The results of being himself, however, were pretty bad.
WOMAN NUMBER ONE
She was at the Ivy Bookshop on Falls Road, looking at a shelf of staff recommendations.
She was in her thirties, he guessed, but she was dressed younger, in ripped jeans, flip-flops, and a T-shirt. Her hair was curly, and a little wild. This seemed like Mitch’s wheelhouse—a bookish woman in a bookstore looking at books—and he briefly imagined them together. Not sexually together, though. He actually imagined them reading on a bench in Patterson Park. That wasn’t the point of all this, but it was a nice thought anyway.
She bent down and leaned forward to read the handwritten note card above a thick paperback. Mitch noticed that the staff member who’d recommended the book was named Deirdre.
“Not sure I’d trust that one,” Mitch said.
She appeared startled, which made sense, of course, because Mitch could’ve been a murderer or a sex trafficker for all she knew. “Why not?” she asked.
“Well, that’s Deirdre up there, and I happen to know that she’s a bit of a drinker.”
Mitch and the woman looked over at the lady behind the counter. She was sitting on a stool, quietly organizing Harry Potter wrapping paper. He had no idea if she was a drinker or, in fact, if she was even Deirdre. He just thought it’d be a funny thing to say.
The woman with the wild curly hair, however, did not. She smiled politely and escaped to the biographies.
“I’m not a sex trafficker; I’m an English teacher,” he wanted to say, but that probably would’ve made it worse.
WOMAN NUMBER TWO
She was a barista at the coffee shop near Mitch’s school.
She had a nose ring, and she looked cute in her red apron, and she had punkish, angular hair that he liked. She was younger than the woman in the bookstore, but he had no idea by how much.
He’d never seen her there before, so he assumed she was new, and he imagined her making him some elaborate coffee drink in her underwear after sex—some crazy thing with nutmeg and finely ground beans from Guatemala. And because he was imagining things, he gave her a shoulder-blade tattoo of an exotic bird and an airy loft apartment downtown, the kind in which artistic people live in movies.
“Hey there,” she said. “Can I help you?”
Mitch looked up at the chalk-written menu over the counter. He normally just ordered a simple black coffee, but that wasn’t much of a conversation starter.
“I feel like trying something new today,” he said.
“Um, okay,” she replied.
“Got any recommendations?”
The barista sighed so dramatically that she seemed to partially deflate, and the people in line behind him murdered him with their eyeballs.
“I don’t know, dude,” she said. “Do you like tea or what? I don’t even really drink coffee.”
WOMAN NUMBER 2.5
This one got half credit, because their interaction only occurred in his mind.
He was in the frozen foods section at Giant, looking at pizzas, which required his full attention because his children had some pretty strong opinions about frozen pizza. He’d once tried serving them Newman’s Own with uncured organic pepperoni, and there’d nearly been a goddamn riot.
A girl in a Towson Tigers T-shirt and jean shorts breezed down the aisle like a gazelle—young and absolutely beautiful. Mitch was old enough to be her father or, at the very least, her super-creepy uncle, so he just looked back at the pizzas and did his best not to stare. He couldn’t help but remember a line from an underrated Steve Martin movie, My Blue Heaven, and he played the scene out in his head.
Excuse me, miss. You know, it’s dangerous for you to be in this section.
Why’s that, sir?
Because you could melt all this stuff.
It occurred to Mitch that, instead of trying so hard to have sex, he should be taking a moment to be thankful that he’d ever had sex in the first place.
What was he expecting to come of these interactions, anyway?
He didn’t know. But it would’ve been nice to get something. Anything, really. A smile. A laugh. Any sign at all that maybe he had a chance at this; that in the last fifteen years he hadn’t somehow gone and become utterly invisible.
* * *
—
And now he was at spin class, wheezing his ass off and gawking at the instructor, the ripped redhead, Tara.
Alan was supposed to come with him, but he’d bailed at the last minute, so it was just Mitch in a room full of sweaty strangers. They were six collective minutes into a seated climb, and the room was starting to come unglued.
“Who’s ready for a little break?” Tara shouted.
“Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi blared through the speakers in the ceiling. It was the Saturday Morning Eighties Ride, and Tara was wearing pink leg warmers.
“Well, tough shit!” she shouted. “ ’Cause you’re not getting one!”
Tara smiled big and bright, reveling in the desperate-sounding responses. Sweat poured down her face and chest, pooling into a dark spot on her sports bra.
“Eight, seven, six!” she shouted.
Mitch wondered if he might pass out.
“When I get to one, we’re standing up, you guys! ’Cause anything worth doing is worth standing up for, right? Right!”
It was classic spin-instructor dialogue. Senseless, but somehow motivational.
“Five, four! And when you stand, add five to your resistance and tell me how much you love it!”
On “one,” Mitch and the rest of the room stood on their pedals, and a shock of vivid pain traveled up his lower back. But the new angle revealed Tara’s stomach and thighs. Her skin glistened. The track lights over their heads were expertly installed and angled to highlight every twitching muscle on her body, and Mitch thought about her sweat-streaked lips and what they might taste like, all wet and salty.
He wondered, had she ever kissed someone while riding her spin bike? Was that even possible? Did she have a bike at home that she sometimes rode wearing only her underwear?
And then their eyes met.
This sometimes happened in spin class. Tara would scan the room, assessing the pain she was causing, and her eyes would lock briefly on his. This time it felt different, though. Longer than usual. Like something. A moment, maybe.
He was stricken with shyness, of course, but he kept his head up and held her gaze. And, despite the pain and physical exhaustion, he did his best to smile, because maybe that was all he needed to do. Maybe it wasn’t about being funny or cool or suave or having a good opening joke about frozen food. Maybe it was just about smiling and making eye contact with another human being.
“Hey, blue shirt!” Tara shouted. “This isn’t a spectator sport. Move your ass!”
23
Later, as Mitch drove home from the gym, he reminded himself that Jessica had had sex with someone else.
For the most part, he’d been good at compartmentalizing this fact, putting it in a small metal box and burying it deep in the dark recesses of his psyche. Driving, though, was his weakness. His guard dropped and his brain spun, and there it was—the inescapable fact of it—blinking like a neon sign on some passing bar window.
Jessica was right. He didn’t get to be mad at her for this. This was part of it. Their experiment. The evolution of their marriage. But that didn’t mean that he had to like it.
Behind him, four long pieces of wood rattled in the wayback of his Honda CR-V. It was their broken bed again. He snickered as he imagined his students reacting to this.
That’s a metaphor, Mr. B.!
Yeah, no shit, genius.
As it turned out, Luke was right. The garbagemen didn’t take things like that. Mitch found them on the ground the morning after trash n
ight, next to his empty garbage cans. A bird had crapped on one of the pieces for good measure. They were too long to fit properly in the back of his car, so they poked up over the kids’ booster seats. Mitch looked at them now in the rearview mirror and made a mental note to take them to the dump. And then he made another mental note to figure out where in the hell the dump was—if one even existed.
NPR was on the radio. The Saturday-morning host was interviewing a musician Mitch didn’t know about his new jazz piano album. As he sometimes did when listening to quiet conversations on NPR, Mitch imagined that he was the one being interviewed.
So, Mitch, what’s your advice? What would you say to all the aspiring swingers out there? All the young husbands like you, looking to laugh in the face of thousands of years of marital tradition?
Well, that’s a tough one, particularly because the word “swinger” is so gross.
It is, isn’t it? There isn’t really a word for it that isn’t gross, is there? Maybe that’s a sign that you’re a fucking idiot, and that this entire thing was a huge, huge mistake.
Were you allowed to say “fuck” on NPR?
The jazz conversation ended, and a guy with a British accent started reading international news.
The light at the intersection up ahead turned red, and Mitch eased to a stop next to some teenagers. Three boys—high school kids, his students’ age. They hung their arms out the open car windows to catch some sun. They were listening to rap music. Mitch rolled his windows down, too, and nudged the volume up on NPR, because at that moment, he felt an overwhelming need to give them a firsthand look at what each of them would someday become.
Halfway to death. In a sensible, fuel-efficient compact SUV. Listening to public radio.
* * *
—
As he drove up the street toward his house, Mitch saw something he wasn’t expecting: his next-door neighbor’s BMW, in the daylight.
It was parked in James and Ellen’s driveway, and as he passed, Mitch saw James. He was standing next to his car looking at his own house. If Mitch wasn’t mistaken, James appeared to be pensive.
Mitch pulled into his driveway and got out. He put his head down and made for the front door, trying to appear oblivious. It didn’t work, though, because James was waving at him. “Hey there, Mitch!” he said.
“Hey, James.”
For the entire time they’d been neighbors, this had usually been the extent of it in terms of interacting. At most, maybe there’d be something harmless about the weather or tree fungus or the Orioles, so Mitch was surprised when James said, “You got a second?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Mitch diverted through the grass and found himself shaking James’s hand, as if they’d just met. James wore a pair of jeans and a nice tucked-in Ralph Lauren polo, and Mitch felt self-conscious in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and biking shorts. James’s teeth looked less aggressively white in the sunshine, despite his deep tan.
“You get a workout in?” asked James.
“I did,” said Mitch. “Spin class.”
“Nice. Good way to start out a Saturday, huh?”
“Gotta keep it tight,” Mitch said, because he wasn’t good at small talk. The two men took a moment to stand silently in the driveway, nodding at the pavement.
“I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Ellen and I…” He trailed off.
“Yeah. Jess and I were sorry to hear about it.”
James frowned. Luke’s new Jeep was parked up near the garage. It hadn’t moved since arriving the week before.
“Awesome Jeep, by the way,” Mitch said.
James regarded the shining 4×4. “Not bad, huh? I’m pretty sure Luke still thinks I’m an asshole, though.”
Mitch did some more nodding.
“I’ve gotta teach him to drive it, still,” said James. “It’s a manual. The clutch is giving him trouble.”
“They can be tough,” said Mitch.
With the topic of the Jeep thoroughly explored, the two men had run out of things to say, and Mitch was planning his escape. And then James said, “Marriage isn’t easy, is it?”
“No argument there.”
“Luke’s always spoken very highly of you, Mitch,” said James. “He really loves your class.”
“That’s nice to hear. He’s a wonderful student. My best one, actually. Don’t think I’m supposed to rank them, technically. But he is. Good babysitter, too.”
“It’s funny,” said James. “English was always my weakest subject. The reading and writing. Never really my thing, you know?”
Mitch heard this often as a teacher, usually from fathers. He used to interpret it as an insult—a knock on his masculinity—but over time, feeling that way got to be exhausting. “Well, it’s not for everyone,” he said.
James nodded. “I think this…this transition…might be rough on Luke. I’d look at it as a personal favor if maybe you checked on him from time to time. You being his favorite teacher and all. Plus, you see him every day. I’m just gonna have…well, every other weekend or so. We’re still ironing all that out.”
The nerve of this fucking guy, Mitch thought. Still, he was struck by his neighbor’s sudden vulnerability. James’s expression was set and stoic, like they were exchanging stock tips in the driveway, but Mitch could see it in the other man’s eyes.
“Glad to,” he said. “He’s a great kid.”
James thanked him and opened his car door. Mitch noticed a box of neatly rolled neckties in the passenger seat. There must have been twenty-five of them, arranged, apparently, by color. As James climbed in, he said, “I know I’m gonna be the bad guy here. I’ve accepted that. It’s just the way it is, right?”
Mitch had no idea how to respond, so he just nodded and looked over at his own house. He’d never seen it from this vantage point before, and it looked different. Smaller, somehow—a trick of lights and angles.
“But shit, man,” James, said, “since when is it a crime to want to be happy?”
24
She saw him before he saw her.
It always feels like an invasion of privacy when that happens—when you see someone who doesn’t know they’re being seen.
He passed a shoe store, a mall kiosk that sold drones, and Banana Republic, and then he walked into the food court. He was as beautiful as he’d been when she left him at his narrow house in the city a week ago. He wore a V-neck T-shirt, jeans, and canvas sneakers. Someone else would look like a slob in things so simple, but on him it was perfect. His sunglasses even hung on the V of his collar, tugging it down at his chest.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
She was sitting at a table near the Chinese place where no one ever goes. Two Chinese ladies stood behind a counter of steaming food with nothing to do as a line formed next to them at Subway.
Ryan stopped and scanned the expanse of tables. When he saw her, he smiled.
Jessica had it all figured out. It was efficient and effective. She was meeting Amber at Nordstrom in fifteen minutes, on the other side of the mall. She’d come here first, meet Ryan, and that’d be that.
“This seat taken?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “All yours.”
“I haven’t had a date at the mall since junior high,” he said.
There was zero chance that Amber would come to the food court, what with all the gluten and non-kale there, but Jessica ran her eyes over the crowd anyway, just in case. “Well, this isn’t exactly a date,” she said.
He drummed his fingers on the table. “A girl and a guy at the food court? Sounds like a date to me. Can I buy you a Whopper? That Burger King over there’s the shit, according to Yelp.”
She laughed, despite herself. “Stop it.”
He leaned forward on his elbows. “When you smile, you get these little crinkles next to your eyes.
Did you know that?”
“I believe those are called laugh lines,” she said.
Of course, lines came out wrong—a th crept in before the s—and she flushed. Ryan sank back in his chair and put his hand over his heart. “Fuuuuuck,” he said. “You’re not playing fair with that.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I could listen to it all day.”
She remembered lying naked next to Mitch one night in college. They were in the little apartment he shared with Terry and Alan senior year. He made her stick her tongue out so he could hold it between his lips and try to suss out whatever imperfection caused those s’s to occasionally go so wonky.
“I was stoked when I got your text,” he said. “I was like, maybe this isn’t a onetime thing after all. Then I saw that…well, you were all business.”
Jessica shook her head. “I just don’t understand this,” she said.
“What?”
“You could have any woman in this…well, this entire mall. That’s for sure. Why me?”
He laughed and looked around. In fairness, the options in that particular food court at that particular moment were pretty limited. “Shut up,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
“I’m not kidding,” she said. “We’ve been vague about our ages here. I get that. But I’m too old for you. If we took a walk around this place together, people would look at us and wonder what our story was. ‘Is she his sugar mama? Is he a male prostitute?’ No offense.”
He laughed again. He was enjoying this. It actually did feel like a date.
“Fuck ’em,” he said. “All I know is, the second I saw you that first time, when you were with…” he trailed off and started again. “Is it so hard to believe that I think you’re gorgeous? And that the first time I saw you I wanted nothing more than to be touching you?”
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