BEFORE HALLOWEEN
August
11
Thursday, August 11, 2022
I tried. I swear I did! I showed up at your door today, seeing you for the first time since you got back from Paris, and I was all ready to do the right thing. When you opened the door, tanned and elegant and, well, just gorgeous, I said, Go ahead, Simon, do it. Tell Lauren, say it, do it, and I did, I told you, I told you I couldn’t betray Vicky like that, we had to stop this thing before it started.
And you, Lauren, bless your heart, you said you understood. “The fact that you’d say something like that is why you’re such a great guy,” you said. My stomach twisted in knots and my chest was about to explode, but we stood there a moment and I said to myself, You’re going to be glad later that you did this even though it sucks right now.
Then I hugged you and you hugged me back and we held each other and the feel of you was too much and then your hands started moving and then mine did, too, and it felt like my insides caught fire and then our lips were pressed together and you moaned and, Lauren, I can’t tell you what that did to me, hearing you respond to me, feeling like I had that effect on you. Do you know how long it’s been since I felt a woman respond to me that way?
So all that time over the last several weeks ruminating and deciding that this can’t happen and within ten minutes, it’s happening. We can’t keep our hands off each other, we’re naked on your couch, going at it like animals, raw and sweaty and ravenous.
And there was nothing in the world that has ever felt as satisfying as hearing you climax, Lauren, that tiny hitch in your voice, that harsh gasp in my ear, the spasm of your hips. I felt like the greatest man alive! Is that what love feels like? Feeling like when you’re with the one you love, you’re on top of the world? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten.
I feel like I’ve just taken my hands off the wheel, closed my eyes, and floored the accelerator.
12
Simon
In the morning, I start with my Five at Five—a five-mile run at five in the morning. My mother used to do that. Four days a week, at five bells, she’d strap on her shoes and “eat some pavement,” as she put it. She had eighteen marathons to her credit, qualifying for Boston repeatedly. “It’s time all your own,” she used to say. “No stress, no phone calls, no arguments, just you. It’s like a million dollars’ worth of therapy.”
I head east, crossing over Austin into the west side of Chicago. You wouldn’t call the most crime-ridden and violent part of the city scenic, but there is something about its dilapidated humility and gritty determination that moves me.
Everyone thinks about the shootings and carnage, but I see the teenage girl playing violin by her second-story bedroom window near Augusta and Waller every morning at the crack of dawn; the old man in a beige uniform sitting on his stoop, getting ready for a red-eye shift, drinking coffee out of a thermos and calling me “a damn fool!” as I run past Long Avenue; the grandmother doing Bible study with several teens on the front porch, weather permitting, otherwise by the front living-room window; the woman in the apartment on Leclaire, coming home in a green waitress uniform with a backpack full of books after her overnight shift ended.
Running through this neighborhood reminds me that some people have bigger things to worry about than whether they get promoted to a stupid full professorship at their school. Some people are fighting for a decent life.
Everyone thinks I’m crazy for jogging through here, and maybe Vicky’s right that I’m just too stubborn not to run here, like I’m trying to prove something. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been followed by a police cruiser, the officers slowing next to me and asking me what the hell I’m thinking. Maybe I am a damn fool. But hey, I’ve been called worse.
Like “Mini-Me,” for example. That’s what Mitchell Kitchens, a massive senior, an all-state varsity wrestler, used to call me, back when I was a diminutive freshman at Grace Consolidated, barely over five feet tall and maybe a hundred pounds. Mitchell was built like a brick house, with a neck like a tree stump, so thick it was hard to see where it ended and his head began. He had these nasty teeth and bad breath and a nose that had been broken several times. His eyes were narrow and spread wide apart, giving him a prehistoric look.
That Austin Powers sequel had come out that summer. Apparently, Mitchell had seen it over Thanksgiving break my freshman year. I remember, after that break, Mitchell spotting me in the hallway and pointing and shouting, “Hey, it’s Mini-Me!” And it stuck, right? Of course it stuck. Only the nicknames you hate stick.
When I’d get off the bus every day, there he’d be, just outside the fence, calling out to me, “C’mere, Mini-Me!” He’d shout it in the hallways. He’d call it out when I walked into math class (yes, a senior was taking the same math class as a freshman, to give you an idea of his scholastic advancement). Initially, I tried ignoring him, not responding, but that only made him shout it over and over again and that only made things worse, so eventually I started responding the first time.
Yeah, I didn’t like Mitchell. I don’t obsess over him or anything. But if I’m ever tempted to forget him, I just have to look in the mirror and see the scar on my left cheek, that day he lost his temper.
“A good lawyer knows the answer to every question before she asks it,” my mother used to say. “A good lawyer knows what she wants to say in closing argument before the trial has even begun. You work backward from how you want it to end, and you plan out the trial so that, by the end, you can support everything you wanted to tell them with evidence.”
By quarter after six, I’m shaving after my shower, rubbing a circle out of the steam on the mirror so I can get a fuzzy reflection.
Vicky pushes through the bathroom door with a moan, her eyes all but shut, her hair all over her face. She leans against my back and says, “How do you get up this early?”
“My favorite time of day,” I say.
“That bed . . . is so comfortable.”
“Glad you like it.”
She drops onto the toilet to pee while I finish up shaving and tap my razor in the sink.
“Late night?” I ask.
Her head drops. “We got a call five minutes before midnight.”
“Ugh. Five minutes before your shift ended? You could’ve pawned it off.”
“Well, I didn’t. Her husband was at the ER, too, trying to get her to come home and drop the charges. It was a real scene. Took three cops to restrain the guy. He even swung at me.”
“Yeah? Did he connect?”
“No.”
That’s probably lucky for the guy.
“And the woman?” I ask. “Did she go with you?”
“Yeah, eventually. I didn’t leave until about two in the morning.”
She flushes and drags herself to the sink to wash her hands.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
“Don’t worry, I will.” She shuffles back to bed, the Bataan Death March, then drops face-first onto the pillow and moans with satisfaction.
I get dressed and put on some coffee. I take a cup for the road. I have a decent drive ahead. I walk back up to the bedroom to say goodbye. “Hey, gorgeous, Daddy’s leaving.”