I’d be easy to spot too, because of my classic and stylish clothes that fit me better all the time thanks to biweekly sessions with my personal trainer, and the great haircuts I’d get at a salon that I’d always wondered about, with its expensive-looking branding and their hair care line displayed in their windows visible from the street. My hair stylist would know the best person in the state for that hair transplant, if I ever got serious about it.
“Trust me,” she’d say, looking at me in the mirror as she touched my hair, “it’s totally worth the cost, and this guy is so good no one will ever be able to tell. Not in a million years.”
Mr. Grate and Bench came to the lobby and asked me to call him a cab. He had read about a restaurant and he wanted to try it out.
I observed, as he waited for his cab, that he was very good at pressing his shirts. “Maybe you can teach me your trick sometime.”
He laughed. “It must be my special talent.”
I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything about it, so I said, “How’s your pregnant employee doing?”
“I’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. “She says she’s showing now.”
“Wow,” I said, “that must be weird, huh?”
“Yeah, it always is for my wife. It kind of makes everything real.”
“I bet.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we’ll see what she’s thinking tomorrow, I guess.”
Then the cab came, and he told me to have a nice night and to take care. I said the same to him, and then I was alone in the fish-bowl again.
One of the day clerks had forgotten to log out of her Facebook account, so I looked up Mr. Grate and Bench. His profile picture was of him and his wife and kids, taken professionally, it appeared. They were seated on a bench on the front porch of their upper middle class tract home in Connecticut. The wife, pretty and brunette, the kids — maybe four and six years old — dressed like their father, in light-colored polo shirts and loafers.
It resembled in no way the life I had envisioned for myself, but it appeared to have its charms. More than the lobby, anyway, where I had to keep a vanilla-scented candle lit around the clock to mask a mysterious odor the source of which no one had been able to locate over the past three-and-a-half years.
A couple of hours later, I watched through the window as my future employer was dropped off by another cab. He took a while figuring out how to pay, and I could see he was slightly drunk. He made a gesture of surrender that I took to mean that he had chosen to overtip tremendously rather than do the math.
He waved at me as he passed the lobby on the way to his room. I waved back, but then opened the door and called out, “How was it?”
“Great!” he said, still walking away from me. “You’ve got to try it!”
60
I WAS STILL A PART OF THE COP’S LIFE EVERY DAY. WHETHER he knew, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was there, a minor character in the movie of his life, knowing and knowing and knowing that I’d move from background extra to leading actor if I could only hold on. Maybe he could sense my presence somehow, a friend and protector, watching over something as minor as his daily email correspondence.
I knew what greeted him each day before he did, what he had to dread and look forward to. At first I only read the messages he’d already read himself, but that quickly began to seem like a meaningless ethical technicality. I soon found I couldn’t resist, and I began reading the messages he hadn’t read yet, always remembering afterwards to highlight them and click “Mark as Unread” before signing out, only to sign in five minutes later to see if anything had changed.
In the weeks just after he ended things with me, he replied to my emails right away. I could see he had read them, and then I would get a reply. But it wasn’t long before I found that he would read my emails without responding immediately. Sometimes days would pass. It was as though he was too exhausted of me even to send a quick note. I could understand why. Even a short reply would result in an astonishingly disproportionate response from me. I read an article during that period about how people who have recently been broken up with have reduced blood flow to the parts of the brain in command of reasoning. It made perfect sense, but when I thought of it, I was only reminded to go check his email again.
Sometimes I would send an email to him, then log in to read how it looked from inside his inbox. I could don his moustache and his holster and his self-assurance and read as though I were him. Often, I’d then think better of it and delete the just-sent missive from his inbox and trashcan, pulling the words back before he could ever read them.
Once, I read a particularly exciting email that had just been sent by the kid minutes earlier. It was about some of the problems they had been having at home and the kid’s promises to try to get better about keeping the house clean and taking better care of the cat. But the kid said that the cop had to make changes too, like being more fun when the kid had friends to the house. And not being such a grump when he was tired, which he often was. The kid also griped that the house did not contain a sufficient number of things representing himself, and that he felt that he was living in the cop’s world, which was very nice in some ways, but awful in other ways, because, though he loved the cop more deeply than he could possibly say in some stupid email, he wanted to be young too, and to play music at high volumes and have posters of his favorite musicians on the walls if he wanted.
I logged out of the cop’s account in something like a state of euphoria.
Nothing in months had made me feel as good as that list of their problems, and after only a few minutes had passed I logged in again to revisit the litany. But I saw that the email had been marked as read. That worried me. I knew the cop was at a work meeting he had been dreading all week, so he definitely wasn’t looking at his email. I was almost certain I hadn’t forgotten to mark it unread, but it was possible. I read the email again, then carefully marked it unread, checked it and double checked it, then read another email that had just come in from the cop’s travel agent about the cruise he and the kid were going to take.
When I returned to the main screen, the email from the kid was grayed-out again, as if it had been read. A moment later, I refreshed the page, and the email was gone. I looked in the trash, and found it there. Then I refreshed once again, and saw that it had disappeared.
The kid was reading the cop’s email too. It almost made me wonder if the psychic had been right about all of us being connected in some past life, the way the cop had chosen the two of us, both of us so sneaky and insecure and scared and dumb.
61
STR8 ITALIAN VISITING. MARRIED COACH TYPE IN TOWN FOR biz. Other str8 guys looking for a massage? I give good ones. Safe and clean here. Average build. Prefer 18–24 yo. Discreet.
Though I was past his target age range by a few years, I emailed him. When he replied asking for pictures, I took a few photos of my dick with my phone. He replied with photos of himself and his room number at the Radisson Hotel downtown. I liked the way he looked, like someone my grandfather would have called “a genuine Yankee.” He was an Italian guy in his mid-forties with a gold chain around his neck and a pinkie ring. He looked like he could have been a gangster and not a commercial property appraiser in town for a conference.
I went to his room, which he had set up for me as a little massage studio, with the bed all covered in towels and the pillows arranged so I’d feel like I was on a real massage table. He even had massage oil. We shook hands, and he went to the bathroom and turned on the shower for me.