Gary Wilson
She stares hard at him through the non-bifocal part of her glasses.
He halts in mid-lick, stares back.
I don’t know how you do it, she says, eyes searching him.
What?
Make that much noise licking an envelope.
Noise?
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Even the blind man and the kid with blue hair trudging up separate aisles of the stadium know that CRACK doesn’t do justice to a perfectly thrown pitch meeting a perfectly swung bat. Even they recognize it’s deeper than that, bolder, sharper, an audacious, perfect sound so complete in itself that the crowd goes silent, all eyes finding and following the flight of the ball into the summer night sky, for the moment a pure white dot on its way to a place in the firmament, a perfect new world in a perfect new creation. They keep watching even as the ball slows in its trajectory—is it the breeze blowing in from right field? heat and humidity or lack thereof? the bat a tenth of an inch off dead center after all? the gods, fate, dumb bad luck?—and release a final collective groan when the outfielder, head tilted to the darkness, ambles back toward the warning track like someone out for a leisurely stroll, fists the pocket of his glove twice for good measure, and without breaking stride, plucks the ball from the air for the final out. He lifts it from his glove on the long trot to the dugout, rotates it several times in his hand, a quizzical look on his face, as though unable to understand what it is, where it came from and why he of all people has ended up with it, then tosses it unceremoniously toward the pitcher’s mound. The blind man shakes his head, turns and resumes tap-tapping his foot to find each next step. The kid with blue hair makes a wise-ass remark to the girl in the seat next to the aisle, locates the guy yelling down in front and gives him his proudest finger.
On my way home from the Art Institute, I pass a crowd pressed against the railing of the Michigan Avenue bridge. I watch as groups form, poses are struck, shutters whir and click, here and there camera phones rising heron-like above the fray, capturing or not a future glimpse of blue police boats bobbing like giant insects on the April-green water below, icy amber eyes flashing as they pair up stern to stern to corral the netted though still submerged form between them. Two figures emerge from the swarm of black-vested minions scurrying to and fro—one to keep taut a line to the waterlogged net, another to gaff the bundled shape, inching it ever closer to the small platform at their feet. Soon legs appear, white and large as alabaster columns, a shadowy mop-haired head with what might be a longish grayish beard and little enough of a face, a bare left arm, cocked at the elbow and raised slightly in a wave. A bus rumbles past, the bridge deck ripples underfoot. Someone says sum bitch just loud enough. Giggles, titters, nervous glances at the torrent of water from a storm sewer outlet on the south bank, a sudden gust of cold wind shivering the surface of the river. A boyfriend pushes his girlfriend against the railing. She screams. Bodies on the boats tense, heads swiveling to locate the distress, before they look back down, relieved, and go on about their business of bagging remains, noncompliant as they are, finishing with a final zip, but for the arm which continues its solitary, frozen salute, even as the boats dance apart and idle upriver under the bridge and the crowd disperses, rejoining the northward flow of shoppers along the Magnificent Mile.
Sweet Sixteen and never been kissed, she teases whenever she wants to be again, like now, like she’s been doing all evening in my car in front of her house, the windows fogged over, Paul Anka crooning, her head on my shoulder, my left arm locked numb against the door, my right around her, aching vaguely, fingers tingling like they’re asleep or frozen, sparks shooting through the ends of them inches above her right breast, but I dare not move or speak for fear I’ll ruin everything, look totally stupid, like some twelve-year-old trying to get through a doorway without running into it and she’ll wish she were with someone else, any one of at least a dozen other guys we both know would give anything to be where I am, doing what I am, her long brown hair smelling of shampoo and fallen leaves and tasting the way I think a girl’s is supposed to as she finger-combs it back from her face and looks at me, eyes half closed, lips searching for mine, which they find, nipping, nibbling, joining, our breaths mingling, mine spilling over the soft bare expanse of her neck she suddenly tucks away–that tickles too much–and snuggles deeper into the crook of my arm, a long breast-raising sigh that brings strands of her mohair sweater to the tips of my fingers which she lifts just in time to kiss one after another, before holding them to her cheek–cold hand, warm heart–and guiding them back to rest, poised perfectly above the swell of her breast, which I know she wants me to touch in the way she–and I, I suppose–imagines a lover would, but she does nothing to make it happen–doesn’t shift up against me as if chilled, doesn’t lay her hand on top of mine, pressing it gently down–and I do nothing, either, even though the tingle in my fingers has become almost painful again, and I know as sure as anything, without quite understanding why, that if not then, never, that once this moment is gone, it can’t be recaptured, re-acted–although perhaps rethought, recreated–and that a time will arrive sooner than we can possibly anticipate when the porch light being turned on at her house will not mean her father thinks she should come in but that he’s died, felled by a heart attack on his way out the door to retrieve the Sunday paper, and that his wife, her mother, will, in a fit of grief, move the family to be closer to her own in Colorado and we will lose contact long before it would have occurred naturally, and she will eventually marry and move to Hawaii, divorce and move to Seattle, where I will write her, asking how she is and will receive no answer, and I’ll wonder for a long while whether she does, or ever has herself wondered.
