Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“ That …isn’t really happening anymore.”

“You broke up?”

“We just sort of petered out.” He shrugged. “Didn’t see a future.” To Kay he added, “Nancy’s my girlfriend. Was my girlfriend.”

Kay thought that, whatever his age, it was too old for a girlfriend: There should have been another word for it.

Then Gary suggested he and Deb scare up some wine from the cellar.

—

“Sorry it’s a total dust bowl down here,” he called from the unlit flight of stairs. Deb was surprised how immediately it made her nervous, being alone with him. He pulled a chain that hung from the ceiling. A single bulb threw light onto the honeycomb of dark bottles and, over it, one of Gary’s landscapes, which he rarely showed and didn’t sell except through hotels and restaurants in town. Mostly fine, precise oil paintings of local harbors, lighthouses on the sound. They suggested an appreciation for small and simple things, one she didn’t have herself but that she admired, hoped to cultivate. Jack said Gary lacked imagination, and vigor. Energy! He doesn’t have any energy.

“Okay,” Deb said, crouching down to survey the lowest rack. “What’ll it be?”

He squatted beside her. “Deb, listen. Your email, it didn’t mention…I heard what happened, about Jack’s show.”

“I guess maybe a white?” There was so much she didn’t know about wine.

“He must be in a pretty bad state.”

“Or red! Red we won’t have to chill.”

“Hey. Talk to me.” His hand on her wrist. He might have been asking the time.

“It’s not about the fucking show.” She kept her eyes fast on the shelf, the shadowed cubbyholes. “There’s been — someone else, you know?” Gary would know, wouldn’t even have to ask whose someone else, hers or Jack’s.

There had been a time, as Jack’s first marriage was ending, when everywhere they went it was tables for three. They went to the opera and to shows, the twenty-six-year-old and her fortyish escorts. Three was supposed to be a bad number for groups — whenever Simon or Kay fell into trios at school, there was always one kid left unhappy — but they’d never been a true triangle, more a line of three connecting dots, with Deb at the center, the leader dot in vee formation, if they were geese. She’d liked the feeling, looking over her shoulder, of these men following behind. She thought they’d liked it too, being both geese or both college boys again.

“Are you surprised?” She pulled an inky green-glass bottle from the wall of inky green-glass bottles and blew the dust off it.

“You’re an amazing woman, Deb.”

Everything, that was how much she didn’t know about wine. “We should probably head upstairs.” It felt like they were hiding, down there in the dark.

In the small garden, Gary lit two glass lanterns, casting shadows to dance on the white-stone table. Simon was back from wherever he’d been. He and Kay leaned over the low brick wall, pointing out fireflies and arguing over who saw them first. You are lucky. You are lucky, you are lucky, you are lucky.

The next morning at airport security, Jack drained his coffee, deposited his laptop into a bin, and smiled at the guard, militant but for a French braid running the length of her skull. Taking off your shoes was one thing. Now apparently they could ask for clothes.

In terminals people hemorrhage money, on magazines, eight-dollar trail mix, batteries, and packs of gum. The confines make them desperate for these things. Glowing amber bottles of duty-free perfume: They slow to look. Flight attendants herd past the shops, monitoring the sales. That personal gumball machine, $39.95. Not low enough yet.

Jack bought a slippery pack of Raisinets and ate slowly.

He found his gate and a row of chairs nearby. Across from him a young couple stood kissing, the woman with tangled hair and a flannel shirt buttoned halfway, the man in tight black jeans. Easy to tell Europeans from the Americans. His own family looked American but not garishly so, not in the way the rest of the world used the word, as a derogatory term. Though still they were, recognizably American. It had to do with what was square or self-serious about them. Optimistic in their ability to circumvent misfortune. Neither he nor Deb would ever take up smoking again, beyond the occasional puff, or ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Ride a motorcycle period.

It is ridiculous to watch the planes take off. Heartbreakingly clunky and hopeful seeming.

—

A lifetime later, his section called, Jack walked the connecting hallway of large accordion-like segments, feeling like lint pushed through a vacuum cleaner. A quick glimpse of ergonomic chairs and entertainment consoles and private islands and on to the narrower aisle in coach. Then they were lifted up, as though seized by the hand of some giant. Always a miracle when it worked, every time a breakthrough in physics.

“Light bird today,” he said to the flight attendant as she passed. He’d heard one of them say that once.

“We’ll be fine,” she answered dully, and kept moving.

As an eight-year-old he’d fallen in total love with a Pan Am stewardess who’d pinned him with a pair of wings. This was when stewardesses were younger and wore those costumes and when people were still allowed pins on planes. It had been his second time flying, the return flight from New York, the only time his father had taken him on one of his trips. They’d lived in a suburb of Houston, and Jack Senior was always flying to different cities to meet with clients, see factories, take the general manager’s family out to eat. The New York trip had been scheduled over young Jack’s birthday, which was why he got to go along.

Of the city he remembered next to nothing. He knew they’d stayed three days and two nights, but not where, and that they saw a musical, but not which one. Jack did remember, because of his birthday, that it was near to Christmas, and that they went sight-seeing on a tour bus and then an observation deck, so he could see the building tops all lit up. His father gave him a coin to put in the telescope and Jack had looked, as far left and right as the machine would let him, for the Empire State Building, but he could not find it. “And why do you think,” Dad had asked, “why do you think you can’t find it?” Jack kept looking until the time on the telescope ran out, not because he still believed he would find the Empire State Building, but because his face was upset and he didn’t want his father to see.

When Jack couldn’t travel with him, which was the rest of the time, his father always brought back some trinket from the hotel gift shop. Jack knew, even then, how it enraged his mother to watch her son run to the door when the car pulled into the garage. The trinket would clutter the boy’s room, become something she’d have to pick up off the floor. I am a single mother in this house, she’d say. Single mothers have jobs, his father would answer.

His father’s job had sent him away sometimes five days a week, but it had paid for all this, and it really had been all this, plenty of space (too much space, his mother said), a maid who came by once a week to do the hard jobs, a banana-yellow Cadillac for his mother to drive around in. They had a color television and dimmers in the living room and a beautiful bar cart that his mother got the most use out of during the week, always going to the liquor store on Fridays to restock before his father got home. There were times also when she forgot, or slept late and didn’t have a chance to go, and those times Jack remembered watching her hold a bottle of something amber under the faucet to get the level up, returning it to the cart a shade too light. All of five and he knew the color of bourbon.