WEDNESDAY AFTER FATIMA’S summons to the party, Jem picked up the phone in the kitchen.
“Jem? Is that you? It’s me! The Studs Terkel of algebra.”
She twisted the phone into the curve of her neck. “I’m sorry?”
There was a pause, then, “You know, that’s what I always loved about you, Jem. You appreciated my wit. Okay, it’s Gil. Must I give my family name? How many Gils do you know? All right, Gilbert Sesame. You want a photo ID?”
“Oh no, not really?”
“And you’re always so glad to hear from me.”
“Oh, Gil! I don’t believe it!” Jem was flustered, sure he knew she was blushing. “I don’t believe it!”
“Darlin’, if you don’t hurry up and say something more positive, I’m gonna have to call the next gal on my list.”
GILBERT SESAME. FIVE foot three to Jem’s five ten. Thirty-four to Jem’s twenty-two—eight years ago when they first met. They were in the same journalism class and took an instant dislike to each other. Jem found him obnoxious and Gil thought she was dreamy. Gil would sit alone in a corner of the classroom, rifling off commentary on the classwork, observations that were usually preceded by “no offense, but….” Such as, “No offense, but I’ve seen cow pies more informative than this article.” The rudeness was exacerbated by a down-home drawl, a weird, undefinable accent. No one knew where he was from, but he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat like a riverboat gambler’s.
Then Gil submitted a feature story about a spider to read to the class. It was insightful and elegant and moved through a range of emotion that Jem never would have believed Gil possessed. As he read, though, it sounded more and more familiar to her, until finally, at the story’s close, she raised her hand and said, “I’m sorry, but I’d swear I read that piece in Reader’s Digest or somewhere.”
Gil flamed; his skin normally had a cherubic cast and emotion turned it fiery as a baby rash. He jumped to his feet and, pointing at Jem, shouted, “You! You are trying to skewer me! I will not, I repeat, I refuse to be a shish kebab for you or any other female!” Then he marched from the room, his short legs switching past their table.
That night he called her up and asked if she’d go out with him for coffee. Jem was too astonished to decline. They sat in the student union and he told her she was the first beautiful girl he’d ever met who had a sense of humor.
“Woman,” she said. “I’m a woman.”
“No, ma’am. You’re intellectually mature, but emotionally you ain’t. I can see that close up and I can see that across that damn seminar room. You got a skittishness in you like a horse around cows. What you need is an experienced cowboy.”
Then he told her she was right; the story was by Loren Eiseley, copied from an essay anthology. “I figured he wouldn’t mind,” Gil said. “Seeing’s how we’re both rural types.”
It turned out he wasn’t a writer at all, but a graduate student in the math department. He was friends with the journalism teacher, Bill Hermans. Bill usually taught proofreading and editing, but the department had asked him to sub in the Beginning Journalism workshop. He’d been so terrified by the prospect, especially by the need to be brusque, bold, and drunken in his commentary—as he saw the offices of a reporter—that he hired Gil on the sly to ride shotgun, a kind of creative outlaw. It was a role that Gil felt—as a mathematician—suited to.
“It’s a fine job,” he told Jem, “being an undercover character, if only there was a living in it.”
Gil was married, but he spoke of his marriage in the way people speak of distantly recalled events, old acquaintances, and faraway cities. He would take Jem out for coffee, sometimes dinner, after their class, and he would reach out and twirl a ring of her hair as they talked. He spoke of places like Laredo, Albuquerque, Laramie. He drew maps in the air with his fingers and told Jem he wanted to show her the Tetons, raft her down the chill waters of the Grand Canyon.
When he wasn’t playing at writing student or totaling equations, he was a pool hustler. “This is the one truly good thing my daddy taught me,” he said, as he demonstrated his technique at the table for her. It was late, the bar smelled of stale beer, and dust moved in a column through the triangle of light over the pool table. Jem was delighted by the transformation of the man as he lifted the stick, wielding it like a wand, thick fingers curling against green felt, his neck, eye, back all fluid in one swan’s arch toward the ball. He made every shot that he called; the few patrons in the bar seemed to know about him. No one would play. Gil was poised and suave, his stocky body transfigured. He twisted chalk onto the stick with a raised little finger and a flourish.
One evening, toward the end of Jem’s college term, Gil took her to a new rec room. It was hidden above a hardware store and had a small, makeshift bar and rows of pool tables and pinball machines. Gil walked up to a pinball game called Zontar, Amazon Queen of Steel Balls, dropped a quarter in, and Jem watched the illustration over the pinball table start up. Zontar’s anatomy flashed lights and a little number-counter panel in her forehead toted points as Gil worked the machine. He squared his haunches against the table rim, fingers feathering the levers; he became elegant, poised to sail into the arms of Queen Zontar. He racked up points, getting one extra ball after another, the machine encouraging him with clicks, whirs, shrieks, and whistles. A group of teenage boys began to cluster around him, imploring, “Oooh, ooh, get ’er!”
For twenty minutes Gil played past more whistles and bells, vortexes of clangs and fire alarms, and then, somewhere near one billion points, he dropped the levers and let the ball roll down the chute.
Some boys clapped, but others were outraged and watched him as he walked away, saying, “Whadja do that for, huh? What you let it go for?”
Gil turned and faced them, the boys already lining up at the table for their own shot at Zontar. “You know who gets really good at pinball?” he said. “Losers like you who haven’t got any friends.”
Gil and Jem hurried out of there to the street and down the sidewalk.
“I thought you were going to show me how you hustled,” Jem said once they’d slowed to a walk.
“I’m sorry, honey-darlin’, but we-all had to get out of there while the gettin’ was good. Besides which, I changed my mind about it.”
“But why?”
“I didn’t want to let you see what happens,” he said. “It gets ugly. That pinball was just a taste.”
“What do you mean?” Jem said, glancing nervously back. “What happens?
“Well, y’know, it’s a perverse kind of thing,” Gil said, taking her hand, warming up to an answer. “Just a bunch of wood and felt, like that machine, plastic and lights. But those toys mean something to a person; they can become a foe, an adversary. A pool table can be a wife, or a boss, something feared or respected or loathed. And the hustler is like the poor sucker’s psychiatrist, trying to get into that sucker’s head, and it’s just so easy to pry the damn lid off; nothing to it, really, it’s pitiful. There you are, making like their mother or their shrink, stroking their withering egos, showing them the table, first this way, then that, first telling them, sure you can be master, sure you can; you stroke them and stroke them till they’re almost believing it themselves, they are believin’ it, sure. Then it’s not so sure. Up and down it goes. It gets tricky. A minute ago, two minutes ago they were positive. The felt table curled up in their arms like a babe and went to sleep. Now something’s waking up. Something’s waking up in their brains, too, and it’s their boss or their wife or their mother, for crying out loud; something isn’t taking no for an answer, something wants a fight, and that’s what the mark wants, a fight. Even if he’ll have to lay down and die for it, that’s what he wants; he wants it so bad he can taste it in his mouth and in the back of his throat.
“And he fights, he does. It’s a fine, noble, sad, disgusting thing I’m talking about. Because I’m talking about taking a man down by inches, giving him back some, taking him down a couple more, a couple more, a couple more. You have to be able to stand to do it. Don’t tell me it ain’t a gentleman’s calling; it’s got its own code of etiquette. Sometimes I bleed ’em slow and clean; sometimes I do it fast and easy. I calculate what every man can stand and ration it out accordingly.
“I’m just there on the sidelines, helping it along, keeping the movie running. I’m just the messenger, bringing him bad news and more bad news, until at the end of the night, the bad news is that he’s cleaned out and more and the game’s over and there ain’t gonna be no more games, no more messages, not from this messenger, not ever.”
Jem stared at Gil, at the way his rings flashed on his fingers as he wiped his forehead, at the way his voice trembled, reminding her of the way opera singers sang, as if delivering up demons. She took a step away from him.
JEM HAD LAST seen Gil at her graduation ceremony. Backstage before the march, he’d given her a ring with a stone that looked as if it were on fire, so big that when she adjusted her gown it tore a gash in its front.
“My leaving town has been unexpectedly necessitated by circumstances beyond my control and not to my liking,” he whispered, clutching his straw hat to his heart. “But do not lose heart, darlin’. I’ll be back for you soon and then it’s off to the Casbah!”
She hadn’t heard from or thought much about him since that day. But here it was, his voice again, after all those years, bursting into the present. She rubbed her temples, dazed and a little dismayed, and tried to make herself sound hearty. “So, Gil! Where are you?”
“The land of legends, over the rainbow, Salt Lake City. Mecca for artists and intellectuals of every stripe. And what’s more, it’s my pleasure to report the time is at hand. Your dreamboat to the West and all the world that waits there has just docked.”
“Dreamboat? Gil, weren’t you, um, married?”
“Married and then some, darlin’, once, twice, and thrice again. But never mind, those spills are all wiped up.”
“Oh, really.”
“The plan is this: we honeymoon a spell in the New York environs, maybe visit Niagara Falls, then light out for the open spaces. Escape!”
“Oh, now, Gil.”
“Just give me a chance, darlin’. Let down your bayou-black hair. Now that I’ve found you again.”
After she’d finally hung up, Jem shut her eyes and listened to a sound like feathers whisking air, a measure of time, the passage of seven broad, empty years. Everything in her past seemed doused in gloomy work and dark winters, and suddenly the idea of Utah opened in her mind like a sunlit plain. She imagined herself riding bareback, lariat held high, catching the sweet golden air of the desert.