The company I work for shuts down for two weeks every winter. Retooling, inventory, a combination of things. Most of us are forced to take the time off. A lot of the guys go to Florida. Fishing. Disney World if they have families. I don’t have a family and I’m not much of a fisherman. So I usually sit around my apartment, rent videos, watch TV, try to keep from going crazy. Try not to think too much about Pamela, my girlfriend in college who married someone else last summer.

There was an ad in the local newspaper about a health club - a week’s trial membership. I thought maybe I should start getting in shape. Not that I’m in bad shape. I ran track in high school and did some cross-country in college. But in the two years since then I hadn’t done much of anything. Once or twice a week I’d go out running. Sometimes on weekends I’d go for miles. But it was winter now, much too cold to run comfortably outside. I called the number in the newspaper ad and they said, “Sure, bring a towel and a lock and come on over.”

On the way to the club I stopped at a hardware store and bought a little combination lock. 16-32-11. I smiled, remembering junior high school, when some of the boys debated whose lock had the best measurements. No way would my current combination be a winner. I tried to remember my old junior high numbers. I could almost feel the knob between my thumb and forefinger, I could hear the frail metallic sound as I twisted it carefully around, but that was it. The combination wouldn’t come. I could spin that dial forever and never get anywhere.

It was early afternoon and the health club was not crowded. In the main room most of the silvery weight machines stood idle. A few people were watching one of the six TVs as they strode the treadmills or climbed the stairs or struggled with the other aerobic equipment, but most of that gear was vacant, too.

Upstairs were free weights and some boxing bags and a large open area with a dais at one end, a soft mat on the floor, mirrors and workout music everywhere else. Around the outside ran a little track.

“How many laps to a mile?” I asked the attendant.

“Sixteen if you stick to the outside,” he said.

I set my water bottle and towel on the seat of one of the stationary bicycles at the inside curve of the track and set off slowly. It was a comfortable surface, not too springy, not too firm. My feet felt fine. After a lap or two I started to pick up the pace.

Off to the side of the center area a big guy was working one of the little boxing bags, tapping it and slapping it and making it dance. He seemed to know what he was doing. I felt my stride fall into the rhythm of his hits whenever I rounded his corner. Then there was the straightaway where I could look down at the pool, at the old men swimming laps in slow motion, and then after the next curve a long length of window to the outside world. It was snowing harder, I saw. White flecks of snow not quite suspended in gray air.

Coming out of the window curve took me back to the stationary bikes, my towel and water bottle on one, and now a young woman on the one next to it. She was slim and almost pretty, and she was working so hard. When she leaned forward the upcurve of her little bottom made my heart (or something) leap. Lap after lap I ran, getting warmed up, flowing, going faster and faster. The bicycling woman was always there. After a mile or so I’d pretty much memorized the three small birthmarks near her spine which weren’t covered by the turquoise lycra of her stretch suit.

I glided round the track thinking about her, about the small constellation of birthmarks on her lower back, about the way her dirty blond hair swayed back and forth across the base of her neck as she pedaled, about the tiny wobble of her small breasts as she leaned forward, the neat synchronicity of her knees and ankles and elbows, and of course that perfect bottom. But mostly I wondered what she might be thinking. Whether she’d noticed me. I struggled to think of ways I might meet her.

I ran and ran, and the snow continued to fall, and the old men in the pool pulled themselves slowly out of the heavy water. But the frenetic croon of workout music continued to crackle and throb, and now the big guy had switched to a heavy bag. His thudding fists plundered the air out of it. The girl on the bike kept pedaling. With every lap I fell more and more in love.

And then she wasn’t there. Her bike was empty. Just a sheen of sweat on the seat. Immediately I slowed. I ran another lap regretting the end of it, but glad in a way. Now I wouldn’t have to do anything. When I got back around to the bikes I noticed another thing: my towel and water bottle weren’t there either.

Strange, I thought.

I stopped at the drinking fountain near the stairs, and then I noticed them in the open area, the woman and the boxer. She was kneeling next to him. He was lying on the floor doing sit-ups. She had my towel over her shoulders and she had my water bottle in her hand. She was sipping from it. She was taking a long slow drink. And then she tilted the bottle a little and let a few drops fall onto the boxer’s bare belly. I felt myself flush. I turned away, embarrassed and perplexed, and quickly I skipped down the stairs to the main floor where for about twenty or thirty minutes I experimented with the various weight machines and exercise equipment. I worked until my arms ached, and then I went to the locker room.

Two other guys were in the showers. One of them was the boxer. He was big. He was soaping himself. He closed his eyes and took the spray head on, and I noticed that his face was faintly pitted, almost scabrous. Water was splattering off of him, and steam rose to the tiled ceiling, and soapy water coursed down his torso, caught up for a moment in the mat of hair above his groin, then spilling down his sturdy legs. I twisted on my own water, and as I turned myself into its wet throb, I allowed myself a glance at the boxer’s body. The hefty dangle of his cock. It looked a lot like mine.

Drip drying took some time. I stood under the blow dryer and that helped. I thought about the girl with my towel; I wondered whether she’d keep it; I wondered whether she was using it right now. Thinking such things made my cock swell a little, so I quickly switched off those thoughts. I took a deep breath and let the number of my combination lock spin through my head.

Then I was dressed and heading towards the exit. The boxer was standing at the inner door to the club entrance, waiting. For an awful moment I thought he was waiting for me. He nodded, and then he smiled, but his smile wasn’t for me. I glanced behind me. It was the woman from the bicycle, wearing a soft smile and carrying a snug red gym bag. I wondered if my towel was inside. I held the door for them.

“What took you so long, honeybuns?” the boxer asked her.

“Nothing,” she said. “Oh, look at all the snow!”

I followed them through the parking lot. “You start the car and I’ll scrape,” I heard him say. A clean layer of white snow covered the black Porsche. The boxer bent inside to get the scraper, and when he stood up a white snowball splattered against his face.

“Oh-oh, now you’re going to get it,” he said.

“It was an accident,” she laughed. Before the boxer could fashion his own snowball from the snow on the car roof, the girl had ducked into the car and closed the door.

My own car was in the next aisle. I dusted off the snow and started it up. I sat there for a while. I felt tired, relaxed, peaceful and at the same time anxious.

Up ahead the boxer’s car was just turning out into traffic. On impulse I followed it.

Only a few minutes from the health club the Porsche made the turn into Wellbright Plaza. Rows of trendy shops lined both sides of the street. A block and a half up, the Porsche swung into a diagonal parking space. I passed it and parked my car a few spaces down. I got out of my car. The boxer and the girl were walking the other way, into the wind, into the fluttery snowfall.

I almost caught up to them when they stopped abruptly in front of The Gallery. They stood there for a few moments looking at something in the display window. The girl pointed and laughed and whispered something in the boxer’s ear and then they were kissing. Not a long kiss, but I could feel the jolt in my groin. I hung back. The boxer and the girl resumed their walk, and few doors down they entered the Starbucks Coffee shop.

I paused in front of The Gallery. A bunch of paintings. A statue of a horse rearing. I wondered if that was what the girl had pointed at. The horse looked like it was made of rust. I wondered if the girl had been pointing at the horse’s cock.

I didn’t know whether to follow them into the Starbucks. Snow started to collect on my coat. I studied the paintings in the display window. The one that most appealed to me was of a small brick building. A desolate blue twilight was drifting in, and the bricks of the building soaked up this blue. A pair of city street lamps guarded the entryway to the building, and next to the door the building had 906 on it in big numbers. Upstairs were three identical windows and in each window a woman was seated at a piano bench playing a piano. It seemed to be the same woman in each window, but the light was slightly different. The woman wore velvet jacket, she had short reddish brown hair, and although I couldn’t tell for sure, I just knew her bottom was bare.

The boxer and the girl were standing next to me. I only had time to notice that they each held a steaming coffee container before I glanced away

“It still seems strange,” the girl said. “Like we were being spied on or something.”

The boxer answered her but I couldn’t make out the words.

“Hair’s the wrong color,” she answered. “And besides, she’s taller, and...”

The boxer interrupted her. “Pretty bottom,” I heard him say.

“You think so?”

“Not as pretty as yours.”

“Okay, then I guess we can get it.”

“For fifteen hundred dollars!” the boxer exclaimed.

“Fifteen hundred? Yow.” She took his hand. They looked at the painting for a few more seconds, and then they strolled off. I don’t think they noticed me at all.

I followed their Porsche to an apartment complex a few miles away. I’d never been in this part of town before. A maze of two-story brick townhomes all the same. The boxer parked his car in front of one of them. I drove past, circled the block. By the time I passed again the boxer and the girl were gone. The building was similar to the one in the painting, but not the same. I was pretty sure that was where they were. From the street you couldn’t really see into the upstairs windows. The angle was wrong. And anyway, the curtains were drawn. I drove home.

It was almost dark. I hung up my coat, rinsed out my running clothes, drank a bottle of water, and thought about starting the cat puzzle. Every few months I’d work a jigsaw puzzle. The picture was of a white cat staring into a fishbowl. Inside the fishbowl were two goldfish. Most of the puzzle was black, all but the white cat and the two goldfish. The first time I’d worked the puzzle was just after I moved here. I was buying towels and bedsheets and stuff at K-Mart for the apartment, and getting the puzzle was an impulse. Finishing it gave me a lot of satisfaction. It had taken me nearly a month, a few hours every evening. After it was done I left it on my table for some weeks trying to decide what to do with it, whether to take it apart or what. Then I saw the notice in my college’s alumni newspaper about Pammy getting married, and I thought maybe I’d send her the puzzle as a kind of belated wedding present. I don’t know why I thought of that. Kind of stupid, but I disassembled the puzzle and put it in the box and actually wrapped it up in some gift paper from the drugstore. But then I didn’t send it. For one thing I didn’t know Pammy’s address. Instead I unwrapped the present and did the puzzle all over again. Finishing the puzzle the second time wasn’t as satisfying. Since then I’d worked the puzzle three or four more times. Now I got the puzzle box out of my closet and set it on the table but I didn’t open it. I wondered whether the boxer and the girl ever worked puzzles. I wondered if Pammy and her husband ever worked puzzles. Probably not, I thought.

I didn’t open the puzzle box. Instead I walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot. It was completely dark outside. I switched on the TV. The middle of a nature program was on. Six young cheetahs. They hadn’t fully learned to hunt yet. They were standing around blending into the shade of a thin tree. Nothing but tall yellow grass and hot sun and a herd of Springbok antelopes nearby. A young antelope strolled near the shade tree. It looked around nervously. Its ears twitched. It ambled forward, hesitated, took another few tentative steps. Suddenly the cheetahs were after it. Instantly the springbok took flight. So fast it was. So graceful and nimble. The Springbok bounded above the tall yellow grass. It fairly flew. But the cheetahs were fast and powerful and they had the Springbok surrounded. The springbok darted here and there, skittering and changing direction, taking long quick leaps, but always a fresh cheetah was after it. The chase seemed to take forever, but maybe it was only a few deep breaths. And then a cheetah was alongside the small springbok. With a swipe of its paw, the cheetah slapped the young springbok to the ground. The springbok got up, but the cheetah slapped it down again. The springbok quivered there, perhaps stunned under the cheetah’s heavy paw. A moment later it tried to get up again. The cheetah kept it trapped. It nuzzled the springbok’s flank and neck. But the cheetah didn’t know how to make the kill. Maybe there was hope for the springbok. The other cheetahs circled, waiting to see if the springbok could get up, if the young cheetah could finish it off. The cheetah mouthed the little springbok, gently at first, and then with more vigor - teeth tearing into living flesh. The other cheetahs moved in. For a while the cheetahs were eating the springbok while it was still alive.

In college Pamela and I were lab partners in Biology 101. The pairings were alphabetical, we didn’t choose each other or anything. I was nervous at getting such a pretty lab partner. I was shy, much too shy to speak to pretty girls, and Pamela was very pretty. But right away she was easy to talk to. She seemed interested that I ran track. She seemed interested in me. Near the end of the semester I finally gathered up enough courage to ask her if she’d like to see a movie with me. “Sure,” she said, “That might be fun. This weekend?”

The afternoon of our date, Pamela called me to tell me she had too much homework. A long paper due on Monday. “Maybe some other time, okay?” she said.

In the biology lab the next week she apologized about breaking the date. “That’s okay,” I said. “Did you get your paper done?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “It’s probably not very good.”

“What’s it about?”

“Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. I called it ‘Two Ways of Overstating the World.’ Sometimes I don’t think I get poetry.”

“Me neither,” I agreed. “It doesn’t seem real or something.”

“I like William Carlos Williams better,” she said. “But I’m still not sure I really get it. Supposedly he tries to keep language from getting in the way. But I think language gets in the way anyway. It’s ... I don’t know, like if you gave a bunch of ants some little plastic shovels and expected them to clear Alaska.” She swiped a few strands of fine blond hair away from her pretty blue eyes and looked at me.

“Would you maybe like to go for a bike ride this weekend?” I asked. My heart was in my throat. She seemed to hesitate, but then she agreed.

On Saturday afternoon we pedaled out past the cemetery, along the farm roads south of campus. It was hot and there wasn’t much shade. I’d run out here a few times, but with the bikes we were able to go much further.

“I’m glad you didn’t have any papers this weekend,” I told her.

“Me, too,” she said.

“How did you do on the poetry paper?”

“I got an A on it, believe it or not.” She laughed. “Sometimes these professors don’t really know anything.”

“Maybe you understand poetry better than you think,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “I think Coggins just wants to get into my pants.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We bicycled quietly for another mile. She was wearing white shorts, and I thought her legs and bottom were unbelievably beautiful as she biked, and her hair was fluttery with sunshine, and her breasts pressed against the drop of her blouse in a way that made it hard for me to swallow.

Maybe half a mile ahead at the side of the road was a stand of shade trees, and I was thinking about asking Pammy if she wanted to race to the trees when I heard some dogs barking. Faint at first but then louder, more urgent. Farm dogs, big ones, three of them, and they were rushing towards us.

“Oh-oh,” I said, “We’d better get out of here.”

We swiveled our bikes around and pedaled down the gravel road as fast as we could, but the dogs had no trouble catching us, and keeping up, yapping and snapping, nipping at Pamela’s legs and heels. For some reason all the dogs went after Pamela, and I was afraid they’d cause her to spill on the slippery gravel even if they didn’t bite her. I tried to distract them by yelling at them, but they paid me no attention. I thought about stopping to pick up some stones or something, but we were going too fast. About a mile down the road the dogs stopped. We pedaled hard for another minute or two and then eased up.

“Whew!” Pammy said, “That was fun.”

“They didn’t bite you or anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Pammy said. She brushed her hand down her bare leg just below the knee. “Just some drool. Yuck.”

We walked our bikes for a while.

“I’m sorry about the dogs,” I said. “I hate dogs.”

“They’re okay,” she said. “It was fun actually. Maybe we should do it again sometime.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What if they got you down? I was afraid...”

“They were just having fun,” Pamela said. “They were just dogs. They didn’t mean any harm. It’s the way dogs are. They probably just wanted to get into my pants.” Then she laughed. We’d stopped our bikes in the middle of that farm road. I leaned across my bike and kissed her. It was the first time I’d ever kissed anyone. It was the only time I’d ever kissed anyone.

At first I thought it was okay. I felt such a surge of good feeling, of excitement. For a moment I thought my life would be all right after all. She pulled away. “Don’t,” she said. She got back on her bike, peddled down the road. I followed her. I caught up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just ... It’s just ... I’m ... I’m in love with you.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t be. We’re just friends. Anyway, I’m not in love with you, so it won’t work.”

“What won’t work?”

“Kissing.”

She didn’t say more than that. I thought she would, but she didn’t. After a while I got up the nerve to say something. “What’s wrong with kissing?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong with kissing.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then... ?”

“If I kiss you I’ll want to fuck you, and if I fuck you, you’ll think I love you, but I don’t love you, so it won’t work. We’re just friends. Friends and lab partners. Okay?” Then without waiting for an answer she pedaled off. I followed her back towards campus. She pedaled at a modest speed, making no effort to wait up for me, and I made no effort to catch up to her.

We were still lab partners, but she was cool to me, and we exchanged the minimum number of words. Over the next couple of years I saw her around campus a few times walking between classes, but we never spoke. In our senior year I noticed her name in the campus newspaper. She’d won some kind of poetry award, and she was giving a poetry reading at the Brighton Hall Lecture arena. I went to the reading. I probably stood out a little because I wore my suit. No one else wore a suit. I could tell she noticed me. She smiled at me, and it made my tummy feel weak, and I thought maybe we’d speak after the reading. I thought maybe I’d tell her I missed her, and maybe she’d say she missed me, too, and we would get together for something. I sat off to the side a little and watched her read. She was so pretty. But I didn’t understand her poems. The words were ordinary words, mostly, but they wouldn’t penetrate my consciousness. I heard the sounds but not the sense. It was sort of like music. I watched her lips move and I remembered kissing those lips, and how I good I felt then, for those few seconds, and how bad I felt a moment later when she said that about fucking. So I didn’t hear the words, but I do remember that one poem was called “Ants in Alaska,” and some of it made some of the audience laugh, and I remember another poem, the last one, was called “Chased Dogs.” After the reading of that poem there was a stillness, like everyone was transfixed, and then a quiet shuffling, and then suddenly the clapping. A lot of clapping. I realized I wasn’t clapping so I clapped, too, and while the clapping was still going on people started going up to the podium, and soon Pammy was surrounded by people, so many of them that I couldn’t even see her. I waited around for a little while, and I tried to think of something I could say to her about her poems, but I couldn’t really think of anything. Anyway, the crowd of people remained around her, so eventually I just went back to my room. A couple of years later in the alumni news there was the short notice about her marriage.

I thought about Pammy for a while, and I thought about the boxer and the girl. Wouldn’t it be something, I thought, if we’d all watched that same nature program on TV. I wondered how Pammy felt about the cheetahs and the springbok, and whether it made her remember that time we went on the bike ride and got chased by the dogs, and whether she was sad about the little springbok. I wished I could have understood her poems. I had the wild thought that maybe I should find out her phone number, give her a call, ask her if possibly she could send me a copy of her dog poem. Maybe first I’d ask if she had watched the nature program on TV about the cheetahs and the springbok, and then I’d ask her about the dog poem. But of course there was no way I could do anything like that. Instead I put the jigsaw puzzle box back in the closet and put on my coat and drove over to the boxer’s apartment building.