaine shift and resettle into a spot that’s a little more comfortable.

  CASEY AND CAITLIN spend two hours brainstorming a new campaign for a line of network servers and everything they have is crap, so they decide to take a break. She goes in search of chocolate while Casey stands, stretches, and watches her walk away in her faded blue jeans and tight black turtleneck. Then he stares out the window at the city street three stories below.

  He is still feeling oddly nostalgic, and his thoughts return to college. The date he found for Petra was his roommate, Brian Stone, but Petra showed little interest in him and vice versa. Danielle, the exchange student (her last name is lost to him now), was every bit as pretty as advertised, but she hardly said anything all night, her English surprisingly limited.

  They went to see a play at the campus theater, something completely forgettable, then drove into town for pizza. Casey kept wondering what he was doing there. Danielle was too young—in high school, not college. She lived too far away. He supposed that they could have some fun together, but it was all too weird.

  At the end of the evening, he walked Danielle to the door while the others waited in his two-tone Chevy pickup.

  “Did you kiss her?” Petra wanted to know.

  He shook his head and she seemed disappointed.

  THE THING IS, Casey tends to look farther ahead than most people. That doesn’t mean that he’s some sort of visionary. Far from it. He doesn’t even play chess, because it requires you to think three or four moves ahead—more, probably. But he thinks it’s pretty easy to see when you’re not really compatible with someone and that the relationship is likely to end badly.

  AT THE BALLPARK with Dan, Casey eventually concedes that he would, as his friend puts it, “do the deed with Liv Tyler,” assuming no one would ever know.

  “That’s a big assumption, though,” Casey says.

  “No, the big assumption is that Liv Tyler would have anything to do with you.”

  Casey laughs. “Hey, you brought it up.”

  It’s the seventh-inning stretch, and as they sit back down to watch the Giants resume play against the Dodgers, Casey is fully aware that the Liv Tyler question is moot. Even so, he’s already reconsidering his answer. He’s wondering whether a secret can damage you even if no one else knows about it.

  THOUGH INEXPERIENCED, CASEY reads a lot. He knows about things like ball gags and safe words, for instance, and not to use the former if you expect to hear the latter. So he doesn’t really qualify as naive, but he does have a sort of willed innocence that has so far shielded him from temptations.

  He is invariably surprised when a woman finds him attractive—a side effect of being called conceited when he was in the sixth grade. He didn’t think it was true and didn’t want anyone else to think so, so he never assumed anything after that.

  A case in point: At a conference in Chicago recently, Casey thought it was odd when a woman in a gray suit (a colleague he hardly knew but one whose provocative pleated skirt had been catching his eye all day) got off the elevator on his floor by mistake. Was it really a mistake? No. Given half a chance she would have torn his clothes off and fucked him to exhaustion. Never mind that she was married with three small children. No one needed to know.

  Casey didn’t know until a mutual friend told him weeks later.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL he turned forty, a few short years ago, that Casey began to realize he’s an adult, with a three-bedroom house, a half-paid mortgage, two cars, a 401(k) plan, and four months’ salary stashed away in a savings account. He knows it should be more, but he and Elaine survived paycheck to paycheck for so many years that four months seems like a huge cushion. He’s very comfortable.

  HE REMEMBERS BEING in elementary school, the sixth grade, when a pony-tailed classmate shifted in her seat, tugged on her skirt, and leaned across the aisle to tell him that his girlfriend, Belinda Chesney, liked Dave Patrick instead of him. The next thing he knew he was crying and couldn’t stop. He raised his hand and asked Mr. Fullerton if he could go to the lavatory.

  Alone, he cried even harder, though he tried to stop. He couldn’t stay in the boys’ room all day. He had to pull himself together. It just wasn’t happening. Then, just as he feared, gray-haired, crewcut Mr. Fullerton showed up and asked him what was wrong. He can’t re member now what his teacher told him, but he was able to stop crying, if for no other reason than to end an awkward conversation.

  It must have been about a week later that he was standing alone during recess—a rainy-day, indoor recess—and Jenny O’Neal came bouncing through the door with what seemed to her a great idea: “Why don’t you start liking Cindy?”

  It struck him as absurd, though he didn’t have a word for it at the time. He said, “Why would I … ”

  Cindy Long was right there, and he saw her hopeful smile fade. He didn’t want to hurt her, but it wasn’t like you could just decide to have feelings for someone—flip a switch and suddenly it would be Cindy, not Belinda, whom he thought about constantly.

  He sputtered incoherently and shook his head. The girls left him alone.

  Later he learned that Jenny was telling everyone he was conceited.

  EATING SANDWICHES IN a small park near the office, Caitlin tells Casey about the movies she rented over the weekend. Casey says he has never seen Indecent Proposal, though he remembers when everyone was talking about it. The central question: Would you let another man sleep with your wife for a million dollars?

  Caitlin asks Casey if he would sleep with another woman for a million dollars.

  He tilts his head and squints at the sunlight filtering through the trees. “Hmm, I … don’t think so.” He shakes his head. “So I should stop saving my money?” she says.

  WHEN HE WAS only eleven or twelve years old, Casey used to go the neighborhood grocery and flip through magazines —Sport, Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News. Then, when he thought no one was looking, Playboy and some of the other men’s magazines.

  He had gone through half a dozen of these—including one that featured a naked woman next to a knight in full armor, visor down so not even his eyes were visible—when the cashier said, “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

  She was an older woman in a cotton dress, barely visible behind the cash register. It took Casey a while to realize she must have been talking to him. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the store just then.

  “I know what you’re looking at. It’s okay,” she said. “But don’t pretend you’re fooling me.”

  Casey put the magazine back where it belonged and walked away slowly.

  “You don’t have to go,” the woman said.

  But he did.

  WHAT ON EARTH made him think of that? The memory comes to him while he’s stuck in rush-hour traffic, so there’s nothing to do but ponder it as the line of cars creeps along the Embarcadero, past the Bay Bridge and Red’s Java House.

  He used to feel guilty about looking at pictures of naked women. Excited and ashamed. He knew it was wrong to have lust in his heart, but there it was. And here were these women who wanted to show their bodies to him. Well, not him exactly, but that’s the way he thought about it. The fact that it was wrong made it all the more compelling. He would ask God to help him, but this urge—this unaccountable, undeniable urge—seemed stronger th
an the both of them in those days.

  The light is green now, still green, but he waits because he doesn’t want to be blocking the intersection when the signal turns red, doesn’t want angry motorists honking at him.

  The funny thing, now that he thinks about it, is he hadn’t even reached puberty yet. It was even harder then.

  TO GET AWAY for a few days, Casey and Elaine drive down to Long Beach and catch a ferry to Catalina. The crossing is crowded and uncomfortable and they’re feeling a bit seasick so are not in a great mood when they finally dock in Avalon Bay.

  By now it is hot and there are people everywhere. They have to be aggressive just to get a taxi. The hotel made it sound easy—“Just jump in any one of the yellow Volkswagen vans”—but it’s not that simple. For one, most of the vans aren’t yellow at all. The one they ride in is brown. Elaine asks the driver if he is from New York. “You’d make a perfect New York cabby,” she says.

  The air-cooled VW roars as the driver speeds down the narrow streets, braking hard for indecisive tourists in their rented golf carts (only residents drive cars here) and nearly forcing cyclists off the road altogether.

  Near the waterfront, they pass a group of girls wearing bikinis and carrying beach bags. They are young and fit and proud, and when Casey looks at them, they look back. He feels as if there is an unspoken challenge in their eyes. Even the taxi driver seems intimidated, slowing the van and giving them room to pass. (More likely, he’s just giving himself time to take in the view, and the girls know exactly what’s going on.)

  When the driver finally drops them off at the hotel, Casey and Elaine feel better instantly. The hotel sits high on a hill on the east side of the bay, near the Chimes Tower, and their room has an excellent view of the boat-filled harbor. Above the fray.

  After checking in, they walk down the hill and have an early-bird dinner at a second-story restaurant on the street that runs along the waterfront. Elaine picks it because it advertises “exotic cocktails” and she feels she needs one. They share a bucket of steamed clams, which are a bit tough and salty, but it doesn’t matter. They are in Avalon and they have a great view.