Throw Like A Girl (21 page)

Meanwhile Chad was busy organizing a kickoff concert that he hoped would really get the word out about the station, get the ball rolling, and any other cliché that might have come out of The Kid's mouth. Penguins Don't Fly was an indie band with a growing reputation; they would be the headliner. Different local groups would fill out the program. The station would gain exposure, valuable association with the desirable spectacle and the heat of urban life. The concert was six weeks away. The preparations were killing him, requiring all his old, wheedling salesman's skills.

When Melanie's ex-husband Greg walked into the studio, Chad at first mistook him for one of the cranks, come to loiter unhelpfully and be his newest best buddy. He and Greg had not known each other back in the adultery days, had only met once before, in fact, and that was after the divorce, a glancing brief encounter when one of the children had needed a ride home. It had embarrassed them both.

Now Greg announced his name. Chad got to his feet and extended his hand, making a quick, involuntary scan for weapons. “Hey,” Greg said. “It's cool. I just wanted to talk to you, if you've got a minute.”

“Sure,” said Chad, who didn't really have a minute but could hardly say so. He invited Greg to sit. Greg lowered himself onto a folding chair. He'd lost a lot of weight after the bypass surgery and he had a deflated look, loose in the jowls and chins. He gazed around the studio.

“So this is the setup, huh?”

“It is.” Reluctantly, Chad looked too. The desk top was a scramble of untidy papers. One of the cranks had brought in a rainbow-colored tissue garland that drooped across the front window. Another had contributed two African violets in a ceramic planter. The bulletin board was shaggy with thumbtacked notices, everything from program schedules to homemade ads offering art therapy sessions and salsa classes. He was going to have to start drawing some lines.

“How's Mel?”

“Good. She's good.”

“Glad to hear it. She's a great gal.”

“Yeah, she is,” Chad said, trying for the right mix of buddyish, appreciative zest and respect. He didn't know what the etiquette was for such encounters. Greg was shifting around in his too-small chair, either nervous or preparing to jump up and throttle him.

“You know, for a long time I hated your guts.”

Chad found himself nodding, as if in encouragement.

Greg let his breath out in a long, horsey sigh. “Man. I must have killed you off about a hundred times. A fantasy, you know? It would just come over me without thinking, I'd be at work, or eating dinner in front of the TV, and all of a sudden I'm seeing pictures. I'm squeezing your head like a grape. I'm watching you spit teeth. You're bleeding from your ears. I'm kicking your ribs and hearing them snap. It was nothing personal, you know? I mean who were you, some slimeball I didn't even know. It was more the whole fucked-up situation. Yeah, I was pretty hot. It took me a while to realize neither of you was worth giving a crap about. So I've calmed down a lot. Not that I don't have flashbacks once in a while, and looking at you up close, I'm pretty sure I could take you. But hey. I've moved on. I stopped by to tell you that. I've got a girlfriend now. Her name is Kendra, she's a personal trainer at the health club I go to. I've never seen a body like hers naked before, and I say that not to brag, but as simple fact. We're going scuba diving in the Bahamas next month. She's got me doing Pilates. I've got a ways to go, but I've strengthened all my core muscles. It's like she's opened the door to a whole new world for me. So maybe everything works out for the best. I sure hope you guys are happy, I mean that sincerely, because if you're not, what's the goddamn point?”

Greg stood and walked out. One of the cranks, who went by the name of Easy Rider, came in from the street with a batch of oatmeal cookies he'd baked. “Hey, Chad? Is it OK if I go sit in the control booth if I promise to just sit there and not touch anything?”

Chad stared out the front window and ate four of the oatmeal cookies, one right after another. What was the goddamn point? Was he happy? Sure. Most of the time. Sort of.

He thought back to the earliest days of his affair with Melanie, the furious emotions, the giddy lust, the feeling that his most ordinary walking-around moments glowed with significance. Of course that had tempered over time. The circumstances had been so impossible. There had been a sense of grinding it out, cycling through all the guilt and frustration and longing. Then had come the momentous decisions to unmarry and to marry. The culmination, the crown, the goal achieved. It was only natural that everything after that might seem a bit—just a bit, and only ever so often—anticlimactic.

Besides, life kept on happening. Little cruddy, annoying things. You never got to the place where you could stand back and admire your happiness like it was a picture on the wall. At least he couldn't. There was something sad and failed and furtive at his very center that didn't allow for it. Chad swallowed the last of the cookies and prepared to reclaim the control booth from Easy Rider, who had taken out a dental hygiene kit and was prodding at his gums.

Melanie and Miss Poona Chumnoi had established an e-mail friendship by now. E-mail was such a wonderful thing. Here they were, ten whole time zones apart, on opposite sides of the international date line, and still they could send these tiny swarming electrons back and forth, an affirmation of human connection. And though such connection was made possible by technical, mechanical means, wasn't it also mysterious, random, hopeful, almost like prayer?

Sometimes the responses lagged, either because of transmission times or because Melanie was busy or Miss Chumnoi was occupied with her devotions or her relentless campaign of good works. But she never failed to answer. She was a reliable presence in Melanie's inbox. “Dear Melanie friend,” wrote Miss Chumnoi, and that locution was charmingly typical of her exotically flavored English.

As the station's big concert approached, Chad worked late every night. Whenever Melanie called the studio he was there, sounding tired and distracted, but she couldn't help remembering all the times the two of them had pretended to be working so they could see each other. It was a sad, unwelcome thought. Maybe she was reaping what she'd sown, maybe it was true what they said, a cheater always cheated. Although she was pretty sure she wouldn't herself. She sat up waiting for him, reading or watching a movie, or sometimes she wandered out into the back yard. When she looked up at the cold stars she felt lonely. It was autumn now and the air smelled of smoke, and soon it would be winter.

She missed her children. She missed the women friends she'd had when she was married to Greg. They had all drifted away after the divorce, either because they disapproved of her or because they had never really been her friends in the first place and couldn't be bothered to pick up a phone. She wouldn't go so far as to say she missed Greg, but at least he'd stayed in nights.

Chad came home very late and was surprised to find her in the yard. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

“Good question.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Fighting words, passive-aggressive style. Melanie walked back inside and Chad followed. She felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle, as if in a thunderstorm. Chad was standing in front of the open refrigerator, shoving cartons around. “There's nothing to eat in here.”

“Fix a sandwich.”

“I don't want a sandwich, I want dinner.”

“Then come home at dinnertime.”

Chad pushed the refrigerator door shut and stood in the center of the room, looking petulant and absurd in his sneakers and old dirty jeans and sweatshirt. Melanie couldn't stop staring at him. It was fascinating, in a horrid way, to see how unattractive, how
ridiculous
, he had made himself. It was as if he had tricked her into throwing her life away, her dear old, drear old life, and then lost interest in keeping her fooled. He said, “I don't need this right now. I'm beat to shit. Don't you know I've got everything riding on this concert?”

“Well that's a dumb thing to have everything ride on.”

“Thanks. Glad to know what you really think. It's only, like, make or break for me. My future. Excuse me. Our future. But I guess you're not very invested in that.”

It was a stupid argument. Melanie was already bored with it. It wasn't the fight either of them wanted to have anyway. She said, “You think it was a mistake getting married, don't you?”

She watched him make the familiar, exasperated face which meant that she'd said something messy and distasteful, an expression that had less to do with her than with women in general. Except that now she was the particular woman he was impatient with. No longer a sexy siren, just another nagging, squawking wife, as if he'd been tricked also.

“Could we not do this tonight? I have to be back at the studio in six hours.”

“Do you ever wonder if we're being punished? For being dishonest. For hurting other people.”

“The only one who's doing any punishing is you.” Chad shut himself in the bathroom. There were vigorous sounds of gargling and flushing. Melanie got into bed and turned out the light and when Chad came in she pretended she was already asleep.

The next day she researched airfares and booked a flight to Bangkok with ground transportation to Pattaya. She equipped herself with a map, a Thai phrase book, vaccinations, passport, and travel-friendly clothing. She said nothing about her preparations to Chad; their argument receded and they were very polite with each other. She said nothing to Miss Chumnoi either. She wasn't sure she had the nerve to go through with her plan and she didn't want to risk disappointments. Besides, she kept hoping Chad would seek her out, attempt to close the distance between them, declare his deepest, truest feelings. She imagined the welling up of tenderness, how he would entreat her not to leave his side, and how, since the world was well lost for love, she would abandon her expensive plane ticket for him.

But she had forgotten how good men were at ignoring things. Chad worked, came home, slept briefly, and left again. He insulated himself with work. Irreproachable, virtuous work! Oh, she remembered that one. She was scheduled to leave two days before the concert. That morning she called Chad's voice mail and left a message that she was going out of town on business and didn't know when she'd be back. She drove herself to the airport, half expecting him to appear, brakes screeching, sprinting madly to the gate area, heedless of the pursuing airport security goons, as he realized that he was losing her forever.

But none of that happened. They called her flight, and Melanie boarded, and the plane lifted cleanly off the runway.

She slept most of the trip, waking at groggy intervals to stare out the window at the blue and glowing horizon, the plane hanging level and motionless in the roaring whoosh of the engines. She hadn't realized how very tired she was. They stopped over in Hawaii and Melanie got off to wander around the airport, poke her nose outside and sniff the balmy air. She smelled coconut, probably just someone's suntan oil, but festive nonetheless. Melanie wondered if Pearl Harbor had any connection to actual pearls, which had to come from somewhere, didn't they? She was losing it, going daffy, she was already too far from home. She turned her phone on to see if Chad had tried to call her but he had not.

On the last leg of the trip the Thai flight attendants served an incongruous sunrise dinner of seafood soup, green curry, and chicken with chilies and cashews. The sunrise stayed put for quite some time because it was chasing them down. It was like running the wrong way on an escalator. Melanie had not thought the flight would be so long, that is, she knew it would last fifteen hours but that had not registered on any purely cellular level, as it was doing now. She felt the same sort of hallucinatory clarity she'd experienced during childbirth. She was going to get off the plane, just for a little while, then she'd come right back.

Finally, against all hope, they landed. The airport was gleaming and modern. Corporations had built it in their own soulless image. Customs waved her through without examining her luggage or asking why she was running away from her husband. Oh she was a mean, mean woman. The loudspeakers played tinkly Thai music, alternating with Western pop of the sort Chad disdained. She wondered if the concert had started yet, if today was tomorrow yet back home, or was it the other way around, and if he even missed her. Crowds of people pushed past her, ladies in butterfly-colored silks, men in business suits, teenagers in the most painfully hip American gear, skinny jeans, mincing heels, glitter T-shirts.