traffic
Mandrane found cigarettes in the glove compartment of his car while he waited for the light to change and he didn’t smoke, and neither did his wife Lucia, and he wondered if maybe she was having an affair but the thought faded and what remained, while he tapped fingers and played with the plastic lock, was surprise at how little he felt about it, one way or the other, this idle suspicion -- it wasn’t that it didn’t matter or that it didn’t matter in the abstract or that he didn’t care, but he should care more, shouldn’t he? Today was Jack’s birthday -- his son’s birthday. Time hiccuped at this stoplight by the side of a fairly populated park. Florida weather: humidity, dead air, outdoors; he fiddled with the A/C and clicked shut the glove compartment. He was already late for the party.Lucia had managed to rent a warehouse off Lake Eola, printed out fliers and invited everybody in Jack’s school -- about half of the 500 students had confirmed. She had organized a massive, drawn-out game of musical chairs, with the stereo programmed so that it would stop at random intervals. That way, Lucia could remove the chairs as they went along and not worry about stopping the music, since Mandrane wouldn’t be able to make it till the game was over or almost over, and they didn’t know the other parents that well. She handled all the details and insisted on overseeing the whole thing alone.
The light changed from red to green, blinked back to red, dipped into yellow and stayed there while an ambulance streaked by the intersecting street. His turn-signal ticked in time to the wail of the horn. He watched a mute scattering of children running about in Winter Park. A boy struggled to keep his kite-string taut, zigzagging half the length of the field, but the wind was weak, and the string limped, listed, tangled itself into the tops of four different trees, the kite’s plastic pierced by one sharp branch pointing skyward. He scanned the park for parents, and frowned when he couldn’t find one. The drivers behind him honked. He pressed the gas pedal and turned, hoping to find Jack’s present in the mall a few miles down, and to make it in time for the end of the birthday party.
His son, now nine, had not asked for anything in particular. They had gotten him a Nintendo set and a bug-catcher last year. He preferred the latter, keeping moths and Palmetto bugs in an old aquarium but forgetting to feed them. He would toss them in the garbage when they stopped moving. Lucia forbade further hunting forays when a four-inch Palmetto bug, thought dead by Jack, crawled out of the can and into a broccoli soufflé.
Mandrane parked on the Sears side of the mall. What did Jack want? Lucia had insisted on enrolling him in swimming and drawing lessons two years ago, but the boy had shown little interest in either. He wanted to buy him something bizarre, magical---he recalled, from his own childhood, a display set of five-hundred Berol pencils at an arts supply store, the kind used to mail-order rare or out of stock colors, valuable in his memory because unavailable, not for sale. The memory came at him in a sharp stillframe commingled with an inexplicable Christmas smell, sweat and cinnamon and Ohio snow, a gray light broken by the vertical prismatic arrangement of the pencils---there had also been a sense of purpose, a link between the pencils and some untapped power; a shimmering had crept through him which wasn’t quite longing and stopped short of magic but hinted at both, childhood’s strange causal world, maybe, step on a crack, if a leaf falls from that tree now mom will be angry because I’m late for dinner, that kind of thing. Maybe. When he read the horoscope, he realized, he recalled fragments from his childhood: avoiding certain patches of ground, not looking up at the sky at a certain hour... Still thinking of the pencils, he entered Sears and inspected a boombox, a Fisher Price tape recorder, and a sing-along machine with an oversized, canary-colored microphone. His son was fond of musical chairs. Jack and Mandrane would play it every night, Lucia sporadically pausing a Roxette CD (Jack’s favorite band), son scrambling for the chair, father feigning a slower, clumsier self. He usually let his son win. Sometimes, to stretch the game out, they would use all twelve dining room chairs, so that there would be no winners or losers for a while---but the three agreed it was much more fun when played with a crowd. Lucia would invite her friends’ kids. Jack would invite his own friends. Mandrane would sit out the game if there was company, but he liked watching. No. What would Jack want with a boombox? He walked into the mall proper.
The Kay-Bee Toys & Hobbies didn’t offer much, nor did Babbages. He imagined an over-sized dinosaur set. Delivered in a gift-wrapped crate. Big wood bones that, when assembled, would be taller than Jack.
The dinosaur skeleton made him think of Mae, his secretary---also his lover. Mandrane stopped by the food court and bought coffee. He drank, thought, drank, thought, the gift and his lover alternating in his mind between gulps. He had turned forty a few years ago. He was gaining weight. Worse, Lucia was gaining weight too, and that somehow intensified his guilt over the affair.
He fished a quarter out of his pocket. The phone was by a video arcade. A black kid, four or five years older than Jack, was inserting coins into a Street Fighter Deluxe Edition game.He dialed Mae’s number at the office. She picked it up at the fifth ring.
"Any messages?" he said.
"No," Mae said. "Can we talk?"
"I’m buying a present for my kid."
"I really need to talk to you."
"We’ll talk tomorrow." He drummed his fingers on the side of the phone.
"Tomorrow’s Saturday."
"And?"
"Nothing. I just want to talk."
"I have to go," he said. "I’ll talk to you tomorrow."
"Whatever. I know you don’t give a shit about me," she said. "I wanted you to know that I know that you don’t give a shit about me." She hung up.
He was about to walk back to his table, but the phone rang. He picked it up.
"I star-sixty-nined you," Mae said. "I just wanted you to know that that’s what I wanted to talk about. Call me tomorrow."
"OK," he said. He hung up.
The phone rang again. Mandrane began to walk away, but thought better of it and went back and grabbed it.
"Mae, we’ll talk tomorrow, OK?" he said.
"Mae? Shit, man. This Murray." The voice was male. "You got the shit, man?"
"What are you talking about?" Mandrane asked.
"Shit. You ain’t Jack? Lisa’s brother? You shitting me?"
"No," he said, and was about to say that Jack was his son, that Jack didn’t have a sister, but stopped himself. Wrong Jack. "Who’s Jack? What shit?"
"You at the mall, man? Jack suppose to be there. Suppose to pick up."
"I have to go," Mandrane said. He hung up and walked back to his table. The coffee had cooled. The party had started at ten in the morning.
He wandered the stores, dazed, weary. Nothing drew his eye. He needed something special.
( . . . )