KAREN
She isn’t used to restaurants like this one, a former blacksmith shop renovated into a California-chic lounge and restaurant. The walls are brick and basalt, roughly mortared. The chairs are black leather. The tables, darkly polished pine. The dim lighting is made a little brighter by the many mirrors staggered throughout the dining area. In her water glass floats a slice of lemon that sheds pulp and leaks yellow blood. When the waiter lays her napkin across her lap, she isn’t sure whether to say thank you or back off.
Across from her sits Bobby Fremont. Since last week, when he asked her out to lunch, she hasn’t thought much about what she is doing—about what it means to secretly agree to a meal with a man other than her husband—but on the drive over she made herself imagine a scenario where they laughed about local politics, talked about their favorite television shows, and ate salads. But now here they are and his eyes never seem to leave her, his gaze hungry and probing, slipping her blouse over her head, unhooking her bra, hiking up her skirt. She feels at once flattered and debased. Maybe that’s why she’s here—to feel that way.
Bend is a small enough town that she looks around often, looks for a familiar, wondering face. What she would say to a friend or neighbor or colleague, she isn’t sure. She lifts her water to her mouth. Ice clatters against her teeth. She has drained her glass already.
Her husband is several hundred miles away, and the distance feels good. It feels right. As though they ought to be separated. Justin prefers not to talk about how things have soured between them, but once in a while, when he is in a foul mood or has sucked down a few beers, she can get him to fight. “You’re not the person I married,” he said a few weeks ago. She didn’t argue.
He thought it was about the baby. It wasn’t. The baby was just a black doorway that took her into a far room of the house where the windows offered a different view. She is unhappy. She does not enjoy her life as it is, and she thinks her marriage has something to do with this. Sometimes she feels guilty about wanting to escape. She has, after all, what most would call an enviable life. A beautiful child, a good job, a nice house. She has her looks and her health. She lives in the shadow of the mountains. Sometimes she reviews this list, counting off on her fingers all the things she ought to be grateful for. She tries to smile. But when she smiles the smile feels more like a fissure that leads down her throat to some darkness inside her.
She likes to go online and plug in to Google terms like “bubonic plague” and “genocide” and “elephantiasis” and even “irritable bowel syndrome.” She scrolls through the Web sites and gasps at the photographs and momentarily feels better.
The waiter—a red-haired twenty-something with sideburns—appears at their tableside and sets their plates before them: the ribeye for Bobby, pan-seared halibut for her. The waiter asks if there is anything he can do for them—more water? “Yes,” she says. The same word spoken to Bobby when he called and asked if she was busy, if she would like to meet him for lunch. Yes. Automatically. Not thinking, just responding. She isn’t sure what else she will say yes to—she isn’t sure even what else she should say, as they sit across from each other, his gaze steadily trained on her, seeking out her eyes—her eyes darting around the room, focusing on nothing and everything.
She has known Bobby for years. Every time she and her husband went to a party or an opening or a fund-raiser, there he was, moving through the room, clapping shoulders, shaking hands. Some people complained about the way Bend has changed, the way Bobby has changed it, the big parking lots and boxy buildings of their new outdoor mall, the hurriedly constructed housing developments with the same five neo-Tudor designs replicated over and over.
The two of them had never exchanged a How are you? a Lovely to see you, until two weeks ago, when she met a girlfriend at Deschutes Brewery. One pint turned into three. She never got out anymore and the beer was so cold and she was so thirsty and when she got off her stool she had to concentrate to keep from stumbling. She felt warm and loose. The music called down from the overhead speakers and made her want to dance. Minutes later, she walked out of the bathroom and directly into Bobby. “Oopsie,” he said and caught her, his hands on her waist, his face an inch from hers. She could feel the heat coming off him. He is much older than she, but handsome and fit and powerfully confident. She kissed him then. Full on the mouth. And he had kissed her back, but first he laughed, and when he did, she could feel the laughter inside of her. And that was it. She pulled away and returned to her stool and grabbed her purse and said good-bye to her friend and didn’t look back. The next morning she did not feel regretful so much as she worried that someone had seen them, that Bobby would say something or want more than what she gave him.
Now here they are. His smile, crowded with too-white teeth, is a dare. This lunch is a dare.
Her legs bounce beneath the table. She ran ten miles this morning and still she wants to move, to race along the sidewalks that snake through town. She has so much energy. She aches with it. She remembers feeling this way as a teenager. Growing pains, her mother called it.
“So?” Bobby says, wiping his mouth with his napkin.
“So.”
He raises his eyebrows and she puzzles over something to say. She hasn’t been on a date—is that what this is?—in more than a dozen years. “Tell me something you learned recently.” This is what she usually asks Graham at dinner. She wants to hit herself, to bring the palm of her hand to her forehead with a smack.
“Ooh,” he says. “Good question.”
“Really?”
He saws off a hunk of steak and pops it in his mouth. He does not set down his fork or knife but holds them upright while chewing noisily. “Here you go. Here’s something.” He still hasn’t swallowed but that doesn’t stop him. “I was out at a real estate site the other day, a place I’m thinking about buying. The owner took the agent and me down a narrow dirt road in the middle of nowhere—truly—middle of fucking nowhere—into a gulch. So we’re poking around and find these wires and cans with holes drilled in them. Apparently the buckaroos used to use this as a place to catch wild horses. We’re talking early twentieth century. They’d drive the horses into the canyon where other men would be waiting. As the panicked horses dashed in, the buckaroos pulled the wires taut from where they were lying on the ground. The wires had strips of fabric on them and cans filled with pebbles. The horses would believe they were suddenly fenced in. And if they brushed up against the wire, the pebbles would rattle loudly in the cans and scare them. Isn’t that neat?”
“That is. Neat.”
He swirls the wine in the goblet, sniffs deeply, sips, and pops his lips. When he speaks again, his tone has shifted from awe to contempt. “What a bunch of stupid horses. And what a simple concept to capture them.” His eyes, already on her, seem to narrow their focus. “No need for trees or wood or axes or hours of labor or waiting for the smell of men to fade away.”
She gulps some of her water.
“No riding broken horses to exhaustion chasing a bolting herd.”
She gulps some more, and then her glass is empty again except for ice, the lemon buried beneath it like a drowned canary. She glances around the restaurant for their waiter and can’t find him and when she looks again at Bobby she finds his eyes still on her.
“What about you?” he says.
She has to pee, she realizes. “What about me?” Her hair is down. She never wears her hair down anymore. It feels alien, brushing against her face, obscuring her peripheral vision. She feels masked by it, hidden. A good thing. With the restaurant full and people walking by on the street, there are so many chances someone might spot her.
“What have you learned?”
“Oh. Let’s see.” Her eyes drop to his plate, the forest of broccoli along its edge. “Did you know broccoli is one of the gassiest things you can eat?” Her mouth seems to belong to someone else. She cannot understand why she said this. Maybe because she doesn’t care? But if she didn’t care she wouldn’t want to climb under the table right now in embarrassment.
His smile breaks for a second before reasserting itself on his face. “Note to self.” He turns his plate so that the broccoli is at the far side of it.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m just not used to this.”
“It’s fine.”
“Is it?”
Bobby knifes into the steak again. “We’re just having lunch.”
“Is that all we’re having?”
She likes the way Bobby looks at her, so intently and so differently from her husband, whose eyes don’t seek her out, always focused elsewhere, on a book, a pile of papers, the window. She sometimes wishes she could snatch them out of his head and train them on her. “Just look at me when I’m talking to you.” But she also knows that when he does look at her—hungrily, as she steps out of the shower and pulls the towel off the bar—she wishes he would go away. Maybe because that’s the only company of hers he seems to crave; otherwise, they could remain in their separate rooms for all he cared. That’s what it felt like anyway. She’s mixed up; they’re mixed up. She knows it.
“You want to know what else I’ve learned? I’ve learned that everyone has two faces. There is the outside face, the mask they wear for the world, and the inside face, the one that comes out when the blinds are down and the doors are closed.”
“Is that so?”
“It is. It is so. Let me give you an example. Do you know Tom Bear Claws?”
“The Indian. The one who hates you.”
“The very same. Did you know that he doesn’t hate me and I don’t hate him? That we’re in fact friends and business partners? Did you know that?”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you only know the outside face.” He lifts his wine goblet and holds it up so that one of his eyes, oversize and bowled, looks through the glass at her. “Outside face, inside face.”
“I guess.”
She looks outside, where a cloud scuds over the sun, darkening the world. Her reflection takes form in the window. Her hair is covering most of her face, but she can see her lips and they’re red and upturned in a strange smile. She hasn’t seen this woman in a long time and barely recognizes her.
“You look beautiful, you know.”
She barks out a laugh.
“What?”
“Say that again.”
“You look beautiful?”
“I haven’t heard it in a long time. It’s nice to hear it.”
In dreams, sometimes you have to run—something is chasing you—but no matter how hard you try, your body responds as if tied down by leaden weights. She felt that way a lot. She felt she was slogging through a waking dream. But nothing was chasing her. Instead she was chasing something, maybe just a feeling: buoyancy.
She wasn’t sure what you called this. A midlife crisis. A seven-year itch that rashed out five years late. She feels bored, resentful, claustrophobic, weighed down.
Bobby says, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
She smiles and tips her head—she can’t decide if he is being silly or charming. It is the sort of question a boy might have asked her, long ago, when parked on top of Pilot Butte, the stars above and the lights of the city below equally bright.
“I don’t know.” She wants to say her son pulled from between her legs and laid between her breasts, the blood still pumping between them through a cord, but she doesn’t. Instead she picks up her glass and swirls the ice in it. “You?”
“You.”
“Oh, boy. You know how to lay it on thick, don’t you?”
“Hey, I mean it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re stunning. You really are.”
She realizes she is toying with her hair, tossing it, coiling a strand of it around a finger and letting it swing loose. “I’m married, Bobby.”
“I don’t really believe in marriage. I’ve tried it three times, you know, so I’m kind of an expert on the matter. And in my mind, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not how we work. You want to wear the same pair of pants—or eat the same meal—your entire life? I love this ribeye, but I’d hate it if I ordered it every day.”
“So I’m meat to you?” She isn’t sure of her tone, whether flirting or mocking.
“We’re all meat, Karen. But I only meant it as an analogy.”
When the check comes, she reaches for it even though she knows he will insist. Reaching for it momentarily reasserts some sense of control. And then his hand is there, on top of hers, heavy and tanned and wormed over with veins. “That’s mine,” he says.
She concedes the check by withdrawing her hand.
“Let’s go back to my place,” Bobby says, not asking, telling. “Get a drink?”
She glances at her watch without even noting the time. “I don’t think so.”
“You have something better to do?”
“I need to go running.”