Blind hearts - 13. jobs and dresses

A dress, Susan said. No lace, no frills, no body bags. The wrap dress looks ok, what do you think? Hmm nice, will keep that in mind. Natural fibers are nice, linen cool, silk best. I need to rest for a bit. What exactly would you doing in this software engineering job you got? We should definitely get you more silk ties. Why do malls have to be such igloos? Maybe I should get the wrap-dress. Let’s try Macy’s. Where kind of country is Laos? Hmm, I knew that. Is anything made in the USofA anymore? What of this shirtdress? Right, and you called the last five dresses good. I bet you’d have an opinion if Frank were asking.

Alex sneezed.

Susan eyed him once over. “Coming down with something?”

“Probably.”

There was a minute of quiet confusion in her eyes. “The wrap dress is good enough.”

“An excellent choice, Mom. I really mean it.

Alex did not like the red rash winged across Susan’s nose or her impatient gangling out the scintillating egress.

Susan excused herself to the restroom, and standing by a steel stanchion, Alex shifted the bags of pink, mauve and glitter, to complete a more debonair look. Stupid yes, but a man had to try. The mall, tall lights, long shadows, a coliseum of stalls, extended arses and toddler parades, and lacking the excitable fribble of schoolgirls, felt miserably vacuous. And tempting his skeptical glance, a lone middle-aged couple hobbled together over the secret contents of a department store bag.

“It better be good enough, it’s sixty bucks.”

“Peachy. Just peachy. Do you have a better idea?”

“Not getting anything is a better cheaper idea.”

“You’re not the one who has to listen to the twelve hour bitching and moaning—”

“If you’d just be nice for a change, she won’t bitching and moaning.”

“Yeah, nice, like getting this fucking present that you fucking hate.”

And on and on their voices billowed unimpeded through the barren hollow of steel and placards for graduation discounts. At least, Alex conceded, they still quarreled. Mercifully, there was still life to be kindled, or to be snuffed out, but vim and vigor all the same. Unlike the heat death of his parents’ relationship, which began with a whimper and ended with limp utterances to remain friends.

His phone beeped a text message from Janet, “We should totally go with Tom to play black jack.” He could even hear her salutary contralto whine over the sudden babble of women flapping out of the mall bookstore. Immediately, a febrile cloud drizzled, and a cough nagged at the bottom of his throat as he could not erase the image of Frank’s pale hand gripping his kneecap, or the asperity in his jeers against Janet’s oft proclaimed dissatisfaction with the cards, her quest for a more suitable—Frank scoffed—more ladylike hobby. He deserved something, Alex thought, finger-combing his hair in search of vindication. A good fucking would be good. Maybe he should call Tony, Jacob even better, but definitely after his cold thing was gone. Either way, something was deserved for persisting through Frank’s odes to the mystical grace of her figure in a tube top and short shorts, his muttering about her piss-yellow toenails.

“Frank isnt coming, if u arent coming. I wanna go, so there,” came another message.

“Deep throat him, and he’ll do anything u want. Im out,” he replied furiously.

Alex elected not to read her reply. He was done with them, he thought. And in assertion of insouciance, he greedily pictured Dimov folded over in the backseat of his car, ass high in the air and snug against his hard dick. Alex shared a good smile with a kid stepping out of the bookstore and repositioned the bags so to provide a warm rest against his groin. The fuck was ridiculous even for his standards, but he had crowned it the perfect way to forget the shitastic interview and to celebrate a-hell-fuck-it-surrender to the gods of adulthood and abnegation. Dimov himself was surprisingly pliant, mousy in fact, muscularly eager to please.

Alex, grinning happier, beamed down the polished shine telescoping down the bathroom corridor, and still Susan’s cherry-red bun was nowhere in sight. His phone rang.

“This is Frederick Stanton?” A sultry female voice asked.

“Yes, hello—”

“I’m sure you remember me, Nancy Grace…”

Alex’s heart beat a thousand in an instant.

“A friend at the Metternich Investments, mentioned, all right blabbed about their new potential hires. Your name came up. I remembered your runty face last summer, and also remember the shitty heartburn you gave me after you turned down our offer.”

Alex rubbed his face and cleared his throat. “A few things—”

“Our offer is still on the table.”

“I don’t—”

“One month to reconsider. I’ll throw in an extra 10k for you.”

Alex couldn’t breathe.

“Think about it,” she added like a succubus.

Her cane shaky in hand, Susan was tapping along up to him, listlessly, frowningly, a wisp of hair dangling down her puffy cheek, and Alex thought God was such a dick.

The dial tone still inveighing against his sanity, he fought the bags upon bags and rushed to her side.

“Great, you look pale,” Susan said accusingly, “Why did you agree come along?”

Alex brandished a smile. “Mom, I’m strong as a horse.”

“A sick horse.”

They came to the outdoor parking lot, and the air fibrous with exhaust, and the panoptic of cars—jelly beans leaching colors and oils under the harsh white sun. Dryly hot, blindingly bright, the day certainly was not congratulating Alex for landing a top job in New York that would pay him 90,000 a year. And Susan was rummaging through their bags, clucking and mumbling about the outrageous wrap dress. Alex wrested control of the bags and fished out sunglasses for the photosensitive Susan before running out, rather fleeing just to drive the car round back to pick her up from the curb.

His ear was still red and hot from the vibrations of Nancy’s voice as the drive unwound through city streets. He negotiated right, left, right, languidly through the groves of wishes whipped back, bound kinbari-style, and hung from haggard trees.

“You’ll need to get buy a hybrid for the new job.” Susan said in the strident tone of sudden solicitude.

A new job meant a new car and new shoes and a new laptop, thought Alex taken aback at his lack of imagination on these concerns.

“You definitely could have negotiated for something more than 67k,” Susan said. “What did your dad say?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

Alex, hoping to evade a maternal inquisition, turned on the radio. Jazzy snare drums effervesced to strained rock croons, which rasped back to the jaunty piano medley, and then fizzed to fake New England accents gushing as respectably as could be about Swedish vacations and sleeping in igloos.

“Why haven’t you told him yet?” she squeaked over the brash saxophone intermission.

He was not aware of the compact that demanded he inform his father of new jobs. The news itself was just two days old and had rudely interrupted his usual cafeteria session of red bull and damned programs that would not compile.

“I dunno—besides,” he sighed, “The finance job is still a distinct possibility.”

“You said you weren’t getting it.”

“Yeah … things are more hopeful than I’d thought.”

Susan blinked at him gravely, studiously. “You and Frank must talk about what a useless old woman I am.”

Alex quirked to glance at the acorn of her face half eaten up by amber sunglasses. Words tumbled out of him shamelessly, “Don’t say that … I love you.” The air still felt like a congealed mass of intestines. “Frank likes you even prefers you to his own mom.”

“Right. You think I’m just blowing hot air, taking up space. If I weren’t sick, you’d be far, far, away. Well go on then, carry on away.”

The light had turned red too suddenly, and he pressed the brakes too hard. A minute or two of quirky heartbeats and jumbled gratitude for narrowly upholding cosmic laws passed by as he watched pedestrians cross the street: A toddler, soaked in tears and snot, was clutching the pearled wrist of his mother.

“I think I’ll stay awhile. I like free rent—We’re a team. If Liana comes over, it’ll make the three of us together,” he said too joyfully.

Alex hoped his smile beamed the requisite gaiety to conceal his inner patter, but it drew her impatient hiss.

“I’m serious. You should move out.”

“Come on Mom. I’m not leaving you alone.”

“Oh please, in between gambling away other people’s money and sleeping with every idiot out there, I’m sure, you’ll find time to check that my corpse isn’t decomposing in the bathroom somewhere.”

Alex sneezed, sniffled through the clanging echoes of agitation, and Susan removed her sunshades as though giving in to the childish, annoying sun. She reached over and palmed his cheek, her damp softness against his rough stubble.

“We ought to get you to bed,” she said in an immiscible mixture of grit and gentleness.

There was also the mist of fear and need wavering about her pulpy puffy face, which stunned Alex, cut him senseless before another of those uncaring phases of time, when the child became the parent and the parent became the child.

He clucked lightly, turned up the radio volume, and strained his sights straight ahead, down the coruscated column of parked cars. Amplitude and frequency were no vacuum for his precise senses. Hot-boxed in with the minty notes of sweat, the exultant notes of gold trading at 1200 dollars an ounce, he sank in there with her slurping breaths, with the ballast of her irrefragable right to his happiness.