Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

After the kiss, as the band segued into a song from her childhood, one Mary Beth remembered from the AM radio of her father’s Oldsmobile Delta 88. Mike settled for an awkward version of slow dancing. His hands fell on Mary Beth in the expected position of a dance instructor, holding her at a length far enough removed to remind Mary Beth of the childhood lessons she received from her father, living room waltzes with her feet across his instep, to the strains of the string-heavy arrangements of the easy-listening hits of the day. Mike puffed a bit with each step, and Mary Beth pulled him in close, conserving his movements, as the song ended in a flourish of cymbals, the elephant-like bleat of horns. He drew back, then glanced again at his watch and said, “You’d think, for two hundred and fifty dollars a couple, someone could have wheeled in a fucking TV.”

ON RICHARD’S television, revelers pressed against a temporary barricade, cops and drunks side by side and staring skyward as fireworks exploded in a towering penumbra, casting the amusements of the Navy Pier in a cascade of red-and-white firelight. Richard could not fathom why he was seeing Chicago on his screen, the John Hancock Center and the Carbide and Carbon Tower bathed in celebratory flashes that boomed out over the great lake. He’d slept through the New Year and now was watching as the television networks chased midnight into the Central Time Zone.

The last thing he remembered, a pair of stories at the end of Eyewitness News at 11, had told of a Nebraska man who had built a lovely modern residence in an old Nike missile silo. A New York City policeman had been accused of taking $500 from the pocket of a man who’d died in the backseat of a Lexington Avenue taxi on Christmas Eve. He’d also slipped the cabdriver $100, telling him, in front of witnesses, “No need to ruin everyone’s day.”

Richard stood, then watched as the remote control fell from his chest, toppling his half-full wineglass, a few ounces of Cabernet spreading across his rug. As he hurried to retrieve some paper towels, he put his right foot down onto a piece of glass, and his brain registered the pain before he even saw the shard protruding from the ball of his foot. The interjection, a basic shit, shit, shit. He hopped to the kitchen on his uninjured foot. He leaned against the counter and cradled his right heel in his hand, then watched as a few drops of blood appeared, soaking through his gym sock. He thought of such things not as accidents but as part of a grand conspiracy, the same trickster forces that made toothpaste fall from his mouth onto his tie, or left small puddles of water on his bathroom floor, unnoticed land mines for his stockinged feet.

He unfurled the bloody sock and gritted his teeth to extract a toothpick-long sliver of glass sunk half an inch into his foot. Immediately he thought of the story of the lion with the thorny paw. Richard could not count on anyone, had somehow managed never to have made a dependable friend in the city. The people he’d once relied on were gone: McDermott, cocaine. Schiek, Valence, Randall, all suicides. Hemphill, colon cancer. Cavanaugh, car accident. The Michaels twins had given up drinking and fled to Colorado. Kassner lived in Jakarta, Hanzel married and went to Virginia’s horse country. McKalip kept threatening to leave the army but never had, was stationed somewhere in Germany, a living remnant of Cold War strategic planning. Up until a few months ago, Richard still talked to his college roommate, but more often than not the calls ended with Wentworth berating him for staying in the city, saying, “Man, you say hello to someone in the elevator, and they act like you’re trying to steal their purse.” Wentworth himself was married to a girl from high school; they’d moved to a Sears bungalow in one of those small North Carolina cities that always showed up on some magazine’s list of Best Places to Live. The last time they’d talked, Wentworth called Richard a liar, said, “I can’t even talk to you, man,” and Richard had lost a friend without ever knowing what the argument had actually been about.

As he tended to the wine spill, blotting it with paper towels and covering it with a thick spread of table salt, the network news was showing the late-night preparations for a party in Seattle. It was nearly 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time when he finished with the mess, rinsed and stacked his dinner plate, and he still hadn’t heard from his sister.

After the commercial break, he started flipping channels, managing to hit a block where all of the two-hundred-something networks of his cable TV seemed to have gone to commercial. A weight loss pill; Are you paying too much for car insurance?; Accident or DWI? We can help. He paused at a come-on for a 900 number, $4.99 for the first minute and $1.50 for each additional minute; his cock greeted the ad with a welcoming and familiar twitch, but he could think of nothing sadder than ringing in the New Year with a self-induced orgasm. Richard wondered how the supervisors over at 1-900-WET-BABE got anyone to stay home and service customers. His only interest, real conversation, wasn’t going to happen. A girl of the sort he might like to talk to was already out on the town. Christ, he’d had two of them practically hand delivered, and now they were out, sucking down apple martinis at eleven bucks a pop, ridiculing the Washington men who went out for New Year’s Eve wearing their best pinstriped suit. In this mood, he doubted he could even get hard.

And if he could concentrate long enough to picture the distinctly hard-core things that these women pretended to want, he had a problem. Cadence. He had tried this type of manual relief before, and somehow Cadence always intruded on the fantasy scenario: Cadence as a plaid-skirted schoolgirl, Cadence as a flight attendant. Soon, Richard figured, the women on the other end of these lines would be from India, perplexed by all the elaborate fantasy scenarios demanded by American men. It was the logical consequence of outsourcing. The accent might work for him, though. At least it wouldn’t sound like Cadence. However much he imagined himself as a noble barbarian, even masturbating wouldn’t help tonight. A couple of Tylenol PMs, washed down with another ounce or two of wine, might.

MARY BETH and Mike continued kissing in the corridor, kissed some more while staggering through the lobby, past a handful of disapproving guests. In the reflection of the elevator’s polished brass doors, Mary Beth watched as her hands roamed across Mike’s wide shoulders. His hands acquired a beachhead at the lower half of her ass, began a playful attempt to raise her skirt. At the ding of the bell indicating their arrival at the seventh floor, they separated, as if by instinct; at home in Texas, they’d become well practiced in the art of keeping their relationship away from prying eyes.

They kissed again, once outside the room and once inside, before Mary Beth shivered at the shock of the room’s temperature. Her complaints about the cold were lost in the hum of hotel machinery. She flipped on the lamp at the edge of the dresser and turned to Mike, repeating herself. “Jesus. Did you turn down the heat?”

“I’m planning on being a human bedwarmer,” Mike said as he tugged at his necktie.

Mary Beth slipped out of her evening clothes and shimmied between the sheets, improvising a bolster out of the king-size bed’s four pillows. She pulled the comforter to her shoulders, then discharged her underclothes with a flourish, tossing them on the corner chair. Tomorrow she planned to return to Dallas and the demands of her son, but her flight wasn’t until 8:00 p.m., and she was thrilled at the prospect of eggs Benedict from room service, watching the Tournament of Roses parade, not getting out of bed until sometime around noon, maybe even more champagne, a last day of decadence.