Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  “It’s not the space itself. It’s what the space suggests. You can hardly find any Texas in Texas anymore; it’s all filled with people from Connecticut and New York. Guys who grew up wearing Topsiders now wear boots with their suits.”

  “Christ. You sound just like my father. We’re sitting having breakfast, the summer before he died. He looks out the window toward the other houses on our block and says, ‘Who put those other fucking houses there?’ And they’d been there all along. Before we were. For about a hundred and forty years.”

  “Exactly. No matter how much I sell, how much money I make, I’m never going to be a part of the old Texas, all that Stetson-hat and Sons of the Alamo crap. I didn’t go to school up in Austin. Daddy wasn’t a federal judge, there isn’t a library or post office named after my great-great-great-uncle somewhere. The real Texas is closed to people like me.”

  “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? You have every advantage I can think of. Every one.”

  “Maybe thirty years ago that was true. Nowadays you can’t even buy the idea of Texas. Costs too much, for one. And it’s stupid to think things will be any different in Utah, any better. But I want to try. I want clean air and jolting winds and peace. Peace most of all. That’s the whole point. Look at these people here, these Mormons, with their eternal marriage and their principles of modesty. The army drove them out of Iowa and Missouri, and do you know what they did? They came all the way to Utah just to be left alone.” He gave her a sheepish laugh, unfolded himself out of the bed, went to fetch a glass of water. He drank and let his other hand rest on his hip. Mary Beth saw how the width of Mike’s shoulders almost matched his waist. He was rectangular, larger than Texas himself. He was Alaska.

  “But you could go anywhere. Seattle. Upstate New York. Why not Montana? Or Colorado?” Mary Beth sighed and slid down flat on her back, still staring at the ceiling.

  Mike climbed back on the bed, pulled at his trunklike legs until they folded into a yoga-like pretzel. “Seattle is over. And the assholes have already gotten to Colorado. Filled to the brim with Californians.”

  Mary Beth relaxed, showing some of her well-appointed teeth. “That’s because there’s no space left in California.”

  “I don’t really know how this happened. Texas went all sour on me. Like a song that I’d heard all summer on the radio. You’re never sure when it happens, but by the time Labor Day rolls around, the thing is ruined forever.”

  “So there’s only going to be space enough in Utah?”

  “There has to be a chance.”

  For Mary Beth, the discussion existed like the moment between burning a finger and actually registering the sensation. She was still debating how much of a reaction she would allow herself to show. “How far have you looked into this? I’m just hoping that you haven’t found anything yet. That you haven’t made commitments.”

  Mike said, “I haven’t done much of anything. But I’m sticking around. That’s the one resolution I made. I came here to stake a claim, find a Utah homestead.”

  Mary Beth pulled a pillow to her lap, petted it like a cat. “I think that’s excellent. I really do. Sounds like a more ambitious resolution, as opposed to the usual ‘I’ve got to lose twenty pounds’ crap. When does this little surveying project begin?” She kept expecting a more specific invitation. But she wasn’t going to spell it out for him. There were any number of ways he could say the right thing. Help me find a house. Help us find our house. His vagueness was exasperating. She had spent years imagining her future, and Gabriel’s, and even the most fanciful versions of what she imagined had never included Utah. She wasn’t even certain that she’d imagined Mike as part of it. And maybe he was being obtuse, but he wasn’t exactly spelling out where she and her son fit in to all of this. He hadn’t said anything explicitly, and to her, her future and that of her son were far too important to assume she belonged in someone else’s future too.

  “Tomorrow morning. After I drop you off, I’m meeting a guy. The guru of Great Basin real estate. We’re taking out the Jeep and scouting for a homestead.”

  Her passing thought: their coming to an end was logical, even inevitable. She should have said no, no to the idea of the trip, no to the idea of taking up with Mike in the first place; her late father called that way of thinking “paralysis by analysis,” yet here she was, in bed, next to a man who was her boss and her lover and who apparently did not think of himself as her future husband. She’d come to Utah filled with questions, and now the answers she was most afraid of were here, taking up space beside her in a hotel bed.

  There wasn’t much else to say. Soon Mike rolled away, perhaps feigning sleep but certainly showing that the discussion had been tabled for now. She wondered what New Year’s Eve at Mike’s house would have looked like, Mary Beth in a simple black dress serving a dinner that she’d labored over for hours. She wanted all the comforts of home, to dice the shallots and herbs for the sauce, to cook a five-course feast on the $4,000 range that Mike used only as a storage cabinet for his pots and pans. She wanted Gabriel helping in the kitchen, tasting sauces and batters out of stainless steel bowls, decorating sugar cookies with rainbow-colored sugar sprinkles. She didn’t want to head home alone and have an almost three-hour flight to think about where she’d gone wrong.

  Utah would be solely his decision, and even in the middle of the night, Mary Beth couldn’t fault his reasoning. He wasn’t a Texan any more than she was, so maybe leaving wasn’t a bad idea, not for Mike and maybe not for her. She just wished she’d been a party to the decisions he’d already made. In his new home, wherever it might be, she would not be a partner or a helpmate. She would be nothing more than another of his accessories.

  She felt restless, consumed by her inability to sleep. Mike wasn’t having that problem. He breathed with a rhythm like a shallow purring, a melody that, in her own bed, Mary Beth had always found soothing. Not tonight, though, so she threw back the blanket, slipped from the bed, and headed to the bathroom.

  She hadn’t been able to sleep without difficulty for years. She needed the cool side of the pillow, clean sheets, the occasional ten milligrams of diazepam, the calm of a controlled environment. In her own apartment, Mary Beth let the air conditioner, a window unit that spat a fine black dust onto the floor, console her with its autonomic noises. Even in optimum conditions, sleep never came in torrents, as she suspected it did for Mike and most normal people. The world was too intrusive, her heart too insistent, to allow more than an hour or two of sleep at a time. When she was lucky, she could string together three or four of these breaks in a night and be a reasonable facsimile of herself in the morning, after, say, three cups of coffee. She had tried everything, prescriptions that left her muzzy-headed, exercise, valerian root, a black satin sleep mask and yellow foam earplugs to block out the world. The world came anyway.

  She knew only one reliable remedy. She eased herself into the empty bath, the plastic of the molded tub cold against her skin. She piled together a temporary bed of ample, plush towels, then made a pillow out of the white terry hotel robe and sprawled out, tensing and relaxing her legs. The small knot of muscle in her midcalf burned with a pleasant feeling that bordered on overexertion, a consequence of the evening’s dancing in high heels.

  She bit into a towel, the texture raw on her tongue. She liked the idea of him walking in, knew how much he would enjoy watching the rest of the performance. That’s what she was picturing as her hand began to work a little faster, as her legs moved wider to accommodate her movements. She wanted to make him feel hungry, carnivorous.

  She slithered lower in the tub and jumped at feeling the plastic—the simulated porcelain—against her thigh. She wanted something real, a clawfoot tub, real tile walls. She wanted a home. The summit of her own climax moved perceptibly closer; she did not need a finger inside her any more than she needed to add details to the fantasy in her mind: Mike standing over her, watching. A husband. As she worked at that most sensitive part of h
er anatomy, the noise came from her in one long, shallow exhalation, and her orgasm was there, tepid, as furious as a damp sparkler, something left over from the year before.

  11

  ROOM-SERVICE dinners fell into two categories, romantic and necessary, and now, in the middle of the night, Cadence could see nothing romantic in the sediment-choked dregs of her empty wineglass, the grease-smeared plates. A glance at the clock radio told her the New Year was nearly two hours old in the Central Time Zone, that its occasion had come and gone without her noticing. She’d slept through it.

  At least it was quiet, Michigan Avenue some twenty-seven floors below no longer ringing with the evening’s sonata of car horns and the occasional drunken shout.

  She was angry because she’d gone to bed with him again and hadn’t said anything. If they were going to keep fooling around, then Cadence wanted to do it in her own particular manner. She was willing to permit access to her body, but she was going to demand certain attentions, a minimum of his ham-handed groping. Thinking of how to explain this to Chadley, how to correct his errant techniques, Cadence’s mind drifted to Richard.

  Richard’s habits—browsing the Sunday Times naked save for his tortoiseshell reading glasses, bringing a glass of wine to the bedside table and never drinking it, even his more earthy proclivity toward cleaning his toenails with the tines of a dinner fork—seemed endearing quirks now that she could view him from seven weeks’ distance. She felt a comfortable abandon when they were together. He could make her laugh too, even during the awkward moments of their lovemaking when his feet tangled into a maze of sheets and blankets and threatened to throw them both onto his apartment’s hardwood floor.

  It was never going to be like that with Chadley, even with the lubrication of three stiff cocktails. She looked at Chadley’s face and saw only the imperfections, the small places where he was not careful enough with his shaving, the one stray hair always poking out of his left nostril. And then there was the fucking.

  At least there had been some recent improvement, less of the thrust and counterattack approach that reminded Cadence of the worst of her drunken college couplings. Too much of how Chadley performed was just prelude to something else, the next thing implied by the placement of his fingers or the pushing of his hands. Cadence showed her frustration by simply picking up Chadley’s hand and putting it where she desired. Richard had never needed such remedial instruction.

  She missed Richard’s way of expressing his needs, when she would beg him to tell her what he thought about, what secret film loop rolled in his head, while he masturbated. She asked him to tell her everything as long as she appeared in the fantasy somewhere; whatever he asked of her, she would gladly try.

  With Chadley, each new encounter felt more like she was in survival mode, their lovemaking an awkward mix of recklessness and sensible precautions. She could not imagine how the provisional approaches they were taking might dissolve into a sea of spontaneity. They used condoms, and Chadley never broached the subject of feeling skin on skin.

  Cadence could give herself over to a man in any manner she chose—she would tell them they could have her any way they pleased, and for most of them, that was enough. By the time most of the men she had known were able to give voice to their desires, it was too late, too late for Cadence anyway. Only Richard could let the darkness out of himself and know that in the morning he would still be able to close the lid on that box. He announced his desires—I am going to fuck you hard—and then acted; the hottest thing she could think about was Richard whispering in her ear about how desperate he was to taste her, to fuck her. The appearance on his face, the concentration and release, became something she always thought about when she was with Richard, and now those thoughts of Richard intruded on her moments with Chadley. Eventually, she supposed, it would be this way when she was alone and her hands started their fundamental ministrations to the needs of her body. It would become a need, and the need would become imperative. And she would think of Richard. And thinking of Richard, she knew, was the part that turned her on.

  Chadley rose up on his elbows. “What are you doing?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Cadence admitted. The thought of waking to a plate of day-old French fries congealed in grease made her want to retch, as did the pile of tissues next to the bed, all lacquered with the fluids of half-inspired lovemaking. She took the greasy plate, the tissues, all of it, and dumped the pile onto the room-service cart, pushed it into the cavernous hallway.

  “What time is it?”

  Cadence returned, shimmied under the covers. “Almost two. We missed it. I didn’t come all the way to Chicago just to miss the New Year.”

  Chadley turned and gave her a garlic-and-booze-riddled kiss before saying, “You didn’t miss it. You were otherwise occupied.”

  “Okay, fine, I didn’t miss it, exactly. But isn’t the point of New Year’s Eve that you’re there, right at the moment? The moment is what makes it special.” Cadence could tell Chadley was more focused on what they had been doing at the stroke of midnight.

  “I thought it was a pretty good moment. But let me be the first. Happy New Year.” He leaned in for a kiss again, and Cadence withdrew, watching the telltale point of his persistent tongue rising from between his lips, then departing quickly, a rodent emerging from its burrow.

  Chadley hopped out of bed and carried his condom to the bathroom garbage can. He yelled back at her, “There’s champagne in the fridge. You can’t have an occasion without champagne.”

  Cadence grabbed the bottle by its neck and inspected the label. It was one of the usual brand names that most guys Chadley’s age had memorized from films; that meant he’d been too shy to ask for help. Richard would have consulted the hotel’s sommelier, had something delivered. “Impressive,” she said, picking at the bottle’s foil cap.

  When Chadley came out of the bathroom naked, a white hotel towel draped over his shoulders, she noticed how the girdle of his hips looked boyish, slim, almost hairless. All she could think of was the other men she had been with, men she had loved, Richard especially, their musculature, their entirely manly appearance.

  “I didn’t think you were going to stay,” he said. “I just kept thinking that something would come up. I keep expecting for us to be interrupted.”

  So he was smart enough to feel her ambivalence. When she’d spent the night in Richard’s bed, she could often feel the gentle waves of nervousness roll off Richard, as if he was always anticipating the worst possible news from her. She could calm him with a touch, a hand on the flat of his chest. But what she felt from Chadley was different, a timidity that reminded her he was a stand-in.

  She wanted to be alone, now, to open the windows to Chicago’s blasting cold, extract the spare blankets from the closet, and cocoon herself against the harshest winter she could imagine; she wanted to watch the city buses sloshing diagonally up the street in a sudden squall, businessmen in trilbys and fedoras turning up the collars of their Chesterfield coats and struggling up the avenue against the wind. She would watch until the city ground to a halt and then wake to room-service coffee and a bath as hot as she could stand. Or, better yet, she could leave. A forty-dollar cab ride to O’Hare and the first flight home would fix everything. Among all her impulsive enthusiasms, this might have been the dumbest, thinking that she could spend the weekend with a near-stranger and distract herself with the mildest of hedonisms, a few cocktails, a good steak.

  She turned the television to a news channel and put the volume on low, just loud enough for her to distinguish between the newscasters and the commercials, and hoped the blink of the screen might hypnotize her into something resembling rest. She did not think she could sleep with this quiet. She wanted all those familiar noises to fill her up.

  Still, she’d never really shared any of these domestic visions with Chadley, and she couldn’t see that changing. “What were you going to do if you were stuck here alone?”

  “Probably order more food, watch a
movie.”

  “What kind of movie would that be?” she said, adjusting the sheet to cover her breasts.

  Chadley grabbed the remote control and pulled up the menu for the adult films. “The businessman’s special, of course.” But Cadence winced at the titles: Where the Boys Weren’t, A Taste of Chocolate, Naughty Newcummers 17, Rocco Goes to Romania. They all held a curiosity for her, but this was a longing she would rather keep to herself. She and Richard had even watched one of those Faces of Death videos, which left her understanding two things simultaneously: first, how distasteful it was that someone was making money off those videos, and, second, how her own voyeuristic gaze had proven that the human psyche had a remarkable capacity for getting, and staying, numb.

  But this curiosity was not for sharing with Chadley. She knew how he liked to think of himself as a charming rogue, convincing enough to talk a random woman—the kind he flirted with in the laundry room or the grocery store—into performing for the camera. Cadence doubted he had any particular gift for persuasion; nothing he said could convince a woman to try the secret things these movies suggested to him—women with comical dimensions and artificially lightened hair who claimed to want to take on Chadley and all his friends, who enjoyed taking it anywhere he wanted to put it.

  Cadence could not help but think that porn had ruined an entire crop of otherwise fuckable men; she didn’t need the Chadleys of the world, their baldly imitative techniques: a quick slap of her ass, or going down on her with a flapping, clownlike tongue. She wasn’t about to perform for him either. Cadence did not want to play any role other than herself. Already she imagined her return flight in a wistful way. Chadley wouldn’t know enough to say his good-byes at curbside, to offer only a modest kiss. She pictured him ruining the moment, doing something crass that only he could assume might be sexy, like bringing his fingers to his face, telling her that he could smell the traces of her that remained. She shivered because she had him figured as the kind of boy-man who thought whispering could make the word cunt sound sexy.