The Fugitives (26 page)

“You could,” said Kat, beginning to grow amused.

“You could argue that, but I’d argue that it’s worse than a washing machine. Nobody ever buys a washing machine and then
doesn’t
wash clothes in it. Nobody goes down to the basement six months later and says God I can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to washing clothes yet, I had such high hopes, I swore I’d do laundry when I made my New Year’s resolutions. But every time you look at a book, it reminds you that you haven’t read it.”

“What if you have read it?”

“That’s super rare. What’s your name?”

“Becky.”

“Becky. Anyway, the point is that malls are bad news. They make people feel terrible. People’s relationship to shopping is at a low ebb. They get angry at the merchandise. This is bad. Retailers need specialized environments. Now, if you’re selling dishwashers and Blu-Ray players, you open a big bare space made out of cinderblocks where every exposed beam is covered with spray fire retardant. This says, ‘This ugly place makes you suffer a little; we’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible, but we’re also going to make you
see
what goes into giving you your deep deep discount. But imagine how great your new dishwasher will look in your kitchen rather than in this hellish no-man’s-land.’ That one’s easy. But if you sell books, what’s the balance you need to strike, how do you make Malcolm Gladwell seem necessary while making him seem as frivolous and commitment-free as a popcorn movie at the same time? You don’t want people weighing the relative merits of Malcolm Gladwell versus an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Things could get really ugly for Malcolm. And you definitely don’t want people comparing the untapped utility of an unread Malcolm Gladwell book with the endlessly tapped utility of a fifty-five-inch HDTV.”

Kat deadpanned, “Who’s Malcolm Gladwell?”

Andrew Meisler shook his head, chuckling. “Who’s Malcolm Gladwell. Do I like you or not?”

“You like me.” Kat started on wine #4. He patted her thigh, then let his hand light on it. She let it remain there, feeling an oncoming attack of what Justin liked to call
acting out
.

“We don’t call it a store,” he continued. “We call it a
commons
. It’s a template devised specifically for places like this, relatively sophisticated dots on the map that are miles from anything resembling a viable alternative to what we offer. We think of the commons as a place where an irresistible conversation is always happening. And there’s only one way to be part of it.”

“Buy something.”

“That’s a kind of reductive but basically accurate way of putting it.”

“Lots of luck.”

“Don’t be negative.” He patted her thigh, then gripped it lightly. “There’s a science behind this.”

“I don’t doubt it. So where, if not the mall?”

“We’re going to anchor the new development Morello’s doing out at the old loony bin. Called Fifty Commons, coincidentally enough. It’s perfect, really. It’s going to be the new center. Everything’s going to be happening there. New research shows that consumers think of reading as something that happens when they’re alone. They negatively associate it with something that’s
isolating
. At the Commons, visitors see that reading isn’t isolating at all. Most bookstores try either to be comprehensive or to broadly identify what their specific customer base might be interested in. Too chancy. The Commons is an entirely curated experience. We feature and promote a limited number of titles. We offer value-added content and activities germane to those titles. You’re not just reading what others are reading, you’re
experiencing
it with them. It’s
happening
. And it’s a liberating experience.”

She turned on her stool to face him. His hand slid off her thigh. She took the copy of Mulligan’s book that she’d been reading and held it up.

“How about this? Is it happening?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a book. Geezum.” She placed it in the hand he held out for it. He flipped it over, flipped it back. Opened it, riffled the pages, glanced at the copyright page, closed it.

“Well, it came out a couple years ago,” he said.

“So?” She emptied her glass in one long swallow.

“Publishers tend to be less enthusiastic about promoting their backlists. We’ll be depending a lot on synergy.”

She leaned forward. They stared at each other for a moment. She felt slightly hot. They had been moving closer and closer together as they spoke. It was one of those places where they turned the music up little by little over the course of the evening so that eventually you had to yell to be heard. She could smell his breath.

“Do you want another?” he asked.

“I’ve had enough. I might need to get going.” She saw, with satisfaction, his face fall a little; watched as he performed a complex series of mental calculations. How could something be exciting and predictable at the same time?

“Are you good to drive?” he asked, finally.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I might need some help.”

“Let me give you a lift back home,” he said. “The roads are still pretty bad.”

“OK.”

He appeared surprised by his luck. “I don’t know what we’ll do about your car.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s a rental.” This seemed to quicken his enthusiasm. She pondered for an instant the connections that could be traced between a rented car and easy virtue. She put on her coat while he paid—she allowed him to pay for her meal—and headed for the door. On the way out she swooped in on a man smoking a cigarette as he watched the TV over the bar and bummed a smoke from him. He looked startled, but shook one out of his pack for her amiably enough and after she’d taken it and leaned forward to let him light it she squeezed his forearm. She felt very sociable. She stood outside on the raised strip of concrete—was it even, could you legally call it a “sidewalk”?—that islanded the building from the surrounding parking lot, drawing on the cigarette, feeling the sharp air and the nicotine colliding with her drunk. Which car, which car. Probably another rented Impala, just like hers. But when he came outside, raising one eyebrow slightly at the sight of the cigarette fuming between her fingers (fuck off), and planted his hand in the small of her back, he began to guide her to a silver SUV parked nearby. It chirped as he unlocked it and he opened the passenger door and scooped some papers and food wrappers off the seat and dumped them in the back. She tossed the cigarette and climbed in and realized that this had to be his car; it was too crammed with belongings and a fluent sense of habit to have been scoured clean recently in some airport backland. She glanced into the rear seat and it seemed to her that he must spend most of his spare time befouling the interior of the vehicle.

He got in beside her and, as she shifted in her seat to take a look at him in this new space, his coat rang; the four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony.

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Are you going to get that?”

“Not yet,” he said. The phone ceased and he turned the key in the ignition, then smiled at her. She smiled back. The phone started again. “Ach. Excuse me a second,” he said, reaching into his coat. She could hear a woman’s voice on the other end: bright, expectant, not unhappy.

“I couldn’t, I didn’t hear it,” he said.

Kat leaned over and put her hand on his crotch. Then she grabbed the waist of his jeans and yanked them open, the buttons going pop-pop-pop-pop. He was slow to react. “No, yeah. It went good,” he said, looking down and studying his lap as if from a height.

She found his penis sort of down and to the right. She kneaded it a little but it just lay there. She heard the woman talking, reciting little facts from her day like anybody.

“That’s great,” he said, nodding. He shifted the phone to his left hand and reached down and closed the fingers of his right around her wrist. “Great.” She relaxed and he let her go. She withdrew her hand and immediately dropped her face into his lap.

“No, no, wait til I get home,” he said. “I think I can take care of it. Don’t call anyone.” He bucked, and hit her in the teeth with his pubic bone. The force of it surprised her. She sat up and touched her fingers to her lip, checked them to see if she was bleeding.

“Listen, I’m in the car and I’m . . . yeah, exhausted. Can we talk—yeah, tomorrow. Is it OK? OK. Me too.” He hung up and glared at her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on. That was my girlfriend, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, excuse me.”

“I don’t mean to be a dick,” he conceded, “but a little discretion, huh?”

“But you are a dick, to me,” she said. She shot out her hand and grabbed at his penis again.

“Hey!” He gripped her wrist and forced her arm into her own lap. She felt her whole body moving backward, following the motion of her arm, his arm, his shoulder. She was surprised by his strength. He looked angry. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

“Look, maybe you better call a cab.”

“This ain’t what you wanted?”

“No,” he said, and he focused his eyes upon her as if he’d spotted some minute contaminant in his environment. “It ‘ain’t.’ ”

“What are you, gay?”

“Jesus, get out of the car.”

“Not good enough for you, faggot?”

“Just get the fuck out, you crazy bitch.” Andrew Meisler looked scared, and his voice canted upward into a new octave.

“Fuck you,” she said, opening the door and putting one foot on the asphalt. “Midget-dick white faggot.” He sped off while she was trying to slam the door as hard as she could, and she stumbled and fell onto the surface of a parking lot for the second time in two days. “Fuck you!” she called. “Fuck you!”

21

T
HURSDAY
morning, the son of a gun told a Nigerian folk tale. Kat had never heard the story before, about Nanabozho wearing a hat that was red on one side and blue on the other, deliberately sowing discord between two women who, viewing it from opposite sides, bitterly disagreed about its color. She tapped
red hat blue hat folktale
into her phone and discovered that it was a traditional Yoruba story. The chutzpah. Awesome. There was no Salteau. No such thing. She wished he’d tell the story of John Salteau one of these bright library mornings. We can all relate. That new life, that uncomplicated history. You build it up. She did it with Justin, who knew she was married once, who appreciated the fact that she had a past, but who thought “experience” meant something wise rather than just the usual unbroken chain of repetitions, to whom that past was a story as pat as any other, the sum of what he’d built up about her, watching her, listening, the unexpected blurts about how Danhoff used to this or Danhoff once said that, the knickknacks and snapshots; he conspired with her to build up that blameless past. What else could he possibly need to know? He got what she intended for him to get. Not only did Justin have no idea what she’d done, he had no idea what she was doing. If you successfully created the impression that you had no old secrets, there was plenty of room for new ones. And this was how she kept herself.

She had a spiteful hangover.

And now here was Mulligan, moral scourge, genius, and insult to literary tradition, in that order. Bugging her about lunch, again. As she’d known he would. How gratifying. The afternoon unrolled nearly as predictably as if she’d set it on a track. “Jesus,” his voice dumbly gasping, as she kneaded his glans, urging forth from it the last glistening drops of his semen. They were parked in a lot near the dunes, and it was brilliant inside the car, the sunlight reflected by the snow all around, striking the interior in odd, unexpected places, affecting the matte black of the dashboard and console with a dull sheen. He slumped against the door on his side when she released his penis, and looked at her through half-closed eyes.

“Nap time?” she asked.

“I could take a snooze.”

“Better put yourself away first.” She reached into the console and pulled out a pack of Kleenex, then wiped her hand, her wrist, the console itself, and the display on the stereo. “Is this sort of thing the reason your marriage broke up?” Why not raise the subject? Her bold presumption seemed to make him come fully alert.

“My marriage broke up,” he said with some spirit, “because I was fucking bored to death. My marriage broke up because it was a pain, literally. For ten years I had pain in my neck, pain in my upper back, pain in my lower back, pain in my hip. Ten years, mysterious pain, doctors, genuine Park Avenue specialists, shaking their heads, take more ibuprofen is what they said. I moved out and it just went away.”

“We should get going,” she said. “I’m surprised we haven’t passed out from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Wouldn’t you notice?”

“It’s colorless. And odorless. And it doesn’t irritate the lungs or nasal passages.”

“There must be symptoms.”

“If you got a headache right now, what would you attribute it to?”

“Your big mouth.”

Well, she had to laugh at that one. Then she sat for a moment, staring ahead through the windshield. She felt momentarily content. The car was warm, from the heat streaming through the vents and from the sunlight streaming through the windows.