Steve Kistulentz: Panorama

Mary Beth’s strongest prospect was Mike Renfro, the Texas insurance man who also happened to be her boss. They’d been dating clandestinely for months, but this weekend was the first inkling she’d gotten that their future contained something more, maybe even something permanent. Mike was the only reason she would be in Salt Lake City. She could think of only one other reason people might come to Utah on holiday—skiing—and she hadn’t been much for winter sports except for a few college-era trips down the bunny slopes. A romantic getaway meant the islands, St. Barts maybe, or dinner and a show on Broadway. Mary Beth had a tough time picturing romance in Utah. She had been meaning to ask about this strange destination ever since Mike snuck into her office the Wednesday before Christmas and left her an envelope stuffed with colorful brochures and airline tickets; there had been only two tickets, Mike’s and Mary Beth’s, and she’d been angry that he’d made no accommodations for Gabriel.

It had taken intense bilateral negotiations before Mary Beth agreed to leave her son with Sarah Hensley, one of Mike’s cadre of just-out-of-college assistants. They would stay at Mike’s house, where Gabriel could avail himself of the big-screen television and the heated pool, all under adequate supervision. Still, her worries had dominated the last three days, feelings of guilt about being apart from her son for the first time in his six years, a sense of remorse tempering the joy she felt at relaxing in the hotel-provided terry-cloth robe, the snacks of fourteen-dollar macadamias and honey-roasted cashews from the minibar.

In the evenings, Mike ministered to her feet, massaging them with peppermint-scented cream. They sipped mimosas and Bloody Marys with breakfast, quaffed Irish coffees after the last run down the slopes. She’d decided to be a gamer, what her late father would have called a good egg, and gone along with Mike’s every suggestion, even ordering a Flintstone-size New York strip, slathered the way all mediocre hotel steaks are in a sauce whose main ingredient was a stick of butter, as her holiday dinner. The austerity program could always start tomorrow. What was the New Year for if not solemn pledges, draconian diets, another chance for reinvention?

She knew herself well enough to call this creeping feeling entitlement. The truth of her guilt: she felt she was entitled to exactly nothing, and she had felt that way ever since her ex-husband had moved out almost seven years ago. Six weeks after his departure, she discovered she was pregnant, her morning beginning with the sign of the cross, the symbol on the home pregnancy test that she stared at in disbelief, thinking of all the worrisome precautions she’d taken for some fifteen years to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. She’d sat through that particular set of holidays on her own, living off her savings, trying to minimize her interaction with the modern world. Ever since, New Year’s Eve had always been a reminder to Mary Beth of the paucity of her romantic prospects, and now, on the last evening of her short holiday, she wanted to enjoy herself. She could not help but think that being away from her son at this time of the year served as evidential proof—she was a bad mother. But she’d made her choice, and Gabriel was safe in the custody of a good friend, so tonight Mary Beth intended to head downstairs to the hotel ballroom, to drink and sweat and grind suggestively up against her stodgy boyfriend and boss in a way she knew couples around her would think undignified.

For this holiday evening, she would not deny herself anything. She wanted to beat perfection—or at least the illusion of it—into her body. In the bath, she ground away the frayed edges of her heels with a pumice stone. She wielded a triple-blade razor to smooth over her legs, underarms, bikini area. She wanted nothing more than to misbehave—she still thought of sex as something to be embarrassed about, something to hide. Just as she rarely hit the dance floor anymore, it had been years since she had found herself lost in the animal compunctions that came over her younger self, the way the twenty-year-old Mary Beth occasionally lingered in the bath or her own bed, masturbating through the melancholy of an anxious Sunday evening. Sex was still an adventure but no longer a thrill ride, a train about to leave the tracks. Now it required preparations—shopping, shaving, personal lubricants—and happened with all the spontaneity of an Everest expedition.

At the end of her ritual, she tended to her hair, molding it in place with a combination of fixatives, including a space-age goo that contained micropolymers designed to add an illusory, silk-like finish; the combination of dry air and winter sun had fried her frosted locks, leaving them as thirsty as an abandoned houseplant. Her eyes received similar detailing: she filled the half-moons of her lids with two tones of color called Shimmering Smoke. The blush that amplified the domes and arches of her cheeks could not hide that her weight had been creeping upward. As she traced the outline of her lips with a deep burgundy pencil, she made her second resolution for the New Year: Lose the baby weight.

She fetched a tube of hand cream from her bag, then collapsed into a wingback chair striped in a pink-and-black fabric that reminded her of carnival tents and children’s games. She sat there listening to the forecast for tomorrow’s good weather, kneading her calves. She did not even like to ski—that was Mike’s thing, this almost comically large man careening down a mountain—and her knees and quadriceps ached after a long weekend learning to flex with the lifts and falls of the slopes. Nor did she care much for the strange homogeneous nature of Utah; it was self-defeating, comparing herself to the flotilla of impossibly lithe blondes who swooshed across the icy slopes, a sorority of phosphorescent teeth and pastel ski jackets. They hightailed past her on both sides, showering her legs with a fusillade of wet snow and ice crystals.

Mary Beth tucked her hair behind her shoulder, then added a reserve of fragrance to her pulse points. She practiced the small talk of New Year’s Eve parties, the explanations of who she was and what she did that would dominate the evening’s conversations. She did not want to talk in the language of Mike’s business, about retirement plans, employee benefit administration, policies for whole and term life insurance, or accidental death and dismemberment. She wondered if she could even talk about anything else, the volatile stock market, the recent presidential race, the prospects for a unified Europe. She’d once had the confidence that she was an intriguing and complex woman; that confidence had gone, she suspected, with her ex-husband. Before him, she went to museums, concerts, farmers’ markets, lectures, charity events, and she’d done it all on her own. The soundtrack of her childhood had been Rostropovich conducting the National Symphony Orchestra. She could manage to sit by herself in a restaurant, shielded behind a paperback, and not feel the weight of self-consciousness. At the movies, the old Mary Beth could buy a drink and a large buttered popcorn and sit by herself through an afternoon of subtitled films, but now, at age forty-seven, she was a single mother on some sort of inadvertent vacation, and she could not remember the last decent film she had seen, or when she’d had time to finish a book.

Mary Beth was using her hair dryer to cure the top coat of her nails when she noticed the blinking message light on her hotel-room phone. Her son and his sitter were the only ones who knew she was in Salt Lake; no one else had the number or the name of the hotel.

So she dialed and listened to what she immediately knew would be a hurry-up reminder from Mike Renfro. His message was nearly lost in the noise of the bar, the clinking of glasses and the liturgical commotion of small talk, all of which made her think of Mike’s familiar hands, likely as not cupping a tumbler of bourbon, then throwing down a handful of salted peanuts. She pictured him tapping his index finger against the crystal of his watch, a gesture he often made around the office. His recorded voice told her, You’re going to need to shake it. And bring my briefcase with you.