Apartment by Teddy Wayne

Author:Teddy Wayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

5

There was little suspense in the air leading up to Election Day; everyone expected Clinton to wallop Dole with assistance, once more, from the amusing third-party peculiarity of Ross Perot. Even for Democrats, the event had the wincing anticipation of a lopsided bout between a heavyweight champion and an underfed amateur.

Billy and I made plans to watch the returns together, and the afternoon of the election I shopped for wine, guacamole and chips, and Brie and crackers. On my way back to the apartment, a ruddy-faced older man outside Beth Israel Hospital was having difficulty getting into a taxi, for reasons I couldn’t understand. He struggled by the curb until the cabbie lost patience, yelled at him to close the door, and sped off. The man looked at the ground.

“You okay, sir?” I asked him.

He nodded without looking up.

“Do you want another cab?”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. I raised my arm and another taxi pulled over.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, “but could I ask you for your help first?” Without bending over, he hiked up his pants leg. Above a loose sock was a glinting aluminum rod where there should have been flesh. I felt a queasy stab in my gut.

“It accidentally locked and I can’t bend it,” he explained. “So I can’t reach down to roll up my pants high enough. Could you do it?”

“Yep,” I said, my throat dry. I crouched down to bunch and roll up his beige polyester pants leg along the slender prosthetic calf.

“Light’s green,” said the taxi driver. “Let’s go.”

“Hold on!” I shouted with a sharpness I never used.

“I just got this,” the man said. “I’ve never had one before. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. I slowed down my rolling before I reached the knee. “Okay, you can unlock it.”

I turned my head away to let him roll up the last bit and adjust something. He tested the movement and said he was ready. I unrolled the material and helped him into the backseat. It was an obvious but nonetheless jarring insight: with the pants down, you never would have known about his missing leg.

“You’ll be okay getting out?” I asked. “What if it locks again?”

“I think so,” he said. “If I’m sitting down I can roll it up. They told me it just takes some getting used to.”

When Billy came home that night from class, I told him about the encounter. “It made me think of your ex-girlfriend’s term. Concealable stigma.”

“She meant it metaphorically for me,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

The first wave of election results came in, and Clinton took a quick lead. “Shit, forgot my push-ups,” Billy said as he tucked into the food spread. “Mind if I do them here?”

I gestured for him to go for it.

“Sorry, I normally do this in my room.” He dropped to the floor, facing away from me. There was a robotic snap to his push-ups, like an assembly-line machine repeating the same motion, bored with its own perfection. His deltoids,

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