After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  Paula wasn’t even supposed to be there. She was supposed to be at home, making up a batch of flapjacks and penne with cheese sauce and lying inert on the couch with the remote control. This was the night before the night before the event, a time to fuel up her tanks and veg out. But because of him, because of her silver-tongued hero in the baggy shorts, she was at the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading in public. And so was Zinny Bauer, the last person on earth she wanted to see.

  That was bad enough, but Jason made it worse, far worse—Jason made it into one of the most excruciating moments of her life. What happened was purely crazy, and if she hadn’t known Jason better she would have thought he’d planned it. They were squabbling over his cigarette and how unlaid-back and uptight the whole thing had made him—he was drunk, and she didn’t appreciate him when he was drunk, not at all—when his face suddenly took on a conspiratorial look and he said, “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”

  “Who?” she said, and she shot a glance over her shoulder and froze: it was Zinny Bauer and her husband Armin. “Oh, shit,” she said, and she lowered her head and focussed on her plate as if it were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. “She didn’t see me, did she? We’ve got to go. Right now. Right this minute.”

  Jason was smirking. He looked happy about it, as if he and Zinny Bauer were old friends. “But you’ve only had four plates, babe,” he said. “You sure we got our money’s worth? I could go for maybe just a touch more pasta—and I haven’t even had any salad yet.”

  “No joking around, this isn’t funny.” Her voice withered in her throat. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to her. I just want to get out of here, okay?”

  His smile got wider. “Sure, babe, I know how you feel—but you’re going to beat her, you are, no sweat. You don’t have to let anybody chase you out of your favorite restaurant in your own town—I mean, that’s not right, is it? That’s not in the spirit of friendly competition.”

  “Jason,” she said, and she reached across the table and took hold of his wrist. “I mean it. Let’s get out of here. Now.”

  Her throat was constricted, as if everything she’d eaten was about to come up. Her legs ached, and her ankle—the one she’d sprained last spring—felt as if someone had driven a nail through it. All she could think of was Zinny Bauer, with her long muscles and the shaved blond stubble of her head and her eyes that never quit. Zinny Bauer was behind her, at her back, right there, and it was too much to bear. “Jason,” she hissed.

  “Okay, okay,” he was saying, and he tipped back the dregs of his beer and reached into his pocket and scattered a couple of rumpled bills across the table by way of a tip. Then he rose from the chair with a slow drunken grandeur and gave her a wink as if to indicate that the coast was clear. She got up, hunching her shoulders as if she could compress herself into invisibility and stared down at her feet as Jason took her arm and led her across the room—if Zinny saw her, Paula wouldn’t know about it because she wasn’t going to look up, and she wasn’t going to make eye contact, she wasn’t.

  Or so she thought.

  She was concentrating on her feet, on the black-and-white checked pattern of the floor tiles and how her running shoes negotiated them as if they were attached to somebody else’s legs, when all of a sudden Jason stopped and her eyes flew up and there they were, hovering over Zinny Bauer’s table like casual acquaintances, like neighbors on their way to a P.T.A. meeting. “But aren’t you Zinny Bauer?” Jason said, his voice gone high and nasal as he shifted into his Valley Girl imitation. “The great triathlete? Oh, God, yes, yes, you are, aren’t you? Oh, God, could I have your autograph for my little girl?”

  Paula was made of stone. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink her eyes. And Zinny—she looked as if her plane had just crashed. Jason was playing out the charade, pretending to fumble through his pockets for a pen, when Armin broke the silence. “Why don’t you just fock off,” he said, and the veins stood out in his neck.

  “Oh, she’ll be so thrilled,” Jason went on, his voice pinched to a squeal. “She’s so adorable, only six years old, and, oh, my God, she’s not going to believe this—”

  Armin rose to his feet. Zinny clutched at the edge of the table with bloodless fingers, her eyes narrow and hard. The waiter—the one Jason had been riding all night—started toward them, crying out, “Is everything all right?” as if the phrase had any meaning.

  And then Jason’s voice changed, just like that. “Fuck you too, Jack, and your scrawny fucking bald-headed squeeze.”

  Armin worked out, you could see that, and Paula doubted he’d ever pressed a cigarette to his lips, let alone a joint, but still Jason managed to hold his own—at least until the kitchen staff separated them. There was some breakage, a couple of chairs overturned, a whole lot of noise and cursing and threatening, most of it from Jason. Every face in the restaurant was drained of color by the time the kitchen staff came to the rescue, and somebody went to the phone and called the police, but Jason blustered his way out the door and disappeared before they arrived. And Paula? She just melted away and kept on melting until she found herself behind the wheel of the car, cruising slowly down the darkened streets, looking for Jason.

  She never did find him.

  When he called the next morning he was all sweetness and apology. He whispered, moaned, sang to her, his voice a continuous soothing current insinuating itself through the line and into her head and right on down through her veins and arteries to the unresisting core of her. “Listen, Paula, I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand,” he whispered, “you’ve got to believe me. I just didn’t think you had to hide from anybody, that’s all.”

  She listened, her mind gone numb, and let his words saturate her. It was the day before the event, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her. But then, as he went on, pouring himself into the phone with his penitential, self-pitying tones as if he were the one who’d been embarrassed and humiliated, she felt the outrage coming up in her: didn’t he understand, didn’t he know what it meant to stare into the face of your own defeat? And over a plate of pasta, no less? She cut him off in the middle of a long digression about some surfing legend of the fifties and all the adversity he’d had to face from a host of competitors, a blood-sucking wife and a fearsome backwash off Newport Beach.

  “What did you think,” she demanded, “that you were protecting me or something? Is that it? Because if that’s what you think, let me tell you I don’t need you or anybody else to stand up for me—”

  “Paula,” he said, his voice creeping out at her over the wire, “Paula, I’m on your side, remember? I love what you’re doing. I want to help you.” He paused. “And yes, I want to protect you too.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Yes, you do. You don’t think you do but you do. Don’t you see: I was trying to psych her.”

  “Psych her? At the Pasta Bowl?”

  His voice was soft, so soft she could barely hear him: “Yeah.” And then, even softer: “I did it for you.”

  It was Saturday, seventy-eight degrees, sun beaming down unmolested, the tourists out in force. The shop had been buzzing since ten, nothing major—cords, tube socks, T-shirts, a couple of illustrated guides to South Coast hot spots that nobody who knew anything needed a book to find—but Jason had been at the cash register right through lunch and on into the four-thirty breathing spell when the tourist mind tended to fixate on ice-cream cones and those pathetic sidecar bikes they pedalled up and down the street like the true guppies they were. He’d even called Little Drake in to help out for a couple of hours there. Drake didn’t mind. He’d grown up rich in Montecito and gone white-haired at twenty-seven, and now he lived with his even whiter-haired old parents and managed their two rental properties downtown—which meant he had nothing much to do except prop up the bar at Clubber’s or haunt the shop like the thinnest ghost of a customer. So why not put him to work?

  “Nothing to shout about,�
� Jason told him, over the faint hum of the oldies channel. He leaned back against the wall on his high stool and cracked the first beer of the day. “Little stuff, but a lot of it. I almost had that one dude sold on the Al Merrick board—I could taste it—but something scared him off. Maybe mommy took away his Visa card, I don’t know.”

  Drake pulled contemplatively at his beer and looked out the window on the parade of tourists marching up and down State Street. He didn’t respond. It was that crucial hour of the day, the hour known as cocktail hour, two for one, the light stuck on the underside of the palms, everything soft and pretty and winding down toward dinner and evening, the whole night held out before them like a promise. “What time’s the Dodger game?” Drake said finally.

  Jason looked at his watch. It was a reflex. The Dodgers were playing the Mets at five-thirty, Astacio against the Doc, and he knew the time and channel as well as he knew his A.T.M. number. The Angels were on Prime Ticket, seven-thirty, at home against the Orioles. And Paula—Paula was at home too, focussing (do not disturb, thank you very much) for the big one with the Amazing Bone Woman the next morning. “Five-thirty,” he said, after a long pause.

  Drake said nothing. His beer was gone, and he shuffled behind the counter to the little reefer for another. When he’d cracked it, sipped, belched, scratched himself thoroughly, and commented on the physique of an overweight Mexican chick in a red bikini making her way up from the beach, he ventured an opinion on the topic under consideration: “Time to close up?”

  All things being equal, Jason would have stayed open till six, or near six anyway, on a Saturday in August. The summer months accounted for the lion’s share of his business—it was like the Christmas season for everybody else—and he tried to maximize it, he really did, but he knew what Drake was saying. Twenty to five now, and they had to count the receipts, lock up, stop by the night deposit at the B. of A., and then settle in at Clubber’s for the game. It would be nice to be there, maybe with a tall tequila tonic and the sports section spread out on the bar, before the game got under way. Just to settle in and enjoy the fruits of their labor. He gave a sigh, for form’s sake, and said, “Yeah, why not?”

  And then there was cocktail hour and he had a couple of tall tequila tonics before switching to beer, and the Dodgers looked good, real good, red hot, and somebody bought him a shot. Drake was carrying on about something—his girlfriend’s cat, the calluses on his mother’s feet—and Jason tuned him out, ordered two soft chicken tacos, and watched the sun do all sorts of amazing pink and salmon things to the storefronts across the street before the gray finally settled in. He was thinking he should have gone surfing today, thinking he’d maybe go out in the morning, and then he was thinking of Paula. He should wish her luck or something, give her a phone call at least. But the more he thought about it, the more he pictured her alone in her apartment, power-drinking her fluids, sunk into the shell of her focus like some Chinese Zen master, and the more he wanted to see her.

  They hadn’t had sex in a week. She was always like that when it was coming down to the wire, and he didn’t blame her. Or yes, yes, he did blame her. And he resented it too. What was the big deal? It wasn’t like she was playing ball or anything that took any skill, and why lock him out for that? She was like his over-achieving, straight-arrow parents, Type A personalities, early risers, joggers, let’s go out and beat the world. God, that was anal. But she had some body on her, as firm and flawless as the Illustrated Man’s—or Woman’s, actually. He thought about that and about the way her face softened when they were in bed together, and he stood at the pay phone seeing her in the hazy soft-focus glow of some made-for-TV movie. Maybe he shouldn’t call. Maybe he should just … surprise her.

  She answered the door in an oversized sweatshirt and shorts, barefooted, and with the half-full pitcher from the blender in her hand. She looked surprised, all right, but not pleasantly surprised. In fact, she scowled at him and set the pitcher down on the bookcase before pulling back the door and ushering him in. He didn’t even get the chance to tell her he loved her or to wish her luck before she started in on him. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You know I can’t see you tonight, of all nights. What’s with you? Are you drunk? Is that it?”

  What could he say? He stared at the brown gloop in the pitcher for half a beat and then gave her his best simmering droopy-eyed smile and a shrug that radiated down from his shoulders to his hips. “I just wanted to see you. To wish you luck, you know?” He stepped forward to kiss her, but she dodged away from him, snatching up the pitcher full of gloop like a shield. “A kiss for luck?” he said.

  She hesitated. He could see something go in and out of her eyes, the flicker of a worry, competitive anxiety, butterflies, and then she smiled and pecked him a kiss on the lips that tasted of soy and honey and whatever else was in that concoction she drank. “Luck,” she said, “but no excitement.”

  “And no sex,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. “I know.”

  She laughed then, a high girlish tinkle of a laugh that broke the spell. “No sex,” she said. “But I was just going to watch a movie if you want to join me—”

  He found one of the beers he’d left in the refrigerator for just such an emergency as this and settled in beside her on the couch to watch the movie—some inspirational crap about a demi-cripple who wins the hurdle event in the Swedish Special Olympics—but he was hot, he couldn’t help it, and his fingers kept wandering from her shoulder to her breast, from her waist to her inner thigh. At least she kissed him when she pushed him away. “Tomorrow,” she promised, but it was only a promise, and they both knew it. She’d been so devastated after the Houston thing she wouldn’t sleep with him for a week and a half, strung tight as a bow every time he touched her. The memory of it chewed at him, and he sipped his beer moodily. “Bullshit,” he said.

  “Bullshit what?”

  “Bullshit you’ll sleep with me tomorrow. Remember Houston? Remember Zinny Bauer?”

  Her face changed suddenly and she flicked the remote angrily at the screen and the picture went blank. “I think you better go,” she said.

  But he didn’t want to go. She was his girlfriend, wasn’t she? And what good did it do him if she kicked him out every time some chickenshit race came up? Didn’t he matter to her, didn’t he matter at all? “I don’t want to go,” he said.

  She stood, put her hands on her hips, and glared at him. “I have to go to bed now.”

  He didn’t budge. Didn’t move a muscle. “That’s what I mean,” he said, and his face was ugly, he couldn’t help it. “I want to go to bed too.”

  Later, he felt bad about the whole thing. Worse than bad. He didn’t know how it happened exactly, but there was some resentment there, he guessed, and it just snuck up on him—plus he was drunk, if that was any excuse. Which it wasn’t. Anyway, he hadn’t meant to get physical, and by the time she’d stopped fighting him and he got her shorts down he hadn’t even really wanted to go through with it. This wasn’t making love, this wasn’t what he wanted. She just lay there beneath him like she was dead, like some sort of zombie, and it made him sick, so sick he couldn’t even begin to apologize or excuse himself. He felt her eyes on him as he was zipping up, hard eyes, accusatory eyes, eyes like claws, and he had to stagger into the bathroom and cover himself with the noise of both taps and the toilet to keep from breaking down. He’d gone too far. He knew it. He was ashamed of himself, deeply ashamed, and there really wasn’t anything left to say. He just slumped his shoulders and slouched out the door.

  And now here he was, contrite and hungover, mooning around on Ledbetter Beach in the cool hush of 7:00 A.M., waiting with all the rest of the guppies for the race to start. Paula wouldn’t even look at him. Her mouth was set, clamped shut, a tiny little line of nothing beneath her nose, and her eyes looked no farther than her equipment—her spidery ultra-lightweight bike with the triathlon bars and her little skullcap of a helmet and water bottles and whatnot. She was wearing a two-p
iece swimsuit, and she’d already had her number—23—painted on her upper arms and the long burnished muscles of her thighs. He shook out a cigarette and stared off past her, wondering what they used for the numbers: Magic Marker? Greasepaint? Something that wouldn’t come off in the surf, anyway—or with all the sweat. He remembered the way she looked in Houston, pounding through the muggy haze in a sheen of sweat, her face sunk in a mask of suffering, her legs and buttocks taut, her breasts flattened to her chest in the grip of the clinging top. He thought about that, watching her from behind the police line as she bent to fool with her bike, not an ounce of fat on her, nothing, not even a stray hair, and he got hard just looking at her.

  But that was short-lived, because he felt bad about last night and knew he’d have to really put himself through the wringer to make it up to her. Plus, just watching the rest of the four hundred and six fleshless masochists parade by with their Gore-Tex T-shirts and Lycra shorts and all the rest of their paraphernalia was enough to make him go cold all over. His stomach felt like a fried egg left out on the counter too long, and his hands shook when he lit the cigarette. He should be in bed, that’s where he should be—enough of this seven o’clock in the morning. They were crazy, these people, purely crazy, getting up at dawn to put themselves through something like this—one mile in the water, thirty-four on the bike, and a ten-mile run to wrap it up, and this was a walk compared to the Ironman. They were all bone and long, lean muscle, like whippet dogs or something, the women indistinguishable from the men, stringy and titless. Except for Paula. She was all right in that department, and that was genetic—she referred to her breasts as her fat reserves. He was wondering if they shrank at all during the race, what with all that stress and water loss, when a woman with big hair and too much makeup asked him for a light.