Wherewithal | by Paul Walter Hauser

“Wherewithal,” she said, spinning her cocktail and body in fantasmic rotation.

She was too cool for Brent, but it was the first time he actually believed it. Brent was curious as to what she meant by that word, but wasn’t about to ask her. The nonchalance of her fashionista spin was enough to stop him from ever approaching her again.

Some toys are too high on the shelf, but if the price was right, Brent imagined his arms could stretch. The problem with his metaphoric to literal to metaphoric nonchalance is that it lacked the grace and truth of the cocktail wielding woman of certain death to all esteem. She was a blaze. Brent simply held a gas can and matches.

In lieu of recent developments, Brent thought he was on fire. The apartment on Fort Everglade with the floor to ceiling windows, made possible by the attaining of a position created from Brent’s workplace contributions, made possible by Brent’s hours upon weeks upon hours helping women move furniture into their apartments or listening to colleagues emote imaginary infidelities over mini bottles, hiding like Easter eggs in cubicles.

“Man” and “machine” were blurring as Brent felt his veins pump with a certainty he had only implied possible if he did A through Z. He was a “liquid courage sans the bad language” Brent. It was the “hold the door open without looking” Brent. The “we’re Brent’s parents, and while we once worried about him constantly, we’re starting to think he’s a real adult, now” Brent.

What, in the name of Brent, is the ultimate? For Brent’s assertion of an “ultimate” began proving a consistent penultimate that was lost on Brent but clear to everyone else. His peak would only suggest further peaks. Those that seek may find, but that did not mean “the seek” was a thing of the past. Brent did not know of a lifestyle coupled with contentment. In the busy-bodied workforce, it was mandatory that you were acing the tests and moving on to the next one. There was time for celebration, but you were celebrating the forward motion rather than the stance and status you had achieved.

Stock was taken of Brent’s assets – his physicality – his name drop value for those in earshot. Despite the impressive resume emanating from his spray fragrance and money clip, Brent did not have everything. He slept alone. He showered alone. He jerked off alone. He went to dinner alone. He went to the movies alone. He went home for Thanksgiving alone.

A pair of heels met Brent’s eyes. They did not exude fashion and sexuality and power as much as they did confidence and a level of unconscious projection that Brent knew he had not conquered. His gaze rose up her fawn-like legs, so purely white and elegant, grazing each other as the woman’s lower half would shift upon laughter or a performance-based reaction. Her dress was an awning for that heart-arousing, statuesque stem of self-transportation. Brent felt himself carry away and adrift from the visual throbbing of her tucked and tightened frame, hugged in the vintage navy blue frock. Her posture had the intimidation of a military fleet all exiting a seaside base at the same time – a do or die arrogance, flaunted too recklessly for one to detest it. Her shoulder blades stuck out like wings. Her face wasn’t bad either.

The gravitating beauty seemed more endangered animal, alien creature, or never-before-seen oddity than woman. The truth was that she was a woman, one with the consciousness to ward off the ill equipped and undesirable by way of wearing her thoughts and standards. Let the idiosyncratic deafen the ears and minds of men that think too much to begin with. She could have been wrangled by an equal. The man that walks into the party like he sent the invitations, but leaves to hit a hot dog stand and go buy shots for the local yokel in the cave saloons. Cowboy with a jawline. Poet with a fuse. A counterpoint that doesn’t speaking in counterpoints or comparison. He simply is.

Brent smiled. He slid his straw from the ice cube pool in his glass. He tossed it and sucked the last of his 18 year Glenlivet. Doing his best “leading man/villain”, he set the glass on someone else’s table and made the long, short stride into the unknown he would never get into.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Brent bolted, more eager than expected. The string-pulled nature of the line felt uninspired. Worse yet, it was an open bar.

“It’d be a cheap date” she deadpanned.

“Oh, I didn’t know this was a date” he replied. His youthful giddy had made its way to the surface, and the “she” now felt more babysitter than Brent-prospect.

“Who are you here with?” she inquired, all deliberate and intent on an honest answer.

“I’m here with everyone,” Brent said. He posed his right elbow on a table and felt it’s sturdiness loosen. He recalibrated and attempted her graceful poise.

“Well, don’t let me take you away from everyone,” she smiled, turned her eyes and ears toward a conversation’s climax, mid story. She absorbed the words of the others, not to appear as one of them, but to place the frame of reference from their references.

Brent’s neck grew warm. He grabbed for a drink that wasn’t there, and played it off carelessly. But for all the nervous, back-to-the-wall reactions, there was no audience. He had already lost her, maybe before he spoke.

“So what is it?!” Brent blurted, forging steps and emotions ahead of where they had stood. This rapt and squeezed the woman’s attention, eyeing Brent’s body and attire now. Brent mistook that for getting “checked out”. She had checked out long ago, and begun to worry about Brent, sharing a glance of concern over intrigue.

“What’s what?” she shuddered.

“Err, what’s the deal? What do your friends here have that I don’t have?” he calmed. But the calm was in Brent’s body, not his line of questioning. And when he didn’t receive an answer beyond a facial expression, Brent tried to elevate his spirits without coming off angry, or insecure, or insane, or any number of things he was beginning to see in himself.

“What’s HE got that I don’t got?” Brent muttered, as if drunker than he was. He sloshed from an abandoned cocktail and made a face at its mystery flavor.

“Wherewithal” she said, spinning her cocktail and body in fantasmic rotation.

For all Brent had lost, he gained a cunning perspective of “us v.s. them” and what it meant to have your foot upon a totem or chain or ladder. He would start tomorrow with a new workout regimen, a new breakfast, the purchase of a new pair of shoes, and probably a fresh trim and a shave. This would renew his inward and outward. A start to the next step, because who wanted to be where he just was?

The problem with belief in restructuring oneself for the benefit of others, and the memorized mantras that lead waywards to eyelines, was that it was unnatural. The woman that dealt with Brent would always be more interested in a flawed man that never knew acceptance speeches, but did know himself. She sought “the real”, and a man with the wherewithal to know the difference.

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Next time on The Hindsight Bridge: Brooke Pieschke continues what she started in “Cheap Shots” and “Ditch Pig” (see the THB achieves). In her usual David-Sedaris-like tone, Brooke, again, relives bad decisions made with good friends. Revisit THB on June 25^th for Brooke Pieschke’s “Trunk Space.”