Free Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb

entered with a self-important rustle of clothes, and went up to the counter, not seeing me where I sat watching her over my magazine. In her low voice she gave the clerk her name and asked for the keys to a certain locker. While she waited, I stood up, fighting nerves, and went over and introduced myself. I had forgotten how intensely blue—like Rob’s—were her eyes. Nearly instantly a shocked smile spread across her face. “Good lord!” she cried. “Have you been here the whole time? You look great. How are you, friend?”
    “I’m fine, fine, Belinda. And what a—how nice it is to see you.”
    After a moment’s hesitation, she leaned forward, delicately for a big girl, and put out her cheek to be kissed.As I kissed her back, I was reached by a faint scent, a mix of female odors and long travel in a closed car, which I found oddly stimulating. Uncertain what to do suddenly, I coughed into a fist.
    “And so?” she cried in a throaty voice.
    “Ma’am?” The clerk, having waited for a lull, chose this moment to speak. “Would you sign this, please?”
    She was still smiling as she reached down and doodled her signature, and then turned back to me.
    “I’m stunned by how good you look, first of all,” she said, and laughed again, with a big depth of lungs in the sound, in a way that reminded you, whether you liked it or not, of the power of her body.
    Laughing along with her, and a bit struck by how unbereaved she seemed, I told her that marriage with kids meant no late nights and merely an occasional glass of wine, and the truth was that being bored was the best fountain of youth known to man. I found myself settling easily into this mode of deprecation of the thing—my marriage—I’d spent years painstakingly building from the ground up. She laughed again, holding my eye, and asked if I’d accompany her to her shed. We left the building, and as she walked to her pickup truck, she cast her eye at my dusty Chevy Suburban.
    “Wow,” she said, hopping into her truck, slamming her door behind her, and then leaning out the window, cheerful, “is that thing big enough for you?”
    A minute later, we were pulling into parking places, and then she was getting out and standing a moment stretching while holding one hand in the small of her back. “Oh, these old bones,” she said, and I laughed as I watched herlifted throat, creamy like a splash of milk against the black fabric, floating over the bending front of her body. She’d always been unembarrassed about her body, and I told myself, standing in front of her and having no choice but to look on as she flexed and groaned, cracking, that I now understood that perhaps she wasn’t loose at all but rather simply indifferent to other people’s opinions, and that this had been misinterpreted by the uptight high school tribes. Maybe I was simply guilty for how we’d first sawed at each other during that hot, throbbing summer of those many years ago, but I enjoyed reinterpreting her previous reputation in this new light. It made me feel good inside.
    “You okay, Rollo?”
    She was looking at me closely. Rollo was her pet name for me.
    “Me?” I said. “I’m great, B. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t very happy to see you, but I’m fine.”
    “Me too. I only ask because you’re looking a little pale there,” she said, and yawned with a waft of stale bacterial breath. “Whaddya say we check out the storage?”
    We shrugged open the garage door to the unit, and then poked around amid the old piles of furniture, and the tarped-over mysterious lumps and the things tied with batlike folds of fabric. “I didn’t know Dracula lived this far north,” I said, clearing the way.
    She laughed.
    “Speaking of which, I recently saw your mom on a condolence call.” I hefted a large dusty candelabra that looked like a huge knobbed hand and examined it. “Her house is kinda dark, you could say.”
    “Dark? The woman lives like a refugee in her own home.Once or