Fishbowl (7 page)

In the hairbreadth of time it takes him to span the gap between the twenty-fourth and twentieth floors, Ian knows this. Even as the memory of Troy and the pink plastic castle and his fishbowl fade, this one certainty remains embedded and true. His basic desire to explore, the very reason for his existence, has hung him in the sky.

Let boredom be to the snails!

And so Ian plummets toward the pavement.

11

In Which Katie Demands Satisfaction from the Elevator Button

The foyer door closes quietly behind Katie. The little hydraulic arm flexes, and the noise from cars passing by on the street outside becomes muted by a layer of glass and steel. As Katie crosses the lobby, she doesn’t notice that the wilted brown potted plants have been replaced by a lush silk terrarium, nor does she notice how well the new silk plants have been watered. She doesn’t notice how the tile has been polished to a high, reflective gloss and how there’s not a scuff mark to be seen. However, the lingering smell of lemons, bleach, and vinegar in the air can’t be missed.

Katie arrives at the elevators and presses the button with the arrow that once pointed at the ceiling but now misses it because, over time, it has become skewed about thirty degrees from vertical. The button now points to a sconce to the top right of the elevator door, and it clicks audibly when Katie pokes it. Katie waits in a silence that should be filled by the distant mechanical hum of the elevator moving. She glares at the button and then pokes it again. Waits. Then pokes it vigorously and repeatedly, the button sounding like an agitated cricket in the calm of the lobby.

The first press is to summon the elevator, wherever it hangs in the twenty-seven-story blackness of the shaft that vaults from here into the sky. The second press is because the button failed to illuminate from the first. It’s a finicky thing. The opaque plastic lights up with a creamy glow from that second push. The last presses are frustration-induced jabs, violent pokings that eventually cause fingertip numbness.

Katie’s emotions are all backed up, and she wants to get this over with. While the severe poking she subjects the button to does little to speed up the elevator’s descent, it does vent a tiny toot of malcontentedness. She wants to be standing in front of Connor. She’s impatient to confront him, have her resolution, and then move on with life. The afternoon has taken its time, slow seconds passing by to make up a minute and those minutes dripping by even more painfully to make an hour. All of them building to an end of her shift at the grocery store where she works, and each of them marking her passage from there to here. She didn’t have the frame of mind to marvel how each second, on its own, was a useless freeze frame, but all of them compiled made something much more coherent.

Her finger jabs.

The first joint flexes backward, and the pink skin under her fingernail flashes white with each stab. It’s a pacifying action, one that gives the same false sense of command over a helpless situation that floating seat cushions do on passenger jets crossing the frigid Atlantic at forty thousand feet. Those cushions won’t do much in a five-hundred-mile-per-hour nosedive into the roiling ocean water. Even if, by some miracle, anyone survives, those cushions won’t do much against the hypothermia and numbing freezing death that awaits the survivors. But it’s comforting to know they’re there, just in case. It’s just like how, if Katie pictures the button being Connor’s chest, she knows jabbing it won’t change anything, but each word punctuated by a poke brings an elevated level of calm with it.

“You’ve”—jab—“neglected”—jab—“my”—jab—“feelings”—jab—“for”—jab—“too”—jab—“long.” Sob. “I need to know you love me back.” Jab.

Katie imagines Connor’s smooth, deep voice stuttering out an answer. She pictures the stupid look on his handsome face, a look of surprise. It’s the look of a trapped animal. His square jaw slack, the bow of his perfectly kissable lips hangs open. His voice, halting and hesitant, says, “Baby, uh, you know I do, uh, you’re the greatest.” Pause. “I think you’re really great, uh.”

She needs to hear him say the actual words, and she will tell him so.

“I love you. There are two things you can say right now.” Jab. “Pick one and say it. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

Katie doesn’t know what he’ll say, but she’ll watch for that quick twitch or that momentary aversion of gaze signifying lying or avoidance. If he says the words back to her and if he really means them, she will make love to him right then. If he hesitates at the wrong spot, she will know. If he lies or can’t say it back, she will take her toothbrush, her favorite coffee mug, and her pink nightshirt and go. She’ll slam his apartment door as hard as she can on her way out. Damn the neighbors too.

The elevator chimes Katie’s thoughts back to the lobby. The doors slowly part, revealing Jimenez standing there like the world’s least appealing peep show dancer. He holds a screwdriver in one meaty fist and has a tiny golden screw cupped in the other. His tool belt has slipped off his hips and taken his pants down slightly as well. The smallest glimpse of his belly can be had, exposed from under his bowling shirt. Katie tries not to let her eye be drawn to the lobe of flesh, but she finds it hard to resist the spectacle.

Katie isn’t sure what Jimenez’s first name is. She’s seen him around the building on occasion and knows his surname from his seemingly unending wardrobe of bowling shirts with the name “Jimenez” embroidered on an oval patch and sewn on the breast pocket. They’ve said a few words in passing and always share a smile or a nod when they see each other. He seems like a nice man.

Jimenez and Katie stare at each other for a moment, Jimenez with his eyebrows lifted and his forehead wrinkled, Katie with her finger still extended like a gunslinger’s hip shot aimed at the elevator button. Each is seemingly surprised by the other’s presence.

“Elevators are broke, lady,” Jimenez says. “They ain’t going up or down. You gotta use the stairs.”

The stairs, Katie thinks. I have to hike up hundreds of stairs to the twenty-seventh floor. Then, most likely, have my heart broken, and then have to hike back down hundreds of stairs again, listening to the sounds of my own crying echoing back at me from the heights of the stairwell. Katie’s emotions oscillate between self-pity and rage at Connor, a heady and unstable mix that leaves her uncertain of how much control she will be able to exert over herself.

Katie’s stomach clenches when she thinks, Twenty-seven floors of hearing myself cry.

She feels like bawling right there, just to get it over with. The sooner she starts, the sooner she’ll find catharsis, and then, done with it, her emotions will be free to heal as much as they can and move on. Instead, she stands with dry eyes, embarrassed and exposed in front of the building superintendent. Her upper lip wobbles into an unsteady smile, and she sighs. Her chin puckers once before she pulls herself together.

She will be strong.

She is prepared.

“Sorry,” Jimenez says.

Katie realizes that there was a long and very awkward moment while she had been thinking, staring wordlessly at Jimenez.

Jimenez, the poor man, she thinks. I’m making this so hard on him. He’s not to blame. He’s such a nice guy too. He always says “Hi.”

“Not your fault,” Katie says and takes a moment to construct a more believable smile. “Thanks, I’ll take the stairs.”

Why did I thank him? Katie wonders as she crosses the lobby to the stairwell. He didn’t do anything wrong, but he didn’t do anything right either. He hadn’t brought her good news.

She hears the elevator doors bing and slide closed again. Without looking back, she pushes through the stairwell door and starts her ascent.

12

In Which the Evil Seductress Faye Bids Adieu to the Villain Connor Radley

Faye rolls onto her side. The mattress whispers under her. It doesn’t creak or moan; it’s just a mattress on the floor. The sheets feel amazing against her skin, a feather-soft embrace of her entire body that makes her achingly aware of every inch of naked flesh. A bead of sweat tickles a path from her armpit down the side of her breast. She shivers from the sensation and lets out a quivering breath at its touch. Her body is horribly spent but still beautifully charged.

The little studio apartment that crowns the Seville on Roxy is stiflingly hot. The air is stale and damp, like every breath of it has been used a hundred times. The late-afternoon sun streams through the balcony door, which is why she pulls the sheets up over her head, an attempt to fend off the light. She looks up, through the wrinkled tunnel of fabric, and she sees Connor Radley, barefoot and shirtless, his knobby spine curved, working on the pile of papers stacked on his lap. Just that glimpse of him is enough to spark her, a seed of desire to mount him mercilessly and ride him again until he’s completely drained.

Faye sighs from beneath a pile of sheets that smells of a sweet mix of Connor’s body and the heady heights of their sex, of their panting breaths and their sweaty skins, two organic fabrics sliding smoothly over one another. It’s the smell of their sweat-damp hair being grasped, sprouting between a knuckled fist and being tugged to one side. It’s the smell of the slippery bits between each other’s legs colliding. It’s the glorious mess their bodies made together. Faye’s skin shares the same scent, as does her breath. She can still taste his skin. Faye made a point not to shower or brush her teeth. She wants to sleep through the afternoon immersed in nothing but the remnants of their time together.

It isn’t a particularly pleasant scent, not one that would ever end up in an air freshener. It’s more of a pungent animal smell than a pleasant floral one, but it does take her mind back to when they were writhing, fighting against the end of their pleasure, fighting against it together but driving one another closer to it with each thrusting second. The taste in her mouth is a fermented one but one that constantly reminds her where it came from. These two things combined, biochemical aphrodisiacs, make her wet again, and she pinches her knees together, happy to be so overwhelmingly aware of her sex, feeling so alive because of it.

The balcony door squeals and squeaks as it shimmies open along its track. Faye closes her eyes to the sounds of the people and traffic passing far below on Roxy. Connor’s coming. She hears him moving around out there, outside of her bedsheet cocoon. She hopes it’s time for round three. Time to feel his wiry body wrap around her, the heat of his skin against hers. A warm breeze breathes clean air into the apartment and caresses the sheets encasing her. The balcony door is left open, the stale air quickly fading in the fresh; the noise outside is now let in.

“You have to go. Right now.” Connor shakes the bed. “My girlfriend is coming up.” His voice is manic. “Get your stuff and go. I’ll call you later.”

Faye lies there and then moans when Connor pulls the covers from her. She opens her eyes to see his face, upside down, leaning over her from the head of the bed. His eyes drift from hers to her body. Faye smiles, stretches leisurely for his benefit, and then reaches up, looping her arms around his neck. She pulls him down for a kiss, with which he complies, but she can feel it’s rushed. It’s a shallow, worried, and hurried kiss, an “Okay, I’ll kiss you but you better haul ass outta here right after” kiss.

The spell her body holds over him is broken, and he bustles off, out of her line of sight.

Faye rolls over on the mattress and watches him for a moment. Then she climbs out of bed and puts on the jeans she had folded and piled on the thrift-store nightstand. She looks from one side to the other. She can’t remember if she was wearing panties before Connor ravaged her, so in the end, she doesn’t worry much about it. Panties or not, it doesn’t matter to her.

Connor walks around the room with a plastic shopping bag hanging from one hand, the other loading it with the sporadic wadded tissues and skin magazines and foreign articles of clothing. In the kitchenette, he peels off a condom that’s draped over the edge of the cutlery drawer. Pinching it between thumb and forefinger, he swings the rubber like the limp corpse of some fish … a bright-green, sour-apple-flavored, ribbed-for-her-pleasure, one-dollar, bar-washroom-vending-machine fish.

If Faye ever were to wonder what she was doing with Connor, which she never has to do, she would just have to look at him to know. It’s simple. He’s the best sex toy a girl could ever want. God designed him as a tool with the sole purpose of making her come. He’s a few years older and almost a foot taller than she is. He’s thin with a tight sheath of skin covering an anatomy lesson of musculature. He’s handsome, square-chinned, and perfectly hung for her tastes, pendulous but not gargantuan. He’s strong enough to throw her around the room when she wants it that way but not so strong that he’s a threat. Sometimes he can be an asshole, but she never questions her desire or asks more of him than what he can provide.

That’s how she knows they’re perfect for each other. Neither wants to change the other. It’s all about using the right tool for the right job.

Never use a spoon to cut a steak, Faye thinks, looking around again at the mess.

“I can’t find my shirt,” she says. “Or my water bottle.”

Connor sighs and grabs a pink nightshirt from the kitchen counter. “Here, wear this.” He crosses the room. “And here—” He grabs her wide-necked sports bottle from the coffee table. It gurgles when he hands it to her. Faye slips the nightshirt over her head, finger-combs her hair back, and finds an elastic in her jeans pocket to secure it out of her face. She fixes it back in a ponytail.

Within a few minutes they are at the apartment door, Connor still shirtless and besweatpanted, Faye wearing jeans and the pink nightshirt. Him, shoeless with hairy toe knuckles, and her, slipping on her flats. Her hand rests on his shoulder for support, sliding down to his chest for balance. Her heart fluttering at the feel of his button nipple under her palm, him resisting heroically, though betrayed by the growth straining against his sweatpants.

Finally, to punctuate the moment, he leans forward to kiss her. He says, “Take the stairs, my girlfriend will be coming up in the elevator.” Then, in response to her strained look, he begs with a drawn-out “Please.”