Up in the Air

“Where were you all day?” I shout into the bathroom while sighting down my crooked, wavy cue. I’ll skip the white over the orange and hit the red and the red will cause a scale-model Big Bang of symmetrically diverging suns.

“People-watching. The faces here. Amazing.”

“You plan events for a living and huge festivities but you’ve never been to Las Vegas? Are you successful?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t to you. I’m mumbling.”

“Can you just give me some time here? Five more minutes?”

“What?”

“Can you just—”

“Kidding, Alex. Kidding. I wish you were in here to see what I just did.”

She shoulders the door closed and I welcome this because I can stop looking through it at the floor where Mr. Hugs’ legs can be seen behind the trash basket. I hang up my stick and leave the rec room. That was my all-time high point, that last shot, a miracle on felt that won’t come twice. I lie on my back on the bed and I replay it on the expanded field of a beige ceiling so heavily textured and spackled and swirled and pebbled that I expect it to crumble or start dripping. Tomorrow’s the day, tonight is just survival, and knowing that should make everything a bonus. If I eat one good shrimp. If I snatch another Dexedrine. If I glimpse Lisa’s back in a crowd and flip her off or see Craig Gregory lose just one quarter. I can treat these next hours as one long jubilee and Alex as Bathsheba come back to life, and if I don’t I’m just stealing from myself. This is why a man must set clear goals, because in the final countdown to their fulfillment, especially if that fulfillment feels inevitable, he can be as playful as he wishes, because all but the riskiest risks are now risk-free.

I’m ordering a limousine tonight. I’d like to see an impressionist. I shall. I’m raiding Alex’s pharmacy in broad daylight and if she catches me I’m going to grin the naughty disarming grin I just now practiced, before I’d even imagined a context for it. I want to find whoever’s dealing “blue bottle” and buy a six-pack, if that’s how it comes, and dose Alex’s drink without her knowledge and carry her back here giggling and fizzing and primed to act out the back pages of Hustler slathered in mentholated shaving cream.

Still, I worry that she’s not successful. Because that will come out at some point and could be hard for someone as madcap and effervescent as the new me. She’s already mentioned that she did public relations once—she noticed on the jukebox a band she’d represented—but she didn’t explain how she got out of it, which means her departure was probably not voluntary. We’ll need to avoid that particular episode and any stretch of either of our lives that words such as episode can be applied to. That will be easy for me, since I’m a master, but could be tough for her as she gets drunker and starts to confuse my radiance with warmth.

Judging by how long she’s been in wardrobe, she’s going to thrill me when next that door swings open, so there had better be some music playing. I logroll across the mattress and sit up and stare down into the jukebox’s bright innards. I’m looking for something light and old and tuneful with no strong associations for either of us. Just a song for two generic flatlanders who’ve known the sprawling opportunity cities but still remember cold drumsticks at the swimming hole and that jig Poppa danced when he drank too much schnapps, even if things didn’t happen just that way. Is there a song like that? Evocative but not stirring? That takes you back without taking you over? If there is, it’s my theme. I’ll make it my new sleep machine.

But it’s not here on this old Wurlitzer. I’m stumped. No Sinatra, no Broadway, no Motown, no bubblegum, just tons of glum college-radio alt rock and overproduced AM country and—it’s so wrong—much melancholy yet strident sixties protest crap. I may as well just punch stuff up at random; a dangerous thought, since that’s what I’m now doing, as though my ideas are now starting in my fingers and traveling upstream to my cerebrum. Out slides the arm and the record from its rack and up comes, at a volume I can’t lower because I see no knobs or dials anywhere, “If I Had a Hammer” by Peter, Paul and Mary. It’s just the tune I didn’t want to hear and of course it’s also Alex’s cue to open the door, spread her arms, and say “You like?”

She takes the catwalk. She’s dipped herself in black lacquer that still looks wet and tied her straight hair back in a whiplash ponytail that she swings around in a slashing full rotation while bowing her head, and I’m really not sure why. Her shoes are the kind you don’t notice, you just see legs, and the whole effect is pure campy female cutout, like those busty silhouettes on truckers’ mud flaps.

“Rate me,” she says. “Be vicious and be cold.”

“Ten is inhuman and never sounds sincere, so I’ll say nine point seven. Nine point eight.”

An abrupt Bond Girl pivot, hand on hip. Reverses it.

“This music’s awful.”

“Do something about it. There’s not much there.”