Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

SHE KNEW he would need reassurance. He was a lovely man and the best fuck she had ever known, and over a glass of wine she once told her closest girlfriend that what made Richard a great lover was that he knew the exact moments to make things all about himself. She used the word lover, and it felt pretentious coming out of her mouth; in so many ways she still felt like an awkward fifteen-year-old girl mustering the courage to reach for her boyfriend’s fly. Richard knew when and how to take command of the moment, and that Cadence was aroused by that assertiveness even though it went against everything she had been taught; it wasn’t the self-actualized message for which she, as a post-feminist career woman, was supposed to be a standard-bearer. Sometimes she liked to be fucked, and sometimes, she liked for the guy who had just fucked her to get up and leave.

Richard wasn’t going to leave. He’d taken a beachhead here among the extra pillows, and God only knew where his other shoe had ended up, and now he wanted to talk about his sister, and Cadence felt she owed him an effort at conversation.

“It was nice, wasn’t it?” Richard asked.

Cadence propped herself up on the pillows and pulled the sheet to her chin. Somehow she hadn’t noticed his turning the light back on, but turning it off now meant getting out of bed and making the walk diagonally across her enormous bedroom, and she didn’t want to face the cold, so she stayed put. “The whole thing? Very nice. Best in a long time,” she said, and then winced at her own words.

Richard sped past the reference to other lovers. “Best in class. Best in show. It’s good to know the talent is still able.”

The talent. As in, The talent is waiting in the green room. The very language of the contract he’d signed for Don Keene earlier that afternoon. Talent agrees to maintain a visible presence in the community. Talent agrees to maintain his weight in the prescribed range. Talent agrees that any material change to his physical appearance without the express written consent of station management shall constitute a breach of this agreement. He still hadn’t told her.

“The talent has always been blessed with certain abilities,” Cadence said, and then decided to brave the cold and turn out the light. There were no coded messages in showing Richard her naked ass. She was still as embarrassed as a teenager at the way she inflamed men, Richard especially. On occasion, he liked to confess little things both vulgar and sexy; depending on her mood, they either gave her a racy and Taser-like charge that kicked her body into another level of arousal, or, more often, annoyed her into changing the subject. If nothing else, Richard had learned how to read her well enough to know when not to make the jokes.

As she walked to turn off the overhead light, she liked knowing that he was looking, that his eyes went to her legs. She stifled the urge to turn around or bend over or make little teasing and lascivious gestures with her tongue because the air of Richard’s grief had returned, expertly defusing the sexual charge she had been feeling.

The light was out.

“You’re waiting for me to say something,” she said.

Hearing her say it was like diving off a dock and into a frigid lake. Her voice had taken over his. How to explain such a frightening prospect? She nestled against his shoulder and wrapped one leg over his for warmth. Richard wanted the room to fill with sound, any sound but that of their voices. He rummaged in the sheets for the TV remote, and the set snapped on to images of the crash, amateur footage from earlier today of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which crashed on approach…, and Cadence reached over to take the remote from him and turn off the set.

“I swear, if you tell me that everything is going to be fine, I’ll be sick.”

“It’s a ridiculous thing to say,” Cadence admitted, “but I’m obligated to, contractually.”

“I hope all this”—Richard patted the bed—“wasn’t out of some sense of duty.”

Cadence took her leg off his and rolled onto her back with a loud exhalation that Richard translated as Jesus Christ.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a hard day. Hard to even remember what’s normal. I don’t know what’s expected of me except that in the morning, I’m expected to fly to Dallas and pick up a six-year-old kid who by some accident of birth is my nephew but is in reality nothing more than a short stranger, and by the time the return flight touches down, we’re supposed to have bonded. Instant father.”

Cadence raised herself up on two pillows, and Richard slid closer to her, wrapped his leg on top of hers, and held on. She said, “You’re going to be just fine, and when you aren’t, you’re going to learn that it’s okay to ask for help. Plenty of people will help if you just ask.”

“I need help,” Richard said. He liked the sound of it in his mouth, so he said it again.

“You can teach Gabriel all sorts of things. Man things. The difference between thirty-weight and forty-weight motor oil. Never to order a steak well done. How to shave around the cleft of his chin. When a team should hit and run. How to slide into second base. When to use a fairway wood. How to check the air pressure in the tires of his first car. How to place a bet. When to double down at blackjack. How to put that little dimple in his tie. He can be a mini-you. In summer, you can take him camping and teach him how to tell the difference between a harmless snake and a poisonous one.”

“Who’s going to teach me that shit? What is the difference?”

“It has something to do with where the eyes are on the head. I’ve never really understood.”

Richard physically felt the challenge of the next few years. It emerged as a tightness in his musculature, and he absentmindedly grabbed at his neck while he talked. “I’d just like to know how everything is going to turn out in the end.”

“Sit up,” Cadence said, and she took over rubbing Richard’s shoulders. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Children might as well be invaders from another planet.”

“You and Ellen never wanted children?”

He could tell she expected him to say yes based on the proportionate increase in the pressure she was applying to his knotted trapezius. How he hated to talk about his ex-wife in front of Cadence, if only because Cadence had always been greedy for details. She wanted to know what they’d fought about, how they’d made up, where they used to live, whether or not Richard considered himself a good husband or had managed to stay faithful, even whether or not Ellen had been a good fuck and a good wife and if she’d liked to suck his cock on long drives or show up at his office with no panties on beneath her summer dress. Cadence could retell every detail of every relationship she’d ever been in with cold precision. To Richard, telling Cadence about the life that he and Ellen had lived had seemed like one last betrayal of his ex.

“We’d go for a walk around the neighborhood, maybe to Dupont Circle, and stop for coffee. We’d sit at the corner tables at this café over by the Scientology building and watch the young families go by. I’d look and think I was seeing my future. But then some couple would roll up with their new baby, the kid in a stroller that cost more than my rent. Ellen always looked at those kids and sneered and said, ‘I’d never want that. It’s like having a parasite take purchase in your body,’ and she’d end it with this little theatrical shiver. It was hard to even suggest sex after that.”

“But you wanted a kid, yes? You saw the allure.”

“I’d see a father lift a kid high over his head, and I’d think only about that kid’s face, half laughter and half terror. And I’d think about how I had no memories of anything like that from my own childhood. None. I can’t recall anything I did with my father.”