Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“You have one of those?”

She hands him a cigarette. She asks, “Do you want a light?” He considers this for a moment and then tucks the cigarette behind his ear.

“You have another?” She gives him a second cigarette, and this one he puts between his lips, and Tania is glad to have the opportunity to use the magical Cricket once again. They silently stand and smoke for a minute or more, altogether too close to each other for Tania’s taste, while he watches the people who pretend not to see him. He puts a hand to his throat, touches it softly, Tania notices. It seems like a pose.

“Can I come in for some water?”

“No, sorry,” says Tania.

“No water?” asks the man.

Tania looks around, and her gaze lights on a bodega on the corner. “You could get some there,” she tells him. He turns to look, then faces her again.

“For free ?” One eyebrow raised.

“No, probably not.”

He discharges something, less than an obscenity, more like the wordless expectoration of disenchantment: She has totally let him down. He steps back and wheels on one calloused heel, then steps carefully with his naked feet, continuing on his bare-assed way down the street. With his departure the spell is broken, and not only do the other pedestrians resume noticing her, but one addresses her as well.

“Bet someone’s looking for him ,” says the woman, who walks a German shepherd.

“Bet you’re right,” says Tania, gazing at the police dog.

Inside, the living room is now dark, and as Tania tiptoes to the kitchen, where Joan and Randi still sit at the table, Yolanda raises her head from where she lies on the sofa.

“Quiet,” she says, irritably.

“Sorry,” says Tania.

Joan and Randi are laughing at something.

“Lately,” says Joan, “I been having troubles with my vocabulary.”

“It’s OK.” Randi laughs.

“It’s like, the word’s under here someplace but when I go to go after it, it’s gone already.”

“You do so well, considering.” says Randi. “I mean, no offense. Anyway, you draw from inward for meaning. It’s a matter of self-actualization. If you know what you mean to say, other people will too. It’s a natural process.”

“Yeah,” says Joan. “But mostly people like to know the names of things. Heliotrope. Jack-o’-lantern. Deadly nightshade.”

Teko comes in, dressed like Al Green and clean-shaven under butterscotch-tinted aviators and hair that has been bleached blond. You walk into a room looking like that you take a second to let everybody get used to the glare. But Teko goes straight into his inspector general routine, like you’re waiting for him to put on the white glove and swipe a finger across the lintel in a quest for fugitive dust. The point is, why bother even hoping for a change? Tania sits quietly on the wicker Queen Anne sofa, her hair damp from the shower and spilling over the white terry cloth robe she wears, she guesses it’s Guy’s, watching as Teko takes in the apartment. His canvas knapsack dangles from his hand. There are knickknacks and other useless creature comforts that Tania suddenly is seeing through Teko’s eyes. She feels embarrassed by her own ease.

“Quite a bed of roses,” says Teko. Teko wears that strange and insincere smile he has. It displays the peculiar concave camber of his upper teeth. Actually, it’s quite an ordinary apartment. Aside from the wicker sofa, there are in this room two undistinguished armchairs, a footlocker pressed into service as a coffee table, a low bookshelf of unfinished pine, and in an alcove the “offices” of the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society: two file cabinets, a desk made from a hollow-core door, and a set of shelves extending from the wall on brackets.

“And here’s the new recruit,” he says to Joan.

“No,” answers Joan.

“No? I thought you were joining us,” says Teko. His voice is mild and laden with malice.

“Just a fellow traveler,” says Joan.

“Well I don’t understand the point of that.”

“The point of I’m not joining you?”

“I mean what are you doing here then?”

“Joan and you all have a lot in common,” says Guy. “We’ve been through all this.”

“A babysitter’s what you’re saying.”

“This isn’t the term I personally would use.”

“But you’re saying if the shoe fits.”

“I’m saying Joan’s been living underground for more than two years.”

“We have some potato salad and cold cuts,” says Randi.

“Why would we start, I wonder,” wonders Guy, “arguing about this the minute we come through the door? You knew what was on the other side of that door. We had three thousand miles to talk about what and I might add who was on the other side of that door.”

“Cheese, orange kind and white kind, and coleslaw,” says Randi.

“It’s not, believe me,” Guy says to the others, displaying his open palms, “it’s not like we had this fun see-the-USA-in-your-Chevrolet trip, forget all our troubles, sit back and relax.” He addresses Teko. “You were bugged about everything , the whole way. The waitress at the Big Boy is looking at you. The clerk at the store puts his hand on your brand of cigarettes before you tell him what you want. Your eye’s glued to the speedometer in the desolate nether stretches of no place, where two deputies patrol a million square miles. You’re unscrewing the mouthpiece on the motel telephones to check for listening devices. And all that time you knew who and what was waiting on the other side of that door in this apartment in this city, and you didn’t say thing one.”

“Ever wonder who came up with three-bean salad? I sure do.”

“So tell me why now we’re instigating some sort of dialogue about the basically settled issue of Joan.”

“I just wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth,” says Teko. He slurs it enough to make it sound like whore’s. An additional tension takes hold of the room. The gratuitous insult has a presence, a weight, that is unignorable.

Tania thinks that there’s something very Hollywood about borrowing and wearing a man’s bathrobe in his apartment. Hollywood and sexily Goldilocks-ish.

“So now you heard it,” says Joan, ignoring the insult. “I don’t know who do you think you’re giving orders to, but it’s not me. I don’t know who it’s going to be.” She looks at Yolanda, but Yolanda’s eyes are downcast.

“I don’t ‘give orders,’” says Teko. He picks up a highball glass that sits on the footlocker and sniffs it.

“On the other hand,” says Randi, “we could always do Jade Mountain.”

“Just No-Cal,” says Tania. Her hair whispers against the terry cloth as she turns her head toward him.

“Frankly, I could kill for some Chinese after a thousand hamburgers,” says Guy. “Has Randi taken you girls to Jade Mountain yet? It’s the best.”

“Oh, have we been out on the town?” Teko shakes his head in disgust.

Guy says to Yolanda, “He’s all yours.”

“Guy, I just, shit,” says Teko. “We’re traveling undercover, and they’re sampling the local cuisine.”

“They’re undercover too. But they’ve got to eat. An army travels on its stomach, says Mao.”

In a concession to Teko’s security concerns, Guy and Randi go to Jade Mountain to bring back takeout. They push the footlocker to the side, making room to form a circle on the living room floor, the white takeout containers clustered at its center. They eat hungrily, without talking. Guy eats scrupulously with chopsticks. Joan does not. The meal seems to mellow Teko out somewhat, and Tania watches him eat, fascinated: He reaches with his fork for the food on his plate and then hovers with it at chest level, waiting while his jaw works metrically at the previous forkload, revealing none of the epicure’s contentedness or satisfaction, his eyes uninhabited behind the candy-colored sunglasses, a device, refueling, on standby.