As Steve jogs around the room he grabs glances of the daddy of love. The TV host is asking Barry White the secret of his success as a recording artist. Steve sees Barry really think about this. Barry wants to give the true answer—a legend has a responsibility to history—and this legend does speak the truth, if his body language is any proof, and Barry’s body does not to need to utter many words to sound big. After a long, serious silence he looks the host straight in the eye and gives a three-word answer, pausing between each word to let it really sink in.
         “Music,” says Barry in that deep, deep voice. Pause.
         “Lyrics,” says Barry. Pause.
         And finally:
         “Groove,” says Barry. After the longest pause of all.
         The pregnant pauses give Steve the opportunity to see, not just hear, Barry’s articulation and delivery of each of the three words. The space he’s moving in is not exactly a running track, even though it includes the galley kitchen and island counter. By the time Steve circles the counter and gets back to passing the TV, Barry makes his next booming pronouncement in the verbal triptych. His timing of “Music … Lyrics … Groove” fits right into Steve’s jogging rhythm. Each booming word becomes the keyword for a lap.
         Long after Barry leaves the screen, Steve is still jogging around the front part of his condo, and, in his head, hearing Barry sonorously call out each word. At first it’s like a loudspeaker in a stadium; then it’s just part of the routine, a mantra, no longer Barry’s voice but Steve’s. A quiet inner voice, an echo settling down to a murmur carried on the breath.
         But the longer he jogs one thing is clear. One of the three words is even bigger than the others. Says it all, in fact:
         Groove.
         Steve really gets inside that word. As the clock ticks on and the sweat starts to dampen his tee shirt, it’s the only word of the three he hears. Groove … Groove … Groove.
         Today, Sunday, Steve’s groove is jogging around the inside of the living room/kitchen combo. He doesn’t want to jog in the street. He doesn’t want a course that stretches over hill and dale, with vistas far as the eye can see. He wants the eye to hit a wall and bounce right back into his head, where the word groove is pulling him around the entertainment center, the bookcase, the kitchen counter, pulling him as though he were the needle on an old vinyl Barry White record, locked in the track of Barry’s song.
         Before Steve knows it, it’s the top of the hour. A Sprint commercial. Then Dell. Then Jeep. They bore him, but something in the back of his head automatically guesses what each cost to make. Then some talking head comes on and starts babbling about the price of natural gas. Steve pivots on the sole of his left sneaker, makes a neat angle around the stereo and lifts the remote off a shelf. In no time flat he’s approaching the TV again. He aims the remote at the face of the talking head and fires. The TV fades to black and oblivion, and Steve picks up the pace. He’s jogging so fast in so small a space it’s almost as though he’s not moving—he’s fixed in an orbit forever, like a planet. This is the true meaning of groove, Steve thinks. And I’m there.
         What’s a dinner hour? Steve hardly notes its passing. And why should he? Planets don’t need food, don’t need Chefs on Wheels buzzing the bell. They’re fed from within, from fires burning deep down at the core. Steve tears around the condo like a comet, feeling lighter and brighter with each step. He thanks the lucky stars above that he’s on the bottom floor of the building. No broom banging on the floor knocking him out of orbit, out of the groove. Above him are fifty one floors; fifty two in all, a condo deck of cards. Each one is a story and each one has a story. But right now Steve doesn’t care. It’s dawning on him, as the night turns from black to gray and the laps cease to be laps and become pure centrifugal force, that of all the six billion people on earth, he may be the only one swooping around his living room/kitchen combo at this hour, at any hour ever, like a fiery star. In terms of sheer distance traveled he could be notching more miles than a marathoner; and at a recordbreaking pace. At Steve’s age, that’s no small feat. In cosmic terms, it could be the greatest accomplishment of his life. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, does the tree really fall?
         Next day, Steve’s on the plane, Philly to Denver, with his watch. He can’t believe it; they really did give him a Rolex watch. Steve feels like a living, breathing Fortune Magazine cartoon. They gave him a Rolex Oyster with a platinum band, along with a golden parachute that would, among other things, cover his ills and woes for the three years until Medicare kicks in. What’s more, they threw in four paid weeks so he could fly hither and yon, say goodbye to his accounts and paternally pass the baton to his successor, no less a suit than Steve but a four-button one.
         Thinking of the days left, Steve fixates on a metaphor. Bath water swirling out of the tub—how you hardly notice a trickle when the tub is full, how fast it goes at the end. Steve is a shower guy, but the tub sticks in his head like a brain bruise.
         He’s buckled in the aisle seat at the bulkhead, accepting pretzels and headphones. But he declines the offer of steak or chicken, preferring to sip water, pop a caffeine pill (Steve will drink no airplane coffee) and partake of the gleaming Oyster. A shaft of high-altitude sun from the window seat bounces off the round face so hard and sharp it’s like a knife to the eyeballs. He blinks, squints, shields his eyes with the inflight shopping mag and finally locates the month, day and year. He used to hate the office shitheads dissing him for being on the Back Nine, but now it’s all down to days, the last putt of the Back Nine, with four Big Berthas on the seventeenth teeing off and itching to rain golf balls on your head. Steve stares at his Oyster and contemplates living life watching the cnbc stock ticker. Taking breaks to queue up for proCardia at Walgreens. He feels like he’s spent thirty years in a seat belt, husband of the road and the sky. Actually he turned sixty and married the Marriott—not only his destination in Denver and other points west but also the owner/manager of his condo. Same furniture as in the hotels, but the upgraded stuff only. As in Club Marriott, suite class.
         Steve has been doing commercials too long, babying the writers and art directors and babysitting the clients. He wants his Oyster to be a food of love, to roll back time and give him another shot at Barry’s Groove.
         Last night with Barry’s booming words, and with his sneakers streaking like jet engines around the suite-class carpeting of the Marriott-owned condo, Steve was a fiery planet. Today, five miles high in mahogany Cole Haan slip-ons it’s weep weep and he’s the monk of advertising. Not straight, not gay, just not. Life as a thirty-year business trip. Nose candy in the Winnebago when the crew breaks the set—(Snuffling and snorting the white stuff for what? It burned his cilia and made his old teeth ache). Those wipe-my-ass media luncheons on the Forbes Yacht. Holiday cards from Christie Hefner. And to think: he did it for the miles.
         There was a would-be wife once, but not the kind he would take to The Effies. He left her in coach to go sit up in first.
         Steve needs a microcosm, a metaphor, a place where he can win. On this winged shuttlebus there’s only one such place, but the sign says occupied. He stands up and waits beside a beverage cart in the cramped galley area, fiddling with his Oyster, pulling it off and on his wrist. He imagines all hell going on behind the folding door; a simple, stand-up, salesman’s whizz would surely never take this long. Finally the panels rattle, the mom and toddler squeeze out and Steve barges in, not even stopping to put his watch back on, smack into the cloud of baby powder they left behind them.
         Steve has only two hands, and one of them has to slide the lock while the other waits in idle mode with the watch, dangling it between thumb and forefinger. But then he gets that ribcage flutter, that left-arm sizzle that tells him Medicare had better hurry up, and the thumb and forefinger snap open like a shark mouth, releasing the Oyster to gravity, to the innards of the aeronautic toilet bowl. On this particular model, the removal mechanism is a trap door; an automatic whoosh-flush at the merest hint of contact. The Oyster plunges in, hits the flap and is swept away. Like a drowning, it all happens in a split second. Steve hunches over and peers into the dark empty well, the thunderous sucking sound still in his ears.
         He knows the drill. This is no Timex here. He alerts the flight attendant, who alerts the pilot, who alerts the United gate in Denver. The plane lands. A courtesy rep meets Steve in the jetway and makes sympathetic eye contact—we understand your loss. Meanwhile out on the roaring tarmac some poor gaffer in a slicker and long rubber gloves sticks his arm past the elbow into the fecal buckets. He fishes the first two buckets: no luck. Third try, bingo, he comes up with the Oyster, rusted brown and half-eaten by the shitkilling chemicals.
         Steve’s an account guy; he knows how to fake pleasure. He takes the watch, wrapped in plastic like medical waste, and dukes the gaffer a twenty. Once the rubber glove comes off, he shakes the guy’s hand and palms him a tenspot for good measure. At the first recycling bin he stops and unloads the whole business. He hears it clank into the Pepsi cans.
         After all this dicking around at the gate he’s the last one down to the baggage carousel. Only the stragglers are left, the lost-baggage folk and the ones who checked pool cues and ten foot fishing poles. Steve scans the moving belt for his Tumi two-suit wheelie (a monogrammed spiffo from the reps at Money Magazine). He draws a bead on it just as it makes a U-turn around the mom with the tyke, the one who poofed up the toilet with baby powder. Her eyes do something, a little dance of dread, that makes him let the bag go by for another round. She has the Patagonia sexy-woodsy look, but the way she’s flicking those deer-in-the-headlight eyes it seems that no amount of Gore-tex and Thinsulate can protect her now. It’s beyond a baggage problem, Steve surmises, because she’s eyeing the entrance/exit to the bus and taxi stand much more wildly than the wobbling belt.
         Something about the endlessly revolving track and the cavernous emptiness of the place does something to Steve and the mom—to the space between them. He can feel the change in the air molecules. They’re so alone they’re suddenly together. And when their eyes meet from a good forty feet away, it feels as close, to him it does, as when they traded embarrassed smiles squeezing by each other at the threshold of the airplane john. What the hell, she’s at that age when she could be his daughter, but in L.A. she could also be his wife. Like an eagle—or a vulture—he hones in on the left hand, the one securing the kid at her hip. No ring. Steve finds himself squinting like Clint Eastwood. His shoulders feel bigger, and he takes that first long stride in his Cole Haans, the one that sends the signal he’s moving her way.
         He manages just three giant steps before the boyfriend, husband, whatever, emerges from behind a thick pillar way off to the side, rushes in like a blitzing left tackle and scoops up mom and offspring together in his ham arms. Steve adjusts course as best as he can, trying to make it look as if his forthright advance was only made out of desire to reconnect with his luggage. He chases the Tumi down the belt and yanks it, just as the happy couple begin their long, hungry mouth-to-mouth. Steve trots away with the wheelie behind him, morphing from Clint Eastwood to rickshaw puller in twenty seconds.
         At the Denver Marriott he’s up in a deluxe room on the vip floor—one of the travel bennies that came with purchasing the condo. He skips dinner for now—why rush a nothing night? Room service comes till midnight. Besides, there’ll be vip complimentary continental breakfast in the a.m. Energy enough for what he has to do: go see the client and do a backslapping farewell, take his game from the Back Nine to the Back Door.
         So Steve pulls open his complimentary USA Today and finds a story he reads seven times. It’s about some man arrested for snapping the necks of four pet birds—one parrot, one parakeet and two lovebirds. He did it during a war over a parking space with a fellow tenant in his apartment building. The accused pushed into the guy’s unit and went berserk, getting crazier with each bird. The parakeet came last and fared the worst: head torn off completely. Crazy man shoved it in the neighbor’s face, stabbing his eye with the beak, then he ran downstairs to the lot and heaved a cinder block through his windshield.
         Steve puts the paper down because he remembers something. He goes into the beige, gleaming all-marble bathroom, takes out his toothbrush and wads up a piece of Kleenex, rolling it in his fingers until it’s a hard little white ball. Then he sits on the bathroom rug, adjusting his position until he finds the angle where the vertical surfaces of the bathroom, the walls, the glass door of the shower and the sides of the tub all meet in such a way that he feels he’s sitting inside a miniature baseball park. He scooches up his haunches and turns the rug so it’s pointing like an infield diamond towards a corner formed by the tub and the longest stretch of marbled wall. This he deems center field, so when Steve sits down again his hand holding the toothbrush is at home plate and his hand, the left one holding the hard white Kleenex ball, is on the mound.
         He cocks the fingers of his left hand. He makes them rear back in a kind of windup, then uncorks and fires the little white ball, fast as he can. With the right hand he swings the toothbrush—crack—the pellet arcs deep and careens off the side of the tub, about an inch from the top. He retrieves it, throws again, swings and misses. Again and foul-tips into the rug. Next pitch he sends to the moon—over the side of the tub and out of sight. Steve licks his lips. He keeps pitching and hitting. He’s everything in this park; pitcher, batter, ump, manager, bullpen staff and thousands of screaming fans. He hasn’t done this for fifty-four years. And he knows, he knows—the hand/eye thing is working, connecting, he hasn’t lost a fraction of a fraction. He’s fast as ever. Steve feels if a mosquito flew in and divebombed him he could take it out with one swing of the toothbrush, crack, just like it was a Kleenex knuckleball fluttering from one hand to the other.

PAUL SILVERMAN has worked as a sandwich maker, olive packer, reporter and advertising creative director. One of his commercials won a Silver Lion at Cannes. His stories have appeared in South Dakota Review, North Atlantic Review, The Adirondack Review, Byline, Timber Creek Review, Happy, Front Range Review, Branches Quarterly.com and a number of other literary publications both online and in print. He is married, with one daughter, and lives north of Boston in the seaport town of Manchester, on Cape Ann.