Fishbowl: A Novel Page 9

  The door was open, but Katie still knocked.

  Connor spun in his seat to face her. “Welcome.” His eyes lit up when they fell upon her. “Come in.”

  “Your office is hard to find,” Katie said and took a step into the cramped room. Connor smiled and stood, crouching slightly because his height exceeded that of the ceiling. He took her proffered hand and shook it when Katie introduced herself.

  He said, “I know who you are.”

  It felt good that he knew her because there were more than three hundred students in the class. It made her feel less lonely in the crowd. They stood closer than strangers normally do because of the cramped quarters. They stood close enough that she could feel his breath on her skin. It smelled like spearmint, or perhaps it was bubble mint, Katie thought.

  “Yep, crammed under the stairs. An obscure space for two obscure grad students working on obscure projects,” he said and smiled again, his lips a perfect bow backed by straight white teeth. “They don’t know where to put me, so here I am, tucked out of sight with Lonnie.”

  He gestured with his chin at the guy sitting at the desk wedged under the lowest part of the stairs. Katie hadn’t noticed he was there, working silently in the laptop-screen glow. Her eyes had been on Connor the whole time. Connor still held her hand.

  Lonnie looked like he had been at that computer for days without even taking a break for a shower. He behaved as if she and Connor weren’t there, to the point he passed gas in the tiny space. It could only have been Lonnie. Katie knew from Connor’s reaction it wasn’t him. Lonnie carried on pecking at the keyboard as if nothing was amiss.

  With a wince at the fouled air, Connor asked, “Do you want to go somewhere else? Maybe I can buy you a coffee?” And with those words, so began Katie’s next adventure in love.

  Katie slips from her reverie when the Seville stairwell goes dark. It’s as pitch as only a windowless concrete column can be. In the dark, she refuses to now think of Connor as her next downfall, her next failed relationship. She will not wind up at her mother’s house, sitting late into the night, sobbing out vague, monosyllabic questions like “Why?” and “How?”—questions to which she knows there are no answers.

  No, there is every possibility that Connor will say, “I love you,” back to her. It isn’t out of the realm of reason that he has been repressing the expression of his feelings. Some people are so in love they can’t say it because they’re afraid to scare off the objects of their affection with the intensity of their emotions. Some people are timid about sharing themselves, as if it makes them weak or vulnerable. Maybe Connor is that guy, vulnerable and shy.

  The stairwell lights come back on.

  Katie sighs at the sign in front of her. “Floor 8.” She takes the next flight of stairs two at a time, the plastic bag from the pharmacy swinging from her hand. There are noises, people moving above her in the stairwell. She leans over the railing and peers up, the spiral of railing ascending into a fuzzy space far overhead.

  They had gone off campus for a coffee. Katie had asked all her questions about the upcoming exam on the short walk to the coffee shop. Connor had answered her diligently and attentively, seeming to want to help her more than anything. By the time they had settled into their chairs with steaming cups resting on the table between them, the sun was setting and the shop was bustling with the dinner crowd.

  “I loved that dog,” Connor said, his voice raised over the clamor of other conversations. “And when he got hit by the bus, I cried for, shit, must have been a week at least.”

  Katie made a sympathetic mewling even though she was smiling. She reached a hand across the table and put it on his.

  Connor looked at Katie and chuckled. “Why are you laughing? It was really traumatic.”

  “No, no,” she said but still couldn’t wipe the smile from her face. “It’s not that. It’s just so horrible. And to get hit by the school bus. I can see you, little kid Connor, all sad and alone. It’s terrible.”

  “That was the loneliest summer of my life. There really weren’t any other kids in the neighborhood my age. Mostly just old folks. My parents had me late in their lives. I was a surprise. That’s how my mom put it. That word doesn’t have the same connotations as ‘accident’ does.”

  “You poor guy,” Katie remembers saying. “And your parents didn’t get you another dog.”

  “Nope,” Connor said. “They saw how hard it was for me to get over Ian, and I think they thought I couldn’t survive the death of another pet. They were probably right.”

  She went back to Connor’s apartment that night. After they had writhed together, after he had fallen asleep, she lay awake with her hand on his head, his soft hair sprouting between her fingers, and thought she might fall in love with him. And she did. How could she not? He seemed perfect. He was handsome and seemed to have a great heart. A good guy, a little down-and-out but so willing to give his all for her to make her happy. That’s how it seemed then, but as time passed, she has craved a more concrete affirmation of her affection.

  Connor doesn’t have much, but he does what he can with it. The fact that he gives so completely and willingly when he has very little to give makes it seem so much more significant. Just last night, she brought a bottle of wine, and they stayed up drinking and talking into the night. Then, with some soft music playing in the apartment, they dragged his mattress across the floor and positioned it in front of the balcony door.

  “I want us to do it among the stars,” he told her. “This is the best I can do halfway between the ground and the sky.”

  It was romantic. He seemed ashamed he couldn’t offer more, but what he did offer was more than enough. There, held aloft by the Seville on Roxy like an offering to the sky, they made love. Afterward, she noticed that the city lights were too bright and she couldn’t see the stars. It didn’t matter though; they lay in each other’s arms and looked out over the twinkling city instead.

  “I love you,” she said. Her heart tumbled, nervous in her chest. She wanted to hear the words back. After all they had shared, there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to say the words.

  Connor grunted a satisfied and unconscious noise. It seemed, though he had been awake a moment before, now he was deep asleep.

  20

  In Which the Villain Connor Radley Sees the Signs and They Are Everywhere

  Connor watches Faye wander down the hall. She seems unsteady on her feet, like she’s distracted, dreamy, or drunk. He likes the way her ass fills her jeans, how it moves with her unsteady gait. He especially likes the crease in the material at the base of her buttocks. He sighs before taking two steps backward into his apartment and closing the door.

  Connor takes a deep breath and turns to confront the mess in the apartment. He picks up a wandering path of dog-eared pornography, errant clothes, and miscellaneous garbage from the apartment door to the balcony door. By the time he gets there, he has a garland of unopened condoms draped over his arm, a bundle of clothes tucked between his elbow and his hip, and a bouquet of tissues wadded up in his hand.

  He pauses at the view out the balcony door.

  Ian swims in his bowl, tracking lazy circles in one direction and then, seemingly on a whim, switching to the other. The snail is a brown dot halfway up the glass. Ian stops to peck at it a few times and then continues his swim. The castle sits as a reminder of harder, more primitive times, not that castles were ever pink, made of plastic, or sunken into the ocean.

  Connor revels for a moment in the absurdity of the castle, the miniature archers manning the walk, puzzling over how their tiny arrows could take down this giant goldfish floating by their walls.

  The thesis papers stacked on the fishbowl ripple in a stirring of air, weighted in place by the coffee mug against the gentle pull and push of the breeze.

  Connor sniffs the air in the apartment. It stinks of hours of sweat, exertion, and spunk. He decides against sliding the door closed. It’s as warm outside as it is inside anyway. He st
ands with his hand on the door handle, looking out on the balcony. Something is amiss and keeps him stuck in place, puzzling him into inaction.

  What is it? he wonders. There’s something deeply wrong here, and I can’t put my finger on it.

  The fresh air washes over him and into the apartment, as if it is attempting to cleanse all that has happened there since he moved in. It brushes past his naked skin, an invisible caress stroking him. Connor takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, attempting to clear the scene from his mind, clear his palate so he can see it with refreshed eyes and pinpoint the problem. He exhales fully and opens his eyes to scrutinize the balcony again.

  It’s a simple scene before him and nothing that should cause him such concern, especially considering the state of the apartment at his back. But for some reason it cripples him.

  The mug reads, “Paleoclimatologists do it in the dirt.”

  He is filled with such deep self-reproach that he thinks of leaving the apartment and never coming back. Whatever is out there on the balcony makes him want to flee, to just go to the elevator, press the down button, and ride it to the lobby. He’d drop his keys in the super’s mailbox, shoulder through the front door, and keep walking. Across the street, across the neighborhood, past the city limits, and right on across the continent, walking away from everything he has and, by association in his mind, everything he is. Walking past highway truck stops and billboards for casinos, past small-town corner stores and dusty gas station parking lots. Eventually he would reach an ocean town, cross the sand-sprinkled boardwalk and ribbon of beach, and just keep going, wading out into the water until the sand dropped away beneath his feet. Then he’d swim, the water turning from a pale blue to black as the continental shelf slid away, plunging into the hollow depths full of unknown monsters, the alien kinds with dangly bioluminescent baubles hanging from organic filaments before their eyes. His body would become a mere speck of humanity hovering over an almost infinite depth of nothing. His movements would be so small in the water that, no matter how violently he thrashed, they’d have no impact. His legs would kick themselves into exhaustion, and eventually he’d fade into nothing, disappearing as if he never even happened.

  Then Connor figures out it isn’t the apartment he wants to flee; it’s something much more difficult to escape. He wants to flee himself. As soon as he realizes this, he knows it’s the coffee mug that makes him feel this way. That kitschy custom mug with a dried coffee kiss on the rim.

  The mug was a gift from Katie. Not from any of the other girls. She had it made at a specialty place where they also print novelty shirts, buttons, and stickers. Ian’s also a gift from Katie. She bought the fish for him after he told her about his dog and growing up alone in a community of retirees.

  And now she’s coming up the building to see him, riding the quivering elevator to his door. She wants to see him, wants to know more about him. She cares about him. And while she’s riding the elevator up, Faye’s descending the stairs. His infidelity is safely secret.

  Connor turns his back to the balcony and sees the empty bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. Katie had brought it. They drank it together and then pulled his mattress to the balcony door to look out at the thousands of city lights in the dark. Connor told her that he wanted to make love to her under the stars, but the city lights were too bright to see them.

  Sure, he’d still banged her there on the mattress on the floor in front of the glass doors. He had wanted them to be near the window because he thought the couple in the next building over was watching them through the telescope he had seen in their apartment. And the couple in the apartment across the way did watch them doing it. Twice. But he and Katie had talked late into the night after they both came, and he had fallen asleep to the soft music of her voice.

  A tea bag sits on the side of the sink.

  The next morning she made tea before she went to work.

  Now, the reminder of her sits there in a salt flat moat of Earl Grey residue.

  These pieces of her are around all the time. Everything reminds Connor of her.

  She’s here in the waxy yellow Q-tip in his bathroom garbage can and the strand of hair on the tile in the shower. She’s here in the glamour magazine draped over the edge of the couch. They’d done the “Are you too picky about your guy?” quiz together. Katie, yes. Connor, no.

  Connor’s stomach clenches with regret. How could he have missed the point? He is a tiny archer in the pink castle watching the giant goldfish float past the turrets. It is so obvious. The continental shelf, the infinite black below, the inconsequential speck of him in the vastness of it all; him, he could be so much more with her. With her, he wouldn’t walk away. With her, he was safe and at home floating in the deep black below.

  All of this stuff she has left in his apartment, the constant reminder of her presence in his life, makes this ocean a little less lonely. And looking at it all, he finally realizes he doesn’t mind any of it. She has been in his life for such a short time, but all of these bits of her make something bigger. She is the most beautiful and wonderful thing, and how could he not have seen that?

  Why does Faye even exist in my life?

  Why is there a Deb in it, also?

  He looks at the porno magazines in one hand, the tissues in the other, and they tell him that he has wronged her. They highlight his shame and make him long to be better for Katie. They make him realize he is committed to her.

  What’s wrong with me that a Katie isn’t enough?

  Faye, great in the sack, sure.

  Deb, very great in the sack, legendary.

  Both of them are. That is it. Nothing more. The only difference is that one is a blonde and one is a ginger. Deb and Faye, interchangeable bodies with varying availability.

  Katie, also great in the sack, beautiful, with a laugh that never fails to make him crack up, and, he thinks, she could really be something more. Connor thinks back to when they dragged the mattress in front of the window and talked, looking out at the city night. There was no struggle to fill the gaps in their conversation. There was no trial of thinking of something to say. In fact, it was three in the morning before he knew it.

  That means something, right?

  Looking around the apartment, there are so many more pieces of Katie scattered about his space and he likes it. That has never happened with a woman before.

  So why do Faye and Deb exist in my life?

  His reaction to Katie calling and coming up exposes what is important to him. It reflects what he truly feels. He couldn’t get caught with Faye because it would hurt Katie, which means that Katie is more important than anyone else and that is something that hasn’t happened before. Ever.

  Could this be what love is about? Connor wonders. He wonders if this could be a sign, an abrupt “This is love” in flashing neon.

  Or is love more gradual? Something a person grows into.

  Is it a sign? I need a sign.

  Then the apartment goes silent. The bedside lamp goes dark. The fridge’s compressor stops running. There’s a distinct silence that falls over the building, more of a feeling than a lack of noise. The quiet buzz of everything electrical is gone, not that it was noticeable in its presence, but it is definitely noticeable in its absence.

  Connor listens to the traffic hum far below on the street.

  Connor knows something is wrong with him.

  Connor knows something has to change, but he has only just started to figure what that is.

  The floor lamp in the corner of the room comes on again, and the fridge clicks and starts to whir. The stove clock flashes a row of green eights.

  I love Katie, Connor thinks. And I have never been so sure of anything before.

  21

  In Which the Evil Seductress Faye Discards the Remnants of Her Love and Begins a Very Long Descent

  Faye opens the door to the garbage room. Its hinges squawk horribly, and the handle is tacky with filth. It swings shut again behind her, and she wipes he
r hand on the pink nightshirt. The walls are painted an off-white color and sport variously hued smears and stains splattered with increasing density near the metal trapdoor in the wall blocking the garbage chute. Faye lifts the hem of the pink nightshirt and uses it as a glove to open the trapdoor. She gags on the smell that emanates from the darkness below. It’s a warm, fetid exhalation that breaks like a rotting liquid against her face.

  She drops the garbage bag into the chute. The sight of the sour-apple condom, wet and plastered against the side of the opaque plastic bag as it disappears into the offal of the dark chute, makes her yearn to wash her hands. The soft sound of the bag bouncing from wall to wall fades, and Faye lets the handle slip from her grasp. The trapdoor bangs shut, the sound amplified in the small space. Faye uses the hem of the nightshirt again to open the door, and when she steps into the hallway, she takes a deep breath and lets it out through her nose, trying to expel the sticky smell in her nostrils.

  Faye follows the signs to the stairwell. She has never been in the stairwell of the Seville and no wonder—Connor’s on the top floor. She always takes the elevator, but this time she will take the stairs, just as Connor asked, just so she won’t risk a chance run-in with his girlfriend.

  Not that I would be able to tell her from any other chick I see in the building, Faye thinks.

  Faye knows of her existence, and she knows her name because Connor talks about her, but she has never even seen the girlfriend. In her mind, Katie is a generic girl with legs and arms and breasts and eyes and hair. Nothing more specific than that.

  Faye knows Connor has other women on the go in addition to herself and this girlfriend. It doesn’t bother her much as their relationship is strictly physical. Faye has other lovers on the table too. She talks about them openly in front of Connor just to see him squirm, which he does.

  Faye believes there are different people out there for different reasons, each serving a purpose in her life. No one could be expected to satisfy her every need. Some are great to talk to, and some are great to go to bed with. Some are there to help her move heavy stuff, and some are meant to go to the movies with. She thinks herself too complex and men too simple for her to be tempted by any single one of them … exclusively.