Coins in the Fountain

I was twenty-nine years old last July, and I spent one whole afternoon in the back of a bowling alley buffing a pin with a rag. That's not a metaphor. There was an actual pin, scuffed up from a league night, and I sat there on an overturned bucket behind the lanes working polish into it because the pin repair guy quit and nobody else knew the machine.

My name is Rod. My ex-wife is Meena. She's twenty-nine now, was twenty-eight that summer, and we got divorced two years ago after three years of marriage. We'd been together since college, since she was twenty-one and I was twenty-two, and by the end we weren't a couple anymore. We were roommates with a shared Netflix password and a calendar on the fridge.

The weird part is we never fought. Not once, not even at the end. We sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad and divided up the furniture like we were splitting a utility bill. She got the good couch. I got the record player and both cats, which tells you something about who loved who more.

So here's what happened this summer. Meena calls me up in June, out of nowhere, two years after the papers were signed, and she says, "Rod, I need a favor and it's a weird one."

I was elbow deep in a pinsetter at the time. I said, "Weirder than the time you asked me to drive your plant to Philadelphia?"

"Yes. Weirder. Okay, are you sitting down? You should sit down."

"I'm sitting on a bowling ball return," I said. "Close enough."

She took a breath and told me. She was performing at this poetry slam, up on the roof of the Hoboken Lanes, which is the actual bowling alley where I fix the machines. Small world, right? I didn't even know she was going to be in town. She'd moved to Philly after the divorce and apparently the Philly slam circuit connects to the Jersey one and here she was.

But that wasn't the favor. The favor was this. She said, "Rod, I want to make you feel good about yourself this summer, and I want you to help me rehearse. That's the deal. I flirt with guys, you get your confidence back, and you be my practice audience."

I laughed so hard I almost fell off the ball return.

"That's your weird favor? You want to flirt at me?"

"Not at you, exactly. Just, near you. Rufus is going to be there. You remember Rufus, twenty-eight."

Rufus. Yeah, I remembered Rufus. Twenty-eight years old, ran the slam nights, worked the server room gig with me for one weird winter where we installed backup batteries in a building that smelled like burnt coffee. He was the guy who introduced Meena to slam poetry three years ago, back when we were still married, and I always suspected he liked her. I always suspected she liked him back, in that way where nothing happens but you notice anyway.

"Rufus is going to flirt with you," I said, "and I'm supposed to watch."

"You're not supposed to watch like a creep. You're supposed to be there, and it's supposed to remind you that you're still a catch. God, Rod, do I have to spell it out? You've been moping for two years. You texted me a photo of your hairline last month. Your hairline! Who does that?"

"It was thinning at the crown, Meena."

"I could see that from the photo, yes. And it looked fine! You look fine! You're twenty-nine, not eighty."

So that's how the deal got made, and I will state right now that money never entered into it. No bets, no favors owed, nothing traded. She wanted to rehearse her slam set, I wanted to stop obsessing over my scalp in the bathroom mirror, and we shook on it over the phone like dorks. Two adults, both clear on what we were doing. That's the whole arrangement, or it was the whole arrangement before July happened and it got complicated. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The heat wave rolled in that first week of July and it didn't leave. Hoboken in ninety-eight degree heat with no breeze is a special kind of misery, and the bowling alley, being mostly basement, was only slightly less awful. The air conditioning died on the fourth of July. I spent the holiday weekend oiling gears in a room that felt like the inside of a shoe.

The rooftop thing is a long story. Short version: the Lanes building has a roof deck the owner never finished, some half-baked plan from the nineties to make it a bar, and Rufus convinced him to let the slam people use it in summer. There's a little concrete fountain up there, about four feet across, that was supposed to have a statue in it. The statue never showed up. People just started tossing coins in anyway. Wishes, I guess. The thing is maybe six inches deep and absolutely packed with change. Quarters, nickels, a few foreign coins, what looked like a casino token. I've fished a bottle cap out of it twice while setting up folding chairs and both times I thought, huh, somebody wished on this and got a bottle cap instead.

There's also the old server room up there. Glass walls, still humming, because the backup batteries never got pulled. Nobody knows why the batteries are still live. The building owner says it's cheaper to leave them. So there's this glass box on the roof, glowing faintly at night, full of dead racks and one green blinking light, right next to a fountain full of other people's wishes. It's honestly kind of romantic in a dump way.

Which is why the slams happen there.

The first rehearsal was a Tuesday in July. Meena showed up at seven with a folder of poems and a gallon jug of iced tea, and Rufus was already there setting up a PA speaker that ran off a car battery, and there were maybe nine people on folding chairs. Traci was there too. Traci's Rufus's friend, twenty-seven, freelance photographer, met him at some rooftop party two years ago. She was shooting the slam for a local thing, I don't remember what, some Hoboken blog maybe. She had a camera with a big lens and she kept pointing it at me when I wasn't ready, and every time I'd say "hey, warn a guy," and she'd say "no, that's when you're natural."

Meena went up first, before the actual slate, just to test the mic. She's got this voice she uses for poems, low and then sudden, and I'd forgotten how it worked on me. I sat in a folding chair with my iced tea and I felt my ears get hot, and that's stupid, because she was my wife for three years and I know her entire laundry schedule. But there she was, twenty-eight years old, in a sundress I didn't recognize, doing a poem about a coin fountain, and half the poem was about a marriage that ran out of gas without ever crashing.

"That one's not about us," she said after, walking back to her chair.

"It's a little about us."

"It's a little about everybody. That's the trick."

Rufus leaned over to me with a beer he'd brought in a cooler, warm already from the heat. "She's killing it this year, right? Philly was good for her."

"Yeah," I said. "Philly was good for her."

And that's when it started, that's when the game part of the arrangement started, because Rufus looked at her a second too long and Meena caught me catching him, and she smiled this little smile at me over the top of her iced tea jug, like, see? This is the deal working. And I sat there in the ninety-degree rooftop heat, listening to my ex-wife's poems, watching a guy I used to install batteries with work up the nerve to flirt with her, and I told myself this was all fine, this was all part of the plan, this was going to make me feel young again.

I polished another pin the next afternoon. Just to have something in my hands.

The actual slam happened that Saturday. Rufus had flyer'd it around, such as he does, and there were maybe thirty people on the roof instead of nine. More folding chairs, a second car battery, somebody's cousin selling canned margaritas out of a cooler for three bucks. Traci was working the crowd with the big lens, and the sun went down around nine and the string lights Rufus had zip-tied to the fence came on, and honestly the whole thing looked almost like a real venue. A dump venue. But real.

Meena was fourth in the slate. She'd changed dresses, this blue one, and she had her hair down, and she stood at the mic with the fountain behind her and did the penny poem again, the full version this time, the one with the part about a man who loved her like a roommate splits the electric bill. The crowd went nuts. Two people yelled. Traci got about forty shots.

"Okay, that one's definitely about me," I said, when she came back to the chairs.

"That one's about money," she said. "Money and wishes. You're hearing what you're hearing."

I was hearing what I was hearing. And then I looked over and Rufus was looking at her, and it wasn't the friendly look from rehearsal. This was the full hunger look, the one guys give when they've stopped pretending they're just being supportive. Three years of flirting, apparently, does that to a man.

Meena caught me catching him again. This time she raised her eyebrows, a whole conversation in one eyebrow. You seeing this? she was asking. Yes, I was seeing it. My stomach did something complicated. Part of it was jealousy with actual teeth on it. Another part, and I'm not proud, was that thing where your pulse picks up because somebody wants her and she's letting them want her and somehow that's your fault and your idea.

"Go get a beer," she said, quiet, leaning close. "Walk around. Give it a minute."

"That's the plan working?" I asked.

"That's the plan working."

So I walked. I got a warm margarita from the cousin. I talked to Traci for a while about her camera, which is a whole camera, costs more than my car. She was flipping through shots of the slam and stopped on one of Meena at the mic, arms out, and zoomed in.

"She's really good," Traci said.

"Yeah. She is."

"And your friend Rufus is staring at her like he's starving." She said it light, just an observation, but she looked at me after she said it, waiting to see what I'd do. Photographers. They're always watching.

"It's complicated," I said.

"Everything's complicated," she said, and took a picture of me mid-eye-roll.

That's when the lights went out. All of them. String lights, fence lights, the green glow from the server room glass, everything, gone. Thirty people made the same noise at once, that whoa sound.

"Nobody panic," Rufus yelled, which is a great way to make people panic. "Backup. The batteries just need a kick, I think."

The batteries. My batteries. I'd installed those backup racks with Rufus four years ago, before Meena even knew what a slam was, back when he was just some guy from the server room gig who quoted Rilke at lunch. The room was behind its little glass wall right there by the fountain, humming all summer, and now it wasn't humming. I knew the panel. I had a flashlight on my keychain because I'm the kind of guy who has a flashlight on his keychain.

"I got it," I said. "Nobody trip over the fountain."

I got into the room and it was an oven in there, ninety-something degrees of battery smell and dead racks, and the transfer switch had tripped, this old clunker of a switch that did this once before. I won't bore you with the whole thing. It took a while. It took like twenty minutes, flipping breakers, crouching in the dark, sweating through my shirt, and the whole time I could hear the crowd through the glass, and I could hear the fountain, that little trickle sound it makes from the pump, except the pump was out too, so just water settling.

When the green light came back on and the string lights outside lit up again, people cheered like I'd done a magic trick. I pushed out through the door wiping my forehead, feeling like a hero, looking around for Meena to do the thing where you point at yourself with both thumbs.

She wasn't at the chairs.

Neither was Rufus.

The crowd was thick, everyone standing and milling, and I did a slow turn. Traci was over by the fence with her camera down, watching me. She pointed, casual, with her chin, toward the fountain.

They were by the fountain. The pump was dead so the water was still, and the coins were visible, hundreds of them, silver and copper in the dark, and Meena had her dress hiked enough to sit on the concrete edge with her feet in the water. Rufus was next to her, crouched, saying something I couldn't hear over the crowd noise. She was laughing. She reached into the water and pulled up a handful of coins, letting them run through her fingers back in, that little splash-and-clink sound, and Rufus said something else and she laughed again.

I should have gone over there. That was, on paper, the whole idea. The plan. My idea, even, if we're being technical, which we are, because it was my idea and I was now watching it work and it felt like watching somebody drive my car into a lake.

Instead I sat down on the far edge of the fountain. Just sat. My margarita was warm and I drank it anyway.

I could see them from there, maybe fifteen feet, and the crowd noise covered me, and I don't know how long I would have sat like a statue before somebody noticed. Meena saw me first. I know she saw me