Outside his apartment we hardly touched. No holding hands on the street, no legs coming together under restaurant tables. If we were meeting at McClanahan’s we met without a kiss, so that it all stayed in the air between us, ignitable but not ignited.
The world was different because of this. The sky was a blue I’d never seen before, hard and cold, with edges that could cut. Smells emanating from restaurants attached themselves to individual ingredients with startling specificity: melted butter, grilling lamb, cumin in tomatoes, cilantro, frying salmon. From the jukebox at McClanahan’s I heard the line of a guitar lift itself from the surface of a song and then settle down again. I wondered if this was what the beginning of crazy felt like. And then Kilroy would say something bland and vaguely cynical, and it would reel me back in to where I was steady again.
We were at McClanahan’s a lot, drinking beers at a table near the back, or sitting at the bar when the place wasn’t so crowded, Kilroy saying, “That guy needs an appointment at a methadone clinic
yesterday
,” or “Watch, now she’s going to tilt her head sideways so her diamond earring will show”—and she, whoever she was, would do just that.
“You’re an observer, aren’t you?” I said one evening. “You should be a journalist. Go around with a little tape recorder you’d talk into. Then you could write these reports about, you know, life in the city.”
It was noisy, so we were leaning forward to talk. Sitting at the back of the bar near the pool table, curved glasses of pale beer on the table between us. Kilroy ran a finger down the side of his, leaving a trailmark in the condensation. He shook his head, but with a smile. “See, there it is right there.”
“What?”
“The pernicious little idea that who you are should determine something as trivial as what you do for a living.”
“As
trivial?”
He shook his head again. “Life’s not like that. It’s not that malleable.
It’s not that neat.” He lifted his beer and took a long drink, then wiped the cuff of his sweatshirt across his mouth. “With that theory
you’d
have to be one of those career graduate students, going from Ph.D. to Ph.D.”
I laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean, I’m a nerd?”
“I was referring to your inquisitiveness.”
My face warmed, and I looked away. The night before, I’d gotten going with questions. We were in bed, entwined after sex, and I’d asked about his last girlfriend: who, how long, what happened. And he became—well, not huffy, but cool. Or not even cool so much as absent. It was like he suddenly wasn’t there. We were lying so close I could feel his heartbeat, but he himself slipped away. The monosyllabic answers he gave were deflections, offered up by someone else, Kilroy 2, a stand-in.
Now, in McClanahan’s, I felt his eyes on me. I was looking to the side. I watched a guy in a blue-and-white striped dress shirt moving around the pool table. He gathered the balls from a low shelf and began arranging them in a plastic triangle. Something about him …
“Hey,” Kilroy said. “I’m not complaining.”
I turned back and stared into his face, his eyes tight on mine. He was, of course, but maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe not knowing didn’t matter. I said, “Not too grumpily, anyway.”
He smiled and lifted his beer again to drink. After a moment he turned and watched the pool table. The guy had lifted off the triangle and was getting ready to break. His opponent stood off to the side, his cue standing upright next to him. He wore a dress shirt, too, but he was smaller, closer to Kilroy’s size, while the first guy …
He had Mike’s shoulders, that was it. The exact span of them, their girth in a dress shirt. He looked nothing like Mike—older, balding, with a long, olive-complected face—but the shoulders … My God, my God. I was dizzy suddenly, queasy with remorse.
Kilroy coughed. “I think tonight’s the night.”
I turned back and found him studying me curiously, eyes narrowed, head tipped slightly to the side. He knew something had happened.
“I don’t know what I’ve been thinking, waiting so long,” he went on. Then he smiled. “Well, maybe it’s that I haven’t been thinking.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Your first pool lesson, of course.” He extended his left hand out in front of him with his forefinger curled, drew his right hand close to his side, and mimed a shot. “What do you say—you up for it? Not to put any pressure on you or anything.”
I shrugged. I felt torn, half in the moment and half back in the anguish
of seeing Mike’s shoulders in another man’s shirt. Mike’s old shoulders. It was wrong to be having a conversation at this moment, yet the fact that I was here, in this bar, in this city with another man—how much more wrong was that?
Kilroy raised his eyebrows. “Well? Want to give it a try?”
“I guess.”
He sat still for another moment, looking at me, then he stood up, fished some change from his pocket, and went over to the table. With the men watching, he set two quarters on the edge of the pool table, then another two right next to them.
“What was that all about?”
He eased back into his chair. “I’ll play the winner and then you’ll challenge me.”
“I’ll
challenge
you?”
“Pool has its protocol, just like everything else.”
“What if you don’t win?”
He grinned. “I’ll win. Those guys have hardly played at all since college, when they used to goof around on the table in the rec room of their frat house.”
I laughed. “Now you’re making assumptions. Maybe they didn’t go to college, let alone belong to frats.”
“Right,” he said with a snort. “They’re dressed like that for their jobs selling hotdogs at Nathan’s.” He shook his head. “They graduated from college within the last five years and now they work on Wall Street or I’m—” He broke into a grin. “Or I do.”
“The least likely thing in the world?”
“Pretty close.”
We turned sideways in our chairs and watched the men play. The smaller one bent over and sized up a shot, the solid red ball just in front of a corner pocket. An old Propane Cupid song came on the jukebox, and I waited for the part I liked:
Riding a Greyhound to L.A., passed your picture on a billboard. You’re not—ready. You’re not—ready for me
. What was I distressed about? Mike, yes, but more: over the pool table a bright pendant lamp shone on the deep green felt, and I dreaded standing in its light.
“Hey, not to worry,” Kilroy said.
I turned, and he was watching me with the same curious, narrow-eyed look.
“Are you worried?”
I lifted a shoulder.
“You’re going to do very well.”
“You seem awfully sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re one of those fetching small-town girls who’s full of surprises.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Is that what you think of me?”
“As if I’d tell you.”
“Now you have to.”
He raised his eyebrows briefly and then looked away, his nose in profile coming to a sharp point. My mouth was dry, and I took a sip of beer. I glanced over at the pool table: the men were almost done, just two balls left.
“It’s a city,” I said. “Of over a hundred thousand people.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, you’re still a fetching small-town girl. That milky-skin thing you’ve got going confirms it.” He grinned. “Oh, and lean forward a sec, there’s a little straw in your hair.” He reached across the table and pretended to pluck something from behind my ear, and the edge of his hand brushed the side of my face, suddenly electric.
The men were done. We looked at each other for a long moment, and then Kilroy got up and went over. I watched as he slid his first two quarters into a little metal drawer on the pool table, pushed it in, then fished the balls into the plastic triangle. He spoke to the tall guy, but it was too noisy for me to hear. It was a noisy, noisy bar in the middle of Manhattan. I was sitting at a table watching my lover play pool.
The game passed quickly, Kilroy moving around knocking ball after ball into pocket after pocket. When they were done he offered the guy his hand, and they shook.
I set my beer down and stood up. Why was I pretending to be interested in playing pool when I’d passed up hundreds of opportunities at home? Actually, I was interested. I was more than interested—I wanted to shoot one ball home after another, I wanted to astonish him.
“Are you going to get a cue?” he said.
“Yes.”
I went over to the wall and looked at the cues hanging there, finally choosing one at random. Its heft was unfamiliar: all awkward, unbalanced length, the wide end so much heavier than the narrow. I found a cube of chalk and rubbed it against the tip, then turned back to the table.
“OK,” he said, “I’ll break, then we’ll ignore the rules and you can just try shooting for a while.”
He made his way to the far end of the table, drew his cue back, and
sent the white ball racing toward the triangle of colored balls, which broke apart with a satisfying
knockknockknock
. The green one slid into a corner pocket, and he looked up and smiled at me. “Go for it.”
The yellow stripe was halfway between the white ball and one of the side pockets. I bent over the table. I liked the idea of the little guide Kilroy had made with his forefinger, to slide his cue through. I curled mine and got the cue situated, then practiced drawing it back a few times, aware of Kilroy’s eyes on me. At last I took a breath and fired, so off the mark that the white ball twisted back and stopped closer to me than it had started.
“Shit.”
He came around the table and stood next to me. “You have an idea what it’s supposed to look like, but you’re not quite looking
at
it. Here, let’s try something.”
He moved the yellow stripe out of the way, then stationed the white ball so it had a free path to the far end of the table. “Just work on hitting it, forget about making it hit another ball. Think of the cue as an extension of your arm.”
I moved closer to the table and leaned over. I lined the stick up and did the drawing-it-back thing again, but this time I focused on the ball. I poked it with what I was sure was insufficient force, and it rolled away from me and knocked smartly against the opposite edge.
We repeated this several times, and then he started setting up shots for me: angleless shots that should have been easy but weren’t.
I was about to shoot when a guy with a goatee came over and set a pair of quarters on the table.
I looked up at Kilroy. “Uh-oh. What’s the protocol now?”
He turned to the guy. “You have someone you want to play with?”
The guy shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever.”
Kilroy tilted his head toward me. “I’m giving my lady a lesson right now. Give us a little more messing-around time and then the table’s all yours.”
“OK.”
The guy walked away, and Kilroy turned to face me. “Go ahead,” he said, but my heart was pounding.
“You called me your lady.”
A smile lifted the corners of his mouth, and I felt my mouth twist into a smile, a question, I wasn’t sure.
Say
something, I thought at him. Say
something
.
Amusement and pleasure were on his face, but there was something else, too: some kind of surprise or even misgiving. What was it? He didn’t
want to think about it. Or he didn’t want me thinking about it. He looked away, rolled his lips inward, looked back. The noise in the bar seemed much louder now, deafening. Finally he ran the back of his hand across his forehead and shook it once at the floor, as if shaking off sweat.
“So?” I said.
“So shoot,” he said with a grin. “The protocol is that now you shoot.”
A tingling nervousness collected somewhere near my center. I couldn’t shoot but I had to. I bent over the table. He’d placed the ball a foot from the corner pocket, a perfect globe, the embodiment of the color orange. I got behind the cue ball and shot, and the orange rolled smartly into place.
“What did I tell you?” he drawled. “You’re a natural.”
Later, we walked back to his place. It was chilly, a mist falling so lightly you couldn’t really call it rain. We passed shuttered shop windows, iron gates drawn across entire storefronts and padlocked. In a high-ceilinged second-floor apartment across Sixth Avenue, a gooseneck lamp illuminated a table with a broad-leafed plant on it. Behind the table, a picture in an elaborate gilt frame hung by itself on a dark red wall, too far away to be distinct.
I’m giving my lady a lesson right now. My lady. My lady
. A choking feeling in me, to think about it. To think about how he’d reacted. He’d wanted to erase it. Not the fact, I didn’t think—just the words. Just my wanting more words, like last night. The fact was fine with him. The fact was where we were headed right now. Walking along, a foot apart. He’d left his leather jacket unzipped, and the bottom edge flapped as he walked. He took long strides, his legs lean and hard under his jeans. His legs were so thin compared to Mike’s. His arms, too—compared to how Mike’s used to be. Mike had always dwarfed me—he could have contained me as easily as the largest in a set of Russian nesting dolls contains the next one down, with room to rattle. Kilroy and I were nearly the same size. I could wear his sweaters. In bed our bodies lined up piece by piece.
“Why were you so nervous?” he said.
“When?”
“Right before you got your cue.”
I thought of how I’d wanted to do well. How I’d wanted to surprise him. McClanahan’s was a center of something; it was my ticket to stay. Or maybe pool was. I looked over at him and shrugged.
“Did you have fun?”
“I can see the attraction.”
He nodded. “It’s a great combination of focus and control, the mental and the physical.”
“I guess so,” I said, but I was thinking of Mike again, Mike and hockey. Mike all padded up for a game, out there on the ice, the blades of his skates freshly sharpened. Getting checked, he’d go with the slam, absorb it. The mental and the physical. That’s what his life was now, but the physical was a burden, not a resource. In my mind I saw him flying across the ice, then saw him seeing himself flying across the ice, from the stationary point of his wheelchair.