Latex and Lost Things

Bea was sixty-three years old, and she had driven forty minutes out of her way on a Tuesday evening because a scruffy brown dog had planted itself in the middle of Range Road 114 and refused to move for anything less than a woman getting out of her Subaru in her good cardigan. That was how she came to be standing in the gravel lot of the Gliding Club of the Northern Plains at half past seven, holding a borrowed leash in one hand and her dignity in the other, and that was also how she came to see Bernard again after fifteen years, which nobody, least of all Bea, had put on the day's schedule.

The hangar doors were open onto the prairie, and a man in a quilted jacket was crouched by a wing, and the dog knew him before Bea did. It bolted across the cobbles, past the stone fountain where the local kids tossed pennies for luck, and shoved its whole blocky head into the man's hands, and the man stood up laughing, and Bea's stomach dropped in a way she had not felt since she was thirty and somebody's wife and still surprised by things.

"I wasn't expecting you," Bernard said, looking from the dog to her, and she laughed, holding the leash that was now attached to nothing.

"He was sitting in the middle of the road like he owned it," Bea said. "I nearly went into the ditch. There's no collar, but there was a tag on his water dish in the car, or, well, not his dish, some dish, honestly the whole thing is a mystery."

"His dish travels with him. He refuses to eat out of anything else, the little tyrant." Bernard scratched the dog's ears and looked at Bea over its head, and she watched the recognition move across his face in stages, the squint, then the blink, then the stillness. "Bea. Good lord. Bea."

"Hello, Bernard." She had rehearsed exactly nothing on the drive out, which was unlike her, because she had been a paralegal for thirty-one years and rehearsal was basically her whole personality. "You look well."

"I look old," he said, "but so do you, so we'll call it even." He was sixty-five now, gray at the temples and thick through the middle, and his hands were still enormous, and something about seeing those hands on a dog's ears made her chest hurt in a way she decided immediately not to think about.

The hangar was empty except for the two of them and a white sailplane tucked under the lights like a sleeping fish, all long wings and glossy skin. The club had gone quiet after a full day of bookings, and someone had left a radio on low playing something old, and the light through the wide doors was doing that thing prairie light does at the end of the day, turning everything gold and forgiving.

"Come in, at least," Bernard said. "I've got a bottle in the office and I was about to drink it alone, which is a sorry sight, and you've earned a drink. You did rescue my dog."

"Your dog. Of course it's your dog." Bea followed him in, the leash coiled over her arm like a ridiculous accessory, the dog trotting ahead with its tail going. "I spent twenty minutes calling him Waffles. He answered to it. He'd have answered to anything, wouldn't he, he's a con artist."

"He's a professional." Bernard hung his jacket on a hook by the office door, and that was when Bea saw it.

Under the jacket he was wearing a one-piece suit, sleek and dark, some kind of stretch fabric that caught the hangar lights and threw them back in a long smooth gleam from his shoulders down to his wrists, and Bea had gone her whole adult life without wanting to touch a man's sleeve and here she was, sixty-three years old, standing in a corrugated iron barn with her mouth slightly open over a piece of clothing. She knew what it was, actually, or she was fairly sure she did, because she had clicked into one corner of the internet she did not mention at book club, and the word that rose in her was latex, and the feeling that rose with it was embarrassing and warm and entirely inconvenient.

"That's a gliding suit," Bernard said, following her eyes, and there was a pause that had weight to it. "It's, ah. It's part of the kit. Some of the fellows think it's a bit much."

"It's not a bit much," Bea said, too fast, and then made herself slow down. "It's very shiny. It suits you. I mean it suits the plane. I mean pour me that drink, Bernard, before I say something worse."

He poured two glasses of whiskey at the little counter in the office, and they carried them out to a bench near the open doors, and the dog flopped across their feet like a rug, and the sun went down over the prairie in slow stripes of orange and violet while they talked about nothing for a while, the club, the road work on the highway, the fountain and its coins.

Then it got real, the way conversations do when the light gets low and the whiskey gets warm.

"Maps, still," Bernard said, turning his glass. "I do survey work now, mostly, charting the county parcels for the grain co-ops, and honestly I still love it. There's something about making a place legible. You draw the line and the chaos agrees to be a field."

"I remember the maps," Bea said. "I remember the kitchen table covered in them until you couldn't find the coffee." She looked out at the flat dark land and heard herself keep going. "My life is very tidy now, Bernard. That's the problem with it. I moved out past Dry Creek after the divorce, well, after both divorces, mine from you and then mine from the city, and I do my files and I water my tomatoes and I go to bed at ten, and some nights I stand in the kitchen and think, is this it, is this the whole show. I didn't expect to say that out loud."

"I'm glad you did." He was quiet a moment. "The divorce was the right thing and we both knew it, and it was still the worst thing I ever did, agreeing to it. I should have fought for the friendship even if I'd lost the marriage. Fifteen years is a long time to lose a person over paperwork."

"Well," Bea said, and had to drink to cover her face, "that's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me in a decade, and the bar is genuinely on the floor."

The dog sighed in its sleep. The radio murmured. Bea set her glass down on the bench and looked at the gleam of that suit where it caught the last light at his throat, and she decided she was too old for pretending.

"Can I ask you something, and you can tell me it's none of my business?"

"You can ask me anything," Bernard said. "You always could. It was one of your better qualities."

"The suit. Is it just for flying?"

He was silent long enough that she thought she'd overstepped, and then he said, "No," and then, "It started for flying, because latex under the canopy is practical, it's warm, it slides against the seat, and then somewhere along the way it stopped being practical and started being, hm. Mine. In a way I didn't share with anyone. Not even you. Especially not you, maybe, because I was ashamed of it, and look at me now, telling you that in a barn."

"I like it," Bea said. Her voice came out lower than she meant. "I like it a lot. I've been staring at your wrists like an absolute fool for the last hour."

"Have you." He turned to look at her then, properly, the way he used to look at her across a table full of maps, and her whole skin woke up. "Bea, I'd like to kiss you. I'd like that very much, and if the answer's no, we finish our whiskey and it never happened."

"Yes," she said. "Please. I mean, yes!"

He leaned in slowly, giving her every chance to change her mind, and kissed her, and his mouth was warm and his hand came up to her jaw and Bea, sixty-three years old, recently a woman who watered tomatoes, made a small sound into his lips that she would think about for weeks. The dog snored. The sun finished going down.

When they broke apart she was breathing like she'd climbed stairs, and his latex shoulder was cool and slick under her palm where she'd grabbed it without permission.

"Touch wherever you like," Bernard said, a little ragged. "I spent fifteen years not expecting this. I'm not complaining anymore."

He laughed then, a real laugh, the kind she remembered from the early years when everything they did was funny because they were young and in love and didn't know yet how it would end, and he set his glass down next to hers and held out his arm across the bench between them, sleeve rolled to the elbow, the black material shining faintly in the blue dark.

"Go on then," he said. "Since you've been staring at my wrists like a fool, you may as well get a proper look. It's not every day a man gets to show off his shameful secret to an appreciative audience."

Bea reached out and laid her fingers on his forearm, and the feeling of it stopped her breath for a second, because she had expected something like a raincoat, something squeaky and cheap, and instead it was warm from his skin and impossibly smooth, slick and tight and somehow soft all at once, like touching something alive that had no fur. She ran her fingers from his wrist up toward his elbow and back down again, slowly, tracing the ridge of a tendon, and she heard herself let out a long unsteady breath that made Bernard go very still beside her.

"Well," she said, and had to clear her throat. "Well, that's. That is not what I expected at all."

"It surprises everyone," Bernard said quietly. "People think it'll be like a balloon. It's not, it's more like, I don't know, a covering that someone else is wearing for you. If you want the truth of it, that is the entire appeal. The way it takes everything and makes it smooth. I put it on before a flight and I'm calm before I'm even off the