Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  He checked his watch and stopped in place and shouted at her over the squawk of the horn section. “Jesus Christ. They’re missing it.”

  “Missing what?” Mary Beth too stopped dancing and leaned in to hear Mike over the thrum of the party.

  Mike tapped the dial of his watch then pointed as a man in a well-worn tuxedo bounded onto the stage, waving his arms over his head in a panic to stop the band, flashing two inches of white shirt cuff from beneath his too-short jacket sleeve. “The goddamn New Year. It’s already midnight.”

  Knowing that her New Year’s kiss would arrive late felt like the evening was offering her a peculiar brand of betrayal. How often real life fell short of even her slightest expectations. She had a moment of guilt, the passing thought that perhaps she should have been watching the ball drop on television, on her own couch, with her son, nested in a huge swaddle of blankets and pillows. She’d kiss him on the forehead and carry him to her room, let him sleep the rest of the night in the big bed. Soon he’d be too old for that particular comfort, and that would be another disappointment to add to her list.

  Onstage, the emcee’s voice counted down the last seconds of another year—“Three, two, one”—filling the air around them, but the timing was off, too late. Even though it was just seconds, it was a ridiculous mistake, an Apollo rocket already off the launch pad while the voices at mission control kept on counting.

  Half a minute into January, the band managed “Auld Lang Syne,” the music rising over the noisemakers and the report of champagne corks. Mary Beth tilted her head to accept Mike’s incoming kiss. He slipped his arms around her waist, slid a step closer, reached a hand into the stripes of her hair near her temple. She craved an epic kiss, if only because the other kisses that surrounded her—the dancing couples with their homogeneous, perfunctory pecks—were so disappointing, the loveless duties she remembered of her parents. She opened her lips and waited for Mike’s tentative introduction of his tongue. His hand crossed her back, his warm fingers circling to touch the skin left exposed by her cocktail dress. The song’s melody, funereal, dirgelike, now swelled as an overture, a call to arms, a battle cry to bury the disappointments of the past year and embrace the promise of the new. The nearby couples sang along, and Mary Beth opened her eyes to find that she and Mike were the only ones still in the clutches of their kiss. She had kissed Mike hundreds of times, kisses as a necessary thing, kisses as a prelude to roaming hands or more advanced activities. She snuck a moment’s peek at Mike’s face because she wanted to capture the kiss in her memory.

  Mary Beth wished everyone could witness the beauty of their kiss. Tomorrow, replaying the moment from an outsider’s view, she would see them in the center of the ballroom, sharing a noteworthy embrace, a life-shaping event. Already she was comparing it to a scene in that French movie, Un Homme et Une Femme, a man and woman kissing on the beach as the camera swirled around them in vertiginous loops. She kept both those images together, allowing them to blend into one, something to recall, replay, savor. Their long kiss ended with a second, shorter kiss—Mary Beth pulling Mike back to her with a two-handed grip on his lapels—touching his moist lips quickly, then pulling away with an audible smack. She could not help but feel that she was getting carried away to the soundtrack of a good-bye song.

  After the kiss, as the band segued into a song from her childhood, one Mary Beth remembered from the AM radio of her father’s Oldsmobile Delta 88. Mike settled for an awkward version of slow dancing. His hands fell on Mary Beth in the expected position of a dance instructor, holding her at a length far enough removed to remind Mary Beth of the childhood lessons she received from her father, living room waltzes with her feet across his instep, to the strains of the string-heavy arrangements of the easy-listening hits of the day. Mike puffed a bit with each step, and Mary Beth pulled him in close, conserving his movements, as the song ended in a flourish of cymbals, the elephant-like bleat of horns. He drew back, then glanced again at his watch and said, “You’d think, for two hundred and fifty dollars a couple, someone could have wheeled in a fucking TV.”

  9

  ON RICHARD’S television, revelers pressed against a temporary barricade, cops and drunks side by side and staring skyward as fireworks exploded in a towering penumbra, casting the amusements of the Navy Pier in a cascade of red-and-white firelight. Richard could not fathom why he was seeing Chicago on his screen, the John Hancock Center and the Carbide and Carbon Tower bathed in celebratory flashes that boomed out over the great lake. He’d slept through the New Year and now was watching as the television networks chased midnight into the Central Time Zone.

  The last thing he remembered, a pair of stories at the end of Eyewitness News at 11, had told of a Nebraska man who had built a lovely modern residence in an old Nike missile silo. A New York City policeman had been accused of taking $500 from the pocket of a man who’d died in the backseat of a Lexington Avenue taxi on Christmas Eve. He’d also slipped the cabdriver $100, telling him, in front of witnesses, “No need to ruin everyone’s day.”

  Richard stood, then watched as the remote control fell from his chest, toppling his half-full wineglass, a few ounces of Cabernet spreading across his rug. As he hurried to retrieve some paper towels, he put his right foot down onto a piece of glass, and his brain registered the pain before he even saw the shard protruding from the ball of his foot. The interjection, a basic shit, shit, shit. He hopped to the kitchen on his uninjured foot. He leaned against the counter and cradled his right heel in his hand, then watched as a few drops of blood appeared, soaking through his gym sock. He thought of such things not as accidents but as part of a grand conspiracy, the same trickster forces that made toothpaste fall from his mouth onto his tie, or left small puddles of water on his bathroom floor, unnoticed land mines for his stockinged feet.

  He unfurled the bloody sock and gritted his teeth to extract a toothpick-long sliver of glass sunk half an inch into his foot. Immediately he thought of the story of the lion with the thorny paw. Richard could not count on anyone, had somehow managed never to have made a dependable friend in the city. The people he’d once relied on were gone: McDermott, cocaine. Schiek, Valence, Randall, all suicides. Hemphill, colon cancer. Cavanaugh, car accident. The Michaels twins had given up drinking and fled to Colorado. Kassner lived in Jakarta, Hanzel married and went to Virginia’s horse country. McKalip kept threatening to leave the army but never had, was stationed somewhere in Germany, a living remnant of Cold War strategic planning. Up until a few months ago, Richard still talked to his college roommate, but more often than not the calls ended with Wentworth berating him for staying in the city, saying, “Man, you say hello to someone in the elevator, and they act like you’re trying to steal their purse.” Wentworth himself was married to a girl from high school; they’d moved to a Sears bungalow in one of those small North Carolina cities that always showed up on some magazine’s list of Best Places to Live. The last time they’d talked, Wentworth called Richard a liar, said, “I can’t even talk to you, man,” and Richard had lost a friend without ever knowing what the argument had actually been about.

  As he tended to the wine spill, blotting it with paper towels and covering it with a thick spread of table salt, the network news was showing the late-night preparations for a party in Seattle. It was nearly 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time when he finished with the mess, rinsed and stacked his dinner plate, and he still hadn’t heard from his sister.

  After the commercial break, he started flipping channels, managing to hit a block where all of the two-hundred-something networks of his cable TV seemed to have gone to commercial. A weight loss pill; Are you paying too much for car insurance?; Accident or DWI? We can help. He paused at a come-on for a 900 number, $4.99 for the first minute and $1.50 for each additional minute; his cock greeted the ad with a welcoming and familiar twitch, but he could think of nothing sadder than ringing in the New Year with a self-induced orgasm. Richard wondered how the supervisors over at 1-900-WET-BABE got anyone to
stay home and service customers. His only interest, real conversation, wasn’t going to happen. A girl of the sort he might like to talk to was already out on the town. Christ, he’d had two of them practically hand delivered, and now they were out, sucking down apple martinis at eleven bucks a pop, ridiculing the Washington men who went out for New Year’s Eve wearing their best pinstriped suit. In this mood, he doubted he could even get hard.

  And if he could concentrate long enough to picture the distinctly hard-core things that these women pretended to want, he had a problem. Cadence. He had tried this type of manual relief before, and somehow Cadence always intruded on the fantasy scenario: Cadence as a plaid-skirted schoolgirl, Cadence as a flight attendant. Soon, Richard figured, the women on the other end of these lines would be from India, perplexed by all the elaborate fantasy scenarios demanded by American men. It was the logical consequence of outsourcing. The accent might work for him, though. At least it wouldn’t sound like Cadence. However much he imagined himself as a noble barbarian, even masturbating wouldn’t help tonight. A couple of Tylenol PMs, washed down with another ounce or two of wine, might.

  10

  MARY BETH and Mike continued kissing in the corridor, kissed some more while staggering through the lobby, past a handful of disapproving guests. In the reflection of the elevator’s polished brass doors, Mary Beth watched as her hands roamed across Mike’s wide shoulders. His hands acquired a beachhead at the lower half of her ass, began a playful attempt to raise her skirt. At the ding of the bell indicating their arrival at the seventh floor, they separated, as if by instinct; at home in Texas, they’d become well practiced in the art of keeping their relationship away from prying eyes.

  They kissed again, once outside the room and once inside, before Mary Beth shivered at the shock of the room’s temperature. Her complaints about the cold were lost in the hum of hotel machinery. She flipped on the lamp at the edge of the dresser and turned to Mike, repeating herself. “Jesus. Did you turn down the heat?”

  “I’m planning on being a human bedwarmer,” Mike said as he tugged at his necktie.

  Mary Beth slipped out of her evening clothes and shimmied between the sheets, improvising a bolster out of the king-size bed’s four pillows. She pulled the comforter to her shoulders, then discharged her underclothes with a flourish, tossing them on the corner chair. Tomorrow she planned to return to Dallas and the demands of her son, but her flight wasn’t until 8:00 p.m., and she was thrilled at the prospect of eggs Benedict from room service, watching the Tournament of Roses parade, not getting out of bed until sometime around noon, maybe even more champagne, a last day of decadence.

  The sounds of Mike urinating with sudden urgency echoed out of the bathroom, so she turned on the television and ratcheted through the channels, stopping when she heard the last ten seconds of an anchorman wrapping it up before the commercial break. Then Mike stood naked at the foot of the bed. He was thick across the beam, the skin of his chest a bright, milky white, especially in contrast to the windburn that bloomed on his cheeks.

  She threw back the covers, and Mike clambered in, pressing against her. His skin felt warm, vaguely moist. She admired how he’d always been at ease with his body, willing to walk from kitchen to bedroom, even out to the pool, without a stitch. Back in Texas, Mary Beth kept a robe on the back of the bathroom door, swam in Mike’s pool encased in a navy-blue one-piece suit, the kind advertised as providing full coverage for the curvier woman.

  On the television, the update at the top of the 1:00 a.m. hour showed footage of a protest gone wrong, two masked students hurling a galvanized garbage can through the plate glass of a chain coffee house, a phalanx of police in full riot gear milling languidly a block away. Taking the shattering glass as their cue, the police consolidated into an orderly mob, marching with linked elbows toward the disorderly. Mike pointed at the TV. “Why do they always do that? Go after the Starbucks first. Set the McDonald’s on fire.”

  “Symbolism,” Mary Beth said. “My brother and I saw a riot once. The start of one, anyway. In DC. We’re at this little Mexican place when a rumor started to go through the neighborhood that a cop had shot an unarmed man. A Salvadoran. The guy was drinking in public, and the cop, a black woman, told him about five times to put it away. He didn’t speak English, and she didn’t speak any Spanish. How he got shot, they never really figured out. But by the time the cameras got there, about three hundred people were in the street, banging on garbage cans, shouting slogans. The cops broke out the gas, but then the wind shifted and blew it right back at them, and when they ran away, it was a free-for-all. A busload of kids ushered the driver off a Metrobus, then turned it over in the street.”

  Mike said, “They burned it, of course. Every riot starts with a burning bus.”

  “Then they turned and went after the lamp store on the corner. A hot dog cart, a Seven-Eleven. Then the Salvadoran bank, and finally the Western Union office where they all go to wire money to relatives back home. Only then did they go after the Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  Mike laughed. “Looking for the Colonel’s secret recipe?”

  “Who knows?” Mary Beth pointed the remote at the TV, kicked the volume up. “The KFC was four blocks from that bus. They sought it out. It was a political act.”

  “For no good reason?”

  “That KFC had to represent something. Oppression, colonialism, slavery, the whole plantation culture. They went after it. It was worth picking up a brick and throwing it through a window.”

  Mike reached for the remote, but Mary Beth showed him a palm that meant stop. “What did they expect?”

  She answered. “Maybe not to get gunned down for drinking a two-dollar bottle of malt liquor.”

  “You sound like your brother. You should be making this argument on Meet the Press.”

  “Our dad had a strong libertarian streak. That’s the cornerstone of history. The inalienable right to be left alone. There are times when that’s all anyone wants in the world.”

  “I take it you’ve been there.” Mike rolled onto his elbow.

  “Wanting to be left alone? Sure. Like tonight, I just wanted it to be us. I didn’t want a party. I barely wanted to talk to anyone else. I can’t trust someone who pretends to be overly interested in talking to the office manager of an insurance agent.”

  “Agency,” Mike said. “You work for an insurance agency. We represent safety, security. We’re a symbol.”

  Mary Beth shook her head. “I don’t want to be a symbol. I don’t want things that stand in for something else, or clever little phrases that are supposed to represent some larger whole. I want pithy little sentences that break your heart, that warn me about the roadblocks ahead. I want something short and sweet that’s going to make me cry.”

  “I have a hard enough time telling anybody what it is that I want as it is.”

  “No one else is going to do it for you. I learned that a long time ago. Like in sales. You have to ask for the commitment; that’s part of being a closer. I learned that from you, Mike.”

  “Are you asking for a commitment?” Mike gave her a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m asking you what exactly you think we have here.”

  “What we have here is something fantastic. This,” Mike said, pointing at the floor, “this is where it’s happening. Utah is the future. New jobs, new roads. All the modern amenities. What we have together is maybe a chance for a future. I just don’t know if I want any future to be in Texas.”

  Mary Beth sat farther up, straight and stiff against the headboard. She wanted him to be a champion and a stalwart, but now she knew he was, at his core, simply afraid. “Are you breaking up with me? Is this one of your resolutions—bring a woman to Utah to do the thing you couldn’t do in the comfort of your own home?”

  Mike smiled, a look Mary Beth took as nerves. “I wanted you to come with me because it’s time for answers. Someone needs to figure out exactly what’s happening here. Are we a weekend thing, or are we a more p
ermanent thing? Or are you never going to be happy unless that thing has a name? We never talk about this stuff. I try to bring it up, and you tell me not to, at least not in front of the kid. So to answer your question, I’m not trying to do anything.”

  She let out a heavy breath and stared at the ceiling, its painted-over water stains. “We don’t talk about these things because most people, most adult couples, have conversations like this at the dinner table. Or in bed, next to each other, after the kid goes to sleep and the TV gets turned off. This isn’t something that we’re going to talk about at work. The only thing that we’ve established for certain is that we’ve turned into a living cliché.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ve said everything short of ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ The next thing I know, you’ll be telling me how you need some space.”

  “I do”—Mike laughed—“but I’m not talking about the kind of space that you’re thinking about. I need space in the no-freeways, no forty-five-minutes-to-go-five-miles sort of way. No gang shootings. No midafternoon trips to the bank that end in sudden violence. No one jostling me from behind at the ATM, looking over my shoulder to steal my PIN code. The Utah kind of space.”

  On the television, the police dispersed a milky cloud of gas that settled over the protesters in a yellowing mist. Mary Beth couldn’t look away from the violence; it wasn’t until she saw the faces of the police, cartoonish and distorted beneath the space-age polymers of their riot shields and helmet visors, that she figured out the scene was from South Korea, a student protest. A young man in khakis and red sneakers, his face hidden behind a red bandanna, ducked under the swing of a police baton and picked up a gas canister, tossed it back toward the police lines. The news went to commercial before she started in on Mike again. “Why Utah? What kind of wide-open spaces are there in Utah that you can’t find in Texas?”