Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories

Youre going to leave your watch on?

Youre leaving on your cross?

Subway grates, steaming tamale carts, charcoal braziers roasting chestnuts, the breaths of the pedestrians outpacing stalled traffic, the chimneys Gil cant see from the window of the airline bus all plume in the frigid air. Its cold enough for Gil to wear, for the first and only time, the salt-and-pepper woolen trousers he bought at an estate sale last summer. Hed stopped on a whim when he saw the sale sign, an excuse to tour a mansion that looked as if it once could have belonged to The Great Gatsbys Tom Buchanan before hed moved from Chicagos North Shore to Long Island in a fashion, Fitzgerald wrote, that rather took your breath away hed brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. Perhaps the deceased had left only debts, for the heirs, haughty with grief, were selling off the furnishings. Those there to buy spoke in subdued voices as if to seem less like scavengers. Gil browsed the sunlit rooms with no intention of buying anything, then in an upstairs bedroom he found an open cedar wardrobe filled with old, handsomely made mens clothes. He selected the trousers and held them up before a walnut-framed full-length mirror, and told himself he might wear them for cross-country skiing even though he hadnt skied in years. Later, when he tried them on at home, they fit as though theyd been made for him, causing Gil to wonder who the man whod worn them had been. In one of the pockets there was an Italian coin dated 1921, and Gil thought it might be worth something to a collector. He kept it in a cuff-link box with spare buttons, a St. Christopher medal, a class ring, and cuff links he never wore. Even after hed had the trousers dry-cleaned they smelled faintly of cedar.

The airline bus has nearly reached downtown when the woman in the seat across the aisle leans toward Gil and asks, Are those lined?

Pardon? he says.

Are those lined? Theyre beautiful but they look itchy. Wings of dark glossy hair and a darker fur collar frame her narrow face. Her smile appears too broad for her, but attractive all the same.

Partially, he says.

Knee-length?

Not quite. Actually, they are a little itchy, but theyre warm.

They look right out of the Jazz Age. Theyve got that drape. I love anything from the twenties music, furniture, the writers.

Some of my favorite writers, all right, Gil says.

They still read so alive! Like that newly liberated, modern world was just yesterday.

It sounds like shes speaking in quotes and Gil smiles as if to agree. Her hairstyle and the coat shes bundled in both suggest another time. The coat has a certain Goodwill-rack look that exempts a woman from the stigma of wearing fur. Gil has no idea what kind of fur it is. It matches the luster of her hair. He has the vague feeling theyve met before, which makes talking to her effortless, but Gil doesnt say so for fear it would sound like a line. Shed know a man would remember meeting someone who looked like her.

Whered you find them? she asks.

At a kind of glorified garage sale.

I didnt think they were new. When designers try to bring back a style they never quite get it right.

Theyre the real deal all right, complete with little buttons for suspenders. I probably should be wearing suspenders.

Not even half lined, though, huh? Bet it feels good to get them off. She smiles again as if surprised by what she has just said.

You sure have an eye for clothes, Gil says.

Dont I, though?

Outside, snow settles on Chicago like a veil, as if it is the same veil of snow that was floating to earth earlier in the day when he boarded the plane in Minneapolis, returning from his fathers funeral. The airline bus has stalled again in traffic. Shes turned away, staring out the window. He doesnt know her name, has yet to ask where shes traveling from, if she lives in the city or is only visiting, let alone the facts of her personal life, but all the questions are already in motion between them.

Why not end here, without answers?

Arent there chance meetings in every life that dont play out, stories that seem meant to remain ghostly, as faint and fleeting as the reflection of a face on the window of a bus? Beyond her face, snow swirls through steam from exhausts and manholes. Why not for this one time let beginning suffice, rather than insist on whats to come: the trip theyll take, before they know enough about each other, to Italy; those scenes in her apartment when shell model her finds from vintage stores, fashions from the past hell strip from her present body? Her name is Bea. Shell say they were fated to meet. Theyll play at being reincarnated lovers from the First World War. Sometimes hes a soldier who died in the trenches, sometimes a young trumpet player poisoned by bathtub gin. Scene added to scene, fabrication to fabrication, until a year has passed and for a last time he visits her apartment in the Art Deco building on Dearborn with its curved, glowing glass brick windows. Theres an out-of-place store on the ground floor that sells trophies an inordinate number of them for bowling. Its burglar alarm, prone to going off after hours, as if the defeated have come by night to steal the prizes they can never win, is clanging again. Shes been doing coke and tells him that in a dream she realized shes been left with two choices, one of which is to kill him. She laughs too gaily when she says it and he doesnt ask what the other choice is. Shes mentioned that shes been in touch with her ex-boyfriend a man who over nine years, with time-outs for affairs, has come and gone at will in her life, a relationship it took her a while to reveal fully because, she explained, she didnt want to give the impression she has a taste for damaged men. If shes implying its a relationship that redefines her, she has a point.

Does he know about me? Gil asked.

Id never tell him you exist, she said, her eyes suddenly anxious and her voice dropping to a whisper as if an omnipotent master might overhear.

In touch means Gil has noticed bruises when he hikes her skirt to kiss the curve of her bottom. Shell have asked for them, he knows, shell have begged, Leave your mark. The boyfriend is an importer, she says. Hes a connected guy whose family owns a chain of pizza parlors. He carries a gun, which she says makes her feel safe, though what she really means is that she finds it thrilling, and when she disappears into her bedroom Gil isnt sure whether shell emerge armed or wearing a chemise from the thirties that shes found at some flea market. No matter how often he strips the past from her body, she finds a way to wear it again. His impulse is to let himself out, but he doesnt want her and for that matter, doesnt want himself to be left with a final image of him running for his life. An escape might make it seem as if the choice in her dream were justified. He doesnt want to admit shes made him afraid, and so he sits and waits for her to reappear.