“Let’s waltz,” she said. “I want you to hold me.” She raised herself up just enough to kiss him quickly on the lips before tugging him out of his chair. He spun her around and pulled her close. She put her mouth to his ear. “Your colleagues are all hitting on me,” she said, clearly not complaining. “I left so they’d direct their attentions to Violet. I’m worried about her.”
“Don’t worry about Vi. She’s—”
“She’s in emotional peril, I think.”
“Peril?”
“It’s a perfectly good word,” she said and laughed.
Over the exuberance of Lolly’s hair, he recognized not Billy or Billy’s date, but a dress, the dress he had purchased the day before Lolly arrived, a fantastically expensive and elegant dress. He focused so sharply on the garment that it took him a moment to realize that the woman in the dress was Lise and that she was dancing with Billy Atlas. He spun himself and Lolly away from them. His heart pounded farcically. He should have known something like this was coming. Reflexively, he told himself that it was stupid to blame Billy. If a pretty girl asked Billy Atlas to do something—almost anything—he was helpless to do otherwise. But goddamn him anyway. Where’s his fucking brain? Of course it was Lise who had promised to disappear. Instead, she was pressing herself against his best friend, moving in approximate time to “I Wish I Were Blind,” trying to dodge the clod’s big feet.
“I’m getting dizzy,” Lolly said. “I’m going to swoon.” After a second, she added, “I always wanted to say that.”
He stopped spinning her. They were on the other side of the floor now. She leaned up to be kissed again, which he obliged. He believed the night he met Lise to be one of the most extraordinary of his life, although why he felt that way was mysterious to him. He and Lise had spent two weeks together—about the same amount of time he’d had in London with Lolly. Lise had given their interlude names: The Days of Beer and Dandelions, The Year of Living Dangerously in Two Weeks, The Fourteen Days of the Condor with Sex Involved. The names weren’t all that clever, he realized, but when she’d popped them off, they’d made him laugh. He had gone to see her at Whispers and Lies and pretended to be shopping for his wife. The place had intimidated him. It was an old house made over for retail, and both the prices and the garments were out of his league. Lise tried on one thing after another, helping him shop for this supposed wife, and finally he purchased what seemed to him a simple black dress but he came to understand that its fabric and cut made it special, made it emphasize the wearer’s beauty while the dress itself seemed to disappear.
Lise had known what was happening while it was going on, how he had cornered himself into buying something for her, and he realized later, after looking at the credit card receipt, that she had shown him the least expensive options, which were nonetheless more than he had ever spent on a gift for anyone. He didn’t care. He owed her a parting souvenir.
The song ended and Lolly wanted a drink. “You go ahead and dance,” she said, pronouncing it in the English fashion, dahnce. Once, years ago, when James was a boy traveling in Europe and trying to pick up girls, he had ruined an opportunity for himself when the Danish blonde he was squiring had ridiculed his U.S. pronunciation of dancing, and each time Lolly said dahnce seemed to him like a slap in the face. She was from New Jersey, after all.
“I’m going to find your sister,” she continued. “I’m genuinely concerned for her. You should be, too.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said, confident she would turn him down. She liked the attentions of men. James didn’t blame her. He liked the attention of women. He didn’t think Lolly was in any danger of falling for one of his colleagues.
“No, you want to dahnce,” she said. “Go ahead, but not with any of the pretty ones.” She pointed then across the room. “Dahnce with that Barnstone character.”
“Pass.”
“Dahnce with some of the bloody wives, then. Make their night.”
No sooner had Lolly left than Kat McIntyre grabbed his arm to drag him out to the floor. “She’s a real cutie, your fiancée,” Kat said. “I’m happy for you.”
Kat was a polished but predictable dancer. He supposed that people thought that about him in his day-to-day life, polished but predictable. His sister seemed especially disappointed in the realities of his existence. She even seemed to have doubts about his marrying Lolly. The song ended and another began, a fast one. He and Kat continued dancing. When he spotted Lise and Billy again, he understood that he wanted terribly to lead Lise to the parking lot and have sex with her in Billy’s ugly Dart. He and Lolly would undoubtedly make love in his big, comfortable bed after this event was over, but the two acts barely seemed related—the furtive, urgent humping in the public dark and the slow caress beneath the dim of a nightlight. Both activities were swell, but they were hardly the same thing.
He and Lise had fucked on the beach, and he not only enjoyed it but appreciated that a woman might not mind sand on her butt in order to have sex by the ocean with the likes of him. But his fiancée was here now, and that time of his life was gone, and probably the beach was gone, too, he thought, washed away, a new layer of sand supplanting the old, much the way layers of flesh rotate themselves over the body. He was soon to be married, and by the time he took Lolly to that beach they would probably have children and middle-aged spreads, and the beach would be a plutonium mine, and the only women there would wear goggles and space suits and breathe through their mouths, including Lolly, his beautiful Lolly, and the government wouldn’t let nursing mothers within five miles of the place. Not that he’d ever had sex with a nursing mother on the beach or, for that matter, anywhere else, and he’d never had sex of any kind in a mine, but still, who would want a plutonium mine where you used to have sex with a lovely young woman, the downy hair on her sacral dimples like mist on water, her young body eager to be handled? What did it make the two of them if not utterly alive? With Lise, he felt powerfully virile and handsome, as potent as a manhattan mixed by a bartender with a heavy hand and trying to impress a woman—maybe the same woman, small-chested and perfect in the ass, and so lovely (okay, not beautiful; Lise was not even pretty, but incredibly lovely) as to make him forget whatever was fucked up in his life, at least for the duration of the evening, her panties catching for an instant between her thighs as she pulled them down.
“Fuck your boss,” she had said to him. They had been talking about his promotion. Lise was against it. She thought he should work with clients, finish his study, become a psychologist. He had tried to explain all that John Egri had done to make it possible for Candler to take over, but she had interrupted. “Do what’s in your heart.” Such a corny line, but she had delivered it without irony or—there she was again, in the black dress, her skin pale in this light, contrasting with the dress, her ass shaking for him and him alone. That ass was expertly aimed and sending its ineluctable messages. Did Billy suppose she was doing anything but using him?
“Hey,” Kat said. A space had opened beneath the colored lights near the stage, and she wanted the maneuvering room. He followed her, knowing that now Lise would see him dance, and his ass would be (there could be no doubt) aimed at her and, yes, his ass would be speaking for his heart. Not that he was in love with Lise (that wasn’t possible), but he was still occupied with her mind and heart and body. He wished his ass could articulate this precisely, but he knew it would merely be saying Desirable me is aware of desirable you, here where I cannot have you and you cannot have me. Or something like that. Something like that (why deny it?) times ten.
He did a triple spin, three full revolutions, and felt the incredible desire to lean forward and kiss Kat as a way to punctuate the sentence his body was conveying to the woman who was not his fiancée and who was dancing with his best friend.
He did not kiss the woman dancing with him, but his able, shifting feet were on fire.
Slow-dancing at the Phantom Limb, his arms wrapped
around a gorgeous woman, high as a communications satellite, Billy Atlas was ready to marry Lise. He didn’t know her last name, but he was ready to say I do. His divorce was final, and what the hey.
He hadn’t had sex with her. This was their first date, and he couldn’t help but notice the flickering glances in Jimmy’s direction. Okay, so what? Lise had called him, hadn’t she? She was here and in his arms (when the music was slow), and eventually, he had faith or wanted to believe or could at least imagine that she would want to be with him for the sake of him alone. Or not. He was a realist. He was thirty-three years old, and he’d had non professional sex with only two women. One of them, twenty-five times; the other, just the once. He’d had a girlfriend in middle school for a month (hand-holding while they were walking around campus was the gist of their relationship), and since then (excluding the citizenship angle) nothing. The long ago girlfriend was named Paulina Peters, and his mother had told him that she lived in the San Diego area now, too. Hope springs eternal, he thought. Paulina had dumped him when she found out he ate only Cheerios and potato chips. That was his diet for years, with the occasional baked potato and a morning glass of orange juice. Other foods were disgusting to him, and he could not stand to put them to his mouth. Jimmy introduced him to pizza and insisted he eat a slice, and of course, he liked it, even though it was a Pizza Shack pie—the worst restaurant pizza in the country. Billy had eaten pizza almost exclusively for six months, and by the end of that period he refused to eat Pizza Shack or frozen pies, preferring gourmet pizzas. He taught Jimmy the difference between good pizza and bad. Years later, as an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, Billy became a pizza chef. He genuinely knew pizza. It occurred to him that he could have gotten work again as a pizza chef, but the idea did not appeal to him. A step backward. He was now a man with health insurance, which had to be one of the sexiest things a guy could have these days.
Lise was a fantastic dancer. Most women were good dancers. He wasn’t. He was still looking for exactly what it was that he was good at that mattered. Knowing pizza lengthened the list of foods he was willing to eat, and now he liked a lot of different foods; also it had provided gainful employment. But unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life smelling of oregano, it wasn’t something that mattered beyond a single stage in his life. Not that being a good dancer particularly mattered, although it had gotten Jimmy laid at least a dozen times, and maybe, who knows, fifty or a hundred times. Maybe Billy had a lousy sense of what was going to matter.
For example, chess. Jimmy got a chess set from some dotty aunt of his when they were in high school, and he invited Billy to play and destroyed him. Billy didn’t like getting destroyed, and it seemed like knowing chess was a good thing in which to invest himself. Chess almost certainly would matter. It was a measure of intelligence, wasn’t it? There was no more challenging or sophisticated game, was there? Chess had legitimacy.
He read books and studied game histories. He joined the chess club. By the end of that same month, he was defeating Jimmy routinely, and by the conclusion of the school semester, he was the best player in the chess club. Within a year’s time, he played in competitions at the state level. The next summer, his mother sent him to chess camp, where a nine-year-old boy from Ecuador beat him twenty-seven consecutive times, and Billy quit studying chess. He could still out-maneuver nine out of ten players, but what did it matter? He could have played the nine-year-old another million times and never won. That kid was now twenty-something and likely having regular sex with Arina Mikhaylova or some other supermodel but most likely one of the Russians. In Russia, chess mattered. Maybe in Ecuador, too, who knows?
How about this: he valued people. He was good at that. He was valuing Lise the whole drive over and he made her laugh when they smoked dope even though she hadn’t gotten high, and he was valuing her now while they were dancing. He had picked her up in Jimmy’s car.
“You trying to impress me?” Lise asked when she saw the Porsche.
“You mean this old thing?”
“I know it isn’t yours,” she said, “and it’s a brainless car, anyway.” She smiled at him, and he imagined kissing her and falling into her mouth and staying there, sleeping like hard candy on her tongue.
“I can’t drive it either,” he told her. “It’s a stick. I stalled three times coming over. Jimmy’s sister wanted my car ’cause it has a backseat.”
Lise drove very competently. “Okay, I’m not endorsing the thing,” she said, “but it is fun to drive.” After a second, she added, “As long as you know how to shift and all.” She asked him to tell her things about himself that she didn’t know.
“That would be pretty much everything,” he said. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Something specific.”
He told her about his chess successes and ultimate failure.
Afterward, she said, “I’m going to tell you something I never told James. You ready? I have trouble recognizing faces. It’s a condition with a name and everything.” The dysfunction was called prosopagnosia, and she discovered only recently that she had it. “You tend to think your memory is messed up in general or that you’re dumb in a very specific way, but it has to do with locking in on a face, which I just don’t do. If I see somebody in a different context, or if maybe he’s cut his hair or changed his shirt, I don’t know him. It’s not like I’m blind, but most people pick up on facial arrangement some way I don’t get.” The underlying topic—why she hadn’t told Jimmy—took them all the way to Onyx Springs. Summarized: she was afraid he would think of her as damaged goods. She did not want to be in the same category as his clients.
Billy liked that conversation and in the basement of Danker, high on this Colombian pot that the utterly insane Vex brought, he told all his funny stories, the laugh always on him, but what diff did it make as long as she was laughing? Once they reached the bar, though, he ran out of material. He knew better than to go into detail about his marriage. He had discovered (the hard way) that discussing the truth about his arranged marriage, bimonthly sex, and eventual divorce was a turn off for women—and even for men. The Hao brothers had seemed especially put off by it, and Violet hadn’t even let him begin. Billy had known Violet forever, since he and Jimmy were eight. On the night she and Lolly arrived from London, Billy had waited up for them, taking advantage of the alone time to smoke dope on the patio. When Jimmy introduced him to Lolly, he said, “This is my buddy Billy. He’s been smoking pot on the patio. Don’t smoke on the patio, Billy. I’m a counselor and I can’t have a bust on the premises. This is my fiancée, Lolly.”
“Sorry,” Billy said, “and nice to meet you.”
“I’ll smoke with you,” Lolly said, “but not now. I only want to sleep now.”
From just beyond the door, Violet said, “You’re blocking the entrance.”
Jimmy and Lolly apologetically moved out of the way. Violet set down her suitcase to give Billy a hug. “Jimmy said you’d be here.” It was the kind of greeting he expected from her, the embrace combined with the noncommittal comment, a sort of intimate disdain.
He didn’t much care to tell Lise about any of that. What did people talk about? Sometimes Billy felt he had a great deal to hide and very little to discuss. There was pizza, still. He had held that back. Also, he had once owned a collection of three hundred bluegrass record albums, and he was knowledgeable about its roots, the differences between bluegrass and folk or country or old-time music, the difference between bluegrass and Irish folk music, the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between progressive bluegrass and traditional bluegrass. He’d owned (before he sold it) a bootleg album of Bill Monroe playing with Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt that Monroe and Scruggs had both signed. But he didn’t listen to bluegrass anymore.
At the conclusion of a Prince cover done with a country beat, Lise said, “Let’s sit.” They made their way to the lobby. She wanted a vodka collins and Billy ordered himse
lf a tap beer. He had a strange moment during which he thought the girl busing behind the bar was Karly Hopper. It wasn’t, of course, and when she straightened, fingers inserted in beer glasses that she had swished in soapy water and rinsed in a gray sink of slightly less soapy water, he realized she looked nothing like Karly except for being fit and brown-haired. Could Karly bus tables or work behind a bar? She’d definitely get a shitload of tips, and maybe she’d let him drink for free.
Returning with the drinks, he realized he was going to have to resort to pizza episodes. His mind was otherwise blank. Lise seemed to be studying him as she sipped her vodka. She put her hand on his arm and asked him what he had done in Flagstaff to make his living.
“I was a pizza chef for a couple of years, and then I worked at a convenience store.” He provided a few details about the U-TOTE-M chain of stores. He had worked at one store for the past ten years. “I guess I’ve been drifting.”
“The same job for a decade doesn’t sound like drifting,” Lise said. “Sounds more like an anchor.”
What he did not want to explain—what he did not think he could articulate—was the pleasure his job had given him. In some neighborhoods, a convenience store has a position of importance, given that everyone winds up there now and again. His role lent him authority. Not that people looked up to him so much as they recognized him, acknowledged his competence. He’d had a place in the community. People wondered why a guy like him was working at the U-TOTE-M, which made him think that the key to competence was finding something just below your level of ability. Too often it worked the other way around. He secretly suspected that this discovery would be in store for Jimmy if he got the job directing the center. Running a giant organization might be too much—or if he managed to be successful, it would come at the expense of something real in his personality: his sense of humor, maybe, or his ability to relax.
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