by Kyle Beachy
At Stuart’s, a man was standing among the automobiles. I waited at the end of the driveway and watched him peer into one car, bending at the waist before stepping back and glancing over each shoulder, at which point he spotted my car and came toward me. It took me a minute to realize who it was. He was dressed in a clean white button-down shirt, a slim blue tie, shiny black loafers, and dark-gray dress pants. Dark-gray slacks. As he approached the passenger side of my car, I saw he was freshly shaven, leaving stark tan lines where the beard had been.
“If it isn’t Potter Mays.”
He got inside and held down the button to move the seat backward. The last person to sit there was Ian.
“Edsel.”
“I have to get to Shannon’s Bar and Grill downtown.”
“You were going to steal one of these cars. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Seven cars sitting here and the cockblower won’t let me drive the ugly one he got for free.”
“Is that gabardine?”
“Big event tonight. Start of a new moment, crucial step in what I plan to become. You’ll be underdressed, but so what. Lessgo.”
I had no reason to resist a trip downtown. Yes, why not, Richard’s downtown, surely something to learn from the deserted shells of once-prosperous buildings and the ignored, downtrodden people who lived among them. As I drove, Edsel read to me from the pamphlet he was holding.
“Successful St. Louisan’s monthly Meet ’n’ Greet Happy Hour is the region’s premier opportunity for fiscally motivated, success-driven men and women to expand their network of connections and further their goals of career triumph.”
Behind us, the sun dipped into a sky the color of scotch and water.
“There’s a two-dollar lot just around the corner.”
I paid the attendant and found a spot. Here was the ogre, beardless and wearing some sort of costume. I sensed we might be sitting in the car for a bit and left the windows down. He pulled a crumble of aluminum foil from a pocket along with a palm-sized vanity mirror. Inside the foil were two milky-green trapezoidal pills. He placed the pills and mirror in the console’s cup holder, then leaned back in his seat.
“What are you doing here, Edsel?”
“You’re here,” he said.
I considered this.
“Making my move,” he said. “Everything I’ve done in the past six years has been preparation for this moment. I’ve hustled Talkative and Relaxation. I went to bed with roughly a hundred different women. Give or take. I have traveled and treated my body like it’s my favorite hammer. I got no other option but some bovine cattle commitment to following this thing through to its end.”
“You shaved. I assumed the beard was linked to the size issue. Your force.”
“One way these people level the playing field is by frowning officially on facial hair at the lower levels. This world of theirs believes in the concept of reward. Facial hair is part of this. If I ever get high enough here, I promise you I’ll grow another beard. I’ll look forward to it. By the way, Stuart paid me five hundred dollars to take you off his hands. Did you know that?”
I didn’t, but it sounded about right. A sedan parked next to us on my side and two men in business attire got out, each holding a suit jacket in one hand. These men had careers. The driver of the car had bought the car. It was his.
“Bigger point is, I agreed to a job and plan on following through on that job. Stuart is gone. Found himself a woman and he’s made his way into commitment. And part of me understands, because a woman like that will make anyone think twice. Even me. Even me. As for you, personally I give half a nut what you think. But the bigger thing here is customer satisfaction. I agreed to do a service. I intend on following through on that.”
“It’s not just your appearance. Your voice has less country in it.”
“If you’re not refining, then all you’re doing is waiting around and sitting still. You should learn that soon as you can. I got the uniform and the necessary personal skills. I have learned the languages. Now I go in there and perform. Wish I could have rustled up a jacket, though.”
There was a warble. His voice shook a bit. I heard it in gu-o and in perforum. And if it didn’t seem impossible it would have been obvious: Edsel was nervous. He placed the mirror and pills on his left thigh, then held out his hand. I pulled the Visa from my wallet and gave it to him. Edsel carefully crushed the pills and herded their powder toward the center of the small mirror.
“Here. Smell this.”
“You going to tell me what it is?”
“Placebo.”
When we got inside, Shannon’s Bar and Grill was in that early stage of attendance when any slight move would reverberate through the rest of the night. The few who were there watched us enter. Vacant pool tables and bar stools, an unused pinball machine. A small group of men and one woman huddled around a video golf game in a corner. We secured a table smack in the middle of the room. My nasal passage wanted to bust free and whip about like some balloon slipped from a clown’s fingers. A slow trickle of nicely dressed young adults filed through the door, and Edsel went for beer.
I watched him at the bar and felt the confessional momentum gathering steam. I had no therapist, no priest behind a screen, just this depraved, remorseless soul. I imagined a wet cloth wiped across a countertop, requisite purgation and atonement. Edsel sat back down and handed me a beer.
“Took that out of Stuart’s five hundred.”
“I fear you, Edsel. You scare me in a way I want to go find somewhere else to live. I fear the implications of you. I fear the reality of a world run by people like you.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep talking. I’m going to try to appear interested and nod my head. Don’t be scared to move your hands. Try and give the impression you’re discussing something financial.”
“I’ve been tutoring the daughter who lives next door for the SATs. She’s sixteen. I think based on her test scores and the way she laughs at me that she’s very smart.”
Edsel nodded and looked around the room. “And you wanna wrestle with this girl.”
“If I call her blond, it’s a clear case of a word not doing justice. Last night I counted eight different shades on her head.”
His pretend listening skills were stellar. His eyebrows rose. He shifted his weight and opened a palm to ask follow-up questions.
“This girl, she’s around all the time?”
“If I’m home later, she’ll be there. It’s as if she knows exactly when I’ll look outside my house, either just coming out or just going in. So I’m forced to either think long and hard about going and talking to her, or think how I wish I had seen her earlier. Yes. Tonight we’ll talk and she’ll be there and I’ll try not to want her.”
“Now shake my hand and I’ll walk away.”
As soon as he left, another hand smacked my shoulder. I turned and was looking up at Matt from Saturdays at the pool house. He wore a blue shirt with a white collar and a solid red tie. He set a bottle of Budweiser on the table and draped his suit jacket over the back of a chair. Eric was a step behind him, also holding a Budweiser.
We all touched bottles and drank and then sat quietly for a few minutes. Shannon’s was filling up quickly. Groups were forming around the bar, then being pushed into the middle of the room as newer groups formed closer in. The smoke was growing thicker, and the layers of chatter soon became loud enough to drown out the music. I saw Edsel on the outskirts of a group, working his way to its inner circle. He nodded and shrugged and shook hands. It was a terrific sight to behold, his first nibbles at legitimacy. Reminded me of that movie where the reformed hooker runs for Congress. Soon he was inside, centrally located, towering over the heads around him, having punctured their circle and this new world. He was just so big. Someone behind the bar turned up the music.
I must have blinked, because suddenly something had changed—the group had moved several feet away, leaving the ogre standing alone. I couldn’t believe how quickly it
went down. He seemed dazed, then began looking for another group.
Matt leaned in and said, “He overshot.”
“By a good yard, at least,” Eric said.
“Who can be comfortable around a person that size? Look at him. He was already tall. Still is. Then he added all that muscle and he became a cartoon.”
“It would be another thing for a guy who wasn’t coming in cold.”
“You’re right. Nobody here has any idea who he is.”
“The contrast between his cheeks upward compared to the mouth and chin area isn’t helping. It looks like some spa treatment Melissa gets.”
“Did he shave with bleach? Is this some attempt at a joke?”
“Good look, otherwise. Good slacks.”
“But where’s the jacket? Does he even have a jacket?”
They were right. Though he’d made his way into the circle, nobody around Edsel seemed to be interested in his presence. He stood peering over shoulders, his massive head jutting upward like an unwanted thumb. They had regarded him, humored him, and now he’d become the eight-hundred-pound ogre no one would discuss. It was almost heartbreaking. Matt and Eric were extremely satisfied with their cool piece of judgment. They sat on their diagnosis like telephone books. Edsel leaned in and said something to the group’s lone woman and she ignored him. They all ignored him.
“He’s done for. What a clown.”
“Jesus. He totally blew this, huh?”
“It’s a joke. He’s a clown.”
Matt tapped a finger to the music. Eric sipped beer, then inhaled through his teeth. Here was the risk of the attempt: failure, public, spotlighted for these hundred eyes, the opinions and pity and casual judgment. Edsel’s attempt at climbing out of his personal muck, and these young men with their voices, words, eyes and faces, ties and glittery watches. I thought of the right word and leaned across the table for their attention.
“Smug,” I said. “Both of you. I never liked you guys but until now I couldn’t say exactly why. It’s smugness. You assholes ooze it with the grins, shit-eating grins and smugness to spare, wearing your slacks, talking your smug shit. Festering smugness, all cozy and smug, got your wives, income, why bother to even try anything. Try something.”
I stood up and waded through the thin crowd of people, most of whom appeared to be in their twenties. At the bar, I turned and stepped onto the foot railing to boost myself over the canopy of heads. Improvement. The legendary notion of personal advancement, of bootstraps and pulling upward, here condensed to its purest form.
Edsel was sitting alone at the table when I returned. I sat with him. The beard had served as both weapon and shield. Now he was naked and revealing more than he should have. Didn’t he know this was no place to exhibit gloom? I slid one of the two beers across to the maudlin ogre.
“Something’s gone wrong. I miscalculated, Mays. I shit the bed.”
“It was your rookie attempt,” I said. “They say disappointment keeps you irritated and therefore motivated.”
He spent the next minute staring into my face while I took sips from my beer and tried to act naturally. Occasionally I watched back. Soon enough, I witnessed a change. His features went from those of the rebuked failure to something else, a hopefulness. He shrugged and settled into confidence. Just like that.
“Yeah well, no shit. So I need more training. So what. The beauty of hopping rails is that the old rail doesn’t go away. There are still women. The old rail is the same as always. Skills like mine don’t disappear. Nor’s this mean the night has to be ruined. Look at the night. It is young. Younger than that neighbor you should avoid at all costs. What we’ll do, Potter Mays, is find us some women.”
The bar was thick with smoke and the noise of language. So many words with so many intentions, words born from desirous agenda, well aimed, everyone in this room aiming, aiming. The ogre had not excelled at this exchange. But now, having failed at professionalism, he would retreat to the effortless realm of seduction. And he would take me with him.
“This girl, Edsel, I’m telling you. She comforts.”
“Forget the child for tonight,” he said. “I forbid you to touch that little girl. Trust me. You remember what sex was like at sixteen? The awkwardness? The are-you-sure-this-is-what-you-wants? Is this how a condom goes on? Why won’t it roll on? See you next time my parents are out of town. Be a grown-up for once, Potter. Grown-up sex is a violent struggle. You don’t want comfort. You want powpow and the bang train. Comfort is for the meek. Look over there. Not like that, easy with the stare. Just look. See them? Two friendly girls, all smiles. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure one of them is willing to lie down with you. And now before you say something, yes, she’s got something in her face. Alright fine. Maybe she’s a little bit downy. But cute still. What am I saying? Look who I’m talking to. Monsieur liberal art. You with the open mind. Plus I bet you’ve heard about the sex drives of the retarded, right? You put two retards in a room, they’ll fuck for hours.”
Escape. There was always escape.
I drove home with every window open, radio off, sound of wind like whiteout. The house was dark and still. I slid into my dad’s office and sat down to my empty e-mail in-box. I began to put together an album of songs. Her silver Jetta was full of shit music programmed into boy-scrawled CDs. She was out there now—I could see her through the crack where the curtain met wall—wandering circles in her parents’ driveway. I removed one disc and replaced it with another, and watched her. Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth . . .
I left the computer and stepped back into the evening. Now she was talking on the phone, one hand against the side of the garage, lifting and lowering herself through a series of careless pliés. I approached and she handed me a cigarette with the lighter. I smoked and made small circles of my own in our driveway. She looked up and mouthed sorry with tiny delicate angel lips. I picked up the basketball from her driveway and shot some jumpers. I walked circles and smoked my cigarette. I pulled a quarter from my pocket and flipped it, thinking heads I would go back inside, tails I would stay. Simplest of equations. T means stay. H means go. It was heads. I flipped it again. Heads. H, then H.
She closed her phone and approached me. I stepped backward from the driveway into the grass of her family’s backyard, moving beyond the limits of the garage light. She was part of it, I wasn’t alone in the process. Hello, body. Within her grasp I felt quiet and I felt warmth. We stood and collected each other. When I pulled, so did she. And grabbed. She went down to the grass, and I did too, and it was wet from the day’s storm, and soft. Then lips and darkness and hair in my fingers and wet soft grass. My knees were between her knees. And for some time we stayed this way. We kissed playfully and then seriously, and then when the kissing moved from serious to necessary, our knees touched, and hers moved outward, and mine followed. I lifted her shirt from her waist and descended down to her bare stomach, brushed lips against untouchably soft skin, the smell of peaches or apple, a flash of light. I moved back upward and her hands went to my waist, fumbling at belt and zipper but not underwear. Pressure. More flashes of light somewhere off to our side, car passing, maybe, or a dog walker’s safety measure. So forgotten an experience I didn’t realize until it was happening. Tightness, pressure. Two layers of cotton, but I was inside her. Barely. Tiny sounds rising, and I stayed with her until I felt the first hints of something approaching slowly from somewhere down this dry road. Then I pulled back and moved my head down to her stomach and laid it there on its side, half deaf to the world.
“Diadem.”
“Whatsits . . . jeweled headband used as a royal crown.”
“Finial.”
“The thingy on top of the other thingy,” she whispered. “An ornament.”
“You are going to be accepted at a top-tier school and have the time of your life.”
When I stood, I found myself sore, tired. I pulled her up and kissed each of her temples, then briefly her lips, resisting the urge to
replay the whole sequence again, return to the ground with her in my possession. A girl within arms. But then we were apart, and she moved through light into the darkness of garage, and I slid quietly through the side door into my parents’ unstable home. I walked calmly through the living room, up the stairs to bed, leaving the computer glowing into an otherwise dark office.
august
one
there was sun all over the place, and glare, in this season of squint. I parked in whatever shade I could find and ate the bagged lunch my mother kept preparing for me, sitting at the foot of trees. We had reached the month of legend and woe. August, dank and brutal, sucking from the city a steady sour tang of human sweat.
Then there was the other thing, the narrowly averted debasement of my angelic neighbor. I worked very hard to keep her out of the daydreams that came at me with increasingly sexual overtones. Sometimes I fell into a whirlwind of sexual memory, Audrey and others and Audrey again, and I found myself longing for her distant frame—an hour, ten minutes with her familiar body. Thirty seconds, her neck only. Single glancing touch.
Was Zoe a virgin? I told myself: do not even wonder. Far more important was that, when asked, I could tell Audrey that, NO, I had not slept with anyone this summer. Because actually this was technically true—if I had pressed myself into anything, it was cotton, the underwear had remained throughout, which meant at most what we had done was a kind of play, technical recreation and nothing more—and it was important to milk these rare moral victories when they came.
And look what else I could do! With one minor sleight of hand, one negligible benevolent fraud, I could instantly upgrade the generosity of my existence. Every bottle could be made into Premium with a quick swap of the caps, these “Premium” bottles substituted into orders for Purified or Natural Spring. Compliments of me, no no, you’re welcome. Please, really, it’s my pleasure. If this qualified me as a liar, it was a title well worth the bright looks of gratitude on my customers’ faces. The spread of eye, curl of lip, tilt of head that captured their disbelief. How clear the happiness. Premium. Postures changed at the sound of this word. Meaning: the highest grade of drinking water available. And if they pressed why, exactly, I was willing to do this? I said we’ll just keep it between us, with a wink and sly nod, and here they grew even further grateful, charmed into one of these minor conspiracies we all so dearly crave.