Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Outside, the wind picked up, and she imagined the building moving with the slightest perceptible sway, the way certain skyscrapers did, the Sears Tower, World Trade. Snow clotted on the windowsills and blew past the picture windows, almost whiteout conditions, the storm and the lights of the city together casting the room in a soothing gray-blue glow.

She stood and leaned into Lemko a bit, took his hand and sandwiched it between hers. It did not mean anything other than a moment of connection. Later, alone in her room, she would think of how good it felt to touch someone—to touch a man—at the end of the day; she wanted to be lost in the sensation of strong fingers on her shoulders, her wrists, warm breath at the base of her neck.

“It’s just too cold for me,” Lemko said.

“What? My hands? The weather?” Nessen swallowed the last of her drink. She was leaving and didn’t want to give the impression that her impulsive grab had been an invitation, tried to deliver the brightest, warmest smile she could muster.

“All of it. The city, the weather. Every damn thing.”

DESPITE THE snow, the Metro was still running at a regular clip. Richard took the train from the airport, transferred once, and was at a table in the back room of the Full Cleveland within twenty minutes. The bar stood at the top of the service road that led local traffic into the Dantean confusion of Dupont Circle, and its clientele were almost completely removed from the world of politics that was Richard’s orbit. It was a dive, and its patrons were failed musicians, chain-smoking graduate students, and young professionals just out of college who’d spent the fall learning how quickly the city consumed the paycheck of someone who worked in a nonprofit cubicle farm.

The taps at the Full Cleveland were filled with beers that had once belonged to the blue-collar man—Pabst and Ballantine—and the coolers were packed with tall-boy cans of Black Label and Schaefer, which Richard couldn’t see without singing the jingle from the commercials of his childhood: Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. His father had often come home from a Redskins game at RFK stinking of beer and singing that song, talking about how he and his boss, the congressman, had gone out for a few pops with the announcers from that game, Lindsay Nelson and Paul Hornung, Lombardi’s own golden boy.

One fall afternoon, after a Redskins–Packers tilt, old Lindsay Nelson had taken a shine to Lew MacMurray, so much so that they had actually traded sport coats, Lew’s Brooks Brothers navy hopsack for Lindsay Nelson’s Hart Schaffner Marx Gold Trumpeter label in a cacophonous houndstooth of red, white, and black that would have been more appropriate as one of Bear Bryant’s hats. Lew had worn that jacket with a white turtleneck and gray slacks to the stadium nearly every Sunday for the rest of his life. “This jacket was given to me by the voice of Notre Dame football himself,” he liked to say, and from a good Irish Catholic, there could be no prouder statement.

It had been almost six hours since he’d eaten anything, and that was just a handful of peanuts at the Pilgrim Hotel bar. The smells from the Italian restaurant next door wafted in, reminding him of his hunger. Richard and Cadence had eaten maybe two dozen meals at that Italian place, evenings when inertia had dragged them into the welcoming comfort of the familiar. The restaurant was part of the city’s legacy and made only two kinds of pizza, sausage and four cheese, and the red sauce, heavy with garlic and basil, was something Richard once thought he could eat every day of his life, but he’d never eaten there without Cadence. On one of their first dates, he’d stolen an ashtray— Mamma Agnelli’s Ristorante Italiano, pink lettering on black ceramic; it now sat in the corner of his desk, a souvenir he could see traveling with him for a lifetime. Only now Cadence wasn’t part of his day-to-day life, and he hadn’t eaten at that restaurant in more than two months; a FOR LEASE sign had appeared in the building’s front window.

With no conversation to distract him, Richard for the first time noticed how much of a true drinkers’ bar the Full Cleveland really was. Over the table was a chandelier on a dimmer switch, the arms of the fixture covered with a dark-gray fake fur that looked like the balls of dust and lint that collected under his bed. At the end of each of the eight arms, a bulb glowed a quiet pink-yellow that reminded Richard of the tubes of the old Magnavox console television from his parents’ basement. He was lost in thought enough not to notice Cadence’s approach to his tableside.

“That’s where the polar bear head used to be,” she said, pointing to an old wool pennant for the Toledo Mud Hens hanging diagonally above them.

Richard stood, and they gave each other a timid hug. He thought about kissing her on the cheek, a noncommittal move, but he hesitated, and Cadence used the moment to slide into the booth.

There was a twinge of weird there, a moment he was certain she felt too. In the early days of their dating, Richard used to insist on sitting on the same side of the booth with Cadence, something he never saw any other couple do. He wanted the same vantage point, the same frame of reference.

Cadence reached across the table and pulled a hair, one of hers, from Richard’s white shirt. It was long and straight, the dark brown-black wire of the kind he used to find in his bathtub or on the floor of his bathroom. He wondered if it was vanity that she always wanted him to look perfect and presentable, or if it was a little reminder that she once possessed him, a way of asserting that she knew she could again. Maybe it was one of those Discovery Channel mating instincts, like rhesus monkeys grooming each other to remove lice and nits, or simply the last reflexology of a dying love.

“There,” she said, sliding back in her seat. Richard noticed the definition of her lipstick, the same color as the burgundy-black vinyl that covered the seat of the booth, and took it to be a good sign.

“I’m perfect now. All fixed.” He decided to play along. The conversation was going to be hard enough. Maybe after a drink, he’d relax.

“It’s a start,” she said.

Richard watched her hands fidget in her lap. Soon they would search out some other imperfection; perhaps she’d touch up her lipstick at the table or take a napkin and begin wiping the surface of the tabletop.

It was difficult for Richard not to blurt out all the news he had in a series of impulsive comments. My sister is dead. I’m expected to fetch my nephew and bring him to live with me. Oh, and I have a new job, two hundred miles away. Instead he indulged in the self-flagellation of nostalgia. He wanted to revisit all the high points of his relationship with Cadence, if only to reassert for himself that those lovely things had actually happened. Like the fixing. That impulse had been there in her from the very first. After crashing her shopping cart into the door of Richard’s car, she had taken out a tissue and tried to wipe away the scratches. Ten days later, between their second and third dates, he had found Cadence on her knees in his parking garage with a can of rubbing compound and a tube of no. 70 Metallic Candy-Apple Red touch-up paint. He liked that she was willing to get her hands dirty.

It occurred to Richard that maybe he had been a reclamation project the whole time. There were new shirts, shoes, CDs, and thrift-shop knickknacks, like a Fiestaware vase for his apartment that Cadence kept filled with cut flowers. She fed him salad, even on the nights when he wanted nothing more than to restore himself with pepperoni pizza and a six-pack from the weird Greek-Italian-Mexican deli on the corner. They would go to a restaurant, and she’d talk gently about the many different varieties of fish, the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids.