Treadmill (2 page)

“Hi there,” a cheery woman said. It seemed a pleasant beginning and he was not sorry he called.

“Hi.”

“Tell me what you look like. I want to know who I’m dealing with,” she purred.

“Six foot, black hair, brown eyes, about a hundred and eighty pounds.”

“I can just see you now. Want to know what I look like?”

“Sure.”

“Five six, great tits, flat stomach, great ass, tight pussy. Blonde, blue eyes. People say I’m a knockout. Can you picture me?”

“Yeah,” he lied. “I got the picture.”

He detected the synthetic nature of what she was saying, but he did not allow himself to analyze it further. It felt nice to hear her warm, enticing voice. He pushed away the thought that he was paying for this, although he realized that the longer they talked, the more it cost. His credit card was already close to being maxed out.

“So, what do you do, baby?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You know, for a job.”

“Oh…. Advertising. I’m in advertising.”

“Wow. You make people buy all the things they think they need. So charismatic.”

“I’ve been laid off. The agency folded.”

“Bummer,” the woman said, her voice still cheerful. “You sound like you’re a smart boy. You won’t be out of work long.”

“It’s been three months. Nothing on the horizon.”

“Hell, what’s three months?”

“My wife left me just about the time I got laid off. She was screwing another guy.” He became conscious of his sudden change of tone. He felt a sudden urge to scream obscenities, so he did. “Lousy fucking cunt!”

“Plenty of pussy in the world,” the woman said. He was pleased that she had followed along.

“You said it.”

“You must be horny as hell.”

“Maybe,” he tentatively said. Actually, he felt nothing, not a twinge of desire.

“Talking to you is turning me on,” the woman said.

“I lost my mother at the same time.”

He felt the whole tone of the conversation change.

“Boy, it sure dumped on you,” she said. Her remark seemed almost sincere. What he was saying was certainly outside the realm of her job description, and was definitely not covered in the training she had received, probably from some greedy greaseball.

Cooper felt ashamed. “This is a lousy idea,” he blurted.

“Don’t hang up,” the woman said quickly. He suspected that she was fearful of losing her longevity commission. He envisioned a bank of middle-aged women, desperate people talking to desperate people.

“I’m not…” he started. “I just feel….”

“Lonely and embarrassed that you have to talk to strangers.”

“Now there’s a canned idea.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just say what you feel. That’s why you called. You wanted to talk to someone.” There was a brief pause. “You do something to me,” the woman said.

“I turn you on, right?”

“You’ve got one sexy voice. Gets my panties wet.”

“Really?” It was the only response he could think of.

“You mind if I play with myself while we talk?” she whispered.

“No.”

“You can do better than that,” she said, her breathing picking up. “Let’s hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“My panties are so wet. Can I push them aside?”

“Sure.”

His throat felt constricted and he could not think of anything to say.

“God, this feels good. I’m taking off my shirt. That okay?”

“Yeah,” he grunted, not aroused.

“I’m touching my big tits. I’m lifting one to my mouth so I can suck my nipple.”

He wanted to hang up, but he could not summon the will.

“You hard?” the woman said. “I need to know if you’re hard.”

“Yes,” he lied.

“Can I get down on my knees and suck it? I want to roll my tongue around its head, kiss your balls. I love to kiss balls.” Another pause. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” he grunted again.

“Zip it out baby,” the woman said, her gasping breath getting louder. “Show me that big cock.”

He hesitated.

“Would you like to lick my clit, baby?”

Cooper felt a sob begin somewhere deep inside of him. It finally erupted.

“Come on, baby,” the woman said.

He slammed down the receiver. He was panicked. He hated himself.

Calculating his situation and his prospects, Cooper concluded that he had started on the slippery slope to total impotence—sexual, economic and psychic. He was thirty-eight years old and he had hit a very bad patch indeed. Maybe he could ride it out. Maybe not.

He joined the Bethesda Health Club, a gym much older and less glitzy than the other ones opening around the city—but because of that, the initiation fee and monthly dues were a lot less. But the best thing about Bethesda was that his apartment building was just a quick jog away.

He was determined to exclude everything out of his life, and focus all of his energy on his body. To do this efficiently and completely, he forced himself to adopt a mental condition that required him to accept the absence of time. The present was the only zone Cooper recognized. The present did not move. The present was not relentless. In the present, there was no ambition, no hopes, no dreams, and therefore no desire. There was only the body: tissue, muscles, bones, cells, and everything else that made up its structure. Time didn’t move, but his body did. Chemicals reacted. Calories burned. Muscles hardened. He was relentless in his single minded and obsessive exertion. He reviewed himself in the mirror, willing his muscles to ripple and undulate. It was the only thing he could command. He was determined to exercise himself into oblivion.

After his workout, he would take a sauna and shower, get dressed, then order a melted Swiss cheese sandwich and a Coke. As he ate at the counter, he would watch the squash games taking place behind thick plate glass windows.

Parrish would watch the squash games too, indifferent and without enthusiasm. Their taciturn attitude was especially bizarre because Parrish ate at the counter at the same time. Parrish would order a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on toast without mayo, and a cup of coffee.

After they observed a couple of games between the professional players, the after-work crowd would arrive and signal Cooper’s departure. He had grown to detest crowds, especially their small talk and laughter. It reminded him of his former job, his marriage, his past. Parrish would stay on and watch the games, his eyes glazed with disinterest. As hard as Cooper tried to repress his speculation about Parrish, he found his mind drifting towards curiosity without his own consent.

Parrish’s routine mirrored Cooper’s. Often they were the only ones in the sauna and the communal shower, but they rarely looked at each other. Actually, Cooper did sneak glances at Parrish’s naked body, but only to inspect the man’s musculature, in comparison to his own. Parrish was a fine specimen, with excellent definition, a slim waist, well-delineated pectorals, muscular calves, and rippling abdominals. With a sense of embarrassment, Cooper also observed that Parrish’s genitals were well formed and without blemish. He wondered if Parrish had ever inspected him in such detail.

****

Cooper thought about Parrish as he walked toward his tiny efficiency apartment on Bradley Boulevard, about three miles from the club.
What is Parrish’s life like? Is he in the same no-man
’
s land as me? Had he also lost control over his own fate?
But by the time he let himself into his apartment building, he forced himself to dismiss any thought of Parrish.

The building was a mid-rise made of red brick. It was old, but well-maintained. He had furnished it sparsely with cast-off furniture that he had bought at the Salvation Army, including a queen size bed, a dresser, a couch, an upholstered chair, a Formica table, and two chrome chairs. Cooper had no intention of ever inviting anyone inside.

He did not own a television set and he no longer subscribed to the
Washington Post
. Once he had been a news junkie, but what happened in the world no longer mattered to him. Politics, wars, scandals, sports, and the stock market were of no consequence to him. News meant confronting the reality of the past and the future. It meant movement and potential. It was not part of the present, which was static and immobile.

Every two weeks, he went to Safeway and stocked up on fourteen Healthy Choice dinners, dividing them evenly between meal categories. He also bought a box of plastic eating utensils and a box of napkins, and carefully rolled fourteen sets, which he stowed neatly in the top drawer of his kitchen cabinet. In the small freezer compartment of his refrigerator he stacked the Healthy Choice dinners, one of which he microwaved every evening. He ate alone without relish, merely out of the necessity to provide nourishment.

He stopped seeing so-called friends and acquiantances, many of them former colleagues at the now defunct advertising agency. Because he was an only child, he had learned how to handle aloneness. He had begun to avoid the people from his old life, purge them from his memory. In his present mindset, living in the now, he did not miss the past. It had not been kind to him.

Cooper had been an English major in college, and about the only thing he had kept from his college years were the novels he had loved as a student, mostly cheap editions of Modern Library. Once he had entertained the idea of becoming a writer, but he had given that up on the grounds that he did not have the discipline, nor the fire in his belly to write extended works of the imagination like the greats. Cooper owned about two hundred volumes, mostly English novels and European works in translation, including a beat-up edition of the entire set of Balzac’s
The Human Comedy
, which he had purchased for thirty dollars at an auction in Georgetown. The only Balzacs he had ever read from the set were
Eugenie Grandet
and
Pere Goriot
, and he contemplated reading the entire fifty-five volumes, one after the other, when he had finished reading every other book in his library.

In the six months since he had given up his job search, Cooper had re-read completely, Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, Gogol’s
Dead Souls
, and Dickens’
Martin Chuzzlewit
. His favorite novel was Stendahl’s
The Red and the Black
, which he had also re-read many times over the years. Once, he had been focused and ambitious like Julien Sorel, the protagonist of
The Red and the Black
. Now that his life had come to nothing, he finally understood what it meant to fail. He felt that he had reached the heart of some truth, that it was safer to live in someone else’s imagination, rather than his own life. Cooper had no bookcases in his apartment and his books were stacked against a wall, like brickwork. The stacks were all alphabetized from the top down, reaching his eye level in a series of high columns buttressed against the wall.

Once a week, he ventured outside the orbit of his routine to appear at the unemployment office and obtain his unemployment check. He could count on at least another six months of payments. It was the only thought that ever entered his mind about the future.

****

The Bethesda Health Club wasn’t exactly state of the art. It had a weight room with a variety of machines, a small basketball court, and a half-dozen squash courts. At ten in the morning when Cooper began his workout, most of the members in the weight room were women in their mid-forties with iPods, puffing hard to keep up, burning fat.

Sometimes, the women would look Cooper’s way, but he would barely acknowledge them. Three seemed regulars. There was the stocky Filipino woman named Anni Corazon, with ripcord muscles. She seemed more interested in maintaining her body rather than losing weight. Her level of concentration was awesome as she would do countless reps with weights reaching loads that appeared difficult for someone of her stature to lift. Her schedule was erratic, at times arriving mid-morning and leaving later than others, but other times coming in at 8:00 AM, and leaving before lunch.

Despite their skimpy outfits, women wearing sports bras and tights that reached up to the concavity of their buttocks, they did not engage Cooper’s interest. The atmosphere was narcissistic. Sweaty participants eyed themselves in the mirrored walls, especially the chubbier members, who hoped their unwanted lumps would disappear when they rolled off their tights.

One of the regulars was a middle-aged black man with a bald head, and large well-defined muscles that showed off years of pumping iron. He was always at the end of his sets when Cooper arrived, sweating profusely through his gray sleeveless jersey, which had
Melnechuck
stitched across the back
.
On one of his arms was tattooed the man’s name in black.

There was something frightening and ferocious in Melnechuck’s demeanor. Confronted with those shark-like eyes and an expressionless yet ravaged face, it struck Cooper that this was not the kind of man one wanted to piss off. Melnechuck didn’t pay much attention to Cooper, as he was always concentrating on his own routine.

Only one of the women didn’t have an iPod. She was an attractive blonde, with her hair up in a ponytail, which bounced while she worked the step machine. At times, when Cooper caught her looking his way, he felt obliged out of politeness to acknowledge her, giving her a thin smile, hoping it would keep her at a distance. Out of everyone there, the blonde seemed the most observant, and although intent on her exercises, Cooper felt her periodically inspecting him as he crossed her field of vision. She, too, appeared on a daily basis, did her sets with the same religious fervor as the others, and disappeared in early afternoon. It was not as if Cooper deliberately kept track of these coming and goings, but anything that diverged from the usual intruded on his consciousness. Like furniture being rearranged.

Occasionally, the Filipino woman would head for the exit at about the same time Cooper would leave to walk back to his apartment. The parking lot for members was located next to the club, and the woman would come out of the driveway in a little yellow Honda, dented and badly in need of a paint job. Cooper sold his car when he had given up on his job search. Getting rid of it had eliminated yet another burden, one less possession that could inhibit control over his life. For his sorties to the unemployment office, he would ride the subway.

Periodically one or two men would appear in late morning, and after a sales pitch by Blake, would attempt to keep to a workout regimen for a few days. Most faltered and quit. One man, however, aristocratic with a wide face, heavy neck and jowls appeared to have somewhat latched on to the discipline, and would show up for a week straight, before he would disappear again for a long period of time. Blake was always solicitous of him, giving him lots of extra attention, as he had a large paunch, and struggled and sweated mightily through his workout. Blake called him “Doctor.”

“Not that way, Doctor. This way,” Blake would illustrate, grabbing the handles of a machine. The Doctor would dutifully obey. When he spoke, Cooper noted he had a German accent.

With the exception of an occasional grunt of acknowledgment to Cooper and Parrish, the Doctor saved his concentration for the machines. After about an hour he’d stop, and by the time Cooper got to the shower, the Doctor would be long gone.

In an effort to appear normal and keep himself inconspicuous, Cooper forced himself to engage in occasional small talk with the gray haired woman who worked behind the lunch counter. They spoke mostly about the weather. Except for his life in the fictional world of classic stories, he had little other frame of reference for casual talk.

Parrish sat stoic and silent at the other end of the counter, apparently never listening to anything but his own thoughts. Cooper marked him as a confirmed loner, and ate his own usual melted Swiss cheese sandwich and Coke in silence as well. Parrish ate his sandwich and watched the squash game, his face expressionless.

Cooper and Parrish might never have conversed if the club had not raised its monthly fee by ten dollars. It was Parrish who spoke first. The sound of his voice directed at Cooper, although soft, had the power of a cannonade.

“They raise yours, too?” Parrish asked.

“By twelve,” Cooper responded.

“Me too.”

“Another squeeze on the old unemployment check.” Cooper shrugged.

“Yeah.”

Cooper wondered if his response meant that Parrish was also on unemployment.

“I was at Merrill and Anthony,” Cooper said.

“I know.” His reply triggered a tiny outburst in Cooper.
Why hadn’t Parrish ever mentioned that?

“Cooper, right?”

He even remembers my name
, Cooper thought angrily.

“I’m Parrish. Mike Parrish.”

“I know,” Cooper said, giving Parrish back in kind, although his memory of Parrish was dim.

“Slim pickings out there, so here we are,” Parrish said, offering the barest hint of a smile. His response cooled Cooper’s anger.

So there it is
, Cooper thought, proud of his deduction.

“Merrill and Anthony folded,” Cooper said, knowing he was stating the obvious.

“What a bitch.”

The woman behind the counter looked surprised by the exchange, having never seen them acknowledge each other before.