Shorter of Breath

By Ken Eckert

Leisure suits! Muscle cars! An annoyingly ethical cocktail-loving alien! Social justice radicals! Time-traveling terrorist music critics! Just like Jane Austen used to write! Why couldn't Alan be cool like people in the '70s? After breaking up with his girlfriend Sheila and unsatisfyingly teaching English in South Korea, he befriends an alien grad student, Coff, who lets him time-travel to swingin' 1967 England to live out his retro-boogie fantasy. But now 70 years old in Edmonton, Canada, Alan takes a chance in meeting Sheila again to confess his past, causing problems in time that Coff will need more than Fleetwood Mac and fuzzy dice to fix. When time-flow conflicts result in them being harassed by university radicals and half-real fictional characters out to prevent Starship from recording "We built this city" in 1985, Alan, Coff, and Sheila must travel to a San Francisco disco in 1979 for a final showdown against the time-terrorists. Shorter of Breath is an enjoyable romp through expat life in Korea, retro 70's culture, and classic rock music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moldy Rutabaga Books
• Release date: Jun 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781775023418

Ken Eckert

Shorter of Breath is the first novel by Kenneth (Ken) Eckert, who is a native of Edmonton, Canada living in Korea. As an English professor most of his writing is academic, including articles on medieval romance, Chaucer, and (post)modern literature, with a recently published book, Middle English Romances in Translation (Sidestone), and Writing Academic Papers in English: For Korean Writers. He is an alumnus of Memorial University in Newfoundland and University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he studied Chaucer alongside creative writing students such as Alissa Nutting (Tampa) and Juan Martinez (Best Worst American).

Book preview

Time

Up, up, up. So early even the birds were still hitting snooze. So early the Germans hadn’t taken all the lounge chairs. He thought of calling her, with the vague idea that it would seem more authentic at that hour. But then he thought better of it—Sheila was but a slip of a girl, and who knows? She could still be in a nightclub somewhere. For when you are older, all young people seem to be in nightclubs every evening.

After breakfast, Alan judged it the best time, and he thumbed their home’s little book and picked up his phone. Then he put it down. Then he picked it up, began to stab a few numbers, and put it down again. This was perhaps going to be the hardest telephone call he’d make in his life. He’d talked it over with his wife, who had reluctantly consented after seeing how much it bothered him. But Alan was still scared.

Order! Order in the court!

I’ll have a Reuben sandwich on whole wheat, with a side of—

"—Oh, no you don’t! No terrible gags here! This is a sophisticated and elegant narrative, with a small but appropriate number of fart jokes for local color. Will Mr. Mason resume his questioning of the defendant?"

Mr. Graff, the prosecutor hissed with contempt in his voice as he slowly paced toward the bench. "These are the basic facts you have given us; you dated this Sheila person for some period and then you broke up; and then you claim to have magically time-traveled to some half a century earlier; during that time, you say you accidentally befriended Sheila’s parents and then witnessed her being born and growing up; and upon newly seeing her ghosted by a younger you, you felt guilty and proposed to tell her? And we are to believe that your intentions through all those fifty years were benign? These are serious matters, Mr. Graff—yes, serious enough to use four semicolons in one sentence as well as generous and ample italics!" The court gasped.

But at that moment there was a scream, and a shapely blonde woman with sunglasses ran through the courtroom; weaving past the bailiff, she embraced Alan with tears in her eyes. In the uproar, an elderly retired circuit judge who was supervising rose, coughed, and intoned in a southern accent, Gentlemen of the jury! You can’t let this poor boy go to prison! Calling Dr. Gilvis—calling Doctor—

There was a tinkle of teacups from the sink, calling Alan back as the courtroom faded. What, then? The problem was that it was all entirely true. He had time traveled. He had by chance made church friends with Sheila’s parents in the early ‘70s when Edmonton was a smaller city and such things happen. He’d never known her parents well anyway when he was young and they were dating—and by the time it’d sunk in what would happen, it was really too late to break the friendship. Alan did feel genuine conscience for his actions, and concern for Sheila, whom he now saw with paternal eyes, if not grandfatherly ones. But in this ever-changing world in which we live in, who was going to believe a man actually trying to do the right thing?

He still didn’t know what to do. Well, that was bullshit: he knew exactly what to do. She deserved to know. He began to dial. Which is, of course, the obvious time to momentarily hit pause and move back a few years to give all of this confusion some context.

Drums along the Saskatchewan

She-‘la stood by her tent flap and scanned the misty horizon over the flags of the camp, as drums slowly beat to announce the start of the hunt. She felt the ochre beads in her hand, felt their roughness and weight, and then gazed out, seeing if there were any birds or looking at the setting and reddening clouds, wondering if she would ever be able to examine them and predict the rains like her father seemed to. However, as Sheila was not actually an ancient native Indian princess—despite her Facebook profile picture—she wondered if her dad was just being full of it and pretending. Why didn’t she sometime remember what weather he predicted and write it down and then see if he was wrong, so he’d be busted!

Nothing much was happening outside except wind and the sounds of a far-off ball game, so she pulled the patio door closed and went downstairs, theatrically clutching at a few grapes as she passed through the kitchen. Waiting for her television show to start, she frittered time looking at some posts, though none were about fritters. Apparently, the inventor of the escalator was so upset that people were using his invention to just stand there and block pedestrians that he committed suicide. Sheila had read the same thing about the inventors of the moving platform and the elevator. All three claims were probably completely bogus. It was a wonder anyone invented anything with the apparently incessant danger of suicide menacing afterward. Why did people forward this garbage in their feeds?

Sheila speaks.

I was born July 31, 1990. It was really hot that day in Edmonton, because Dad for some reason had videotaped a rerun of a show he liked, and kept the tape for me, and it had a weather recap during a commercial. When I was little we would watch it together as a father-daughter sort of special thing—Bizarre. When I was little I didn’t understand anything but Super Dave the stuntman doing funny things and getting squished by a crane or smashed by a truck. When I was a little older I got the dirty jokes, though I never found topless girls showing title cards while flute music plays to my taste.

I have no adventurous or sad tale of family woe. I have a sister. My parents are nice people. My dad works in a bank. He claims he yells at people all day and turns down loans to widows as he twizzles his moustache, but I don’t believe it because he’s not like that at all, and he’s clean-shaven. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking. My mom is a substitute teacher. She’s tougher than he is. You have to be to teach those little jerks as a sub. I would know.

Anyway, they probably will retire pretty soon. You don’t get to be really old when you work in a bank. Maybe when your mind starts to go you can’t count correctly anymore. Besides, they’re both in their sixties. They were older parents when I came along. They have pretty nice friends—the Cormiers, the Graffs, Mr. Romanko. Mr. Graff had a cool sports car when I was little. I’ve always liked sports cars, but I won’t say no to a motorcycle either, unless it’s raining. They never say in magazines that leather jackets smell bad when it rains and it’s not quite like Easy Rider glamorous then.

Alan Byrd wasn’t my first, but nearly my first. The fact that I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on this, exactly, should say something to the effect that I’m not a bad girl and I respect my ex-boyfriends. So people shouldn’t ask, because I won’t talk about it. Because it was also a hot summer day (I won’t say ‘sultry’ even though it was damp and before a thunderstorm, because that sounds cheesy and like it’s the beginning of an old romantic movie with a cute dog and Meg Ryan), and because it is so far north we don’t see many days like that. We had a little radio as we sat on the grass, and it was playing an old Stones song from Exile (no, it wasn’t the Righteous Brothers or Stand by Me, Bridget Jones), and we were bored.

What should we do? Nothing to do, do.

Let’s have sex.

"Sex?"

Don’t just think about it—do it, do it, do it.

I wasn’t expecting that. We hadn’t been going out that long, and this came out of left field, because I thought he’d suggest a movie or playing on the computer—this was right when smartphones just came out, so they were expensive and people weren’t addicted to them like cocaine yet, like my sister would be (to her phone, not cocaine)—and I laughed, because it was such an extreme thing to say. We joked about sex a lot, but we didn’t often say anything that real.

But my mom and dad weren’t home, and suddenly I thought, well, why the hell not.

To cut to the chase, we would break up that fall, and I’m not a really sentimental girl who gets hung up on these things, but we went out about ten months, from February 2012 to October 2012. I don’t remember the exact days, because I’m not Google and it’s not important, but I think we broke up around Thanksgiving, which is earlier for Canadians because it gets so freaking cold by November that probably the hunter’s rifle won’t work anymore on the turkey.

We were at West Ed Mall, and because Alan came from some dumpy town an hour or so south... Ponoka, where the crazy people are kept?—no, Camrose, I don’t know why I forgot that... and he’d moved away when he could because he couldn’t stand his family and the kids were mean to him growing up in school. We were both going to the U of A, in different faculties, me psychology and him education. I think he just took education because it was mostly women there and he thought he’d score with all of them, but apparently they were mostly stuck-up manhaters anyway. Alan had no idea where he’d live when he graduated, which was coming up for both of us, but while it lasted he had a dorm room to himself and I had no complaints about that, because we could be at it like bunnies there. But it did mean he got crabby at holiday times. Sometimes he went home, but he usually didn’t.

So at West Ed Mall, it was him and I, and we hadn’t gotten along well for weeks. Usually I get along with men well, young ones and old ones. If it’s a gift, I won’t send it back. I’m not proud, I’ll take them all. Mr. Graff says it’s the eyes, but he’s just being old-man polite. I think my best attributes might be further down. Wait, delete that. No, grandma, I was just joking. I am virgin pure, really I am. I am not Brenda. Alan said he’d never met a Brenda who wasn’t crazy. Maybe he was right. Once she was laughing and said, Oh, my virgin ears. Todd answered, Is that all that’s left? It got really quiet, like in a Disney movie when someone says the wrong thing and a basset hound puts his paws over his eyes. Death on a cracker.

I have lots of good friends to hang and club with, and I don’t know why I keep going back to talking about my parents’ friends, because it’s certainly not the highlight of my life—but Alan had met them a few times at barbecues or sometimes when he did go to church with me and we all used to go out for pancakes or something near Meadowlark Mall—I swear he got along better with them than with my friends. They hit it off instantly. They started saying, You got it, Pontiac to each other. Did he learn that from them, or did he already know that phrase? He began to use it a lot.

In short, Alan wasn’t stuffy or snobby, but he was old-fashioned in a literal way. Some people just don’t fit in with the world. He really liked ‘60s and ‘70s music; he downloaded pirate files of old TV shows and movies (I thought Bizarre was a little dated. Who still watches the Rockford Files! The Dukes of Hazzard, to see Daisy’s shorts, I could see, but...)—his fashion sense isn’t so bad, but he has a magpie’s look for bright colors—not like Bono who wears silvery things in videos, but bright, bright, and stripes. If I let him he would probably put a fondue pot and an 8-track player in his dorm room, and wear a leisure suit. It was a harmless quirk of his personality, and after studying psych I knew about some pretty dangerous kinks some people have. He was just a bit strange. It was better than dressing like a Greek warrior or a Viking and chopping down people with a broad-axe, I guess.

So no problem. He did, I admit, have a normal car and did his homework. Maybe he was marriage material someday. Probably not me. I imagine myself like a sexy cougar, who still goes to the clubs and drinks cheap wine coolers, rather than a Desperate Housewife. But as you can imagine, a guy who swaps cultural references and jokes around with my parents’ crowd isn’t the sexiest MOFO bad boy, and it was starting to piss me off. Enough. It was OK to like the past, but it was kind of an insult to my life that he wasn’t interested in the music or things I liked, and my friends were starting to call him Grandpa Alan and things like that, and asking whether he carried an onion on his belt since the war.

At the mall that day we were on Bourbon Street and he was cranky, and I was cranky, and everyone was cranky that day. Alan, as usual, was fighting with Leet, and it was a stupid argument—why they keep making remakes of old movies and TV shows when people could just watch the old ones, which were better in his opinion. My friends rolled their eyes—the guys, of course, maintained that Daisy’s shorts in the original show weren’t bad but were now as edgy as cornflakes, and that the movie made the shorts shorter and her character sexier. Well, thank you, Siskel and Ebert—but the girls (Elaine, Leet) made a better point: they make them because the producers can update things in the movies so that they’re relevant. They show the past ironically and comment on it. It sounds very hipster and giant-bicycle parked next to the Apple store, but they were right. Alan was having none of it. We all drank faster. Or did we drink slower? Later that night we got into it.

Another wonderful evening ruined, grandpa!

Don’t call me that. And I didn’t ruin anyone’s evening. It was a momentary disagreement. And God forbid Leet ever be contradicted.

"Sometimes Leet is right."

Well, yes; just like a broken clock is right twice a day.

"Why did you have to talk like that? Why do you have to embarrass me? They were right. You’re the only one who still thinks Ginger on Gilligan’s Island was sexy. No one cares!"

I’d take her over a Kardashian. I have a right to my opinion.

"Okay. Fine. You don’t have a right to force it on everyone. They didn’t even know what you were talking about half the time. They didn’t get it, Pontiac. It makes you sound like a snob. Like you’re talking about your cool life in Europe."

He didn’t like that.

It’s a simple fact, he retorted. "Hip-hop is crap. It’s not music. Putting it into a TV show set thirty years earlier to make fun of how stupid those people were and pretending it’s some edgy ironic statement is dumb. Leet can’t see it because all she likes is pounding drums and yo-yo-yo smack-my-bitch-up and thinks it should be in Pride and Prejudice."

"Sorry for troubling you with these young people with their rock and/or roll music who won’t stay off your lawn or pull up their pants. You know, you could try. You could try to like my friends more than my parents’ friends. How f—ing weird is that? I don’t wanna go out with an old man. Should I find you one of my single aunts?"

Maybe I was going too far. Alan was getting angry and didn’t say anything. That is when I knew he was really mad at someone.

No answer? Still processing it? Need a cup of tea?

He spoke slowly, coldly, Just maybe your friends could grow up a little. I like them, but they could. They’re all going to play video games in their parents’ basements for the rest of their lives.

So you’re the voice of reason, huh?

"I don’t talk about Star Wars and Batman all evening like Brent and Dan do. I’m not a kid. I try to talk about something adults like."

"Wonderful! I’m bursting with real fruit flavor! I’m not sure your fantasy world is any better. If you like the past so much, why don’t you pack up and move there for good? You could put on your Nehru jacket and bellbottoms and live in a swinging penthouse, with giant color dots on the wall and lots of lava lamps! You can hide away from the real world and listen to trumpet jazz and all the shitty old music you like with my parents’ friends over and over, and you won’t have to be troubled by the nasty big twenty-first century anymore!"

We didn’t have much else to say to each other that night, and he went home. And then he didn’t want to answer his phone, and we sent each other a few text messages, and he was polite—dammit, that made me even more mad sometimes, that someone could shoot him and he’d still be polite about it, ‘no, really, no trouble at all, it’s just a flesh wound, and the red will compliment my ascot nicely’—because I wanted him to yell at me, swear at me, tell me he’d hunt me down and tie me up, make me call the police, I’ll be following you every breath you take, now I’m doing it.

It was the right thing for us to break up. But it hurt bad. And we have a few friends who know each other, and he disappeared after graduation that December—I don’t remember why he was off a semester. Gone from e-mail, gone from Facebook. It’s been almost three years. I still think about him. I’m not being Bridget Jones again, saying that I don’t miss him at all while I cry into the fudge I’m eating, in my pajamas. This is not a pathetic chick flick, and he wasn’t Hugh Grant. But he was a part of my life. Where did he go, I wonder, when I hear music he liked. No Alan. Nowhere.

──────

In Sheila’s defense (calling the witness, where were you on the night of August the fourth) she wasn’t lying or trying to talk herself into something. She did miss Alan, and still hadn’t dated anyone else, except for a few match-ups by friends which went nowhere. She wasn’t any more into men obsessed with Batman than Alan was. But in fairness, she had bigger fish to fry—she had to write a senior project and then graduate, and then what? Universities will let anyone who can say Tell me about your mother in a fake-German Freudian accent into undergraduate psych programs, but for graduate school, it gets hard fast and the acceptance rates drop off a cliff.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to do grad work anyway. She could go up north to Fort McMurray to the oil rig town and probably find an easy job, and being that the town was 98% well-paid and sexually frustrated single men, she’d have her pick of the Newfoundland litter, she thought. Yes ‘by, flat on the back for that! But then again, claims of her being brokenhearted for life are greatly exaggerated. She wanted to be on her own for a while longer.

She ended up with a job at the Royal Alberta Museum, which would allow her such frivolous luxuries as food and clothing, in addition to sharing an apartment with Leet (really, she wasn’t so bad, and tried to be charitable in consoling her over a guy she was kind of oil and water with). A museum? As Morpheus would say, history is not without a sense of irony. However, this was a natural history one, dealing with a much older time period than Alan’s fixation with two decades in the twentieth century did. And it had donuts. Many a job, however dull (schoolchildren saying wow and then running around like sugar-crazed chimpanzees; men trying to make jokes about the dinosaurs coming back to life; the incessant white guilt of the First Nations displays, which were as subtle as a chainsaw) could be forgiven via donuts, the nectar of the Canadian gods.

So Sheila had not settled on her future very much, but she was getting by. What did happen to Alan, by the way? Rampaging Mongolian hordes? Fell down the well and Lassie was busy on Skype at the time? Went to Ubud to find himself—Eat, Pray, Love, and all that?

Alan speaks.

I don’t blame her. Things just happen. I wasn’t very happy at the time, and I was stressed about graduation. Not about the coursework; I was a transfer student with three years in international relations, and while this wasn’t quite like engineering faculty in its rigor and workload, it was certainly a more difficult program than ridiculous education faculty, with its touchy-feely namby-pamby tell-me-how-you-feel-and-we’ll-all-reflect-in-a-diary P.C. crap.

And then they dump you into a class with thirty little hellions straight out of A Clockwork Orange, with no practical preparation on how to deal with it and your alcoholic co-teacher. Who keeps hitting on you. Well, no, actually, she never hit on me. I think that was a good thing, really. What she mostly did was show up twice a day with coffee and cigarette breath and tell me what I was doing wrong. What was I doing there, paying extra tuition to work for free?

And if it didn’t work out, I would have to go home to Camrose, and my family. Swinging, mixing Camrose. The city that can tear the roof off with its sick, phat beats. Carnival in Rio has nothing on your tractor demonstration days and big-wheel trucker-of-the-day prizes on CFCW. Wild, crazy nights at the Hard Rock Café, Club Super-Sex, or Moulin Rouge in Camrose, or maybe just at the legion hall. Where the excitement for the evening was a far-off cow farting in a different pitch.

And yes, I liked the ‘60s and ‘70s. Because my brother and sister were hellions themselves, and usually my sister was on someone’s bed or pool table by about eight o’clock and my brother was watching television and practicing being mean to everyone, I didn’t have a bad life as a boy but I was alone a lot. That comes of being a rambling man—trying to make a living and doing the best I can.

Alright, well, maybe that was an exaggeration, and Cathy wasn’t some big ol’ slut, and maybe Dave wasn’t so bad, but Cathy was from time to time a young women of easy leisure with her boyfriends. Mom’s answer was to let her do as she wished, and Dad was often out of town doing restaurant inspections. They weren’t bad people, and no one meant badly, but I wasn’t close at all to my family, and didn’t make many good school friends. A lot of them wanted out too. I can hardly blame them.

And so in some of the odd jobs I did over summers in Edmonton staying with my uncle and aunt, I knew a lot of older people. Sometimes at the bar, or when I was younger at the Piper Husky station, we had regular barflies or people who just had nothing better to do than hang out and jaw. And so these Norms and Oscars and Wandas became my brothers and sisters, and Cream and Zeppelin and Rush and FM and Warhol and Nixon and Wayne and Shuster became my world. They’d lived in the ‘70s, but I got to live it through them.

This world was much more real to me than the forty-ouncer of small-town Camrose boredom I usually imbibed and the insipid boy bands and boring fashions of the new decade my classmates listened to. O for a muse of fire to show me the way out of Justin Bieberville, or hipster hell on Whyte Avenue, with stupid beards and lumberjack shirts! There was nothing left to invent, no more cool things to do, no more cool guitar licks after Beck and Page had written them all in dark castles, no more Clapton meeting Hendrix in a rainy Soho club, no more women who wore jeans and shades and looked like Claudia Cardinale, and rolled their own joints with their tongues and one free hand, who were free, free to ride a motorcycle, far from Alberta grain elevators and hog pricing reports, down past Lethbridge across the Coutts-Sweetgrass border, through Vegas, to L.A. where it didn’t snow a ridiculous 2/3 of the year, halfway to Barstow when the drugs began to take hold. It’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses, so hit it...

I don’t blame Sheila. Maybe some of the things I disliked about my home town or my lame millennial whiny generation I projected on to her. We would probably be happier apart. At least she would be. With my degree diploma in my hand, and little idea what to do next, I was less sure. I don’t mean to be so theatrical. No one was shooting at me, and I had enough to eat. But I didn’t know where to start.

2. The analog kid

Edmonton, Alberta did have the typically—well, bracing northwestern Canadian climate. The city was rather prickly about being mocked or put down by other cities and was terminally resentful of Toronto and Montreal (which prided themselves on Big Things Happening) and moderately resentful of Vancouver (which prided itself on pleasant weather), and recurrently resentful of Calgary (which hadn’t really done anything to deserve the rancor except to be a nearby rival for business and hockey). Otherwise, it was a pretty city with an inordinate and welcome number of festivals and park spaces.

The only problem was that enjoying all of this was concentrated into three panicked months of decent weather. Like many native Edmontonians, Alan (growing up in nearby Camrose) grew up with the unconscious idea that air conditioning in a car was somehow foolish or morally pernicious, as though sweating in a car in the summer was storing up heat karma which would make winter more bearable. One should ask not for whom the snow tolls; the snow tolls for thee, and it will be back. When he later lived in a warmer climate, he often had the subconscious feeling of guilt that he was not always outside, as though, my God, it’s not blizzarding, we need to get out and enjoy this weather right now before it ends in thirty minutes.

But in a way, when it’s -40 your life has purpose, and becomes a game of survival. Can one actually start the car? Can one make it to work or school? If you can, and if you get proficient at driving in snow, you’re a man, my son, and if you can drive a stick-shift while drinking a Slurpee you’re a god, unlike pansy Americans who skid off the road if they hit a one-inch ice patch. An Edmonton winter was in that respect like carnival in Brazil, where social rules relax. People understand if you’re late. You can chat with strangers about how bizarre it is to see gas-cylinder doors slam, and your spit freeze in midair, and an icy steam rising off the ground, and the way sound itself seems to move more slowly. This was why Canadians tended to have more communal politics than Americans. In winter you cannot be a lone outlaw. You help each other, or you freeze to death.

Thus some locals really did like winter, and enjoyed the sports, bragged to outsiders about their toughness, and shoveled the white stuff with pleasure. (Wind chill numbers were for sissies, and those were just made-up temperatures anyway, probably invented by communists.) Jack Frost was not their enemy, but a dependable old friend who cleared away the mosquitos, urged the welfare sponges to continue on to Vancouver, and purified the decaying leaves into a morally upright white blanket. To Alan such people were benign but clearly insane.

For this reason, most things of narrative note must take place between May and October in Edmonton. Not much action can take place in frigid winter months, excepting a lot of interior psychological dialogue where people philosophize about life’s meaning and a great number of unpronounceable Russian names must be remembered.

The point is that Sheila was not unhappy. Nightclub life (once you have stood in the interminable coat-check line to stow your now-uncomfortable parka, imagining that the eighteen unsuccessful Miss Mexico finalists in the club are just then leaving without you, or in Sheila’s case, the finalists from the Nevada’s Sexiest Cowboy competition 2014) still went on regardless of the exterior weather conditions). But over the winter she didn’t do much and her parents didn’t socialize so much. The gruel of TV shows that they watched to pass long nights may be mercifully passed over.

So whan that April, with his shoures soote, arrived, people were more than ready for barbecuing season to ensue and to socialize and get outdoors. The Palettes decided to invite some friends on a Friday evening, and were rewarded by the presence of the aforementioned Cormier, Graff, Romanko, and Hennessey parties.

Sheila came to have supper, partly because she liked barbecue (unlike vegetarian Leet, Sheila was there with steak knife in hand), and partly because, in small doses, she had a soft spot for her parents and their friends. In her generation it was questionable whether people would ever stay in one spot long enough to develop life-long friendships like this. What was it like, what was life like when mortal beings could afford to buy a house? Could there ever be this kind of community anymore, without people picking up and leaving for a job or spouse, or after the spouse, to find themselves?

It might happen, but probably not while she worked in a natural history museum and was single. It could happen. Sometimes women who did nothing but collect cats and drink cappuccino and read cheesy romances with names like Forbidden Rebel of Penzance, with a cover featuring a shirtless, muscular horseman grasping a bosomy woman with his bullwhip in the other hand, causing the lamp to crash to the floor and her nightdress to be naughtily half-opened, were still invited to parties. So she had that going for her.

Sheila, as ever, liked men, both romantically and as friends—she was neither a tomboy nor a homewrecker—she simply had a sort of natural sympathy for and enjoyment of men; the sort of girl who becomes a den mother among type-B males taking computer science. Greg and Tina Palette were far from prancing effeminates whose friends read poetry and cried, but it is true that their social circle was not a macho, shirt-unbuttoned group. Jim Cormier and Alan Graff had known Sheila her entire life, and they could tease and flirt with her with enough laddishness to make it funny without making things in any way awkward—their wives trusted them enough to know it was in fun. They were kindly guys, i.e., they did not stare at her boobs. Well, maybe a little, but they politely took their cue from that one-second rule which applies to food falling on the floor.

Alan Graff was good with a barbecue, but Greg, for all his accomplishments as a competent and kindly husband, could only produce two steak settings: mooing and cinder. He was not too proud to let a steady hand take over once the thing was lit; lighting the barbecue was a task understood to be sacrosanct to any male homeowner not currently in a full-body harness. Alan’s wife was inside, and her laughing cackle could be heard. Greg was mixing drinks and told Sheila (technically a visitor but always a part of the household) to ask Al what he would like. This was probably a fool’s errand as Alan mostly wanted beer, but ask she did.

Kokanee, please. How are you doing, Sheila? How is it working out living with Leet?

She liked that about him. He asked a useful question, as opposed to a generic, obligatory how-are-things-at-the-museum. He did not treat her as a child. She had talked about him before about Leet, and Alan, having lived in a dorm himself as a college student, understood enough of the culture to remain somewhat relevant.

Leet is a little quieter than I am, so it works out well. She can cook and I can eat, a marriage made in heaven.

He laughed softly without looking as he turned and raised the kebabs, the barbecue