Page 35 - Vol. VII #1

his old names, but she needed something stronger to remove their lurid graffiti.
He was dark Irish, with every angle severe. Nothing soft or substantial. Underweight, bony—knotted, firm. No cushioned landings with Carl. Carl, who used to make a good living selling cocaine at the local col- leges, who was now laying low as manager of a mall sneaker store. Apparently, corporate now wanted to move him out to headquarters in Denver. They’d met when he sold Veronica a pair of running shoes. Once Carl got enthusiastic about something, it was dan- gerously contagious. This marriage bug—Veronica wasn’t sure she was ready to catch it again. Maybe she still had immunities from the first time. His, his proposal, she suspected, was just the weather talking. She could like the weather, but not what it said.
~
“Let’s stay outside,” she said. “Let’s go running. I want to run!” She took a series of long graceful strides.
She had run obsessively, religiously, in all weather. For years, it had been her go-to drug—until she had to have knee surgery. The doctor warned her to cut back, but it was such a big part of who she was that she couldn’t stop. She liked to run hungover, pushing through the dreamy haze.
She turned back, but he was still standing, in the distance, where she’d left him. “For someone who knows so much of about running shoes, you’re sure a pussy when it comes to actually doing it!”
“If I run, I’m gonna puke!” he shouted.
“Puke and get it over with, then we’ll go running!” she shouted back. The cold sun on her cheeks jazzed her with momentum to be carried forward into the blue, blue sky. She took off and left him.
“Hey!” he shouted, but she was gone. If he really wanted to marry her, she thought, he’d catch up. At least try.
~
Carl, despite his complex, overlapping, never-ending relationships, had never been married. Veronica had married Roger, her high-school sweetheart, right after they’d gone through the purgatory of attending separate colleges and mistook the opportunity to be together at last as a sign of permanence. With no ob- stacles in their way, no long drives and urgent phone calls, the cheap walls of their cardboard love came a-tumbling down pronto. With Carl, Veronica felt like everything was cardboard to begin with. She had no
illusions, but it was turning out that he might.
Veronica divorced Roger after less than a year, and she entered graduate school in social work at Pitt
the following fall. She wanted to catch up on college social life, do it right this time—she was out of the convent of guilt and deprivation, no stopping her now. She didn’t even have Roger’s TV or phone number or email address. They were not friends on Facebook
or in any book. He’d slept with a teenaged neighbor. Slept with the babysitter before they even had a baby to sit. Veronica had been a substitute teacher hoping for a permanent position when Roger had taken his own permanent position. She kept their wedding al- bum as an historical document. It gathered dust like a family Bible. Two years later, here she was with Carl, only the fifth guy she’d slept with. Not that long ago, Roger had been alone on that list.
She liked that Carl wasn’t hiding out in college, like many of her fellow graduate students. Like she her- self. He had dealt with the real consequences of his messy life—like a stuntman who knew how to fall without getting hurt, he could tumble, then roll, then get right back up laughing. It seemed like there’d always been someone to applaud for him. Maybe he was worried the potential audience was thinning out like the long black hair he combed forward.
~
Their party was an odd mix—it was at Carl’s, but he’d told Veronica to invite her friends too. He’d been pro- moted to local regional manager of Little’s Shoes, and the idea was to celebrate his new respectability with an ironic nod to debauchery.
Between them, they had enough friends who threw enough parties to fill most weekends. The grad- student parties and the Carl’s-friends parties were very different, and the two of them often ground
their gears moving from Friday to Saturday night. More women attended the grad student parties. The drinking, more diffuse, less focused. The music softer, more eclectic. The drugs less visible and not shared— reserved for those who could afford them. The grad students were more ironic—the currency they ex- changed in lieu of real money and love.
At Carl’s parties, drinking was a mission, a script everyone had to follow. The first couple of hours were tense, but once everyone got hammered, the music got cranked and you had to shout to be heard, and the shouting turned to laughter at the punch line nobody was quite sure of. If someone was shooting
(continued on next page)
28