Shouldn’t’ve come here.
The money’s good. Gotta keep the boss happy.
Doesn’t matter.
Shouldn’t’ve come.
A little after six he worked out in the motel health club. For forty minutes he slammed along the treadmill and hefted free weights—30-pound barbells — as he worked up a good sweat despite the chill autumn air that bled into the underpopulated exercise room. These facilities were always kept cool in the motels and hotels. He was convinced it was to save money in heating costs and to discourage people from using them because of liability. A broken neck, despite the waiver, could be very, very expensive, he figured.
Ransom took a fiercely hot shower and at 8 p.m. he dressed in tan slacks and a dark shirt, pulled on his navy blue sports jacket and headed out the door. At the front desk a fifty-something guy who looked like a lifetime front desk clerk directed him to the Flame and Fountain, a steakhouse. He was there in five minutes. He hardly needed the restaurant’s sign to find it. Out front an energetic, blue-lit water treatment surrounded an impressive plume of fire. Tacky, but the exhaust of grilled steaks was seductive.
He smiled at the hostess and passed her by. When traveling for work he never sat at tables, only the bar, which was what he did now.
Several stools away was a woman close to his age, late thirties. In front of her was a frothy drink in a martini glass with a stem the shape of a fat teardrop or skinny boob. It was that kind of bar.
Tacky…
Wearing a tan skirt and matching jacket, she was attractive, a little heavier than she probably would have liked but it was sensuous weight and definitely appealed to Ransom. Voluptuous. Her hair, probably bottle blond to combat premature white, not brunette, was matte textured and had been wrestled into a taut ponytail. When he’d sat down she didn’t look his way. But then she wasn’t looking at anything, except the New Yorker she gripped with fierce fingers, tipped in iron-clad red nails.
Ransom assessed: She’d broken up or divorced about five or six months ago and had finally decided the severing was for the best and was now determined to abandon the comfort of Häagen-Dazs or Doritos for the real world. And here she was, meeting that tough challenge head-on, no safety net, as a woman alone in a bar. You needed to be vigilant, confident and constantly measuring what came your way.
Ransom didn’t think he’d have the energy to handle it.
He ordered a chardonnay, which turned out to be buttery and rich. Opening USA Today, he asked the bartender a few business traveler’s questions about the area, more making conversation than satisfying curiosity. He noticed, through his periphery, that the woman glanced his way twice then returned to the magazine. The bartender moved on and this time when she looked toward him he noted — not directly but in the smoky mirror behind the bar — her eyes graze the ringless heart finger of his left hand.
Ransom gave it a few minutes longer then asked her politely if she’d eaten here and if so what was good.
Food is always a good intro (she’d had a decent chicken, she told him in a husky, humorous voice; but two steaks had walked by and they’d looked better). From that icebreaker there followed typical banter — careers first, of course, then glancing reference to exes and children (the former yes, the latter no, in both their cases), then sorties about TV shows and movies and media and very careful forays into politics and religion.
But still, an objective observer, fly on the wall, would note that they survived the ritual admirably, that the conversation flowed like silk and was buoyed with humor and that Ransom and Annie had more than a little in common. The New Yorker, NCIS, Dancing with the Stars and the guilty pleasure of Two and a Half Men, now that Sheen was gone. Cabs over pinots. They shopped at Whole Foods for special occasions, IGA or Safeway normally. They each had secret indulgences: unshelled pistachios in her case, Mounds bars in his, a line that Ransom managed to deliver without a spark of lascivious intonation.
He had dinner — yes, a steak, which lived up both to her assessment and to the aromatic promise wafting through the parking lot. When he was through he talked her into sharing dessert, over two glasses of sweet wine.
And then, pushing ten o’clock, the night concluded. As indisputable as a chime, they both knew it was time to go.
But, the question remained, go where?
That inquiry was answered as soon as they were swathed in their coats and outside in the nose-tingling chill of the evening, under a dome of staccato stars. She said in that low voice of hers, “Walk me home? Just two blocks?”
“You bet.”
And with that the night was settled. Love, or one of its many approximations, is always determined in subtle subtext.
They walked down a street canopied by rustling leaves, washed gray of autumn color because of the missing streetlights.
In the middle of a conversation about Miami, where Ransom had just been on business, she took his arm firmly. Her breast met his biceps with persistent pressure.
And sometimes, he reflected, the communications are less subtle than at others.
A moment later they heard a loud voice: “Hey, why’re you with that old, you know, guy? You want a real dick?” The words slipped and slid as if they had vertigo.
He was stepping forward from an alley. The kid was white, acne speckled and beefy. Eighteen or maybe younger. Annie tensed immediately and Ransom increased the pressure on her arm as he led her around the boy.
“I’m talking to…you.” His brows knitted belligerently but it was hard to bring off ominous since he couldn’t focus.
Ransom smelled beer mostly and guessed his already hearty belly would swell to double its already impressive size in five years.
“What’re we going to do?” she whispered.
“Just keep walking.”
“Fucking slut. You’re a fucking slut. You want a dick?”
“Go home,” Ransom said calmly. “Get some sleep.”
“I’ll fucking take you down. I will. I’ll fucking do it.”
Tighter on Annie’s arm, he moved to the left and then right, swerving slowly like a ship around an iceberg. The young man’s eyes were swimming as he tried to follow them. Ransom decided that in the next sixty seconds the boy would jettison most of the alcohol that wasn’t in his bloodstream and he wanted to make sure they weren’t nearby when that happened.
The kid made a fist and stepped forward.
Ransom stopped and held up a hand, palm first. “Think about it.”
“You asshole…”
“You hit me, it’ll ruin your life. You’ll be in jail for a year. You want to explain that to your parents? Your future employers?”
The hesitation was enough to let Ransom and Annie get a breaking-the-spell distance down the sidewalk.
“You’re both fucking sluts,” he shouted.
He didn’t follow.
A half block away Annie whispered, “Oh, that was terrible.” She was shaking. “I thought he was going to attack us.”
“He couldn’t do much damage in that condition.”
Ransom looked back. The young man staggered around the corner and the sounds of what he’d predicted a moment ago floated unpleasantly into the sharp air.
The grunt, the groan, the splash.
Thinking suddenly of his mother.
Then, naturally, of his father, whose ghost seemed to be inescapable on this trip. A loner in school, skinny, Ransom was picked on a lot. He asked his father to teach him how to fight but the man scoffed. “Fighting’s for fools. Don’t ever get into a fight. You fight, I’ll whip you.”
“Why not?” young Ransom had asked, a bit confused about the apparent contradiction — and at the man’s vehemence (he never spanked the boys).