Men Seeking Women Page 11

But Julie had realized that the object in her grip was a remote control, and she was eagerly channel surfing.

  “Ohmigod!” she squealed. “It’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street! This is like my third-favorite movie! Ohmigod it’s Norma Shearer! Look at her hair, I had a wig just like that once!”

  Van did a movie search.

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  Julie was transfixed. Long, enraptured moments passed, broken only by her intakes of breath and the gentle clicking of Van’s ThinkPad. “My God,” Julie breathed at last. “I’m getting into this so much!”

  With occasional glances upward, Van watched the movie enough to catch its drift. It was a period chick flick, about a sick girl stuck at home, whose situation turns around when some good-looking con artist shows up and hands her a line of artsy bullshit.

  “How about some popcorn, Julie?”

  “I don’t think I’m hungry.” She began to tremble.

  Van went to his futon, fetched off his musty blanket, and carefully wrapped her up.

  “I’m afraid of dying, just like she was,” she muttered. “I just don’t want to die all alone.”

  “You’re not dying. You’re very alive and safe here.”

  “I saw a dead man today. If you hadn’t been there, trying to fix it, I would have just completely freaked out. I just would have started screaming. I don’t know how I would have ever stopped.”

  “Nice movie, huh? Handsome production values. How about a nice cup of Korean green tea?”

  She hugged the blanket closer. “I’m having a really long day,” she whispered, and began to sniffle.

  He hadn’t expected to see Julie crying. The crying thing turned him completely inside out. It hit him like a match on oil-soaked rags.

  The darkest level of his psyche burst into sullen blue flames. Those tears meant she was helpless. Just like the handsome actor on the screen, he could hand this trapped, drug-addled girl any line he pleased, and she would have no choice but to nod and blink and hope for the best, and then he could do absolutely anything he wanted to her.

  The crazy feeling subsided, as quick, sudden, and evil as a smash of glass and a midnight car alarm, but then there it was: she had come into focus for him. There was a woman in his life.

  He sat down, picked up her hand, and patted it.

  When they returned to work next morning, late, together, in her car, and with Julie still in yesterday’s clothes, there could only be one logical conclusion. It was true that they had been sleeping together, since Van had bagged a couple of hours upright on the couch. Julie hadn’t managed any sleeping. She claimed that she just felt “clear” and “kind of peaceful.” Once in her work station, she slipped right back into the routine. Although when word got out in e-mail, absolutely everybody knew.

  Darren called Van in for a conference. Darren was tall and handsome and probably gay, and got a lot of play in the Austin tech press. He was on the road all the time, selling the Vintelix vision to the distant venture gods of Redmond and Silicon Valley.

  Darren was in a serious pinch because of Louis’s sudden demise. The loss of a key programmer made it harder to meet shareholder expectations, to keep up market momentum, and to manage that special Vintelix buzz. Unlike most of the other coders, Van had some coherent idea of what Louis had been up to. So despite the fact that he was only employee number 26, Van found himself with most of Louis’s work on his hands, plus a raise in salary.

  Then came the obligatory “sandwich treatment,” with broad hints that Van should dress more appropriately for his new, exalted station in Vintelix management. Inappropriate relationships with female Vintelix personnel were of particular concern to Darren. Van departed with a final lacquer of praise: a boost in his stock options and a new and more meaningless job title.

  Van spend the rest of the day and most of the night going over Louis’s code. The spaghettiware was even worse than he’d imagined. Louis had always treated the Vintelix code just like his own baby: in a way, the Vintelix code was Louis’s own baby. It was the only baby Louis had ever had.

  By one A.M. Van had arrived at a game plan: outsource everything in sight. Louis had always hired people on instinct, but Louis was the kind of guy who would hire people he played Dungeons and Dragons with. Coders who really got it were worth twelve of anybody else. So even if they were upset by a reorg, all the hardcore guys would come around when they saw some real progress made. In sum, there was probably nothing wrong with Vintelix that a total and silent hacker revolution couldn’t somehow cure behind the scenes.

  Van was hauled from his bed at eight A.M. to accept an express delivery of books. The Rules and The Code had arrived. Next day, while he oversaw the transfer of his own hardware to a new office more suitable to a “senior technology coordinator,” Van examined The Code. Unfortunately, the book was merely a series of lame jokes, featuring no actual data on exploiting women for sex and not paying.

  The Rules, however, was a work of deadly seriousness. Mostly, it was about phone calls.

  The Rules was bitter, life-and-death, stripped of all sentimentality. It was about surviving, and protecting children, among a race of large, brutal, half-blind creatures who would exploit you without conscience and could easily beat you to a pulp. Most everything in The Rules made a lot of sense to Van. The thing was more than a self-help book: basically, it was an operating system. The work fired his imagination and reset his agenda.

  Van went home early—at a mere 7:00 P.M.—and picked up the phone. Then he put it back down, and logged on to Julie’s webcam, instead. Much as he had expected, Julie had thoughtlessly left the camera plugged in. She was carefully painting her toenails, reading a woman’s magazine, and almost literally hovering over her phone.

  Van captured and froze a webcam frame and blew it up for closer study. Julie’s magazine was Cosmopolitan. The magazine featured a shapely young blonde in a blue reptile bikini top. The cover text, though blurry on the screen, was still legible. Make Him All Yours: Play Cosmo’s Fantasy Game with Him Tonight and Win His Undying Love. Man-Melting Massage. 97 Sexy Date Looks. The Confessions Issue!

  Van dialed her number. He saw her scramble for the phone in a fury, upsetting her nail polish, face alight with desperate hope.

  “Hello, this is Van.”

  “Hello, Van,” she said with polite indifference.

  The previously unseen hippie roommate rushed into Julie’s room. Julie emitted a silent scream of triumph, waving her fingers frantically. The roommate, enraptured, leapt up and down in sympathetic glee.

  Van examined his stack of notes and cleared his throat. “Julie, listen. I need to ask a favor of you. I’m sure that you value your time and have a very crowded and fulfilling social life. However, I’d be truly grateful if you would join me tonight . . . to shop for clothes.”

  “What did you say?”

  Had he overdone it? She seemed stunned.

  “Julie, I need a new wardrobe. I just got a promotion. I feel uneasy about my new role and I depend on your judgment and support. I’m sure your unique insights will help me fit in among the top echelon of the company.”

  “You’re not mad at me for freaking out on acid in your living room? Ohmigod, I wish I’d never done that to you. I felt so embarrassed, I just could have died.”

  Van thumbed rapidly through his briefing cards. Here it was: the Self-Esteem Crisis. “Okay, maybe that was a little indiscreet. But frankly, I found it provocative and exciting. It was a bold move from a woman who knows what she wants from life.” He leaned back. “So, Patagonia closes at nine, right? Can you come and pick me up in your car? And bring us something to eat.”

/>   “Okay, sure, right! My God, Van, we’d better hurry.”

  “You’re saving my life here, Julie. You’re a treasure.” As he hung up, a net search hit pay dirt in the browser window. It was some English-major site, dating back to the early 1990s, when the Web had still been full of academics. Public-domain stuff, old poetry.

  This Browning woman didn’t seem to have much going on: a lot of thees and thous. Van spooled down the screen until something in the spinning text caught his eye.

  <
  So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move

  Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair:

  And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,—

  “Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said. But, there,

  The silver answer rang,—“Not Death, but Love.”>>

  He hit it with a bookmark. Plenty of time to decode that one later.

  THE FACE IN THE GLASS

  Paul Hond

  Byrne switched off the engine and checked himself in the rearview mirror. Already he looked different. His act had changed him, deepened his beauty. His mouth—the finely carved lip (like a woman lying on her back, as his brother once said), the tiny divots above and below, put there, pressed there, as if by a finger to clay—had been refigured, sensualized to a point of anguish: he touched it as he would a wound, with awe and sadness. The nose, hanging nobly above, appeared smooth as a slope of marble, aloof to the lower appetites. His high cheekbones tapered delicately to the grim outline of his jaw; and when the light caught his chin there were copper sparks, bits of wire that glinted fiercely, the needles of the noonday sun.

  The radio reports said that investigators had no solid leads, but were interested in a dark green sedan with Virginia plates.

  Byrne’s car was blue.

  And by now, the weapon—a Colt .45 “Defender”—would be sunk at the bottom of the river: he’d chucked it off the Powhatan bridge, right out his window as he drove north on Mountain Road. There had been no other motorists in sight.

  Byrne touched the rim of his sunglasses; he had yet to look at his eyes.

  Cars pulled in and out of the lot: in the mirror Byrne could see the traffic pass on the highway. His Virginia tags felt conspicuous to him, here in Pennsylvania; if the feeling persisted he might have to ditch the car. At the very least he would have to avoid gas stations and motels. Luckily he had a gas can in the trunk.

  Byrne removed his sunglasses, slowly, like a thief revealing stolen jewels: two cold blue eyes stared back at him. Byrne felt adrenaline, as though he were confronting an enemy. He then tried to admire himself in the mirrored lenses of the glasses, but his hand was shaking, causing the image to blur. This alarmed Byrne, who was susceptible to omens. He willed the tremor to stop.

  He got out of the car; his knees almost buckled, and he had to put his hand on the roof to steady himself. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  He moistened his lips and ground the tip of one heavy workboot into the asphalt; then he kicked a pebble and watched it skip. It went much farther than he’d expected, as if it had come alive. A good sign. Heartened, he followed the smell of bacon to the entrance of the diner. Byrne was a vegetarian, not crazy, but he did believe in treating his body as a temple, and objected to unhealthful foods. At the moment, though, he wasn’t hungry.

  He pushed the glass door, taped to which was a flat cardboard jack-o’-lantern. Byrne did not look at its eyes. In the vestibule he noticed a bucket containing two umbrellas, even though it wasn’t raining.

  He was then struck with the thought that she might not be there.

  What then? Where would he go?

  He walked past the cashier’s station and looked around the place. The cushions of the booths were the sharp orange of American cheese when it has been sitting too long, and the lacquered wood-paneled walls had reddish tones that made Byrne think of light going through a bottle of cola.

  He smelled pancake syrup, a cloying sweetness on the edge of a waft of meat; it reminded him, obscurely, of his mother’s sickroom. . . .

  He spotted her.

  She was seated alone in a booth by a window, toying with buttons on a miniature jukebox that was mounted to the table. There were two cigarettes crushed out in her ashtray, and she was smoking another. The ashtrays were really just fancy pieces of tinfoil.

  Byrne shrugged his shoulders under his old denim jacket and blew air into his cupped hands. Grinning faintly, he approached the table.

  She looked just as her photo had promised: a big girl with a big heart. Her name was Carly. She had wide green eyes and dirty blond hair to her shoulders, styled in a perm. She wore white tennis shoes, tight black exercise pants cut out at the ankles like stirrup socks, and an oversized sweater of white, green, brown, and red, depicting what appeared to be a reindeer in the snow. Byrne had chatted with her online five or six times. She’d said she was twenty-four—a year younger than Byrne—but she seemed much older, sodden with television and disappointment. Next to her, Byrne felt ageless.

  “Carly?” he said.

  “Yes?” Carly looked up at him, and her eyes glittered.

  “It’s me,” Byrne said. “Kyle.” He gave a nervous, disarming laugh.

  “Kyle?”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Carly hastily put out her cigarette as Byrne sat down across from her.

  “You don’t look the same in person,” she said with coy suspicion.

  Byrne stroked his face. “Must be the whiskers,” he said. He took a spoon in his hand and twirled it idly. “Hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Carly said. “Are you?”

  “Hardly,” said Byrne. He had a soft, gentle voice. “I’ve been thinking about you the whole ride. All those things we have in common.”

  “Like what?” said Carly, leaning forward on her elbows.

  “All those things. Like how you love animals, and hiking.” Byrne smiled. “And movies.”

  “And going places,” Carly said.

  “And going places.”

  “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?”

  “Right here,” said Byrne.

  Carly smiled, blushed. “I was thinking more like Barbados, or South America. There’s a lot of places I want to go.”

  Byrne glanced at his image in the concave side of the spoon. He had never been on an airplane. He was deathly afraid of them.

  “You hungry?” Carly said, with some urgency, as if afraid of losing his attention. “Everything’s good here.”

  Byrne noticed her hands. She had a ring on every finger, and her nails were bitten down. One ring had a small silver crucifix.

  “An orange juice, maybe,” said Byrne. He fished some quarters from his pocket.

  “Oh, the orange juice is really good here,” said Carly. She signaled for a waitress. “They squeeze it fresh.”

  Byrne fed the jukebox as Carly ordered juice for Byrne and a slice of pie for herself.

  “Pick some songs,” Byrne said.

  “Okay,” said Carly, happy as a girl at the fair. “I always play the same songs.”

  A song came on, something countryish that Byrne didn’t know.

  They talked for a while. Carly wanted to learn more about Byrne’s work as an artist’s model. Byrne told her that his job was to pose naked while college students drew him.

  “You mean, totally naked?” said Carly.

  Byrne laughed. “It’s not porn or nothing like that.”

  “I know,” Carly said, blushing. “But still, I mean, did you ever, you know—get excited or anything?”

  “No,” said Byrne. He wasn’t smiling now. He toyed with the spoon again. “Nothing like that.”

  “Did I embarrass you?” Carly said. “I’m sorry.”

  Byrne looked around, suddenly worried that Carly had had someone follow her, to make sure that Byrne looked okay. But all he saw was a bunch of fat yokels
eating scrambled eggs and sausage: a few families, some old gray-haired couples. Somewhere in the room a baby was crying.

  “So what do you want to do?” said Carly. “You get to decide, since you came all this way.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” said Byrne, turning his attention back to her. “But first I need to figure out where I’m staying.”

  “I told you in my e-mail that you could stay with me,” said Carly, uncapping a tube of lip balm. She applied it in slow strokes, working her lips together. Then she returned it to her shiny black handbag, which she kept on her lap like a puppy.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” said Byrne.

  “No,” said Carly. “Why would I?”

  Byrne thanked her and ran his hand through his hair.

  When they were finished, Byrne paid the bill. Then they went outside to their cars.

  Carly drove a white hatchback. Byrne followed her. The day was cold and blue. Byrne felt a wave of nausea as he drove the unfamiliar road, thinking that at any moment a patrol car would appear in his mirrors. But what if he were stopped; what could they do to him? What evidence did they have?

  Byrne sucked his lip. There were too many cars. He was grateful when Carly turned onto a back road.

  The trees were in fiery form, stunned and brilliant as the plumes of wild turkeys.

  After a mile, though, Byrne wondered if he was being led astray.

  Carly then turned on her blinker and slowed.

  Her house was hidden from view; a mailbox on the roadside announced its presence. Byrne followed Carly into a gravel driveway, at the end of which was a white, box-shaped house with lime-colored shutters. The neighboring houses were obscured on either side by a kind of curtain of field herbs and thin, crooked trees, with leaves of pink and gold.

  Byrne parked behind Carly in the driveway. He got out of the car, opened the trunk, and removed his overnight bag. The small front lawn was the color of hay, and matted, as if a board had lain upon it all summer.

  Carly led the way to the front door; three ears of Indian corn hung above the brass knocker.

  “This was my grandparents’ house,” said Carly. “I was living in an apartment, but then my grandmother died, and she left me the house. The deer come right up to the back door.”