The Shape of You
In our year of iPhone 16, Vinny feels his phone pulsing in the back pocket of his shorts the second he squats in front of his golf ball and examines the green. He knows of the green’s subtle deception, how it appears as a simple straight shot. It won’t fool him this time. Above, heavy clouds hang still in the sunset like fiery leviathans. He shrugs the pressure off his delicate shoulders and raises his hat to wipe the sweat from his hollow haggard face. There’s time for another workout if he finishes quickly, if he ignores the constant throb of pain in his muscles.
It’s his father who’s calling him. He stands and places his putter behind the ball when his phone stops. From a distance, maybe all the way back at the tee box, his spindly limbs are another set of golf clubs sticking out of his shorts and shirt. He is a scarecrow on the golf course. His shadow slants and stretches behind him, almost reaching the sand-trap, expanding twice his height, a long insect flattened by one of the clouds. Yes, he will stop at the gym before it closes.
The hole of the green peers back at him. His putter taps the ball so lightly he barely feels the shot. He follows the ball’s slow arc toward the hole. His phone vibrates again. The ball lands in the hole with a satisfying clatter.
At the gym, Vinny flexes his triceps in the mirror and takes a picture of himself with his phone. He zooms in on his arms and shoulders, deletes the photo, and takes another one flexing harder. Studying the image, he concludes he feels nothing like forty, and he looks younger than thirty, as if he’s reversed ageing. His face hides behind the phone in his hands. He opens an app and uploads the image to a post and types about his third visit to the gym. Earlier, he posted a picture of the sunset on the golf course. He refreshes to check the likes and finds his father has commented on the sunset.
Beautifall sunset! Lets get out there soon. Love you son.
It’s the only comment on the post. Embarrassed, Vinny scrolls and skims down the unending main thread of media. Pictures pop up with every scroll. Videos play and replay without his consent. Continuous loops of men and women demonstrate proper form, offer workout tips, share advice on health and fitness. They speak casually and confidently, and they treat their followers like friends, it’s all about feeling good and being active, it’s about connection, community, goals, the best version of you. They are exquisite and profound, their bodies sculpted to perfect beauty. Beautiful, impossibly beautiful.
Vinny works as a trainer for the gym, too, but his supervisor has “noticed things” about him that were “concerning” to her. She suggested he take some time off, with pay, while she covered his classes and personal sessions. Time off from anything fills Vinny with dread. He struggles to sit still. He fails to loosen up and let go. He can’t just do nothing. It feels so blank to him.
After a while of scrolling, his mind, so filled with tips on exercise and reels of perfection, aches and swells, his thoughts weighted down with a fresh new bulk of content. He places a dumbbell behind his neck and raises the weight over his head twelve times. After two sets, his muscles burn so much he can barely move his arms. It feels good to him. He looks better now. Before leaving the gym, he takes another picture in the mirror, applies a filter, and uploads a new photo.
He finds two new text messages when he steps out of the shower and taps his phone.
His brother Dominic: I don’t know how much longer I can take this.
His mother: What do you think about Dominic moving in with you for a bit?
He starts a reply, but then closes his phone and looks to the mirror. Steam covers the glass, dampens the counter. He can’t see his image until he wipes his hand across the mirror and erases the murk. Only his bare torso appears, floating in a clear space, his head and legs still hidden beneath the mist. He examines with his fingers, pinching flabs of clean skin, turning one way, sucking in his stomach. The steam recovers and fills the empty space in the glass. He finally steps out of the bathroom when he can no longer see himself.
As he dresses in the cold air of his bedroom, he thinks of Lindsey.
Vinny’s life took on a new shape in the middle of the covid lockdown four years ago. He was going through the storage room of the basement when he found an old bench press he had taken from his parents’ house some years ago after he had moved in with Lindsey. After cleaning off the dust and buying a set of weights, he was soon pumping iron over his chest, curling the barbell in front of a mirror. A workout in the basement was a resurrection from the lockdown. Exercise filled his day and set goals. It saved him from all the fear, all the updates of more death, it delivered him from the repetitive isolation he shared with Lindsey.
Lindsey valued time and things for herself. A person couldn’t live if they had nothing to call their own. Ever since they met, parts of her day had been separated from him and set aside strictly for herself. Most of her mornings were spent reading a book in candlelight. Any errand led to some of kind wandering through town—he rarely tagged along with her. She took long walks and left him alone in the house looking out windows and hoping to find her silhouette in the dusk of evening. He respected her alone-time, he knew what it had meant to her, but he became so tangled in his lonely envy that he had grown suspicious.
Where did she go? Why did she have to go out by herself all the time? What was she doing? Was she with someone else? Was it him—did he embarrass her? He would stand in front of a mirror and lean close to the glass as if he might find the answer somewhere in the imperfections of his image—blemishes on his chin, the undefined muscles, the lack of independence in his eyes. What was it? Unable to sit still, unable to free his thoughts of Lindsey, he found himself on the bench press in the basement, pushing a barbell up and down in a violent steam, pushing Lindsey farther away from him.
Despite the growing gulf between them, they remained together in the house for another year—side by side in the bathroom, facing each other across the dinner table—carrying out roles in some strange act of sexless, loveless cohabiting. They might’ve made it to marriage, they might’ve conceived a child, but Vinny began skipping meals and losing weight, and anytime Lindsey said he needed help, he’d retreat to the basement or the gym.
It has been three years since they broke up. Sometimes, when he is dressing in front of the mirror, he pauses and closes his eyes. His image appears out of the black nothing of his head. He sees his form, what he likes to call the shape of you. It burns like a gray beacon through the deep night behind his shut eyes. This shape of light nears his eyes and fills him, pouring through the inner spaces of hunger, and he can’t open his eyes, he can’t face the real shape in the mirror.
The last of the day cuts across the bottom of the black sky like a smeared strip of lipstick. Vinny sits in the car and imagines the lips of the light caressing the shaved, showered skin of his face, the hands of the light touching the ridges of his shoulders. It fills him enough to forget about dinner again. His breath quickens and his blood rushes down his empty stomach in a roused heat. In the mirror, his dark sweptback head shines with gel. He wears a fresh pair of jeans and a brilliant white V-neck. Silver watch, silver necklace, silver crucifix. Almost perfect, he thinks, almost complete.
He gets out of the car and walks through the parking lot. His reflection appears in car windows as he approaches the front door. A quick glimpse of Vinny might fool you. His arms and legs show off solid, defined carves of muscle. He keeps a gait of grace in his walk, stepping and moving with supreme agility, athletically sound, in good condition. The alacrity on his thin face never subsides. There is a booming liveliness in his eyes, there is a triggered expectancy in his voice. Everything inside of him seems loaded and ready to pull the trigger on what’s in front of his face.
A solid crowd fills the strip club for a Tuesday night, but the men sit still and calm, subdued in the soft strawberry glow of the lights. The slow deep throb of music sets everyone in a hushed daze. On stage, a woman gently swings around the pole, then fully stretches her legs and arms out on both sides, hanging motionless, red hair touching the floor. He can feel the brush of her hair on his face and smell the fruit of her shampoo. It smells of strawberry. All the light in the room comes from her hair. She looks so unreal, so perfect, to him he stops, unmoving and speechless, and waits for her to move again when the song ends. In the far back, dancers sway and grind over customers sitting in the dark edges beyond the glow. After she leaves the stage, he orders a drink at the bar and finds an empty seat and looks for her.
It has been a long time since Vinny has had any intimate contact. He lost a part of himself after Lindsey. They spent years together, college and most of their twenties, and they had spoken of marriage and children, and he had envisioned their future selves going to soccer games and packing lunches for school, cleaning up after dinner, a little television before bed. It had been such a plain and dull dream, nothing extraordinary, but he respected the simplicity of it, he looked forward to a future of routine and certainty, comforted by the fate of everyday things among him and his family.
This is not the future he expected. Sitting in the chair, waiting for the red haired girl, he feels as if someone else has put on his clothes for him and dragged him here to this cool strange dark. Woman pass and offer a dance, another drink. He replies with a tight smile, a flimsy hand. One of them doesn’t know what this means. Her nails tap his arm, a kind of motherly touch. She tells him she’s around, and if there’s anything he needs, anything at all, just flag her down, honey.
“Where’s little Mike?” Michael, his father, looks around the dinner table, then turns to his brother Dominic. “Where’s Ava?”
“We’re…” Dominic starts, but shakes his head and laughs. He has repeated too many times about he and Ava splitting up. None of them use the word divorce. “They couldn’t come tonight, Dad.”
“Why not?”
“Eat your steak,” his mother Claire says as if his father is a little boy.
His father forgets how to use a knife. He digs the side of his fork into the great hunk of steak, stabbing and struggling. He forgets to shave and turn off the stove, he forgets he puts the toothpaste and shampoo in the refrigerator. The time of day eludes him so much he leaves voicemails at three and four at night about planning a golf trip with his brother Dominic. He forgets Dominic is in the middle of a divorce. He forgets his car keys are hidden because of all the times he has left the house and wandered off, gone missing in the car, then on his feet. Sometimes, he forgets Vinny’s name, forgets he is his eldest son, his firstborn, the one who takes him golfing.
Vinny pretends not to notice when his mother leans over, fork and knife in hands, and tries to cut the meat on his father’s plate. Dominic shovels a heap of mashed potatoes toward his face. The sloppy slap of the food in his brother’s working mouth makes Vinny sick. He has taken small bites here and there, but his food is mostly untouched. He can’t eat anymore.
“You need to cut it,” Claire says.
“I’m fine,” Michael replies. He pushes her hands away. “I know.”
He sticks in the fork and flips the steak upside down and bites like a wolf. The steak hangs in front of his father’s face, then falls back to the plate with the fork still stuck in the top. Claire creeps her silverware closer to Michael’s plate. Dominic pauses with a glob of potatoes on his fork, laughing. His father, catching the smile on Dominic’s face, begins to laugh as he picks up the meat. The two of them stifle giggles at the dinner table like mischievous teenagers.
“This’ll be good,” Dominic says to Vinny.
“Let me get it for you.”
“I don’t need your help,” Michael says.
“Yeah, you’re good, right?” Dominic says.
Dominic and Michael keep laughing at each other. Claire puts her knife down and places her palm on his arm when he uses the knife with his wrong hand.
“Just let it go tonight,” Vinny says to Claire.
She gives up.
“Your right hand, Dad,” Dominic says, but Michael keeps using the same hand. “Your other right.”
“I know,” Michael replies, then switches the fork and knife.
“See?” Claire says to Vinny. “He won’t listen to me. He’s not the same anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Vinny says.
“For what?” Claire asks.
“For him.” Vinny’s fork clatters on his plate. He expects the sound to silence Dominic and Michael but they go on laughing as if this night, this house, this family has become one big joke. “For everything. It’s not fair you have to stay here and take this all day.” Vinny watches his father kid around with his brother. Michael asks about Ava again, about his grandson little Mike. “And you’re right—he’s a completely different person.”
“You guys talk like he’s not even here,” Dominic says, his voice loud, all the humor gone from his face.
His father replies with an indignant yeah even though he is clueless. He stands out of his chair. A tall broad man, fit and athletic, with a full head of dark hair, he looks nowhere close to seventy, he looks fully capable of cutting his own steak.
“Fuck all this,” Michael screams, walking away. “Fuck all this and fuck you.”
They watch him escape to the basement, then hear the record player blasting an Eagles album. Dominic shakes his head and laughs again.
“It’s not funny,” Vinny says.
“You have to laugh at some of this,” Dominic says. He gets up and gestures at the fork stabbed in the steak. “It’s so crazy you have to laugh.”
Dominic descends into the basement and the music soon falls to a soft, quiet volume.
Claire looks at his food.
“You’ve barely eaten anything.”
“It’s good. I’m just not that hungry.”
“Are you watching your weight or something? You didn’t eat much last time either. You’ve been looking a little thin.”
“Too thin?”
He stands with her and gathers the dishes and helps clean up.
“No, no,” Claire replies quickly, “You look great. It’s more a me thing right now. I just can’t stop worrying about everyone all the time. Any time I try to say something no one hears me.”
Claire stops putting the leftovers in Tupperware. Her hands rest on a lid and her eyes close. She lets out a long breath. It’s a common sound out of her. In many ways, his connection to her is stronger than the ones he keeps with his brother and father. They often share these private moments together, like now in the kitchen, when one of them needs to be heard. He can remember other times, when he was younger, how freely he could speak to her about things. No one else could match the patient trust he had found in her eyes, and he knew that whatever he might tell her she’d reserve her judgment, because he had always been the one to share with her. As of late, Vinny has kept his guard around her, afraid of what he might reveal, of how he would look. An empty space grows between them and silences their talk. He fears it will keep growing, swallowing these moments.
Vinny takes his hands out of the warm dishwater. He sees the slimness of his wrists and the fine cut of his arms. He likes how quickly she said You look great. He replays her words in his head and looks at her.
“I hear you,” he says, hands in the water, back to work.
In his home at night, he sits on his bed and faces the crucifix on the wall of his room and recites his prayers in the soft glow of lamplight. His necklace rests across his folded hands. He makes sure the tiny silver cross is facing the crucifix before he closes his eyes and begins about his family, his time on the golf course and at the gym, his regret for going to the strip club, his interest in Chelsea, the dancer he met last night.
His prayers return to his family. It’s like he can hold them there in the enclosed center of his palms, but soon they slip through and fall into separate pieces that he can’t put back together correctly, like the words his father misspells and the things he confuses. It all stems from his father’s dementia, he believes, but he doesn’t ask God why or how, he just wants to be strong. Weak, lame, he cannot hold them on his own, he is not strong enough no matter how much he loves each one. He is nothing without them.
When he is finished, he places his necklace on the nightstand because he cannot put it back on again until he prays in the morning before work. His phone sits under the lamp. He knows he shouldn’t pick it up before bed, but he is soon lying on top of the covers with the bright screen of his phone over his face, scrolling scrolling scrolling. He stops on one picture: a woman in tight workout clothes straddles a bench in a gym, arched back, a finger on her parted lips, a hand on the inside of her thigh. Vinny holds the image with his thumb, and she moves up and down, riding the bench, hair thrown back.
The image has nothing do with exercise or health. It’s simply there to catch his eye and arouse him. He doesn’t know how something like this appears on his feed—maybe because someone somehow tracked his visit to the strip club? But he can’t stop pressing his thumb, he can’t move on to the next post. His phone shines close to his face. His hand slides down his waist, between his legs. An eager shame flares through him, whipping uncontrollably. It is so strong and sudden he finishes before he can touch anything. He breathes with terrible alarm and shock. The hard blue-white glare of his phone hurts his eyes. He turns off the screen and flinches when he finds a skeleton reflected in the blank black of his phone.
Weeks suddenly quicken. Days rip away in hurried blurs. The light of the afternoon darkens by the time he is home from the gym. A thick air of tomato sauce greets him inside his house. Sickness rises through his throat. He turns his face back to the cold dark of early November for a whiff of fresh air and considers getting back in his car. Dominic is calling his name from the kitchen.
“There’s hardly anything to eat around here,” Dominic says. A pot of boiling water rumbles behind the sauce. “So I decided to make some sauce and spaghetti.” He stirs the sauce with a wooden spoon and scoops up a bloody steaming blob. Nodding, smacking his lips after his taste-test, he offers Vinny a try. “Not that bad for a first timer.”
Vinny says he’s not hungry. He feels his brother’s eyes on him, but he refuses to meet his gaze. His mother used to say how much Dominic had looked up to him when they were younger. He promised to watch over him when they were on the bus. He made sure he gave Dominic a hug before and after the school day. Only five years apart, Vinny would let Dominic hang around him and his friends even if the things his brother did or said sometimes embarrassed him. His mother’s words echo in his head: He looks up to you. He wonders if that is still true. A hole opens up in him.
“You’re not telling me something,” Dominic says now.
It’s Tuesday night and he needs to get ready for Chelsea. It has been three weeks since his last time there. His brother is always home, and he doesn’t want him finding out where he goes on Tuesdays, or sometimes on Saturdays or Thursdays, he doesn’t want anyone knowing he has memorized Chelsea’s schedule at the club. Once, a week before Dominic moved in, he parked his car at a gas station across the street and followed her to a small apartment complex late in the night. The light of a television flickered in the window on the first floor. A high school boy stood up from the couch, her son, and greeted her at the door. Sometimes, he wonders if she thinks about him, if she expects to see him, if she feels the same as he feels, if he can be a father to her son. He can’t miss another Tuesday.
“I have a better idea,” Vinny says, then the name of the club comes out of his mouth, soft and strange, as if it’s a new bad word. The idea of going to a strip club with his brother brings on a ringing in his ears. His stomach drops when his bony fist lands a brotherly punch into Dominic’s arm.
“Alright,” Dominic replies, laughing. “Fuck it, alright! Let’s see some whores.”
A kaleidoscopic storm of lights twist and turn across the walls and floor. Vinny feels the energy the second he steps inside and leads the way for his brother. He has never seen the club so amped and charged. Drunk men holler and laugh, standing up from their seats and leaning over the floor with their hands full of cash. Dollar bills flutter through the lights like crinkled moths. The dancers on the floor and in the chairs move in a quick violent rhythm to the bumping seizures of EDM music, hair whipping, hips rolling. All the tiny dots of light go white and flicker everywhere like bright bugs. Everyone is lit with electric pulse.
“This place is crazy right now,” Dominic shouts in his ear.
“It’s usually not like this,” Vinny shouts back.
“How would you know?”
“I mean it never looks this busy on the outside.”
They find seats in the center of the chaos and watch the women on stage. Dominic orders a round of beers. They clink the tops of their bottles. Vinny feels his brother’s hand on his shoulder. Dominic bites the bottom of his lips and grins at the stage. His teeth are very large and clean when the lights turn white again. It is a face that burns Vinny’s eyes, an afterimage that will float through his sleep. He regrets bringing Dominic here. He searches for Chelsea, but he doesn’t see her, and just as he is about to get up, he feels a hard hand clamp down on his shoulder.
“You need to go.”
It’s one of the bouncers. He wears a black t-shirt that’s too small for his arms and chest. Chelsea stands beside the man and holds her phone in front of her face. Vinny realizes she’s taking a picture of him. She puts down her phone and begins gesturing to another bouncer by the bar. Women in the back section of the club have slowed their dancing, some completely frozen. The men sitting in the front row have turned to watch.
“What’s going on?” Dominic says.
“Now,” the bouncer says.
“We just got here,” Dominic replies. “We’re not doing anything.”
“Get the fuck out!” Chelsea screams at Vinny, waving her arms.
More bouncers rush to the table.
Dominic stands up before Vinny can speak. He can’t move or hear his brother shouting over the music. He can’t see the other men nearby smiling and laughing. He feels nothing when his finger touches the outline of the crucifix beneath his shirt. As if everything has shut down, a switch flipped off, Vinny loses sense of the pounding music under his shoes and the blinding lights cutting through the dark.
Nothing works, nothing clicks. Then his brother is picked up by another man, and everything turns on, the music and the lights, the air of perfume and alcohol. The bouncer lifts Domnic high into the lights and slams him down on the floor. Vinny watches. Chelsea shouts behind another woman and holds her phone over her face. Another bouncer grabs Vinny by the collar and directs him to his brother. He hears his brother’s breath against the floor, short and high, constricted. Dominic holds his side and groans. They will learn his ribs are bruised but not broken. They will never tell their parents. They might laugh about it years later, but Vinny will have dreams of Chelsea, he will wake with a racing heart, alone in his bed. The bouncers and dancers keep screaming at Vinny to get him up, to get the fuck out of here now. Even after he pulls his brother off the floor and helps him out of the club, he watches, he hears, but he is still outside of himself, half-there.
“There’s something in the sand trap,” Vinny says after teeing off.
His ball drops and bounces on the green circle in front of the trap. He admires the tiny speck of his ball, his best shot of the day, and then turns to whatever rises out of the sand, dark and round, not a rock because the shape of the thing seems soft and fragile, but it’s too far away for him to tell exactly what lies there in the circle of sand below the green.
“What is it?” he says.
It’s the last day before the course closes for winter. The horizon has hardened with long deep marks of darkening grays. A cold rain will come tonight. It seems they are the only souls on the back nine. They walk down the flat fairway and make guesses on what’s lying in the sand trap. Their voices barely break the density of silence.
“Oh my God,” Michael says when they are close enough to see.
The doe is still breathing. She lies on her side and struggles for air, her wide nose dusted with sand. Nothing looks wrong about her. No blood soils the sands, no broken bone. Michael kneels down in the sand and wonders if she’d been clipped by a car, that some kind of internal bleeding was killing her. Like the course, she lies in almost perfect stillness beneath the iron sky. Vinny sees the frame of her ribs with each desperate intake of air. She is on her final breaths. Her large black eye reflects the gray heaven. He wants to place his hand on her stomach, to see her eye close and to let her fall silent in the stillness.
They walk up to the green and find their balls. His father stands before his ball and aims for the hole, but he can’t move or shoot. The doe breathes against the sand, whimpers with death. There is no other sound.
“We can’t leave her here,” Michael says, shaking his head. He picks up his ball and slips it inside a pocket of his pants. “Not like this.”
They turn back to the doe and look down from the green and wait for her to die in the sand below their feet. Michael pokes her leg with a golf club to make sure she is dead. He points to the scrap of woods between the road and the course. He tells Vinny they can place her there so she’s not out in the open like this for others to see and then they can let the club know about her. He figures they can just take her by the legs and drag her into the trees, shouldn’t be too hard for them.
“Come on, son,” Michael says.
The deer looks small and thin, delicate, but dragging her across the rough of the course takes a long time. The death of her weight is heavy and hard to handle. She must’ve been a strong runner. The muscles in her legs twitch and then harden in his hands. He sees her bounding through trees and fields in predawn mornings. Dragging her hurts his back and arms, and he gets sick when he sees her dead eyes and feels the bone of her legs in his hands. They stop for three breaks to catch their breath. They make their way into the woods and find a spot for her under the trees.
His father bows his head but doesn’t say anything, and Vinny, standing beside him, finds the dead eye of the doe again. He wants to close the eye but he can’t move. The shape of her is beautiful. He thinks of the dancers at the club. He thinks of Chelsea suffused in a cherry light. Everything is a piece of beauty, and he is a piece of beauty, too. It’s not so easy for him to believe it. It’s not so easy for him to be beautiful, to be strong in his skin, in his shape. There is more he can do and more he can be. Beautiful, strong, he can be the doe, he can be her. He prays she gets up from the ground and shakes her head, bones cracking, tendons flexed. She stands tall and proud. Like the sky, she emits a cloudy glow of gray, a substance beyond the body, a quality of soul. She walks past him and his father, steps soundlessly through the woods, and leaps away with perfect grace.