The Viewing Game

I finished the bottle of wine on a Tuesday night in March, which is not an anniversary or anything, just a Tuesday, and I sat on my couch in my socks and my old gray cardigan and thought about how the last time anybody had touched me on purpose was fourteen months ago and how that seemed like a number I should be embarrassed about but mostly I just wasn't. My name is Laura, I'm fifty-two years old, I run a small indie record label out of a converted warehouse in the industrial end of town, and the label is dying, and my marriage died two years before that, and if you stacked all the dying things in my life in a column it would look like one of those charts nobody wants to put in a quarterly report.

The wine was a cheap Malbec I'd bought on sale, three for fifteen dollars, and I'd started it at six and killed it by ten, and somewhere in the middle of that I caught my own reflection in the dark window of my apartment and I did not recognize the woman in it for a second, which sounds dramatic but it's true, she just looked like a tired person in a cardigan, and then I realized she was me and that was worse somehow. My body and I had stopped speaking to each other somewhere around the divorce. Randall had been the one who left, at forty-nine, after twenty-two years, and he'd done it politely, over coffee, with a folder, and I think what I missed most wasn't him but the idea that somebody looked at me and wanted something, even if what he wanted turned out to be a woman named Carolyn from his cycling club.

Nobody had looked at me like that since. I had a good body still, I knew that in an abstract way, the way you know a car runs but you never open the hood. I hadn't opened the hood in a long time. I sat with the empty bottle and my feet tucked under me and I cried a little, not the ugly kind, just the leaky kind, and then I went to bed at eleven and slept badly in the way I'd gotten used to.

Wednesday I was at the studio late because the band recording their EP, a four-piece called Copper Weather, had gone home at eight and I'd stayed to balance the books, which is a generous word for what I was doing with a spreadsheet and a calculator and a growing feeling of nausea. The Brickhouse is my whole life, honestly, a squat brick warehouse with a control room that looks through a big window into a small soundproofed rehearsal space, and the window has this trick where depending on the lighting it can go one-way, dark side sees in, or you can flip the lights and see straight through both directions. I love that window. I have loved that window for eleven years, since we put it in, and it never occurred to me until recently that a window like that has other uses, but I'll get to that.

I was in the lounge with the little fridge and the sagging couch when Roland came in around nine-thirty, and I didn't hear him at first because I was crying again, sitting on the arm of the couch with a printout of our accounts in my hand like I was going to do something with it. Roland has been my best friend since I was twenty and he was twenty-two and we joined the same terrible local band, which means he's been in my life for over thirty years, he's fifty-four now, never married, plays session guitar and engineers half the records we cut, and he has the particular decency of a man who knows when to pretend he didn't see something. He pretended for about nine seconds and then he went to the cabinet, got the emergency whiskey down, poured two glasses, and handed me one without a word, and we sat there and drank in silence like two people at a wake, because in a way we were at one, the wake for Brickhouse Records, apparently.

"Bad spreadsheet," he said finally, nodding at the paper.

"Bad everything. We're three months from done, Roland. I don't even know how I'm paying you next session." And then, because I was tired and three drinks into grief, I heard myself say the true thing, which was, "I don't even know why I care anymore. I haven't felt like a person with a body in two years. I'm just a woman who owns a failing business and a couch."

Roland turned his glass around on his knee a couple of times, and he looked uncomfortable, and Roland is never uncomfortable, he's the most level man I know, so that alone should have warned me.

"Can I say something dumb?" he asked.

"You've been saying dumb things to me for thirty years, why stop now."

He laughed, kind of, and then he took a breath and said, "It's just, when you say nobody looks at you, that's not strictly a thing I can relate to, because my whole problem is the opposite, and I've never told a living soul this, so don't you dare laugh."

I promised, and I meant it, and I could see him working up to something, this fifty-four-year-old man who has sat in on every awful breakup and funeral and holiday I've had from the Reagan years onward, twisting his glass and staring at the carpet, and finally he said, "I've got this thing, Laura. A kink, I guess, the word everybody uses. I've had it since I was young and I've never once done anything about it because I can't even say it out loud most days, and it's the being watched, being seen, when it's, you know, intimate. The idea that somebody is looking, that I can't hide, that's what does it for me, and I've been to plenty of beds in my life and never mentioned it to a single one of them because it felt too stupid and too big at the same time."

I didn't laugh. I want to be fair to myself about that, because it would have been the easy road and instead I just sat there with my whiskey going warm and thought about my best friend, who I have watched tune a guitar a thousand times, sitting there confessing something he'd carried alone since he was a kid, and I felt two things at once, which were tenderness and a completely inappropriate jolt of interest that I filed away to feel guilty about later.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

He shrugged, the way he does, and looked out toward the big window into the dark rehearsal room, and he said, "Honestly? Because you looked at that window too, last week, when Sunny was fixing the lighting rig, you made a joke about the one-way thing and you went pink, and I've thought about that joke for six days, which is either nothing or it's the only interesting thing that's happened to either of us in a year."

I had gone pink, that was true, I'd made some dumb remark about how the window could see you but you couldn't see yourself and then thought about it all night. I finished my whiskey and looked at my oldest friend and I felt less dead than I had in fourteen months, and that was the moment, though neither of us knew it yet, when everything about my quiet sad life started coming apart in the best possible way.

I laughed, of course, because the alternative was to sit there and admit that my whole body had gone warm at the words being watched, and I covered it with a cackle and said something about midlife crises and cheap whiskey, but Roland just waited me out the way he always does, patient as a tuning fork, until the laugh ran out of air and I was left holding my glass like an idiot. "Okay," I said finally, "okay, fine, since we're apparently doing confessions, here's mine, and you don't get to laugh either. I've always been curious about watching. Not just porn, I mean that does nothing for me, but real people, actual people in a room, the whole idea of seeing something that isn't for the camera or for me, that's the part that gets me, and I've never told anyone that either, not even Randall when we were still pretending to like each other." We stared at each other across the little table between the couch and the coffee maker, two adults, me at fifty-two and him at fifty-four, blushing like a pair of amateurs at an open mic, and then we both started talking at once about how it was just talk, just whiskey talk, just two old friends saying stupid things late at night, and neither of us believed a word of it, and we both knew the other one didn't believe it either, and that was somehow the most honest conversation I'd had in a decade.

He left around midnight and I sat on the couch for another hour with the last inch of the emergency whiskey, which was the good bottle by comparison, and thought about the window, that big beautiful window I have loved for eleven years, the one between the control room and the rehearsal space, the one that goes one-way or clear depending on how the light falls, and I thought about what it would mean to sit on the dark side of it with a purpose instead of just a mixing board, and then I went to bed at one and slept better than I had in months, which tells you something about me that I'm not proud of but there it is.

For a week nothing happened, or rather everything happened the way it always does, Sunny in the office booking sessions and arguing with the printer, Copper Weather in tracking their EP, me doing payroll math that made my stomach hurt, and Roland came and went and never once mentioned that night, so I decided it had been the whiskey talking and put it away in the same drawer as my other embarrassing thoughts, and then the following Wednesday he showed up at my office door at four in the afternoon, which was wrong on its face because Roland never comes in before seven, and he had a look on his face like a man holding a signed confession he wasn't sure he wanted to file. "So," he said, leaning in the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, "I've been thinking about that thing we said, and if you want to forget it that's completely fine, I want that on the table first, but there's a woman, Faith, she drums for Velvet Cartel, they're on the road and passing through, we've known each other for years and I talked to her, told her the whole thing, the kink, the window, everything, and she thought it was funny and then she thought it was interesting, and she said yes, if you said yes, because it's your studio and your window and apparently I told her enough about you that she wants to meet you first." I sat there with a purchase order in my hand and my heart doing something completely undignified, and I said, "You want to do it here. In my rehearsal room. With me watching through the glass."

"Only if you want it," he said, and he meant it, I could see he meant it, he would have walked away if I'd said no and never brought it up again, and that's the thing about Roland, he's never once pushed me in thirty years. "I want it," I heard myself say, before the sensible part of me could get a word in, and he nodded like we'd just agreed on a take, said Saturday night after the session band cleared out, and left me sitting there holding a purchase order and grinning like a fool.