Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“You must be new. I haven’t seen you before.”

She’d been hired a week earlier, she said, as a receptionist in Foreign Subs. Stationing her at the desk out front must be giving Subs a continental flair, he thought. With her dark glossy hair and olive eyes, she looked as if she might speak with a foreign accent. Her All-American name, Betty, didn’t seem to fit.

Later, she’ll tell him how even as a child her name felt like an alias. Once, she asked her mother, “Why’d you name me Betty?” and her mother answered, “Dear me, I don’t recall.” She’ll tell him that as a child she felt that her mother might be an imposter, too.

Betty agrees to meet for a drink after work, just not at the bar where the Subs hang out. She chooses the Surfside, a singles bar he knows by reputation, the kind of place he ordinarily avoids. The Surfside is at least a mile from water. It would take a tsunami to hear the crash of surf.

“Promise you won’t be late,” Betty tells him. “I get nervous sitting in bars alone. Guys don’t leave you in peace.”

“I don’t suppose they do,” he says.

Later, Betty will ask if he’s seeing anyone. He’ll say no; she’ll say, me neither. Really? he’ll ask. She’ll say there’d been a discreet fling with a Corvette dealer who played bass in an oldies rock band and was seeing Noreen, a girlfriend of hers who’s a hospice nurse, so it was complicated. Complicated is a word Betty uses whenever she mentions the ’Vette dealer. It means they kept things secret and just when the sex got really hot between them—“our amazing connection, a magical mystery tour,” the ’Vette guy called it — he dumped her without an explanation, at least not one that she believed. She hasn’t been serious about anyone since.

He keeps checking his watch and tries hailing a cab. Traffic is snarled to a standstill. He could walk faster than he could ride, but then he’d show up looking foolish — liquor on his breath, hair plastered down, his glasses in need of windshield wipers. He’d hoped to make an urbane impression. Instead of having arrived early enough to order a drink for himself and to fold his coat over a barstool so as to save her a seat, and then to sit nervously waiting for her to show, he will be the one who’s late, and the rain is falling harder.

Later, his first time in her bedroom with its bare white walls, lying beside her in bed, she coaxes him into reciting the profound thoughts he wrote down as poems in high school, something about “Time receding, erasing the past…” And she asks, I wonder what would have happened had we met as kids? Would we have felt the same connection? Probably, he says, but we might have had to delay the sleepover. She laughs and says, I’m trying to reorient myself, I mean, I can still count backward to when we first kissed — only thirteen days ago! You’re an amazing kisser, he says. That’s what you told me that night, she says, and the next day I called to say you were my first thought in the morning, and you called us a work in progress. And now look, we’re supposed to be watching the State of the Union Address and instead we’re in a state of half-undressed with no idea where this country is headed. That could be serious. Serious is fine, he says, just so long as it isn’t complicated. And she says, Thanks for complicating things even more.

He’s never noticed before how rain simultaneously rains at different speeds: one for the drops beating off the pavement, spattering his shoes and cuffs; another, faster, for rain streaking through the beams of headlights and the streetlights that have just blinked on; and a third speed for the rain chuting from the scalloped edge of the awning.

Still later, in a conversation he will never forget, in winter, she’ll say, It’s too cold to be walking with your coat open. They’re walking from a bar to the train station, both tipsy. Betty is leaving for a long weekend to visit her friend Noreen and he’s carrying her suitcase — carrying it rather than rolling it because of the dirty slush. He tells her that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to stop to button his coat. He’d have to put the suitcase down in the slush and take off his gloves. And she replies, I’d kneel in the cold street to button your coat.

The coat on the black window of the bar raises its collar. Just on the other side of the window the tipsy bunch from Subs are rolling dice and saying, “I feel like the bitters in an Orange Blossom.”

“I feel like the grub at the bottom of a bottle of mescal.”

“I feel as blue as blue Curaçao.”

Later, she’ll ask, Remember that first time you joked about undressing down to our concealed weapons? I do, he says. I’m sorry it wasn’t funny — I was so nervous. I’m all in, she says, there’s no more need of protection between us. I want you to have all the pleasure a woman can give.

Blocks away the new receptionist, Betty — a name whose whispered, soft explosive B his lips have yet to learn — Betty, who tonight wears her hair pinned up ballet-style and looks as if she’s come from a town named Cortina or Palermo but probably hails from somewhere like Peoria or Decatur, is wearing a pink raincoat and red heels. Despite the grass stains that couldn’t be dry-cleaned out, her raincoat, sworn to be discreet, won’t reveal how, at a drunken party, a salt-and-pepper-bearded man in a red-and-black leather Corvette jacket stripped off the raincoat and threw it down beneath their bodies on the wet grass. Betty sits with her legs crossed in a soon-to-be-razed bar called the Surfside. It will be the wrecking ball, not a tsunami, that demolishes it, but at this moment Betty isn’t worried about its fate. She’s impatiently wondering if Max — she doesn’t even know his last name yet — will show and why he’s late after she made him promise to be on time, and although she’s annoyed, when he finally arrives, apologetic, dripping, his hair plastered, his glasses spattered, and tells her, “You’re like the Galliano in a Harvey Wallbanger,” she has to laugh. She removes his glasses and wipes them dry on the hem of her raincoat, a gesture that exposes her thigh. No matter what they’re calling tonight at the Twenty-first, here at the Surfside it’s going to be a Harvey Wallbanger night.

Later, in early spring, after he sees the first convertible of the year with its top dropped — a candy-apple-red ’Vette with a pink raincoat riding shotgun beside a bearded driver in oldies rock bandanna headwear and dark glasses — he’ll ask Betty, Is there something you should tell me? She’ll act offended and insist there’s nothing and he’ll say, I should tell you, to save us both the embarrassment, that I already know, and Betty will say, Look at my face, look into my eyes, I swear to you. He’ll remember she’s an alias with a mother who is an imposter. He’ll spend a weekend watching her lie. He’ll finally ask, If you don’t love me enough to tell me the truth, at least tell me, do I need to go get tested? And Betty will answer: The truth inhibits me.

The neon lights, despite their false starts, have flickered on. In the sprayed headlights of stalled traffic, the wet street looks sleek and shiny. He plunges out from under the awning into the procession of bobbing umbrellas, and zigzags through the downpour like a broken-field runner, dodging past those who aren’t late tonight for whatever destiny awaits them.

Later, just before he puts a few things worth saving — books, photographs, a coat — in storage and buys a ticket out of his life, he’ll translate her phrase, “ The truth inhibits me,” into Latin. Probitas me cohibet. A classic phrase like that deserves the gravitas of a dead language, he thinks. It could be cast as a motto on a medallion or a family crest or an epitaph on a gravestone. Maybe there’d be a market for it on a T-shirt. Then he remembers Willis’s question: Have you ever endured a time when something in your life felt as corrosive as the rim of salt on a margarita?