He felt the blood in his heart rush in and out like waves into a cave.
They didn’t say anything to him, of course, nor did he expect or want them to. What would he have said if they did? Instead, the women spoke to each other, while Bronfman eavesdropped as best he could. Crouton, one said. Mumble mumble mumble. Then they laughed—the way only women can laugh with each other (he had overheard them often, standing behind one in a line, or sandwiched between them in an elevator), so full of meaning and unguarded delight. Bronfman thought that anything and everything a woman did had some sort of delightful meaning. He leaned toward them a bit, the better to hear, and was sure that he heard one of them say, “Not my cup of tea,” and the other said, “Not my cup of anything.” More laughter.
As they turned to look for the bartender, the gaze of the brown-haired woman rested briefly on Bronfman’s face, but long enough, apparently, for her to register it. “Oh, hey,” she said. “You were … weren’t you—?”
“At the show?” he said. “Yes, I was. That was me.”
She had seen him.
The women looked at each other and, within that look, had a short silent conversation.
“Okay. So we have to ask you. What did you think?”
He’d been afraid she might ask him this.
“Well,” he said. “I thought some of them—the pictures of the barns and the … the small children—”
“Not bad. Right. Nothing bad about them, really. I’m Shawn, by the way. This is Lucy.” Lucy, the curvy one, offered him her hand. He took it, shook it, and quickly let it go. “It’s just that I’ve seen it all so many times before, you know? John Rosenthal—have you seen his work? It’s like Crouton but a thousand times better. It’s the real deal.”
“No,” Bronfman said. He was having trouble reconciling who he had thought these women were—Crouton groupies—with their obvious distaste for his work.
“And what a dog,” Lucy said.
“Rosenthal?” Bronfman said.
“Crouton.” Lucy laughed. “His eyes were chest level all night long. His mind was even lower.”
And then, for a reason he could not fathom, Shawn touched Bronfman on the arm, and leaned in close.
“He asked us to go home with him,” she said, sending her and her friend into hysterics. “Not me, not her: us. Now, that’s a confident man.”
“Overly confident.”
Shawn practically slapped her mouth with her hand. “Oh, my God. You’re not a friend of his, are you?”
Bronfman shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think I am.”
He was almost ready to explore this idea with them—this idea of friendship, of what it is, and what it could be—they seemed so nice, they would talk to him, they would listen—when there came the sound of a very familiar voice behind him.
“Well, well, well.”
Bronfman swiveled, as did the women.
“It is I, Crouton,” he said, obviously, pitifully drunk. His smile was lopsided, his eyes were glazed. He spoke to the women, ignoring Bronfman completely. “I thought I might find you two here.”
“And we were afraid you might,” Lucy said.
The bar was loud. Crouton didn’t hear her. Reluctantly, Crouton looked Bronfman’s way. “Oh, yes. And thank you, Mr … I’m sorry, I can’t—”
“Bronfman,” Bronfman said.
“Ah.” And Crouton was done with him. He turned again to the women, but whatever words were about to lunge from his mouth stopped short. Because the women weren’t looking at Crouton. They were looking at Bronfman. It was as if Crouton didn’t exist. They were sharing that look with Bronfman. He knew what they knew. They shared a secret now, the truth about Crouton—that he was no Rosenthal. That he was not original.
Bronfman felt like one of the women.
Crouton sensed that something was amiss. His instincts for survival were well honed, and he realized that he had found in Bronfman a bit of a rival. Bronfman had never been anybody’s rival before—unless you counted Corey Spaulding, which he couldn’t. It was intoxicating and not a little frightening. Crouton threw an arm around his shoulder. “Bronfman and I know each other from the gym,” he said to Shawn and Lucy. “It’s where we get all big and strong. Check these out,” he said, sarcastically flexing his meager muscles. “And then, after getting all hot and sweaty, we retire to the locker room, where we walk around naked for a while, swinging our dicks.”
Crouton barked out a laugh.
“Oh, my God,” Lucy said. “Did you really just say that?”
“Stop,” Shawn said. “Please.”
Crouton shrugged. “Well, it’s true. Back me up here, Bronfman.”
The women looked at Bronfman, waiting. He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “about the swinging part. But there are—you do see a lot of … some of the men there, they get dressed … slowly.”
The women laughed. They seemed to like Bronfman, even though he had only been accidentally funny. “Women aren’t shy, either, I guess,” Shawn said. “In the locker room. No big deal.”
“But it’s different with the men,” Crouton said. “There’s a primal battle going on in there. A competition, no different from what you see in the jungle with those silverback gorillas.” Again, his French accent totally disappeared. “We’re displaying our prowess. We’re staking our claim. Right?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Bronfman said again. “It’s not what I do, really.”
It was then that Crouton stuck out the pinky on his left hand and showed it to Bronfman, and to the women, at whom he winked. “And there is a reason for that.” Crouton laughed heartily again, but alone.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Shawn said. “You are appalling.”
“The truth is appalling,” Crouton said.
“No,” Lucy said. “I’m pretty sure it’s just you.”
“And your photographs are silly and derivative and pretentious,” Shawn said.
Crouton manufactured a nonchalance even Bronfman didn’t buy. “All I mean to say is,” he said, and he slapped Bronfman on the back, “is that this man has a very, very, very, very small penis. Teeny. Teeny-weeny. And it has an odd shape to it. It looks like a harmonica that’s been run over by a truck. Just for your information. In case you were thinking about it. Now, if you will excuse me, I will take my much larger and extremely handsome penis to a woman—or women—more likely to appreciate it.”
And he saluted, bowed, and walked away, already waving at a woman sitting at a table against the wall. When she didn’t wave back he stopped, still and alone in the middle of the room. He looked lost, stranded.
Bronfman and the two women shared a silence composed of equal parts shock, repulsion, and gloom. Normally, Bronfman would have had the gloom all to himself, but in this instance these two women, whom he had only just met, absorbed a good deal of it. Even so it was unbearable, a nightmare from which he could not wake. In fact, sleep would be the only avenue of rescue from his reality. He cast a furtive glance sideways at the women, but they couldn’t even look at him. They were looking at each other, partners in disbelief, sympathetic but helpless.
The bartender reappeared, and Shawn ordered a drink. Ah! So the Crouton imbroglio had been just a small speed bump for them; now that it was over, their night could be resumed. Life goes on: Bronfman knew that. It’s just that sometimes it went on so fast.
“I … should be going,” he said, in a voice so small he could almost not hear it himself. He turned to them, and an odd thing happened, something he hadn’t expected. Lucy smiled. Something might have been said, a whisper shared between the two women, he wasn’t sure, but she smiled, a smile the size of a plantain. Felt good. He had to admit that. To have a beautiful woman smile at you feels good.
He stood.
“Wait,” Lucy said. She touched him—his elbow with her hand—and he immediately sat back down. “Have a drink with us.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don??
?t drink except on special occasions,” meaning almost never.
The bartender brought six shot glasses full of what appeared to be urine and set them on the bar in front of them. Lucy pushed two toward Bronfman.
“Drink up,” she said.
He scrutinized the glasses. “What is it?”
“Tequila. It’s really good. You’ll love it.”
“I’ve had tequila before,” he said, not sure if this was true. It may have been true, but at this point it didn’t really matter.
“Great,” Lucy said. “Then you know you’re supposed to throw it back, right? Like poison. No sipping.”
“Like poison,” he said. She wasn’t selling it, but in for a dime, in for a dollar, as Muriel said when she was about to make another mistake with a man.
“I’m already a wee bit tipsy,” Lucy said.
Shawn laughed. “You have to be tipsy to say ‘wee bit.’ No one says ‘wee bit’ unless they’re—”
“—a wee bit tipsy!” Lucy said.
And they laughed and lifted a glass, and he lifted a glass, and together they “threw it back,” just as Lucy said to do, and Bronfman felt a warm electric pulse pump through his body, felt bubbles blowing in his brain. But it was like taking a hot bath: scalded at first, he soon got used to it, and then it felt very, very good. The bar, so wretched a moment ago, took on the patina of a dream. He identified areas of his brain that he hadn’t known were there. It was as if the tequila (which he was now sure he’d never had in his life) knew the secret combination to a locked room, and the creaky door opened, and inside it were treasures beyond measure.
“And now one more,” Lucy said. “Okay? Courage!”
“Okay!” he said with gusto. He had possibly never said anything with more gusto in his life. He closed his eyes and down the hatch it went! This one made him feel as if he’d been walloped in the head with a down pillow.
“That’s good, right?” Shawn said, or slurred. A wee bit.
Bronfman nodded. Was he drunk? Could he be drunk? How could two small glasses of anything make a man drunk? But he was something not quite himself, something grand. His soul left his body, and rose, and hovered above everyone else in the room. He was high. He could even see himself from where he was, Edsel Bronfman, on a stool in a skuzzy bar, sitting beside two beautiful women. It was a scene from a dream, a fantasy he would never have given himself permission to have.
But it wasn’t enough.
“I’m wondering,” he said, or this strange person he had become said, “if the two of you could do me a favor.”
Lucy and Shawn exchanged another look. The last time he had seen a look like this was at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Robert Redford looks at Paul Newman before they jump off that cliff. “Anything,” Lucy said.
“We’d need to go back there.” He gestured with a nod of his head toward the darkness behind the bar. Back there. What an odd way to put it. He was sure they would say no. What woman would agree to accompany a man she had just met into the cavernous darkness of an already dark bar? If he were a woman, that’s the last place he would go. But they seemed intrigued.
“Ohhh,” Shawn said. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”
“I’d like your opinion.”
Lucy inhaled sharply through her nose, and her eyes widened in a way that suggested both shock and friendly titillation. Somehow they knew exactly what he meant.
“Absolutely,” she said, and she took Bronfman’s hand and pulled him off the stool. “Let’s do this.”
The women stood, taking the lead. Happily, gratefully, upright and resolute, he followed them behind the bar, away from everybody and everything, all the noise and light and alien life. Suddenly they were there, in the secret catacombs, alone. Stacks of cardboard boxes created narrow pathways, private spaces—pallet after pallet of unmarked something or other. It was even darker than it looked from the bar. There was no light back here, none of its own, anyway, just the stray and leftover glow from the lamps up front. Temporarily blind, Bronfman’s eyes slowly adjusted until he had a sense of where he was, the space they were in. But it was all in a grainy black and white. He couldn’t see a single color. At some point, he had let go of Lucy’s hand and managed to get a step or two ahead of them. He turned. There they were behind him, mostly shadow now, but still so ethereally beautiful, even as vaporous ghosts.
This had to be done, but he wasn’t sure if he could do it.
“Okay,” Lucy said. She covered her eyes briefly, and pulled Shawn close to her and almost squealed. Then she looked at Bronfman. “Okay!”
“Okay,” he said, but still he stood there, frozen. His Bronfman-mind was surfacing. It was telling him quite clearly not to do what he knew he had to do. He was arguing with himself. He lost the argument, or won it, or both.
Lucy grasped Shawn’s arm with a ferociously tight grip. “Okay,” she said again. “Let’s see it.”
His ears were ringing from the barroom’s din, though now it sounded miles away.
She took a deep and bracing breath. “Let’s see your penis,” she said. “You ready, Shawn?”
“Ready,” she said, with an encouraging bravado.
Penis. With that magic word it was as if she’d opened a door and that merely by hearing the word Bronfman had walked through it, fully entering this new, strange world, a place where the people spoke an unknowable language, but with words that sounded much like our own.
“You don’t have to,” Shawn said. “Really. If you’ve changed your mind. But you want a fresh perspective, right? We’re here for you.”
They laughed a little, and then they stopped laughing, and waited. Shawn’s phone chirped, but she didn’t answer it. The moment seemed to drag on and on for a timeless eternity, but it was probably no more than a second or two. I should just go home, he thought. I cannot do this; the night has been sufficiently horrific already. It was impossible. Nevertheless, he looked at his hands and discovered that they were busy unbuckling his belt—that they had made the decision for him. The belt unbuckled, his trousers slipped all the way past his light-blue boxers before he caught them. He had lost a couple of pounds; his pants were almost a size too big. But there was no going back now. He released his trousers and watched them fall, watched as they crumpled on the floor, a wrinkled blanket for his shoes. Never in his life had he done anything more unlike himself than this, which meant that he was not himself, not really. He was someone else now.
Lucy and Shawn waited for the boxers, and in one swift and fearless pull he was, from the waist down, unbelievably, naked.
A cool breeze greeted his penis.
He looked down at it. He really never saw it from any other angle. It was so lonely down there, stranded beneath his stomach and between his legs. Black-and-white and blurry in the shadows, it looked like a character from a silent movie. Not the lead, of course, one of the smaller parts. Not only was it naked; it was the essence of naked, honest and a bit naïve, hopeful, like a poor native of some impoverished island country the Americans had come to save.
Sheepishly, he raised his head and looked at the women, but they weren’t looking at him; rather, they were studying his penis with a seriousness and an absorption bordering on the scientific. Lucy nodded, as if agreeing with some secret thought, but the nod could have gone either way, for or against.
Time slowed to a molasses crawl. Seconds stretched to their breaking point, unquestionably the longest of Bronfman’s life.
“That,” she said, “is very nice.”
“It really is,” Shawn said. “Very nice.”
“I like it.”
“What’s not to like?” Shawn said.
“Nothing, not a thing.”
“Shapely. Friendly. And approachable. That’s the main thing. A penis you wouldn’t mind hanging out with for a while.”
“I mean, is it, you know, really big? No. Obviously not.”
“Definitely not huge,” Lucy said.
“But the truth i
s, no girl wants a huge one. I’ve seen a couple, and they scared me.”
Lucy shook her head, as if she, too, had seen huge, scary penises in her time. “So, this is good,” she said. “And I’m telling you the truth, Bronfman. It’s not necessarily going to win an award. It’s not the penis-of-all-penises. But it’s good. It’s good enough. And good enough is great, especially when it comes—”
“—to penises,” Bronfman bravely intoned.
“Or to almost anything, actually,” Lucy said.
Shawn agreed. “I think you should be proud of it.”
Proud. Proud? He wasn’t sure this was a feeling he had in his repertoire, but there it was, pride, making an entrance, slowly but surely, as all three of them looked on.
“Okay,” Bronfman said. “I will.”
The two women stood there a bit longer, looking at it, then at him, then at each other.
“Any questions?” Lucy said.
Would you like to go to the beach with me? It would be fun, the three of us. An extraordinary adventure, totally free, the entire weekend, a beautiful condo in Destin, Florida, and a continental breakfast to boot.
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
Their job here was done. Lucy took a step backward, and Shawn followed. Lucy may have winked at him, but it was hard to tell in the grainy darkness they were slipping back into.
“You take care, Bronfman, okay?”
“I will,” Bronfman said, waving at the departing spirits. “You, too.”