The park was full of children tonight. Gerry did not want children and, in the end, women almost always did. That had to be the reason Gretchen left. But the best way not to become one’s father is to never be a father at all. He had tried to be kind and faithful to his romantic partners and, for the most part, he felt he had been true to his own standards. He had been faithful to Gretchen, no small thing. Gretchen had started out as a most provocative bed partner; the contrast between her suited daytime self and the wanton body in bed at night had heightened his attraction to her. But she seemed less and less interested in him as her paychecks rose and his earnings stagnated. She did not respect him. By the time she left him, their sex life had long been dead.
He suspected she had a lover, up in New York. He didn’t even care.
Alonso’s was quiet tonight. The bar had been renovated recently, updating the dark, homely little tavern into something sleek and modern, much to Gerry’s disappointment. He preferred its original incarnation. He and Lucy had lived half a block from here. They had doted on its horrible pizza, pizza so bad that he craved it still. They had eaten the too-salty mozzarella sticks, tried to wrap their mouths around cheeseburgers almost as large as their heads. Then they would go across the street to Video Americain, take home one of the staff recommendations. Gerry still stopped into Video Americain on his walks, still heeded the staff recommendations. Last week, he had watched a film called Funny Bones, which had surprised him because he realized, in the final minutes, that he didn’t know if he was watching a comedy or a tragedy. See, art can do this, he’d said to Luke across the void. It is possible to create a story where people aren’t sure what happens next.
He spoke a lot to Luke, in his head.
As he sat at the bar, drinking the first of the two beers he allotted himself, he became aware of a couple sitting across from each other in a booth. The woman was twentysomething, a mix of ethnicities; he had never seen anyone like her—Asian, yet freckled, her skin a warm olive cast. Not beautiful, something better. One would never tire of looking at that animated, lively face.
The man across from her could have been Gerry. Forty, give or take, full head of hair, Waspy. The couple’s eyes were locked on each other; no one else existed as far as they were concerned. The man would speak; she would laugh. And yet, they did not touch. They were conspicuously not touching. It was an act of propriety, an attempt to convince those who saw them that this was a friendly meal, nothing more.
It was one of the most erotic things Gerry had ever seen. It was another one of Luke’s before moments. These people had not slept together yet. The woman was trying to decide if she would sleep with this man. It was her choice, not his. The wheel was spinning, spinning, the ball was bouncing. Where would it land? Who was this woman? She was a fantasy, an apparition. The man opposite might as well have conjured her for the express purpose of torturing him. She might sleep with him, but she would never be his, she would never belong to anyone. She was quicksilver, a treasure that would flow through a man’s fingers.
Then, in an unguarded moment, she took a french fry from the man’s plate and ate it. Gerry realized he practically had a hard-on. There was nothing arch or sensual about the act; a french fry is technically phallic, but it is a limp phallus, especially in a place like Alonso’s, crinkle cut and undercooked. No, it was her assumption that the man’s food was hers to take. She would take what she wanted from this man, then move on. Not in a mean, avaricious way. She was not a gold digger. She wanted this man for her own pleasure, nothing more, and she would offer pleasure in return. She would be generous and wholehearted, but she could never be possessed.
Gerry would give anything to know a woman like that.
He paid for his first beer and left without having a second. He had to get home, he had to write. Fuck the maximalists, the Tom Wolfe imitators, the worst of whom was Tom Wolfe these days. Last fall, Alice McDermott had won the National Book Award over Wolfe and some people had tried to make it a literary scandal, claiming Wolfe was robbed because of political correctness. No, McDermott was showing the way with her human-scale stories, but she was too modest to make a case for herself. Gerry would write a piece about where fiction should go and then he would show everyone.
He would show everyone.
The wheel spins, the ball bounces, bounces, bounces. Where will it land? Will you get the girl? Will your name be read from stages, the recipient of important prizes? Will your name be remembered? How will it be remembered? Will you be remembered at all?