“It’s not a band, it’s a collective,” shouted James at Ana, delivering a new piece of information.
Ana laughed. “How Stalinesque!”
Ana sipped her beer, far from the band, near the bar, while James and Ruth attempted to talk over the noise, their heads tilted together, nearly touching at the top. They gave up and James separated, stood upright, and stared, fighting the impulse to go to the front, to climb up on stage. I could have done that, he thought. I could have been that! This exact thought was already snaking through the room, especially in and out of the heads of the few guys older than thirty. For the younger ones, there was no sense of regret yet; still a possibility, still a chance.
James bought two beers, knowing that the severance money was going to run out in six weeks and wondering what that would look like: Would he get an allowance from his wife? He shut up the thought, taking in the stink of old bar cloths and the deodorant of strangers. He saw his wife moving away from him, cut off from her by young men who looked like James used to look, and women in lipstick who seemed black in the dark.
“Do you want to smoke?” asked Ruth. James couldn’t see Ana, and he nodded, feeling bundled in bandages. He handed Ruth a beer.
He went outside with her, under the streetlamp. He lit a cigarette and offered her one. She raised an eyebrow, led him to an alleyway, and pulled a joint out of her wallet. James laughed at himself: “That kind of smoke,” he said. How long had it been since anyone had invited him to smoke pot?
He studied her face as she lit up: slight lantern jaw keeping her from prettiness, and a kind of a put-upon sadness that was unappealing. But she was sympathetic, too, because she was trying so hard. He took a long, deep drag, and another.
Nearby, a small crowd of people were doing the same thing, two guys and a girl. A pretty girl with black hair, smiling at him as she exhaled, lifted her fingers in a wave. Emma.
She walked with her hips forward. Her jacket was tight around her breasts and came out from her waist like a bell. As she moved, she was backed by the muffled sound of the band, frantic and ominous. (An organ? Did they bring out a goddamn organ, too?)
“My God. How weird is this.” She said it like it was a good weird. “I see you everywhere.”
Ruth, if James wasn’t mistaken, looked a little annoyed. Her hand was extended into space, waiting for James to take a drag.
“I don’t—this is Ruth.”
“I think I know you. Were you at Yoshi’s book launch?” asked Emma, peering at her.
Ruth shook her head no, suddenly a bumpkin, and the difference between the two women glared like a lantern in the darkness.
“Do you want—” Ruth thrust the joint at Emma, who plucked it from her fingers and inhaled.
“Where’s your wife?” Emma said, as if she knew Ana. She was bolder tonight, perhaps buoyed by the frisson from the club, the pot. She passed the joint to James, who was feeling the widening of his sensations but inhaled deeply anyway.
James gave Emma a backstory: A few hours earlier, she had come from her father’s place in an Edwardian in the north end of the city. There, in one of her two childhood homes, she had sat through a long meaty dinner, enduring a simpering lecture from her stepmother, whose face was so chemically altered that she resembled a bank robber with a stocking over her head. On her way out, she’d stolen a handful of Xanax from the master bathroom, chewing them up on the subway platform. So probably she was afloat right now, even higher than he was. James watched her burning electric, like a neon-colored cartoon character outlined in black ink.
James didn’t know how he got separated from Ruth. Later, he pictured her forlorn expression, her stubbed-out half-joint gingerly placed in her wallet for later, her trudge inside the club to the tune of a slow morbid song, the organ and the saw. He was certain that she had reentered the bar, searching the crowd for Ana, nowhere to be found.
But James hadn’t tried to find her. He stayed in the alley, crushed against the body of a woman eighteen years younger, the scent of gutter urine absorbed by his ankles. He pushed her to the wall, and it all came back to him, what to say, the slow constant patter—You’re so beautiful, you’re so, so, so—and his hand, and then his fingers, all this with her coat on but opened and the feel of her soft bra, black, he thought, but even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see much, just shadows. But he had mapped the body in his mind so often that he knew where to go, and found her wet beneath her clothing, moving until she shuddered in his hand. Then she had her hand on his buckle and he thought of his belly hanging over the edge of his jeans, but it wasn’t repulsive enough to stop her sliding down the wall, getting on her knees. He could no longer hear the music then—they were far away—just the white noise in his head, a string between the noise and the feeling of her warm mouth around him, her tongue and a slight nibble that he found both painfully self-conscious and unbearably good, so much so that James put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her mouth off him just in time, the wet mess remaining on his pants, far from her face looking up at him, the chewed lipstick on those thick lips. He looked upon the strangest grin, a smudge of destruction and shame and pride.
James backed away, the two of them returned to their own bodies, their hands doing snaps and buckles and putting themselves away as easily as they had served themselves up just a few minutes before.
James wanted to be heroic, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to swear it off forever, but he said nothing, only felt the walls around him tilt and whirl ever so slightly. They walked back to the club together, but a half block before it, still in the shadows of the alley, Emma stopped.
“I’ve got to meet some people,” she said. James wondered if he should kiss her. Before he could decide, she reached into her pocket, and James felt a tingle of curiosity: What else did she have to offer? Was it not over? Then she pulled out her phone and ran her fingers over its face. She backed away, typing and waving.
The club was still full. James felt he had been away for days, but it had been less than a half hour from the air to the joint to the girl’s mouth around his cock.
Ana appeared beside him, carrying two plastic cups of beer. What surprised him was the calm he felt and how recognizable it was. He had almost forgotten, in his time with Ana, that he had always been a liar, that he had gone from bed to bed in one night on several occasions and looked women in the eye with ease. Just washing a few key body parts and carrying a toothbrush in his backpack had been enough to get him through university. He was good at this.
What he wouldn’t consider (until morning, oh, morning) was how refined Ana’s sense of him was. What did she know, or fear, about this part of James, that had been lying dormant for all those years?
“Were you smoking a joint with my subordinate?” Ana shouted over the music, smiling, passing him the beer. James relaxed. Her face was dancing with drunkenness. He had not seen her so loose in weeks, or longer. If he was honest with himself, that static between them had been crackling long before Finn arrived. James took the beer and drank it in one sip, washing away Emma’s taste. Then he grabbed his wife by the waist and kissed her. Those hipbones against him; her familiar mouth, welcoming, and a wave of loss smacked him, broke his grip on her. The band was louder than it had been, but sadder, too, filled with urgency.
“Careful,” she said, as he lurched apart from her, brushing the droplets of beer that had splashed on her wrist.
“What about Finn?” Ana asked suddenly.
“What about him?” shouted James.
“We should get home.”
Both of them drained the plastic cups. James made a gesture to throw his on the ground, but Ana intercepted, depositing them both in a recycling bin as they pushed through the crowd.