Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

The sounds of Mike urinating with sudden urgency echoed out of the bathroom, so she turned on the television and ratcheted through the channels, stopping when she heard the last ten seconds of an anchorman wrapping it up before the commercial break. Then Mike stood naked at the foot of the bed. He was thick across the beam, the skin of his chest a bright, milky white, especially in contrast to the windburn that bloomed on his cheeks.

She threw back the covers, and Mike clambered in, pressing against her. His skin felt warm, vaguely moist. She admired how he’d always been at ease with his body, willing to walk from kitchen to bedroom, even out to the pool, without a stitch. Back in Texas, Mary Beth kept a robe on the back of the bathroom door, swam in Mike’s pool encased in a navy-blue one-piece suit, the kind advertised as providing full coverage for the curvier woman.

On the television, the update at the top of the 1:00 a.m. hour showed footage of a protest gone wrong, two masked students hurling a galvanized garbage can through the plate glass of a chain coffee house, a phalanx of police in full riot gear milling languidly a block away. Taking the shattering glass as their cue, the police consolidated into an orderly mob, marching with linked elbows toward the disorderly. Mike pointed at the TV. “Why do they always do that? Go after the Starbucks first. Set the McDonald’s on fire.”

“Symbolism,” Mary Beth said. “My brother and I saw a riot once. The start of one, anyway. In DC. We’re at this little Mexican place when a rumor started to go through the neighborhood that a cop had shot an unarmed man. A Salvadoran. The guy was drinking in public, and the cop, a black woman, told him about five times to put it away. He didn’t speak English, and she didn’t speak any Spanish. How he got shot, they never really figured out. But by the time the cameras got there, about three hundred people were in the street, banging on garbage cans, shouting slogans. The cops broke out the gas, but then the wind shifted and blew it right back at them, and when they ran away, it was a free-for-all. A busload of kids ushered the driver off a Metrobus, then turned it over in the street.”

Mike said, “They burned it, of course. Every riot starts with a burning bus.”

“Then they turned and went after the lamp store on the corner. A hot dog cart, a Seven-Eleven. Then the Salvadoran bank, and finally the Western Union office where they all go to wire money to relatives back home. Only then did they go after the Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

Mike laughed. “Looking for the Colonel’s secret recipe?”

“Who knows?” Mary Beth pointed the remote at the TV, kicked the volume up. “The KFC was four blocks from that bus. They sought it out. It was a political act.”

“For no good reason?”

“That KFC had to represent something. Oppression, colonialism, slavery, the whole plantation culture. They went after it. It was worth picking up a brick and throwing it through a window.”

Mike reached for the remote, but Mary Beth showed him a palm that meant stop . “What did they expect?”

She answered. “Maybe not to get gunned down for drinking a two-dollar bottle of malt liquor.”

“You sound like your brother. You should be making this argument on Meet the Press. ”

“Our dad had a strong libertarian streak. That’s the cornerstone of history. The inalienable right to be left alone. There are times when that’s all anyone wants in the world.”

“I take it you’ve been there.” Mike rolled onto his elbow.

“Wanting to be left alone? Sure. Like tonight, I just wanted it to be us. I didn’t want a party. I barely wanted to talk to anyone else. I can’t trust someone who pretends to be overly interested in talking to the office manager of an insurance agent.”

“Agency,” Mike said. “You work for an insurance agency. We represent safety, security. We’re a symbol.”

Mary Beth shook her head. “I don’t want to be a symbol. I don’t want things that stand in for something else, or clever little phrases that are supposed to represent some larger whole. I want pithy little sentences that break your heart, that warn me about the roadblocks ahead. I want something short and sweet that’s going to make me cry.”

“I have a hard enough time telling anybody what it is that I want as it is.”

“No one else is going to do it for you. I learned that a long time ago. Like in sales. You have to ask for the commitment; that’s part of being a closer. I learned that from you, Mike.”

“Are you asking for a commitment?” Mike gave her a raised eyebrow.

“I’m asking you what exactly you think we have here.”

“What we have here is something fantastic. This,” Mike said, pointing at the floor, “this is where it’s happening. Utah is the future. New jobs, new roads. All the modern amenities. What we have together is maybe a chance for a future. I just don’t know if I want any future to be in Texas.”

Mary Beth sat farther up, straight and stiff against the headboard. She wanted him to be a champion and a stalwart, but now she knew he was, at his core, simply afraid. “Are you breaking up with me? Is this one of your resolutions—bring a woman to Utah to do the thing you couldn’t do in the comfort of your own home?”

Mike smiled, a look Mary Beth took as nerves. “I wanted you to come with me because it’s time for answers. Someone needs to figure out exactly what’s happening here. Are we a weekend thing, or are we a more permanent thing? Or are you never going to be happy unless that thing has a name? We never talk about this stuff. I try to bring it up, and you tell me not to, at least not in front of the kid. So to answer your question, I’m not trying to do anything.”

She let out a heavy breath and stared at the ceiling, its painted-over water stains. “We don’t talk about these things because most people, most adult couples, have conversations like this at the dinner table. Or in bed, next to each other, after the kid goes to sleep and the TV gets turned off. This isn’t something that we’re going to talk about at work. The only thing that we’ve established for certain is that we’ve turned into a living cliché.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve said everything short of ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ The next thing I know, you’ll be telling me how you need some space.”

“I do”—Mike laughed—“but I’m not talking about the kind of space that you’re thinking about. I need space in the no-freeways, no forty-five-minutes-to-go-five-miles sort of way. No gang shootings. No midafternoon trips to the bank that end in sudden violence. No one jostling me from behind at the ATM, looking over my shoulder to steal my PIN code. The Utah kind of space.”

On the television, the police dispersed a milky cloud of gas that settled over the protesters in a yellowing mist. Mary Beth couldn’t look away from the violence; it wasn’t until she saw the faces of the police, cartoonish and distorted beneath the space-age polymers of their riot shields and helmet visors, that she figured out the scene was from South Korea, a student protest. A young man in khakis and red sneakers, his face hidden behind a red bandanna, ducked under the swing of a police baton and picked up a gas canister, tossed it back toward the police lines. The news went to commercial before she started in on Mike again. “Why Utah? What kind of wide-open spaces are there in Utah that you can’t find in Texas?”

“It’s not the space itself. It’s what the space suggests. You can hardly find any Texas in Texas anymore; it’s all filled with people from Connecticut and New York. Guys who grew up wearing Topsiders now wear boots with their suits.”