Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“That’s because faith requires a machine.” He smiled the kind of self-satisfied grin that Cadence took as encouragement.

“People need the machine. A doctor can tell you about the tumor, he can recognize its fibrous mass just by palpating it. He can say how it’s the size of a walnut or a baseball or even a grapefruit because all tumors have to be compared to the totems of our everyday life, and everyday life is nothing but sports and fruit. He knows just from the look of it that it’s malignant, but no one believes him until they take a biopsy or a cold-frozen segment or a needle extraction and run it through a machine. The machine gives me credibility. They believe me because I believe in the machine.”

He regarded her. “I’m almost sorry I asked. Almost.” He smiled, showing off bright-white teeth of an extraordinary symmetry. They looked so unnatural that Cadence thought they might be dentures.

“Why? It’s a typical Washington question.” Cadence cut him off. “But you’re not a typical Washington guy, right? This is an ironic stance.”

“How did you know? I’m Chadley, by the way.”

“The purple tie. That’s supposed to say how you’re not really all about your day job—you have a band that plays out on weekends, or you’re sitting on an idea, trying to get some VC together for the start-up, get parole from the nine-to-five world. But what you really want to do is write a book.” Cadence knew she was being harsh, but Chadley looked willing to take the abuse. The alcoholic flush of his complexion said that he was a couple of drinks ahead of her. This was actionable intelligence.

“Actually, I’ve always thought I had a decent book in me.”

“Everyone says that. They also say things like, I’m not looking for anything serious right now, or, My job is in transition. ” Cadence folded sixty dollars together and slid it across to the bartender.

“You’re done? Without even letting me buy you a drink?”

“Barring a drastic shift in the prevailing winds, I’m gone.”

“Too bad. I’m thinking I should ask you to lunch. A limited-time trial offer. You know, low pressure.”

“Low pressure is good,” Cadence said.

“I’m all about low pressure. I’m an auditor. Even when I go in and find that the books are fucked, you know, the CFO has been writing some questionable checks, or the big boss has a five-thousand-dollar shower curtain in his executive washroom, all I ever get to do is hand the bad news over to someone else. My entire career consists of saying things like, I think you ought to take a closer look at this, Dave. ”

She liked that Chadley wasn’t serious. Richard was many things, and serious was right at the top of the fucking list. With Richard, she’d gotten used to conversations in which he and his friends commanded the bar, riffing about Senate confirmations, appeals-court decisions, the prospects for peace in Ireland, home rule, defense appropriations, a four-hundred-ship navy, the market prospects for securitized mortgage instruments, the two-state solution to the Palestinian question.

Somehow, she stayed for a drink. Almost immediately, Chadley told her he lived in the suburbs, not anywhere near her neighborhood. His condominium consumed almost the entirety of one of his twice-monthly paychecks. He described the expansive view from his balcony in the marzipan-and-spun-sugar suburb of Crystal City. The neighborhood turned itself off at 5:30 each night as parades of military officers and Defense Department bureaucrats trudged from office building to subway through a series of tunnels, rarely venturing to the hotel-lined streets above.

“The only problem might be the nightlife. Or lack thereof. The place is like a test site for the neutron bomb,” Chadley told her. “The only time I see anyone is on the subway, on the way to the airport.”

“Which airport?” Cadence asked, meaning it as a test. Maybe half the poster-size subway maps had been changed to add Ronald Reagan to the airport’s name.

“National,” he said. “I can’t pronounce the name Reagan without bursting into flames.”

“You just did, Skippy. Besides, I’m thinking,” Cadence said, “you’re probably a closet Republican.”

“I don’t make enough money to be a Republican.”

Chadley offered a certain safety. He was obviously younger, uninterested in talk of children or commitments. Which made him ideal as a temporary distraction.

After two weeks, she knew that Chadley Billings was yet another of her strange enthusiasms. Dressing for their dates, she would sing a line from a song she had loved in college, a lyric she thought described the situation perfectly. A simple prop, to occupy my time. She thought of it as a disorder, these frequently appearing mini-obsessions. Because she feared the traditional holiday gain of five pounds, December’s fixation had been her new diet, an implausible combination of high-protein vegetarianism that equaled gallons of yogurt and tofu in a million impossible ways. But for the New Year, sequestered with Chadley on the twenty-seventh floor of Chicago’s InterContinental Hotel, in the heart of Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, she had a craving.

“We’re going for red meat,” she announced from in front of the bathroom mirror. Chadley had busied himself flipping through the tourist guides he’d found on the desk in the room’s corner, and Cadence knew by the time he’d decided on a restaurant it would be impossible to get a table. He hadn’t made dinner reservations either, which, given the holiday, she found mildly irritating. Wasn’t the New Year built around the idea of elaborate plans?

After a couple of days being cooped up together in a hotel room, she was beginning to notice the specific disadvantages of dating a younger man. Not all younger men, just this one. Chadley had a difficult time committing, an equally hard time letting go. He possessed surprising inhibitions. Even their fucking had been far too choreographed. He couldn’t go with the moment, couldn’t even let it slide that somewhere in Cadence’s recent past was an ex-boyfriend; he wasn’t perceptive enough to notice that she had never asked about his recent past.

Chadley might learn in the next few years to appreciate the difference between fucking and making love, something all older men knew, something Richard understood intuitively, but God knows how long that would take. And as she went over the rims of her eyes with pencil, she mumbled his name, Chadley, and the thought struck her, What sort of name is Chadley anyway? She worried that she might have asked the question aloud.

In front of the bureau mirror, Chadley tended to his hair in an intricate ritual involving two different styling products and a series of contortions with the blow-dryer. As Cadence poked her head out the bathroom door, he clicked the machine off and asked, “What?”

She walked to the television, where a cable news channel was showing a clip of an on-air confrontation between two men in suits, the younger one standing in front of the older, looking for all the world as if he was about to take a swing. She couldn’t get the context without turning up the volume, and she wasn’t about to do that, because the younger man was Richard. The screen filled with chyron titles: IRATE DEBATE.

Cadence clicked off the TV, announcing, “I have a craving,” then retrieved her skirt from the paisley armchair at the foot of the bed. She held the skirt in front of her, snapping it out like a matador, but before she could step into it, Chadley wandered over, kneeled to plant his face just beneath her navel, and started kissing his way down. To her, this was performance.

He looked up long enough to whisper, “I have a craving myself.”