If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  “Beautiful,” he said, picking up a bookmark. “You made it look like a child drew these.”

  I wanted to ask him for gas money for this morning and for the trip I would be making later to drop off the bookmarks. The girls went to a private school thirty minutes away. But I felt too ashamed. Asking for money reminded me I had no real claim to their love.

  But Cal would pay anything to show his two daughters he loved them, especially after he and his wife had dragged each other through that nasty divorce. I sent the girls presents to her house using Cal’s credit card. I made their lunches for the next day in the office kitchen before I left on the afternoons Cal had the girls. I spread mayonnaise on turkey sandwiches, peeled carrots, and filled tiny containers with ranch dressing, and tied neat baggies of chocolate with ribbon.

  Other people would quit or at least find the work demeaning. I hadn’t gotten a promotion in the five years I’d worked for Cal, and I could be making more money somewhere else—money Robert and I could put toward a down payment. But this job made me comfortable, as though I’d found a knot of people who understood and appreciated me. Their dilemmas were mine to solve, and I solved them better than I did my own.

  * * *

  Robert and I had met ten years ago when we both worked for a labor union, he as the bookkeeper and I as the office manager. We worked for activists, which we felt good about, but we didn’t have to be activists ourselves, which made us feel even better.

  Then a new president and financial secretary were elected. The financial secretary would keep the books and do the taxes herself, so Robert lost his job. I was let go because the new administration was suspicious of the old. The former president had been ousted for using union funds to visit, repeatedly, a psychic who charged a hundred dollars an hour. He’d gone crazy, but he was my friend.

  Why hadn’t anything concerned me back then? Even when the president was charged with embezzlement, the idea that I might face my own consequences for my choices someday never seemed real to me.

  Robert and I fell in love in our waning days at the union. We whispered in the break room about our futures and complained that it wasn’t fair that we were suspected of complicity. Integrity, trust, honor: those things had been important to us back then. Robert said he hadn’t known about the president’s secret debit card until it was too late, and as soon as he found out, he told a trustee. I believed him at the time, and now I didn’t care.

  Robert and I were less in love now but we were still friends. There wasn’t any ill will between us, only boredom, and, on my part, occasional weeping in the shower. All that life, six years of marriage plus two years of dating, had passed serenely, without excitement or tragedy. We could have done with more money, but we always made rent, even if it meant putting groceries on credit. If only one of us had been mentally ill, or an alcoholic. If only I’d won the lottery one of those times I’d put a five-dollar bill down on the counter and asked for five easy picks.

  I stood over the stove that night, stirring ramen noodles for our dinner. The collection calls had distracted me. I’d looked through Robert’s spreadsheets of our finances when I’d gotten home, but nothing seemed strange to me. The usual expenses, the usual low balance left over at the end.

  “Robert?” I called. “I need the computer. I want to look at my credit score. Did you use the website that aggregates all the different reports out there?”

  Robert didn’t seem to hear me. His office popped with the sound of music and gunfire. He was playing his computer game in which he was a spy on the Titanic. The objective wasn’t to stop the ship from sinking, that happened regardless, but rather to stop World War I and the Russian Revolution from happening. I didn’t get the connection but trusted it was there.

  I turned the burner off and poured the noodles and their packets of salty powder into bowls.

  “What’s this?” I set his bowl down on a pile of papers, picking up a book that lay open, pages down, on the desk.

  Robert snatched it away. “Don’t,” he said.

  But I’d seen the title. “Cheater’s Guide to ‘Titanic: Adventure out of Time’!” I exclaimed. “You’re cheating at the game?”

  “Oh, come on, Beverly,” he said. “It’s a game.”

  “But you’ve been telling me about the complicated puzzles as though you’d figured them all out yourself.”

  Robert turned the computer off the way you weren’t supposed to, with one push of one button, and left the room. The book, with its answers and shortcuts, was small and depressing. We didn’t even have anything interesting to hide. Better not to fight at all.

  “You didn’t save your game,” I said quietly.

  He didn’t hear me.

  “I don’t care how you play the game!” I said loudly.

  Steam spiraled from the bowl of noodles, but even the steam looked pitiful, as though it could barely bring itself to rise.

  Robert returned, a sheepish smile on his face. Our fights never lasted long.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  He took the pair of chopsticks I’d set on his desk and clacked them together, then used them to pick up a strand of my hair and put it in his mouth. I smiled; he smiled. I put the book down on the desk but picked it up again. It had been covering an American Express bill with my name on it, addressed to Robert’s office.

  “Bev, don’t. That’s a mistake.”

  The bill unfurled in my hands, revealing a long list of charges. Gas, groceries, but also large amounts spent at Best Buy and on Amazon, and then other websites I didn’t recognize.

  “I was going to pay it all off. I just needed more time.” Robert’s face looked alien: his small mouth was open wide and red splotches appeared on his neck and cheeks as though he’d been hexed.

  Until he spoke, a part of me—a desperate, hopeful part—believed this to be part of the scam. Then it was as though I’d been sleeping on a plane, and I was thrown awake by the thump of wheels on the tarmac.

  “How much?”

  Robert hesitated. I stared him down.

  “Twenty thousand,” he said.

  A voice came back to me, one of the debt collectors on the phone. The number, so high, had made me completely sure it was a scam. But now Robert was standing there with his lie breaking apart between us, and I could hear myself snapping at the man on the phone. In my own memory I now sounded like the one who was wrong, a belligerent woman trying to get out of paying her bills.

  I let the bill fall to the floor and sat heavily in the office chair. It twirled vaguely beneath my weight. Robert stood before me, admitting to what he’d done, but I felt guilty, like a criminal surprised at having been caught. There was the bill with my name on it. It said I had spent that money; it said those numbers belonged to me.

  I asked Robert what he’d spent the money on, but he didn’t answer me, and I didn’t really want to know. Not tonight at least. I was just dumbstruck, and tired, and wanted to eat my pathetic dinner alone. I told Robert so, and he went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  The noodles had gone gummy. Moonlight shifted through the curtains and I listened to the night birds making a cacophony outside. To soothe myself, I thought of the motel room where the Beast and I had spent our night. I remembered the stained red carpeting and an electrical outlet dangling from the wall by its wires. I’d stood on the balcony in my ridiculous dress, watching a girl—my age, or a little older—swim the length of the pool in slow strokes. I could see her whole body: long legs shimmering in the pool lights, the wavy white of her bathing suit, her hair moving like a jellyfish as she swam.

  I’d turned to see Hadrian, his jacket removed, his tie undone and hanging from his neck. Had I gone to him or waited for him to come to me? Had he torn my dress off with the curtains wide open? No. I went inside and closed the door and the blinds. I think I might have tried to talk about poetry with him. I liked to write poetry back then, but mostly my poems were full of questions that made n
o sense, questions only a deranged person would ask. Oh, and didn’t we love to go into the river?

  * * *

  I was glad to find Cal full of anxious energy the next day at work. I needed a distraction. Robert and I had woken to our alarms and readied ourselves without speaking. Why hadn’t I thrown him out? Because I didn’t want him to put a motel on credit? Because I didn’t want to be alone? I had thought the two of us had been bearing our boredom silently, bravely, but Robert had been buying things to make himself happy. And what had he been buying? Only a horrible habit could require that amount of money. I wondered if it was gambling or pornography, or hookers or drugs. I almost missed my exit, so caught up was I in Robert’s imagined transgressions.

  I parked my car and was waiting for the weather report to come on the radio—my signal that it was time to walk the two minutes from the car to the office so I could clock in by eight—when Robert called. I ignored it. He texted me a photo of the Amex cut in half, a gesture that annoyed me since it seemed he’d done most of his shopping online, where he probably had the number saved.

  The morning brought a problem with one of the clients, a parking service called Safely Park. Cal had brokered the policy but now the carrier had canceled the general liability insurance because, when the policy was initially signed, Cal had forged the loss runs to make it appear as though Safely Park had never had an accident or filed a claim. But Safely Park crashed cars all the time.

  Cal was furious when the notice of cancellation was faxed over. He snapped at the sales staff and the customer service reps. The general liability specialist emerged from Cal’s office with her head hung. I caught her blotting tears in the kitchen. Somehow, this was everyone’s fault but Cal’s and mine, though I’d used Photoshop to make the loss runs look clean. “I’ll end up in the slammer right next to Cal,” I’d joked back then, but I grew nervous as the day went on. What if the carrier reported the fraudulent loss runs to the department of insurance? What if I did go to prison?

  Cal was on the phone all afternoon, calling in favors, saying he didn’t know how the mistake had happened. Finally, he slapped the phone into its cradle, which I heard from my desk outside of his office. I turned to see him take the bottle of Grey Goose from his desk, and he called out, “All clear! Get out of here, you scoundrels.”

  Everyone in the office clapped. I did too. We hated Cal when he yelled and we loved him when he let us leave at 3:00 p.m., even if we’d almost gotten arrested earlier that day.

  I lingered, and when everyone except Cal had left, I checked my credit rating. There was the American Express card, the balance glowering at me, and beneath it a Visa I didn’t recognize. I began weeping. I’d gotten pregnant on prom night, the night I’d spent with Hadrian. I stayed pregnant for twelve weeks, until I turned eighteen and didn’t need my parents’ permission. Getting rid of the baby then had been the right choice, but now, having a baby would never be an option, would never be feasible. I wondered if I could sue Robert, or put him in jail. But the truth was I was either bound to Robert, bound to the debt, or free of it but on my own.

  I put my head in my hands.

  “Beverly? You okay?”

  Cal had come out of his office.

  I swiped tears from my eyes and slowly gathered my things. Cal stood in his doorway, clutching the bottle of Grey Goose by his side. I avoided his eyes as I slipped my arms into my jacket. “Yeah. Yep. Just worried about today. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Everything’s really okay?” I said.

  “Oh, Bevie,” he said. “I would never throw you under the bus. If the DOI came for you they’d have to go through me first.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “What a day,” he said as he swung the bottle of vodka to his mouth. “I need to go get a drink.”

  I looked at him closely and saw tears brimming in his eyes.

  “I’m going to a concert tonight.” I didn’t know why I was telling him but I knew I didn’t want to see him cry. I hadn’t told Robert about the show, and as I spoke I knew I wasn’t going to.

  “What band?”

  “Someone’s I knew a long time ago. I don’t think the music will be very good.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “I have an extra ticket. It’s all the way in New Plains, though.”

  Sunlight pierced the window behind Cal’s head. He appeared to be thinking. We didn’t want each other. If we did, something would have happened by now. We just wanted to be a little less lonely; we wanted something different than what we had.

  * * *

  Cal and I ate dinner at the hotel bar, Cal guzzling vodka sodas, and then I drove us to the venue, a barn just outside of New Plains. I parked in a roped-off grass lot that spread away from the barn. Clusters of wild violets sprouted in the fields surrounding. Teenagers in heavy black boots stomped over them. Cal had fallen asleep on the way, and I sat in the car with the engine clicking, embarrassed that I’d cried, and surprised that I’d felt so strongly that I’d lost someone upon seeing my ruined credit, the rating persistently red on the screen. In a life of blind, vague longings, I’d seen clearly something I wanted, only to have it taken away.

  I nudged Cal awake. “Ready, or would you rather stay here?”

  “Ready.”

  The barn teemed with teenagers wearing black. They’d painted their faces to look like skulls, and some wore devil’s horns like I’d seen Hadrian wearing in the paper. I trudged in my pumps and nylons toward the door. Cal trailed behind, looking ill. The last of the sun fell on a boy selling T-shirts adorned with the band name. The t in Beastific was an upside-down Gothic cross.

  “Twenty bucks,” the kid said. He looked gaunt but his teeth had been straightened with braces.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “These kids are fucked up,” Cal said. He pointed to a group of girls staring ghoulishly from within the hoods of their sweatshirts, their eyes rimmed with heavy black eyeliner. “What parents would let their kids dress like this?”

  I thought of Cal’s girls and wondered what their futures would bring. Now they wore matching sapphire rings, Christmas gifts from Cal. What would they trade those rings for, when the time came?

  “They probably think we’re parents who wouldn’t let our kids go alone,” I said. “They’re probably wondering who here is the loser who came with their parents.”

  I warmed at the thought that one of these kids could be my own. I’d noticed a few women in parked cars, piles of coats in the back seats.

  “I’m going to find the bar,” Cal said.

  One long note resounded from inside the barn. The show had begun.

  I stood in the back and watched Hadrian sing into a microphone swinging from the ceiling. His face was the same face: strong chin and sunken eyes, high cheekbones. He was wearing his hair long again. He still looked boyish. I became, once again, the girl who wanted him, the girl who had teased him out of love, but standing there, I also felt the presence of all the time we’d been apart. We’d never even known each other in the first place. I’d had nothing to do with his angst. I was not the wicked bitch he sang about. Our lives had briefly overlapped, and that was it. These two feelings—I loved him, and we meant nothing to each other—combined to make me brazen.

  The crowd of teenagers moved chaotically, but I tried to shoulder my way into the mosh pit. I lost my breath quickly; my jostled bones felt like rattling tin cans. I was knocked to my knees, and a group of hands pulled me up and pushed me toward the back wall—the safe haven of the few adults who had chosen to come inside. I felt stupid, but no one seemed to notice me.

  Hadrian sang one song, then another. They all sounded the same to me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I wanted to talk to him, touch him. Above me the packed beams of the roof seemed to clasp their hands in prayer.

  The show ended, and my keys were in my hands but I didn’t go to my car. I milled around outside wi
th the rest of the people finishing their drinks or buying T-shirts and waiting for a chance to get an autograph. I didn’t see Cal. I put my keys back in my purse. And then a swell of sound rose from the crowd as the band emerged from the barn, their long hair flying in the breeze. Hadrian was close enough I could see the closed smile that shaped his jaw. And I knew, upon seeing it, that I wanted to know if he would recognize me. I thought of Robert as I shouldered through the crowd, nudging aside the girls who lingered around Hadrian. I pictured Robert at home, nosing around the Titanic, flipping through his book for clues.

  Then I was in front of Hadrian, and his eyes met mine with the blankness of a stranger’s.

  “Do you want me to sign something?” he asked, looking down at my hands, which weren’t holding a T-shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, fumbling through my purse. “I’m here to get something signed for my daughter. She couldn’t make it—she really wanted to come, but she had to work.”

  The lie came out like a ball of light: enthusiastic and with a trueness of spirit that even my truths didn’t always possess. I thought he might recognize my voice, but he didn’t seem to.

  “I was going to say,” Hadrian said, and his smile opened up a little, “that you don’t look like our typical fan.”

  I gave him a twenty, and he pulled a T-shirt from a box near his feet and signed his name to it. He handed it to me along with a flyer for an after party.

  “Bring your daughter if she gets off work,” he said. “We’ll take a photo.”

  And without saying anything else, he handed his attention over to the group of kids standing behind me, smoking impatiently.