Andrea Lawlor

The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.

The country-punk counter girl smiled at him. He left more messages on more answering machines, leaving the payphone number for callbacks. He’d used up all his numbers and all his dimes and now he’d have to guard the payphone against other customers. Paul smarted at this unfairness of apartment hunting: you needed an apartment with a phone to get an apartment with a phone, like you needed a job to get a job, or money to get money. But worse—you needed a phone to get a job, so you actually needed an apartment to get a phone to get a job, so the apartment was first, but you needed a job to get the apartment. Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction.

Paul stared at Diane, remembered the day he’d met her in the Michigan kitchen, tried to hold onto whatever first invited this compulsion to stare, tried to understand, to puzzle her out, to possess through figuring out, to maintain, to plumb, to ensnare and study. What kind of creature was she, dark and earth-smelling, a rustic, topsoil-encrusted fingernails and all. The musk of her armpits at night, her red lips the texture of rose petals, the hard muscle of her arms, the occasional gray hair he’d find, her eyelashes like tarantulas’ legs, she was Zeus’s own sweet cow and his tender cupbearer at once, placid slow expanses of skin and what Paul knew to be called big-boned. She was bigger than him-as-Polly or him-as-Paul, a few inches taller and wider. Her shoulders were broader than his. You’ll stretch it! he thought helplessly when she’d borrowed his shirt that morning, but no, better, he’d sacrifice his shirts for her. He’d wear the stretched-out shirt thinking Diane’s body was here and I am now inside the space she left, I fit myself inside her shape.