“Not originally. But I live in Manhattan.” He dusts off his stump speech. “Needed a little time off from my PhD . . . after what happened in September and all.” This time he leaves his mouth ajar, the word all dangling. He maintains eye contact and then lowers his gaze. Lane’s pleased that he’s getting a sense of how to optimize the pacing and accompanying physical expressions.
The tension leaves her face. He has her on the hook. It is Lane’s coup de grâce. This is the first time he’s witnessed the full power of his trump card story outside of New York.
Of course, he had so much vodka and Vicodin on 9/10 trying to forget about Mia and the consultant’s transgressing penis that he was in the hospital having his stomach pumped when all went down. He assured the doctors that the overdose was an unfortunate accident. That he had a legitimate prescription for the Vicodin for an old skiing injury (back strain from loading five-gallon drums of premixed coleslaw at the Fred Meyer deli) and needed another day or two to recuperate. They still kicked him out of his hospital bed to make room for triage. That was Lane’s most direct experience with the attacks. His story was pathetic in New York, but he recognizes its clout here and runs with it.
“It makes you think about how fragile it all is. What’s really important. Family and the people you love. That’s it. The rest is distraction.” He tries to clench his eyes even more but wonders if he’s overdoing it. He’ll need more practice on this section.
“What did you—”
He throws a roadblock into her line of questioning. “It was horrible. Truly terrible.”
She rests her hand on his knee. “I love New York.”
“Me too. So much better than this place. Nothing happens here.” He extends his hand. “Lane.”
“Nina.” She gives him a salesman’s grip. They lock on each other’s eyes, their hands still clasped. “So, you’re Lonnie’s friend, huh?”
“Lonnie? Oh, hey. Yeah. You’re . . . ?”
“Nina. I just said that.”
He nods, trying to recollect what all Lonnie told him.
“You’re heading back in a few more days?” she asks.
“A bit longer than that.” He coughs from her cigarette. “But still, in and out.”
“In and out.” She pauses again to look him over, perhaps guessing at his height. “Shot? . . . Reposado? Añejo?”
He makes an empty promise to buy the next round as she stubs out her Camel Light in an ashtray made from a lacquered half of a coconut shell.
THREE
“YOU’RE A DECENT-LOOKING GUY.” NINA licks the remaining cocaine off her index finger, rolling it around on her tongue. “Charming even, if you don’t talk too much.” She inches toward him but stops at the perimeter of his personal space, daring him to take the next step.
They stand in silence between the condo’s staging furniture and an oversized Le Chat Noir poster. He considers his angles: the value of a rebound hookup or even an ongoing affair. Although he shouldn’t sleep with Nina, his ego still needs her to want to sleep with him. “I’m flattered.” He shows his ring. “But I’m also—”
“You told me that before.” Her tongue searches under her fingernail for more white residue.
He should have run when he had the chance. When she was doing key bumps and listening to Matchbox Twenty in her gunmetal gray Mercedes E320 with California plates. When she was fumbling with the lockbox on the front door of the townhouse and Lane stared at her face on its FOR SALE sign. Nina Radcliffe. On all of the FOR SALE signs up and down the street. When she was stabbing her same ignition key into the cork of the Syrah she’d yanked from the seasonal cornucopia display between the open-concept kitchen and great room.
She offers him the glass vial of cocaine, but the one thing he promised himself after his Ketel One and codeine incident was no drugs, prescription or otherwise. Quitting drinking would have been a prudent idea too but wasn’t realistic under these trying emotional circumstances. A person has only so much discipline to go around.
Lane is close enough to catch her aroma of conditioners and moisturizers not sold at drug stores. He smells top notes of monogramed towels and large-denomination bills. Scents that transport him back to his beloved in Gramercy Park. His mind and his body veer in different directions as his pulse quickens in his chest, flooding blood into his penis like an unruly mob down a dead-end alley.
He feels guilty for his unintentional erection and fights the notion that he’s attracted to someone other than Mia. He’s heard about fear giving men a hard-on, some sort of fight-or-flight survival mechanism. He wonders in terms of evolutionary biology how that would have come in handy when faced with a saber-toothed tiger or a wooly mammoth.
He turns his thoughts to Mia and the first time he slept with her, which was the first time he met Mia, at a house party near the University of Washington. Lane was there backing up a Fred Meyer coworker who moonlighted as a DJ and bartender, if you call playing Top 40 CDs between mixing rum-and-Cokes in red plastic party cups to be DJing and bartending.
It was great timing, as Mia had come to Seattle to participate in the WTO protests and stuck around, houseboat-sitting for an old college friend who was on an extended assignment for Amazon in Beijing. She filled her days with sleeping late, snowboarding at Snoqualmie Pass and auditing psych, religion and anthro classes at the UW. She’d taken a hit and a half of ecstasy earlier that evening and was going through a phase that Lane now saw as less about her and more about not being her parents.
She reveled in a kind of East Coast rich kid fantasy of libertine West Coast life where shoes are optional and everyone pretends to be super outdoorsy (even if they hate camping) and weed is good for you. She told him about how she lived in Jackson Hole for the year prior to coming to Seattle with some boyfriend she met at Dartmouth. She’d dropped out when he graduated, bought a new Range Rover with a full-grain leather interior, Bose speakers and six-disc changer, and drove west.
Meanwhile, Lane was still spending most of his time wearing a vinyl apron, polyester tie and latex gloves while machine-slicing honey turkey and provolone at the Lake City Fred Meyer, flailing through his last semesters of college without financial aid. Three years in total. That’s what it took him to finish his senior year, a handful of credits and fifty-hour workweeks at a time.
As they lay on the king-sized waterbed in Mia’s friend’s houseboat, Lane lost himself in the wraparound view of Lake Union. He’d never seen such a vista in an entire lifetime in Seattle. He fell in love with Mia’s strawberry blond hair. The light freckles sprayed across her nose. Her passion for those less fortunate matched with a laugh that could be heard a block away. He knew at that moment. She was both his muse and his rope out of the pit.
But now that rope is running through his hands, flaying his skin on the way down.
Nina snaps her fingers an inch from his nose. “You still with us, dude?”
“Me? Yeah, for sure.”
“Well, you gonna be the man here or what?”
He notices that without underwear or a belt to restrain him, his erection has crested the waistline of his pants. He feels something like the panicked realization that he’s left an open Penthouse in his mom’s bathroom—exposed, vulnerable, betrayed by all of his baser intentions. He steps—almost hops—to her, trying to get close enough to narrow her field of vision. Lane overshoots his mark and ends up pressing himself against her.
The pressure from their bodies pushing together forces the throbbing from his crotch back into his chest, where it overflows, rebounding up to his neck to his temples.
She swivels her neck so her lips line up with his, her breath—an antiseptic wintergreen stacked atop the dimly sweet cocaine, alcohol and tobacco—entering his mouth.
“You’re not much of a closer.” She turns and starts walking away. “But you’ll do the trick.”
“Wait. Where’re you going? What trick?” He feels his face flush and tries to force air to the bottom of his lungs.
“Don’t go anywher
e.” She points at the phone in her hand and keeps walking. “We have more to discuss.”
“Wait. Seriously. What trick?” His eyes follow Nina until she disappears into one of the back bedrooms.
He stands in the middle of the kitchen, overcome with guilt and shaking out his feet to try to redistribute his blood supply.
LANE DIDN’T NOTICE THE FAKE plasma TV above the fireplace or the plastic Christmas tree in the corner until now. He rushes through the index of his brain, thumbing for a topic of conversation for when she gets back, something to segue into explaining why he has to leave.
He cranes his neck to hear. She’s pacing and only audible when closer to him. “Yeah, whatever, fuck that little bitch,” she repeats in tones that are at once frustrated and soothing. “She’s not gonna do shit.”
Never taking his eyes off the hallway, Lane kneels to slip one finger into the top of her purse and pulls it open. He starts to feel through the bag, searching for the loose bills. It is like rummaging through a recycling bin. He pulls out a few wadded receipts before extracting a twenty. He sticks it into the pocket of his jeans.
“Yes, I’m listening,” Nina says in the other room. “Yes, attachment parenting, I understand.” She is pacing faster now. “Yes, I know what fucking attachment parenting is. I read the book, remember?”
He rubs the papers in the purse between his thumb and index finger to try to locate the grainy stock of currency. Instead, he finds the smooth stickiness and sharp right angles of a photograph.
“I promised you I’m gonna take care of it, right?” she proclaims. “You know me.”
Lane brings the photo to the mouth of the purse and tilts it so he can see. It is Nina posing with an Asian woman and a darker-skinned boy, not a baby but not yet in kindergarten, Lane guesses. Maybe what people who know about these things call a toddler.
He returns his gaze to the hallway and is met with a waist-level view of Nina and her smooth leather and black python belt.
“Find what you’re looking for?” she asks.
“I, uh, I wanted to check out your ePod.”
She eyes the photo in the top of the purse, “And? What do you think?”
“Of what? That?” He shrugs. “Like a Benetton ad.”
“My son.” She smiles. “And my wife.”
Lane joins in on the joke. “Yeah, your wife.”
“Yeah, my wife.” She lowers her tone. “You got a problem with that?”
“Problem? No. No problem. Not at all.”
“Actually, she’s not my wife.”
“Shit.” He holds his hands over his face and exhales. “Got me again.”
“No same-sex marriage in Washington State. But we’ve been a couple for a decade.”
“Oh, OK, no. That’s cool. I love lesbians.” He swallows. “I mean, not as like a fetish thing, but like I respect and appreciate all people, but I believe it’s, I—So, you’re selling this place?”
She rolls her eyes, pauses and decides to let it slide. “Pretty much the whole neighborhood. I’m bringing some of the best practices I learned in the Silicon Valley e-commerce space to bear on the Pacific Northwest residential real estate market.”
This exchange strikes the deathblow, putting his erection out of its misery.
“Listen.” She coughs. “I need you to do something for me.”
“OK?” He worries that a cameraman and a production assistant with a release form on a clipboard are about to emerge from the closet.
She searches through her handbag, pulls out a Motorola pager, and tosses it onto his lap. “It’s alphanumeric.”
“It’s alphanumeric.” He nods and repeats the word. He thinks he understands what it means but is unsure how exactly that applies to a pager.
“When I send you a message, you need to call me back. Right away.”
“What for?” He doesn’t trust that he has the right words to ask if she is planning some sort of illicit heterosexual affair. Better to let her say it.
“I need you to talk to somebody for me. Somebody from your neck of the woods.”
“Gramercy?”
“Not exactly.”
“I got my own cell,” he says as he picks up the beeper.
“It doesn’t work. We both know that.”
FOUR
“LANE. LANE.” HIS MOM POUNDS on the door to the TV room.
He’s dreaming about the forty-foot Norway spruce in Gramercy Park, the one at eye level out the window of his home office. He thinks of long afternoons drinking double Americanos near the Columbia campus, how he feels twirling the stem of a nineteen-dollar martini at the Gramercy Park Hotel’s Rose Bar, and, for the first time in a while, he ponders his dissertation. Soon, he’ll be a doctor of philosophy. A few more years and the degree will be something that nobody, not even Mia’s father, can take away from him.
He battles the voice drawing him back to consciousness. He wants to stay where it all makes sense, where his efforts deliver the life he deserves. But he’s mouth-breathing with his lips on the pleather couch and his feet are cramped with cold from sticking out below the quilt. The space heater crapped out again. Either that or his mom came in before and turned it off. She was always a Nazi about the electric bill.
“That cross-eyed kid’s here,” his mom announces.
“Who?”
“The ugly one.”
“Lonnie’s not technically cross-eyed. He’s—” Lane notices the clock on the VCR. It reads 1:26, a few minutes short of two hours after he was to meet Lonnie. “Goddamn it.”
He yanks a semi-buttoned dress shirt over his head and staggers barefoot and hungover toward the front of the house. Lane opens the door to see walleyed Lonnie standing on his front porch in a full denim outfit and a Mariners hat, eating a red plastic bag of corn nuts.
“Hey, man. How you been, Lonnie?” Lane smiles and extends a hand. “What’s up with the Canadian tux?”
Lonnie wipes bits of corn nuts from his beard and folds his arms across his chest. “Dude, I called you like six times, dude.”
“Can we talk outside?” Lane nods his head toward his mom in the kitchen.
They walk out to the front lawn toward Lonnie’s white Toyota Tundra, its two front wheels rutted into the foot-long wet grass. Lane’s feet cramp more from the cold lawn.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t be hella pissed.” Lonnie was always a big guy. Fat and big. He’s at least three inches taller than Lane but has never shown too much of a temper. Then again, business is business.
“You see, my colleague, he had to go home—”
“To Europe?”
“He is . . . He was . . . No, you know . . . It’s, you see, the cops—”
Lonnie hits Lane in the stomach with a short right hook. He has good form, building from his right foot and up through the rotation of his hips. Lane doubles over and drops to the ground.
“I can’t . . . can’t believe, you did that.” Lane struggles to breathe, feeling as if his liver has burst and shot hot bile throughout his body cavity.
“Fuck, dude.” Lonnie shakes his head. “I don’t even sell trees no more. You know what I had to go through to get that much weed for you on short notice?”
“Everything OK out there?” Lane’s mom shouts from the front door.
“Hey, Mrs. Bueche.” Lonnie waves to her. She disappears back inside.
Lane tries to pick himself up. “It’s Bue-shay, like—”
“Shut up. I’ve known your ass since middle school, motherfucker.”
“We pronounced it wrong then ’cause it was easier for—”
“I know you’re all Boo-shay and New York ’n’ shit and think you’re all hella filty now.”
“Filthy. Th. Th. There’s an ‘h.’”
“Filty. Yeah, that’s what I said. Either way, this weed—I didn’t get it from Nordstrom’s. There ain’t no return policy, dude.”
Lane spits and rolls to his knees, still unsure if he’ll vomit or not, and starts to cry. He isn’t
sobbing, per se, but he can’t fight back the tears that streak down his cheeks.
“Seriously, Lane?” Lonnie kneels down to clean bits of wet grass off of his Jordan 6s, while swearing under his breath.
“I was with—I was at that party.” Lane fights to get it out. “With the lady.”
After a few deep breaths, Lonnie heads toward his pickup, dialing on his Ericsson T68 with a color screen as he walks. He leaps into his driver’s seat, talking in a hushed voice and nodding his head.
Lane eyes the woods at the far end of his mom’s street. He doesn’t think Lonnie will hurt him. Not too bad, but who knows? He’d rather Lonnie beat the crap out of him than force him to pay for the weed, as he can spare a bruise or two. But, as for money, well, that’s what he is crying about. He decides to run, but as he tries to stand, his feet are stone and his abdomen won’t unfurl.
Lonnie walks back over, removing his Mariners hat and running his hand over his shaved head. With the bald scalp leading to mid-mounted eyes and then the beard, it appears that Lonnie’s head is on upside down. “We’re cool, player,” he mumbles. “Don’t never fuck with me like that again, though.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you don’t sell anymore?” Lane pants.
“I was trying to help you out.” Lonnie pulls Lane to his feet. “I heard you’re going through a hella hard time.”
“What? I’m great. Who’d you hear that from?”
“People.”
“People?”
“People. And Toby.”
“Who the fuck’s Toby?”
“Uh, your mom’s boyfriend, dude.” Lonnie motions his head toward Toby, who is now looking out the kitchen window along with Lane’s mom.
“That’s his name?”
“Dude works at my cousin’s fireworks stand. Sometimes. Up on Lake City and 145th there, past the city limit, you know? Nice guy.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call him her boyfriend.” Lane doesn’t remember the end of his conversation with Lonnie. Something about how Lonnie was trying to get his GED, but the teacher got sent to jail for some sort of mail or welfare fraud. Otherwise, it was a series of Lane’s excuses and counting the moments until he could get back in the house to yell at his mom for not waking him up earlier and to tell Toby to stop spreading rumors and focus on minding his own goddamn business.
Lake City Page 3