Jake watched Rachel take off her sweatshirt, revealing her tight-fitting spandex two-piece suit, the black and yellow top hugging her chest, the black shorts painted over her.
He thought, Whoa.
Her calves and thighs were beginning to get the same sculpted look her arms had, and when she leaned to the side to drop her sweatshirt in a cubby reserved for members, stretching so that a curved line ran from her hand through her arm, torso, and to her foot, Jake thought of geometry. He wanted to run his hand along that curve. He tried not to think about the fact that he hadn’t had sex in many months. The last time was with a waitress at the restaurant, an alcohol-induced fling that they both regretted immediately, but they had remained friendly.
Rachel motioned for him to follow, and he did. The muggy gym, low-tech and filled with old free weights and dirty Universal machines, was poorly ventilated, and he broke out in a sweat. He saw half a dozen Hercules clones glance up at them as they moved to a set of machines at the back. Then he remembered that this was a gay gym, and he felt self-conscious. Did they think the straights were taking over? Maybe they thought he was gay.
“How’d you find this place?” he asked Rachel. “Accident, really. And it’s the cheapest gym around.”
“It looks old.”
“Yes, but it has everything I need.” She waved to the weights, then pointed to the treadmills and Stairmasters near the window.
“Can I say you look really good? Two years of this?”
“About two years.”
“What about Eugene?”
She shook her head. “I brought him here once, but he never came back.”
“Why?” Jake asked. “Not because it’s a gay—”
“No. Look at how fit everyone is. He felt awful, really almost embarrassed.”
Jake looked around. It was true, not one ounce of excess fat in this place. Suddenly Jake felt out of shape. He realized there were no women except for Rachel. He mentioned this to her.
She laughed. “There are a few regulars, but no, there aren’t that many here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But the women here are in better shape than I am.”
“Really,” he said too quickly.
Rachel smirked. “Down, boy.” Jake bowed his head contritely.
They began to alternate on the Universal, spotting each other and talking quietly. Grunts and heavy breaths from across the room punctuated the rhythmic whirring of an oscillating fan by an open window. There was no music. It felt religious. He stared at the sweat collecting on the back of Rachel’s neck as she did lat pull-downs, the front of her top flaring out whenever she raised her arms.
He asked her politely about work, about how she was doing, and she answered with a shrug. They moved onto the shoulder press and switched off sets. Jake asked how bad things were for Eugene at work. She said, “He doesn’t talk about it anymore. I think pretty bad.”
“Maybe I’ll drop by tomorrow. I’ve never seen the place.”
“ManageSoft? It’s just a big office.”
“I know. But I never quite got what he did for a living. I mean, you’re a banker—”
“I manage tellers. Just a pencil pusher. And not for long.”
“But at least I understand it.” They switched positions.
“I’m a glorified cashier,” she said.
He began his set. “Whatever. For Eugene, I’m not sure.” He felt a stitch in his groin, and paused. The pain subsided and he continued pulling down the bar.
“You should visit. Maybe you can scope out his girlfriend.” Jake stopped. “What?”
“There’s a woman at work who’s hot for him.”
“No way.”
She laughed. “Yes way.” She mimicked a high voice, “Oh, Eugene, you know so much about everything.”
“Eugene? Our Eugene?”
“Yes. He won’t admit it. He pretends I’m imagining it.”
“Are you?”
“Whenever I see this woman, she looks like she wants to slip a knife between my ribs.”
“Wow. Eugene the stud.”
“One of these days, he’s going to take her up on it.”
Jake glanced at the mirror, checking Rachel’s expression. She was half-serious. They exchanged places, and Rachel continued her set. He noticed that she was hunching her back as she grew tired, so he pressed his palm against her spine. She straightened and thanked him. “I don’t know if it’d be such a bad thing, with this woman,” she said.
“No, you can’t mean that.”
“Why not? He claims to be so unhappy with me. Let him try someone else for a while.”
“You want that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, slapping the weights down too hard. They moved to the chest press. As Jake lay down on the bench, Rachel laughed. “Don’t listen to me. I’m just rambling.”
“He says he’s unhappy with you?”
“We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
He looked up. She didn’t appear to mean this, so he pursued it with, “What could he possibly be unhappy about with you?”
“You should check his list.”
“He has a list?”
“Well, we went to counseling for a while and were supposed to write down things that bother us about each other. Things that we said or did or just the way we were.”
“And you kept one too?”
“I started to.”
“And what was on your list?” he asked.
She grinned. “Oh, just small things, but we stopped going to counseling.”
“Why?”
“Things got crazy at work for both of us,” she said. “Though I suspect he’s still writing his.”
Jake nodded. His brother was always meticulous about homework, and of course Eugene would continue writing down Rachel’s faults.
He mentioned this to Rachel, who said quickly, “Yes! No kidding! He has everything on his phone. I’m talking everything. Once he left it on and I saw a daily list. You know what was on it?”
Jake waited.
“Seducing me was on it. Getting me flowers, wine, all that.”
“Why?”
“Something the counselor told us, but on the screen I was listed right after oil change. I’ll never forget that.”
“He probably didn’t mean anything bad by that—”
“I know, I know. I’m sure it was time sequence, that he’d go to the oil place after work, then pick up stuff for me that night, but still.”
“He needs that structure.”
“I know. He tries to have everything in place,” Rachel said. “Believe me, I know.”
“Well, I’d have blocked out the whole day,” Jake said, and winked.
She turned to him. “But you don’t do that, keep lists.”
“No. I’m not that organized.”
“Where did Euge get it from? Your parents?”
Jake shrugged.
“Your mother?”
“Maybe. I didn’t know her that well.”
“How old were you again when she left?”
“Eight,” he said, surprised that she brought this up again. He asked, “Your father died when you were young, didn’t he?”
“Fifteen,” she said, moving towards the freeweights and dumbbells. Jake followed. They were going to work on their arms. Biceps, triceps, deltoids. Rachel rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck. When she arched her back and stretched her arms behind her, one hand grabbing and pulling the other, Jake remembered she was an only child, and pictured her as a fifteen-year-old, lanky and awkward, her long, messy hair falling over her face.
She said, “Most of the men in my family died young. My father had a massive heart attack. My uncle was hit by a truck. My grandfather was killed in World War II.”
“What about the women?”
“They live forever. My great grandmother is still alive. The women survive. The men blow up.”
They used different weights, and worked out next to each other, both facing the mirror. After a few minutes of silence, Jake asked, “What did he tell you about our parents?”
She focused on her reflection, lifting her dumbbell unsteadily for a difficult set. Jake saw the sweat trickle down her chest. He leaned over and spotted her for the rep, helping her with the final couple of inches. She let the weight down slowly. “Thanks.” Sitting down on the bench and breathing heavily, she said, “That your father was a little crazy. Some of this came out in the counseling sessions. It was surprising how we learn things from our parents’ marriage.”
Jake wasn’t sure what that meant. What could Eugene and he have learned from their parents? Don’t get married. Simple lesson. What else? Don’t beat your wife. Jake turned to Rachel, startled. He said, “Eugene doesn’t get…physical, does he?”
“What? God, no. I didn’t mean that. No, I meant how our conception of marriage gets formed by what we see.”
“Sounds like head-shrinking talk.” She smiled. “Maybe.”
They did the triceps, flys, and forearm curls in silence. Someone went on the Stairmaster and the high-pitched whirring drowned out the other sounds. It was beginning to get crowded and Jake realized this was the after-work rush. He wasn’t used to the schedule of commuters, since his job at the restaurant peaked during the evenings and weekend afternoons. Because of this, his gym was never crowded when he went there in the late mornings, and he never seemed to wait on lines at the grocery or the drug store.
Although he had been trying to find a normal routine in Seattle, trying cut down the number of jobs and not get greedy, he found that he also liked the excitement. He felt more present. More real. He liked being on the move. This worried him.