It’s been lately that he’s been late to catch the bus. He’s always walking either too far ahead to the crosswalk – the correct, upstanding citizen following minutely the laws of traffic, of car-abiding, of painted white bricks on the pavement – or else he’s running behind it, maddash across the street between traffic, one trope harried businessman, camera jumping puddle-potholes, tie a-flapping to catch hell and he’s all out of shape, and he must make the bus to make the train… and yes, it’s been giving him some trouble at work. His wife has tried to understand just what it is that’s causing such a slow down, but he’s unable, when pressed, to give specifics, to give examples. How could he ever fix the blame on just one thing? One thing and then another, he supposes. Jeanie worries it’s become a way of life.
They have a car, too, and so he doesn’t strictly need to take the bus, but for him it is too inconvenient to drive in the city. He gets uncomfortable in terrific pits in his stomach to back the five-door hatchback out of the steeply sloping driveway onto the busy road at eight fourteen, terrified, as there’s busses and walkers and bikers and other cars going by. He would not have bought the car at all but for the weekend trips up to old-aging parents in Vermont and down to New York to visit the little sister and almost in-law, and even for that they ought to take the train anyway, for who wants to park in the boroughs, or even on Long Island, and who ever wants to drive anyway, although the car sure is shiny and red. (Red and can you believe they wanted to charge an extra fifty a month on insurance just for the color?) As advertised, the red was electromagnetically protected from dirt and roadsalts and the tamer classes of careless parallel-parkers. He’d thought long and hard about the car, about their needs, and read reviews before purchase, although it was his wife who’d decided he’d wrung his hands enough and brought them to the dealers’. Impregnable ton-o-steel red, the color. A model featuring a leather-wrapped steering wheel and American-made mold-injected laser-measured floormats. He once drove that very car by the factory that makes the mats in one of those middle western states, feeling mixed feelings for the cost, for the labor.
Jeanie, instead, is practical and prefers creature comforts and heated seats in the Winter. And dear lord is it going to be cold this morning! According to the right-swipe app on their phones, the mercury’s dropped right out the bottom glass of the thermometer, and is now pooling between treeroots and sidewalk cracks and roadsalt from the last big snow. Jeanie will press the button that’ll heat the car up in due time, and she’ll be greeted with a warm seat to carry her onward to her day, sealed in a heated bubble of metals and glass and plastics that represents, for her, one of mankind’s greatest innovations, so far as the inevitable commute is concerned.
And yet: he prefers the bus. He prefers to be seated and carried along without worry, prefers to have the option (rarely taken) of reading a book. He prefers the bounce of the backseats to the shock-balanced bounce of the driver’s, prefers to be perhaps a bit late if it means he is not responsible for the traffic, prefers to risk additional delays once he makes the train, and prefers to risk the knowing look the guard gives him at reception and the oppressive clock reflected in the elevator doors and how he must sneak by the boss’s office and avoid the eye-rolling of his teammates and the note that perhaps will be taped, though a sticky, to the top of his monitor reading, “Please come see me whenever you finally make it in.” Anything at all, but to drive.
There’s the community aspect of it, too, he reasons. So many the same mornings, the missings, and everyone huddle-hunching shoulders and jockey-knees back and forth in the little line-dance shuffle, counting in time the ten minutes between missed busses. Bus Number n: the imagined nation. An old joke he knows has lost its imperial punch. Instead he imagines kinship. A sort of relation. Relatively. Save perhaps when they’re pretty women or have particularly fine beards. Like mercury, like a fluid. And in a way everything relates; it all comes down to instincts and humanity and biology and sex, and sex, and sex. Still, you can’t be kin and —
He finds himself most days waking up just before the sounding of alarms, then hitting snooze, then snooze, then listening to Jeanie rolling over, also in the bed, and then maybe they have a cuddle a little in the middle of the king-size from their respective sides, their divided sleepdoms atop the fitted sheet that’s ever so mis-matched with the sheet on top. (There’s laundry irregularities and that mercurial stain from the liquid soap detergent and also the other night and who has time to do laundry well?) Cuddling is all, of course, only-if the cat isn’t there between them and maybe-if it’s not too hot, which it is in their house even in midwinter because the radiator’s working on overdrive, which is incidentally the name of the e-library system which Jeanie frequents on her how-is-it-so-impossibly-cheap tablet, which works very well.
Most mornings are inauspicious.
And still —
Now that it’s after the eyes
have fluttered up, the snoozing in, the
cuddling closer, the pushing off, the turning over, the sighing, and
the sighing, the closing eyes, the wrinkle feeling, groaning up, the
swinging legs, toeing floor, the aching back, walking potwards, the
pissing, the pissing, the missing of a little, the wiping up, flushing
down, washing hands, flossing ‘twixed, brushing yellows, spitting, the
greenstuff gurgling, spitting, the warming shower, calling ready, and,
Jeanine naked, “Together or?” looking at her shin, at her knee, at
thighs, in between — she turns —her rear end, the cupping ass, and her
hand slapping him away, the giggle, the looking bashful, the curtain
close, and him offing bedwards, sliding sheet-between, snoozing,
checking time, snoozing, checking bus schedules, and Oh shit, I really
am behind, and Jeanie back, showered off, smiling, the
water running
(yet!), and him dropping trousers, showering self, back naked too, and
Jeanie stocking nylons, the swinging ding-dong, the laughing, the
semi-scolding gonna be
late for work, all-smiles, the button
dress-back, the closet run, the briefing, the ballcup, the re-tucking
of junk, the shirt-drape, the tie-drape, the pants drape along bed, the
sitting down, socks pulling up, the walking closetways, sliding feet,
the choice of shoes, forefinger-thumbing shoeheels back to bed,
returning bounce-sit, arch-backed, the shoehorning of leftfoot, the
heeling in of right, and now pulling the lace, beginning to loop (will
it be bunny ears? the rabbit-through-hole? the double or triple and why
is it never the same with him and how strong are subsequent knots and
do the multiply or divide or what so far as strength?) and so
momentously, without warning:
His left lace snaps.
His left lace snaps.
All the while, Jeanie is fully clothed and walking back and forth between the kitchen and bathroom, mending eye makeup and schmearing bagels, packing lunch for herself since he’ll eat out like always (like last night, she thinks, a snort), a little bit of extra chocolate tucked into the meshpouch for her, just in case it ends up one of those afternoons. Jeanie wipes down points of interest on the table, consults the whiteboard calendar on the other wall. She plans, aches, and circles yoga for next Tuesday.
Jeanie, who is rarely if ever late.
But of his shoes! The thing is that they’re his favorites, the pair whose laces snapped. Beautiful brown fair-trade leather oxfords with the welt lightstitched to the dark-tan-dark sole of the shoe, the faux-wood heel epoxied to the rubber-top-piece-meets-the-road, with, of course, a brogued toe-cap (echoing a half-claimed Irish descent on his wife’s father’s side), and he tries to wear them every Friday since they go well with the dark jeans Jeanie picked out for him the last time he’d been with her to the mall. He polishes these brown shoes regularly and with care, always rushing the heel polish but lovingly tucking the horsehair bristles of the brush into each individual divot and dot of the leather brogue.
And the snapped lace? Well, that’ll be the last fuckin’ time he buys replacements from Walgreens, is what that’ll be. Perhaps he’ll just have to order a new pair from the Internet. But he then thinks of the shipping costs – both dollar and environmental – and what does that do to the world, what does that say about him and his class and society and the larger economic condition? But then also how much does it really cost to ship x pounds (though they must only be ounces) from a warehouse in Kansas City or Irontown or Albuquerque if the plane or truck or bus is going anyway? Between there and here, but only a letter. There’s logistics, though, and perhaps electrical current costs (electricity powered by coal) for the tapping and tracking and paystubs for the people who must wear back-braces (further cost!) sweating in the big shipment warehouses dotted here and there across the map he keeps tenuously and likely inaccurately in his head. He wonders: are they happy, the sweaters? Is it the kind of masculine (or feminine, he supposes,) feeling one has when once works with the body, with the hands? With the totality of human force? But moving boxes is not building train tracks and is this thought too not merely an affectation? Hard to rationalize that romanticization given the exposé published last-last fall on one of the Big Ones, on those conditions. But perhaps he would prefer to work with his hands. But perhaps this is guilt and nostalgia and ––
But here he ought to be trying to get to work. Get to work at his desk in the comfortable faux-leather chair (which matches, conveniently, his shoes) at the desk that buttons up or buttons down to stand or sit or change his ever-ergonomically questionable wrist-angles at the keyboard, but he is instead thinking about ping-ponging around the United States in a box the side of Jeanie’s hand when it’s around his—ah, but he fondly remembers Pong.
He then thinks he may swing by a store that sells suitable replacements on his lunch break or on his way home, but the particular store that sold him this particular pair of shoes is no longer, or at least no longer at that location, and who could be bothered to look up where there’s another one, with the store-locator on their website looking so gawdamnawful on a mobile phone? And how can he get to work with a shoe missing its lace?
He begins to check the site just to see, begins to check up on train schedules and delays and comments on those delays and gets lost, loses time, but stops himself shorter than it could have gone and so back to the closet.
He opens the doors both wide and looks down at the two neat rows of Jeanie’s shoes and at the haphazard box of his. He could always go with the black oxford pair, but there’s no brogueing and it’s a casual Friday and he has already put on his dark blue jeans. They just don’t look as good with black shoes as they do with the brown ones. Jeanie says so. Black and blue. A vetoed color scheme for their wedding, and also the name of the last album he can remember buying on cassette tape: I’ll show you the shape of my —
Chuck Taylors are out because though it’s casual, he’s a manager, and some things simply won’t do at the office, although he loves the street-smeared green, once bright and primary, now delectably dull and careworn, and the laces too are more puddle-gray than blinding white; the canvas, once stiff, now pliable and the sole bendable and when he was a would-be-punk-rock teenager he’d sharpie the missing places where the black elastic piece ringing the shoebottom ought to have been, but he is older and feels he ought to dress better to fit the part.
Running shoes present a similar problem in terms of taste, and are suspiciously new-looking (as they are, by and large, unused). Jeanie’s tried him with yoga and with running and it never takes with him, but he knows it makes her butt look so damn good and those yoga pants of hers and he could probably lose his little but growing beer and takeout gut if only he tried and he wonders why she still wants him sweaty and getting fat on top of her all the time. (She says it’s ‘cause he gives good head and has a handsome face with eyebrows that are simply to die for down there.)
He could always wear his snow boots, but against only the half-inch of slush-ice left over from the weekend, it would be embarrassing, and they ride too high above his creaky and unreliable ankles and will be far too hot once he arrives at the office. But perhaps he could bring an extra pair of socks, could change them over at lunch…?
But at the bottom of the barrel, the Container Store box: what-have-we-now this could work!
Tucked under a pair of too-big Keens from an attempt at hiking and the detached-thong Caribbean-flag flip flops from a holiday last summer and (perilously) under a tin of black shoe polish that really should not be there, he’s found his uncle’s post-funeral closet-clean get-rid-of-things-in-grieving hand-me-down leather Red Wings, and wouldn’t you know they’re brown (to boot)!
Yes, he can feel the weight of their wisdom as he dangle-carries them by the electric blue laces away from the closet and down the hall and onto the kitchen mudrug to pull the more respectable (or at least congruent) workboot yellow-brown laces from the pair for snow. Ah, but if only he could pull off the blue laces. He’s too serious for a splash of color, even if he doesn’t think himself serious, though isn’t style pretty relative all the same to begin with? But, relatively speaking, he would rather not have to compete with the electric green laces that the new Creative Director prefers to wear. Why they ever thought it would be good to hire someone in from Advertising—
He heads back towards the edge of the bed to re-lace the boots.
Jeanie, instead, comes out of the bathroom post final make-up and touch-up and sees him waddling back to the bedroom in greysocked feet swinging the boots by their laces and shouts after him, “Aren’t you going to be late for work?”
“I love you,” the reply.
Closed-eyes and high-eyebrows, Jeanie shakes her head and breathes in deep her Ujjayi breath (today’s “practice,” as there’s no other time and an inconvenient class schedule at their gym on Fridays) and she pulls her coat on off the back of a kitchen chair and checks again the coat pocket for her keys.
An extrashouted goodbye for love, a pick up this and that in the store on your way home, please, a don’t forget to leave water for the cat, a loveyoubye, and she’s off, down the steps, out the backdoor, bag and purse in the passenger seat, then around the nose of the car and into the pre-heated front seat, down the so-called-by-husband treacherous drive (however treacherous) and she’s off to the races again.
Jonathan Gold has now taken the laces out of the old brown boots and just now realizes he doesn’t remember which way they had been laced before, and as a somewhat younger man in college he’d had lots of ideas about how a shoe or a boot should be laced, and as slightly older (and perhaps: adult) man he can’t think of what those ideas had been.
Ought he go under-out or over-under, after beginning the lace (obviously) with the toe-laces over-in, over-in? Ought he consult a proper work boot, so as to match the laces to their expected style? Is there much form to the lacing of a boot, much meaning in its arrangement? Should he go and look up a catalogue of flowers and their meaning, derive his pattern from poppies for pleasure, violets for faith? Ought he go after work to buy a dozen and one roses for his love?
Over-under, over-under it is. He laces the first boot without much fanfare, aside from fighting the cat for the lace-tips and shooing her away and then again shooing her away and then getting up to close the door because he is really late now and he didn’t mean to, he didn’t really. But it is halfway up the other boot, the left boot, that he begins to be unsure: he has laced them both left-right from the toe, each left-up-to-right slash of the X per quadrant of metal eyelets coming over the right-up-to-left slash, and should they be opposite-facing? He thinks, perhaps, they should. But as he untangles and unthreads his work so far he wonders if this isn’t the right way to do it for the left boot so that, when reversed, when he’s being looked at by an outside observer and planted firmly in their gaze, it appears his bootlaces spring out from the inside of his legspace?
Or is it perhaps more secure to have it going in from the outside of his foot?
Was this the reason his other shoelace snapped?
There must be a right way to do it.
There must be a single, best way.
He consults his phone. He googles the best way to lace a boot. He consults the Art of Manliness. He consults the Times. He checks again for train warnings on Twitter. He falls down a hole. The cat mews and headbutts the other side of the door. He’s really in it now: reading about Syria, about vegan cupcakes, thumbing photosets of frozen lakes. He thinks for a half second if he’s got time to look at porn, but stops, thumbs down to scroll up to reveal the bars and the carrier and the time and the battery and good god look at the time!
He hastily laces up crossing right-left and left-right without pattern and he tells his phone to remind him at ten fifteen — after the morning meeting, after his coffee, after the shit that necessarily comes after his coffee, after he gets back to his desk, after he sees the note about a sale from last week and goes and sees his boss, after he is sighed away, after everyone else will have settled down into their work and so he’d finally have a moment to sit — to remember to re-lace his boots, and he opens the door and almost kicks the cat and grabs his coat and pockets his keys and finds his backpack and hammers the steps (and back up to check the lock) and comes around the corner wall of his drive—
And of course, he has again missed his bus.
Daniel Elfanbaum