This was the underlying logic that had coerced him into becoming a member of the YMCA.
There were other forces at work, too. The sense of powerlessness he had felt in the home of Thomas Edison, especially when the little man in the bathroom pressed the pistol into his stomach (there was still a small bruise); the advice his mother—and Sorsby—had given him; and the vision he had of himself at the beach, now just a month and a half away, as a man with definition. It’s what he was looking for every day of his life, in a larger sense of the word, and what he suspected everyone was looking for: definition, the answer to who you were.
And then, to cap it all off, a flyer came in the mail addressed to Current Resident—to him, in other words. There was a YMCA not far from King’s Manor, and the introductory rates were very good, almost too good to be true, and the Y had all the weights and stationary bicycles and medieval-looking torture machines the other, more expensive clubs did.
And so he joined.
He lifted weights. In just ten minutes, he could feel the burn. His arms and legs felt as if they had come to life. Many of the members here were much older than Bronfman, in exceptionally terrible shape, and that made him feel better about who he was and how far he had to go, which was really not that far when he compared himself with an obese eighty-year-old man. Bronfman paced on a treadmill for half an hour or so. He knew it wouldn’t make him healthy (he’d eat a box of doughnut holes on the treadmill if they were served there), but just being able to think, I’m on my way to the gym, or I’ve just gotten back from the gym, felt so good, so right, that it was worth the time it took to change out of his street clothes into his shorts and T-shirt and tennis shoes, and then, less than an hour later, back into his suit and shoes again and off to work.
He worked up a bit of a sweat, though; parts of him were even sticky. He got why people did this.
But to Bronfman’s discomfort—in fact, he could not imagine a discomfort that was greater—for the first time in his life he found himself in the company of penises other than his own. In the beige-tiled and dream-steamy locker room of the YMCA, he had to change back into his street clothes, and here there was absolutely no inhibition. The men stripped down to nothing and made nothing of it, showered with one another and shaved before the mirror without a stitch, and sometimes even engaged in rambling conversations with a friend, both of them utterly naked, and quite old, raisin-withered. Bronfman didn’t get it. Usually hidden away from the world, here the penis became just another part of the body, no different from a nose or an elbow. Bronfman stole a quick look at the other penises now and again, as he pretended to check the time, say, or pick up a sock he’d accidentally dropped. He didn’t like having to do it, but he had to know what it meant to have the penis he had, and whether it was true, as he feared it was, that the problems he had with women, with men, with life itself, were, in the end, the result of a disappointing penis. Not just its size or shape, really, but something in the spirit of it, its personality—its is-ness. He had wondered the same thing all his life in one way or another since high school, when he had the uncomfortable vision of what Corey Spaulding’s penis might look like, or how it might have behaved in a strange dark room with Mary Day.
And this was where he met Dennis Crouton.
Dennis Crouton was a photographer from somewhere else, possibly France. Bronfman knew this long before he met him. Voices carried through the locker room; words seemed to hang in the air, buoyed by the steam. Minutes after they were spoken they could still be heard, floating around in their own particular cloud of sound. He had also seen Crouton—all of him, every bit of him—because, of all the unself-conscious inhabitants of the men’s locker room at the downtown YMCA, Crouton was the least self-conscious of all.
In the parking lot, lost, trying to locate his car, Bronfman heard the familiar faintly foreign voice of Dennis Crouton behind him.
“Allo? Excuse me?”
Bronfman turned. “I’m sorry!” he said, having no idea what he might be apologizing for.
“No, no,” Crouton said. “This is mine. I just need to get in it.”
Crouton indicated that it was the car whose door Bronfman was standing in front of, a blue Saab of indeterminate age.
Bronfman stepped aside. “I can’t find mine,” he said. “I thought it was—wait, I see it. There it is.” He had purchased the pale-red Toyota Celica thirteen years ago from a first-year college student who had been selling the car that his parents handed down to him in high school. It drove exceptionally well for a vehicle with almost 250,000 miles on it. It leaked oil, though, and Bronfman had to keep a close eye on that (he kept an entire case of WD-40 in his trunk), but otherwise he couldn’t complain.
Crouton seemed not to care. He waved away Bronfman’s words as if he were shooing away a fly. “Dennis Crouton,” he said. “Like the crunchy bread in the salad.” Crouton didn’t offer his hand and wait for it to be taken, the way most people Bronfman had ever encountered did. Crouton found Bronfman’s hand, which had been hanging limply against his trousers, and took it in his own, and gave it not a shake but a squeeze.
“Edsel Bronfman,” Bronfman said, as he felt his hand disappear into the warm palm of the possible Frenchman.
“So people call you Ed or—?”
“People call me Bronfman,” Bronfman said.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” he said. Crouton found a pair of Ray-Bans in his gym bag and, donning them, immediately became perfectly, totally foreign. “Of course, I have seen you and you have seen me.”
“Yes…”
“Many times.”
“Many,” Bronfman painfully admitted. “Many, yes.”
“So often we see each other—it is the same with all people sometimes—and we never say hello. It’s the way of it now, in the modern world, non?”
“No,” Bronfman said. Then, understanding what he meant, “Yes, it is. It is the way of the modern world.”
“So fast,” he said. “So busy.”
“Speaking of which,” Bronfman said, and pointed to the place where his watch would have been had he remembered to put it on. But, as he hadn’t, Crouton watched him point at his naked wrist. “Work.”
“Work!” Crouton said. It was odd—Crouton’s accent seemed to come and go. “Sorry to keep you from it. What is it you do?”
“Oh, it’s … hard to explain. It’s a business—where I coordinate shipments and billing and…”
But he had already lost Crouton, who was fishing around for something in one of his pockets. Bronfman had managed to bore him in one sentence and a half.
“Ah, here it is,” and he removed a torn, crumpled, dirty piece of paper. “My card.”
Bronfman took it and read, “Dennis Crouton. Photographer.”
That was all it said.
“You’re a photographer,” Bronfman said, pointlessly. “What do you take pictures of?”
“The world,” Crouton said solemnly. “All of the world.”
“You must be busy.”
“Oh,” Crouton said. “I am. Very, very busy.” He sighed. “And so I will see you in the gym sooner or later, no?”
And with those words Crouton slipped into his handsomely beat-up car and drove away.
Later that same day, thumbing through a local weekly paper called Happenings, which billed itself as “the guide to all things local,” he saw that the photographer Dennis Crouton had a showing of his most recent work at the Winter Gallery—that very night. Bronfman had to read it twice to believe it. But there it was: “Dennis Crouton at the Winter Gallery—Tonight.” The news inspired a series of thoughts. What a coincidence was the first thing Bronfman thought. And then, I know where the Winter Gallery is (though he had never even considered going inside it), and then, I have nothing to do tonight; I could very well go.
But the last thought, the big thought, and the one that hung around in his head the longest, was this: Why didn’t he tell me? He gave me his card, which would have been the per
fect time to say, “I have a show tonight. You should come, no?” But he didn’t mention it, which could mean only one of two things. Either he was too shy to invite Bronfman, incapable of tooting his own horn, or he simply didn’t want Bronfman—this white, naked, nearly hairless thing he sometimes shared a bench with—to be there. Bronfman opted for the first, because he harbored a secret crazy hope that this man, Dennis Crouton, might actually become his friend.
TWO
The Winter Gallery was bravely situated on a corner in a section of town that had yet to be saved by the ambitiously gentrifying young. It seemed to be waiting for other establishments of similar quality to join it there; so far, apart from a spooky-looking bar down the street, none had. The soft light of the display was overcome by the red-and-green neon of the steel-barred ABC store beside it, one sign flashing OPEN and another blinking NO CREDIT, JUST CASH. There were no bars on the picture windows of the gallery, which meant that either the owners were striking a defiant note of trust in their fellow man or this was an admission that there was nothing inside the gallery that anybody would want to steal. Bronfman watched from across the street as people came and went. Half a block away, a group of slump-shouldered hoodlums checked Bronfman out. He thought about Serena Stanton. Officer Stanton. He had her card. He could call her right now and say, “Looks like there’s some trouble brewing down this way. No, no backup required. I think we can handle this one ourselves.” But he hadn’t brought his phone. The hoodlums stared him down. All they had to do was nod in his direction to get him to move, and so Bronfman dashed across the street into the cool beige of the gallery, where a young woman handed him a pamphlet, on the cover of which was one word, printed in big black letters:
CROUTON
“I hope you enjoy the show,” she said.
She was wearing a nametag: “Alice Gray Stites.” Bronfman was inordinately impressed by nametags and intimidated by anyone wearing one, especially someone with three names. Yet he was feeling brave tonight.
“So, you work here … Alice?” he ventured.
She drew back. “I’m the curator of the show, actually.”
“Ah,” he said, not knowing what that was. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“As well you should,” she said, and turned away, pamphlets at the ready for the next lover of photography who happened behind him.
The room was packed. “Excuse me, I’m sorry. Thank you, pardon, excuse me.” It took a lot of apologies for Bronfman just to get inside. All kinds of people were there, from rich older women festooned with bedazzling jewels, to some young scruffy types in jeans and T-shirts with holes, to a man in black wearing cowboy boots and a blue scarf around his neck. Not a single person from the YMCA was here, though. Only Bronfman.
It did make Bronfman happy to see the gallery full of people; he was pleased for Dennis Crouton in a way that made absolutely no sense. He didn’t know anything about the art world, or if this even was the art world. And, of course, he had never heard of Dennis Crouton before that afternoon. But on the way over he had worried that he might be the only person here, which would have been awkward and painful. But apparently this Crouton was somebody, and Bronfman had never known a somebody before. One day, were Crouton’s name to come up in conversation, he could tell people that he had once known Dennis Crouton—that he was, in fact, a kind of friend.
But that day would never happen—who was ever going to mention the name Dennis Crouton?—and it wouldn’t matter if it did. Bronfman wouldn’t mention it. That really wasn’t Bronfman’s style. When he was nine years old, Uncle Pat had taken him to a minor-league baseball game. Young Bronfman, for some reason, owned a baseball glove, which he had tucked in the back of his closet along with the ukulele and the cardboard box full of fool’s gold—driveway gravel, really—he used to collect. Uncle Pat insisted that he take the glove to the game, because you never knew when a home run might come right at you. “Right at me?” Bronfman repeated. He didn’t like the sound of that. The chances seemed so slim, though, that of all the people in the entire stadium the ball would happen to travel his way, that he humored his uncle and took the glove along. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Some guy hit the ball so hard that it rose above the confines of the field of play and floated into the stands—right at Bronfman—who, closing his eyes and lifting his glove to protect his face, found that the ball had somehow fallen neatly into it. There it was. And the smile on his Uncle Pat’s face was monstrously enormous. He often wondered what had happened to Uncle Pat. Where did he go after the months spent with Muriel? He imagined a holding pen where uncles past, present, and future were held. Or did they move on to another woman with another child, another lonely pair who needed an uncle for themselves?
It turned out to be an indescribable feeling, actually, catching the ball. The next day at school Bronfman overheard some seniors talking about it—how some kid at the game yesterday had actually caught a home run and how cool that was, and how much they wished it would happen to them one day … and Bronfman had every opportunity to say, “That was me! That was me! I caught that ball, and it was like a dream come true.” But he didn’t. He had some sort of condition that wouldn’t allow him to say anything that might improve his position in the world. He had never told anyone about the miracle catch, as, likewise, he would never tell anyone about Dennis Crouton, even though it was true, he did know him. They might become friends. Bronfman might become Crouton’s wingman as together they trolled the bars of Birmingham for women. Stranger things have happened, surely.
He was also happily surprised when it turned out that he actually liked Dennis Crouton’s photographs. Crouton wasn’t kidding when he said he took pictures of the whole world. There were photos here from all over: California, Tibet, Norway, and little towns in Alabama and Mississippi, towns that appeared to have been abandoned or burned down. Horses. There was a lot of squalor and sadness, and all the photos were in black and white. Bronfman spent some time admiring each of them, and helped himself to some cheese and crackers and grapes, which made him feel somewhat fancy. He went back for seconds and ventured into another room.
That’s when he saw Dennis Crouton. Crouton held a glass of wine in one hand and gesticulated with the other, talking and talking, easily stringing one sentence after another together without a second thought. He wore a black jacket with jeans, a pale-yellow button-down shirt—a step up from the T-shirt and shorts he usually wore to the gym. The two women he was talking to—beautiful by any standard, it was ridiculous, really, how pretty they were—nodded and smiled, smiled and nodded. They couldn’t get a word in edgewise, because Crouton didn’t stop talking. It was as if he’d been stranded on an island by himself for a year and had all these words stored up inside him and had to get them out before he exploded. Bronfman watched as the women exchanged a glance or two with each other, though it was impossible for him to interpret the information they were trying to impart. It was some secret, he would wager, because if he knew one thing about women it was this: they were full of secrets.
Bronfman pretended to admire the photographs in this room, which were strikingly similar to the ones in the other room, and when he was in Crouton’s sight line he casually turned around and waved. Crouton wasn’t looking his way, of course, but Bronfman didn’t stop waving, and eventually Crouton saw him and tilted his head. A series of expressions flashed across Crouton’s face, easily interpretable: Do I know you? Let me pretend to know you while I place you. I can’t place you. Wait—I think—really? You? Then he lifted his hand in a sort of half-wave, and returned to his conversation with the beautiful women who had looked his way as well but with no registration whatsoever. And even though Bronfman circulated through the gallery for another twenty minutes, drifting like flotsam toward Crouton, then away, then toward again, giving his new friend every opportunity, the photographer said not a word to him. Not one word.
* * *
About a block away from the gallery was a bar called the Hole-and-
Corner, and in the hope that it served hamburgers Bronfman escaped the gallery and made his way down the threatening streets, as fast as he possibly could, and entered. Dingy, loud, full of people who had taken chances with their lives and lost. This was the kind of place Bronfman would have frequented had he been a completely different person. It was like a warehouse. Maybe it was a warehouse. Shadowy and cavernous, thrift-store chairs and tables and a long aluminum bar lined with red-topped stools, and behind that—darkness. It was the sort of place where he could imagine running into Coco and Thomas Edison. Bronfman took a seat on one of the stools and waited to be served.
And waited. He felt abandoned, stranded, alone with his thoughts. He didn’t understand what had just happened at the gallery. He had been snubbed, yes, that was obvious. But why? He had never expected to be real friends with Crouton. Still, Crouton could have said hello. Just that one word, hello.
A young female bartender wearing a boa and a furry blouse materialized before him. Almost the entirety of her was covered in tattoos. Her arms and neck and who knows where else. Bronfman did not understand tattoos.
“Something I can get you?”
“Oh,” he said. “A beer, please. And a hamburger, if you have it.”
“I’ll tell the chef,” she said, shooting Bronfman with her stare. After a few seconds, he got it.
“You don’t have a chef,” Bronfman said.
“No. And when you say ‘beer,’ which of the thirty-five do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t even like beer. He should have just ordered water, but now it was too late. “Something light?”
She sighed. “Sure,” she said, and walked away, disappearing into the darkness at the other end of the bar.
As he waited he swiveled on the barstool, back and forth a little, trying it out, then a full 360 degrees. He did it twice. On the third go he slowed, and the rotation stopped him as he faced the door of the bar—at which point who should come in but those girls, the women, the lovely women, the two Crouton had been talking to. One of them was tall, with shoulder-length brown hair and bangs that fell just a little bit into her eyes, and the other was shorter, with thick curly red hair. They were both wearing little black dresses. He looked at them and then looked away. That would have been enough for him, to have their images lithographically etched into his mind, soon to make an appearance in a 3 A.M. dream. But there was more. Two stools to the right of Bronfman weren’t taken, and those were the stools the women chose to sit on. Beside him.