Interlude
Sienna
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The new one is named Beau, and he’s perfect, and I know it the first time I see him in the lot outside the facility, because he’s doing the thing.
The edge-of-the-group thing. Dex brings him around and he laughs a half-second late and there’s a ring on his hand and a look on his face like a man trying to remember the words to a song he used to know, and I think: there you are.
He’s lonelier than most. I can tell. Some of them are just bored, and a bored man is a worse bet—boredom passes, a bored man goes home eventually.
Beau isn’t bored. Beau is erased. New town, big new job, a title he wears like a coat that doesn’t fit, and underneath it a man who used to know who he was and can’t find the guy anymore.
I’ve seen it a hundred times. A man who’s disappearing will grab anything that makes him feel solid, and I am very, very good at making a disappearing man feel solid.
I just have to be the mirror his wife stopped being.
I see you, Beau. I see the guy under the coat.
He’s still in there, and he’s interesting, and he’s wasted on a life that’s got him picking up kids and going to bed at nine.
I don’t say it like that. I’m not crude.
The whole art of it is that you never say anything a man couldn’t repeat to his wife—you just look, and you listen, and you laugh at the right half-second, on time, the way nobody’s laughed with him in a while, and you let him build the rest in his own head.
They always build it. That’s the part that would surprise the wives, if they knew.
I do so little. The men do the entire affair in their imaginations and then resent me for it, like I broke in, when all I ever did was leave a door open and let them walk through it carrying everything themselves.
He’s got a wife, of course—that’s the point, I don’t want the ones without.
And a couple of kids, and a boy who plays the cello.
He mentions it once, at a fire, the boy and the cello, with a flicker of something real that I file away, because the realer the thing he’s neglecting, the bigger the proof when he neglects it for me.
There’s a recital coming. A big one, he says; the kid’s been working on it for months, and his wife’s reminded him twice.
I watch him say it with that guilty flicker and I know, the way I always know, that he’s going to miss it.
Not because I’ll make him—I don’t make them do anything.
He’s going to miss it because somewhere in him he’s already decided he’d rather be a man who gets to ride off for a weekend than a man who sits in the second row, and I’m just the road he gets to ride off on.
People will say I took him from that recital.
I didn’t. He was always going to find a way out of that chair—I’ve met a hundred of him, I know the species—and if it hadn’t been me it would’ve been a bar, or a hobby, or some other woman in some other lot.
I’m just the one who happened to be standing there when he went looking for the exit.
That’s all I ever am. The exit somebody else was already looking for.
And when he picks the rally over the kid—when he chooses the road, and me on it, over a boy and a cello and a chair—I’m going to feel the only thing that makes the riding worth it: chosen.
For one weekend I’m going to be the thing a good man set his whole family down to have, and it’s going to feel like proof, and it’s going to last exactly until he comes to his senses by some fire and remembers he has a floor to stand on and I don’t.
And then I’m going to be nothing again, and I’m going to get on my bike and ride to the next town before the nothing fully lands.
I always leave before it lands.
Except this time—and I don’t know it yet, sitting in this lot watching Beau Hartley laugh a half-second late—this time the man comes to his senses faster than they usually do.
This time there’s a wife who won’t play her part.
This time the nothing comes for me before I can outrun it, and when it does, I do the one thing I always swore even I would never do.
But that’s later. Right now it’s just a lot, and a lonely man, and an open door.
I’m so good at open doors.