“Harsh.”
“Except Louis. Otherwise you’re all cheaters, if you ask me. Not that I give a damn.”
“I’m really divorced.”
“I believe you. No, seriously. I was kidding.” DaBlonde’s expression changed again, her long face looking placid, her gray eyes vacant. “But most men are cheaters. You know they are. And worse. Like my ex? Was just convinced that I screwed around, and I never did, not once in seven years. But meanwhile Scott’s out knocking off new stuff every other weekend. And — and carrying on with my best girlfriend, maid of honor at our wedding.” The corners of her eyes crinkled and her smile returned. “Louis is probably hovering out there right now, hoping we’re having sex again, and here we are having a regular conversation.”
Tacko thought, A regular conversation? That’s maybe not how he would’ve described it, but they were having... something. Something Tacko was okay with. That he was here for, present for. He was good with all of it. It was just — he still had a hard time convincing himself he could do something like this, weird shit like this, and get away with it. He’d probably get AIDS. Or maybe Louis was right that second dropping a diamond-shaped purple roofie into his cup of coffee, he’d end up with a ball-gag in his mouth and dangling from a ceiling beam. Jesus. Had he lost his mind? Had he lost his mind since he’d lost his job? He wondered.
For almost nineteen years he’d worked at Greene and Scivally Advertising, the last eleven as a group creative director. Then: new management, and out he went. Week before Thanksgiving. One day he’s brainstorming a new campaign for a national brand, the next he’s emptying his desk with a security cop standing by in case he goes berserk. But Tacko wasn’t the excitable type.
It was scary carrying away his carton of personal items, but also a secret relief. He’d been in career burnout a long time, he just hadn’t let on. In recent years, movies and novels and TV series about characters who found the courage and/or the foolhardiness to abandon stifling lives had held great appeal for Tacko.
The first two months he didn’t do much. Got out to the gym more regularly, subscribed to Netflix and caught up on the third season of Lost, scheduled and kept doctor and dentist appointments before his company health insurance lapsed, and worked on his screenplay, the one based on a botched kidnapping that happened in the early 1990s. But the story got trite as he was writing it, not basing it closely on the real case at all, and he gave it up again. He knew he wouldn’t go back to it.
During this period Tacko wasn’t dating, by choice. He’d had an on again/off again friends-with-benefits thing with a married secretary who used to work with him and now worked for the Virginia Bar Association. But when they didn’t get in touch over the Christmas holidays, Tacko wondered if maybe this time the off-again was permanent. Upon consideration he discovered that possibility not even slightly painful. Thinking about Connie Agnew and how insignificant she had become in his life was the first inkling Tacko had that he might have left more behind recently than his job.
People he knew well, whom Tacko considered friends, called and left messages. Tack, a bunch of guys are getting together for poker tonight, we’d love to see you. Vincent, my man, you at all interested in seeing a movie? Tack? I sent you an e-mail about Robin’s birthday party. Call me. Vin? Nikki and I were saying how we haven’t heard from you. Vincent? Tack? Tacko? He didn’t get back to most people. It just wasn’t anything he cared to do. After a while there weren’t many calls. Tacko had no problem with that.
At the end of December his brother died suddenly, but he didn’t fly out to Salt Lake City for the funeral. They’d been estranged. Their personalities, their politics, their dad’s will. His brother, though. Jesus Christ. Heart attack. And he was younger than Tacko by four years! His brother Kenny’s death shut Tacko down for weeks, well into the new year. Except for paying bills online, he mostly slept and moped around the house. He watched four seasons in a row of The Wire. Grew a beard and shaved it off.
He’d received a good severance package, and had significant savings, even some excellent technology stocks, so money wasn’t an issue. The rest of his fucking life was. But even deep into January his future remained a subject Tacko felt he couldn’t deal with yet. If something great, some fabulous new direction, didn’t happen or present itself by the first of February, he’d look for another job in advertising. First of February. February the first. He marked it on his calendar.
Often Tacko woke in the night and lay awake for hours. He couldn’t turn his brain off. One night, but just the one, he pondered ways a reasonable man might realistically kill himself, but otherwise he just thought about how much he didn’t want to resume his former life. Is that what it was already? His former life? What he wanted, what Tacko most needed, was something different, a fresh possibility, even the merest glimpse of one.
For a about a week he considered writing a novel, one set in the cutthroat world of advertising. He actually outlined one on the computer. But when he read over what he’d done, it sounded like every other story ever written about an ad agency, so he deleted it and looked at Internet porn instead.
Honestly, Tacko could not recall how the habit started — from boredom and curiosity, probably. But he’d also recognized just how infrequently (hardly ever) he thought about women these endless unemployed days and nights at home, and so it was possible he was using the stuff as proof he hadn’t lost interest in sex. Porn gradually became a daily routine, and one of his favorite pay sites (by the middle of February, he’d subscribed to six) was DaBlonde’s. Not only because she was located in his hometown, although it surely played a major part. (Finding her site had been a sheer accident, serendipity, link to link to link to link...) No, what he liked best about her? The woman seemed utterly reckless. Fucking men in stairwells, hallways, at highway rest stops. Behind the Museum of the Confederacy. That took guts. Her site biography (which Tacko figured was probably all bullshit, but he chose to disregard his cynicism) stated that she’d been raised in a strict household and had never even kissed a boy before she was twenty-one. And look at her now!
“You seemed like you were going to say something.”
“No,” said Tacko. “Just thinking.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do,” said DaBlonde.
“Who came up with your name?”
“It’s what my ex used to call me, but that’s not what you were thinking. He’d call me that when he called me a slut. So what were you really thinking?”
“All right. I was just wondering — you and Louis met online? At a chat room?”
“Yeah...? I was in North Carolina and Louis was living here. Well, out in the county. So?”
“I was just wondering. Was there, like, one day, one particular day, when the two of you just said that’s it, enough, and then packed your stuff and walked away and — got together?”
“I guess. But it’s not exactly an original story. It happens all the time.”
“Well, maybe.”
“It does. People walk away, Tacko. And the world doesn’t end. You can do whatever you always wanted and nobody can stop you. Is that what you’re asking me?”
“Yeah. No. I’m not sure.” He was babbling now because he realized this was the first time she’d called him by any name, and she’d chosen his last name, the least familiar, even the coldest, of the possibilities. His heart sank a little.