The Best of Loose Change: Volume 4, Issue 1

“Mm-hmm.”

Boyd stares fondly at his gleaming equipment. Since Jane died he’d lived like any bachelor: 200 thread-count sheets, scratched Teflon pans, tilting bookshelves put together with screws. With the move, it felt nice to pay attention to color schemes and place settings, like opening a new part of himself, a part Boyd assumed most single, straight men never explored.

“Laying it on a little thick, aren’t ya?” Merritt asks, gesturing toward the entrance of Boyd’s bedroom, which is separated from the main room by heavy drapes tied with thickly braided rope. At night Boyd draws the drapes, feeling like Lord Byron, or The Continental.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, and then he shows Merritt the gilt edges of his antique mirror, meets her eyes in it.

Tell her now! says the voice of his poetic sensibility, crotchety usually, but which occasionally assumes the authority of Indiana Jones. Now! As if the job were to swing from a vine across a gaping chasm.

Merritt checks her teeth in the mirror. “Okay, forget it,” she says. “But I mean it about the womb. I can’t see you getting laid here, Boyd. I can see you getting PMS.” Maybe it’s the brick walls, Boyd thinks, the red streaked with darker red, or the messy abstract he’s centered over the couch; the splotches of thickly layered paint might come across fleshy, striated.

Boyd retreats to pour drinks. “Tell you what,” he calls from the bar. “I’ll buy a bunch of Washington monument paper weights. And a model train set. To counter the feminine imagery.”

“Or just get a real girlfriend.”

“A what?” Boyd hands Merritt her glass, then scratches his head in exaggerated confusion.

Merritt rolls her eyes.

There is a chance she knows about Charlie’s affair already. At the high school where she and Boyd teach, she has taken to spending off-periods alone, head on her desk. She reads self-help chapters aloud to her Earth Science classes. The substitutes suspect she’s the one stealing all the desserts from the faculty fridge.

Away from school, Merritt and Charlie share a ranch house in the Hills that is so unnecessarily big, according to her, that the hallways actually stretch when you walk down them, like in Poltergeist.

Merritt arranges the National Geographics on Boyd’s coffee table in an unimaginative stack, centering her sweating glass on the top. The Unbeatable Body, reads the topmost cover.

What are its limits?

“Probably I’m the one who needs a housewarming, not you,” Merritt says. “Or a house-thawing. I still consider me and Charlie a hot couple, but then I remember the second "16