THEY WERE SUPPOSED to meet at Elizabeth’s house the next day. She half expected him not to show; they’d never done two days in a row before, and when she woke up (much later than usual), it felt like the day after a raucous office party—the aftermath to an evening of workplace transgressions. If there were a lesson to be taken from her ongoing “tutorial” in dating, it was that meeting your date’s friends en masse was to be avoided, especially in a setting as volatile as an alcohol-fueled party. She would have been better off meeting each of Richard’s friends—Mike in particular—in a more intimate setting, at dinner, or a night at the movies. All day long—at coffee with Orpheus (she chattered nervously for much of it about Richard’s impending visit that evening), in the ocean on her surfboard (the waves were puny, so she spent most of her time watching the pelicans skim the water with their long, scissorlike beaks), and in her armchair, staring at (instead of reading) Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters—she felt an anxiety akin but not quite identical to dread. She had nothing to be embarrassed about, after all, and while she was by no means eager to see Richard so soon after their night together, she was curious to see how he would handle the unexpected turn events had taken less than twenty-four hours earlier. (She counted to five on one hand a total of five times that day—squaring the number like this pleased her.)
At 5 p.m. exactly she heard a knock on the door, and there he stood with a gift-wrapped package in one hand and a bottle in the other. He offered up the bottle first:
“Nonalcoholic.” He grinned sheepishly.
Elizabeth walked inside to place the bottle on the kitchen counter, and he followed her, thrusting the box forward with both hands, as if it were a bowl and he, Oliver Twist asking for more:
“Here. To help make up for last night.”
What could it possibly be? Elizabeth tore off the wrapping. It was from Saks Fifth Avenue. She lifted the lid, tossed it aside, and pawed through multiple tiers of tissue paper.
It was a skirt.
She lifted it out of the box. It was black, like the one she’d worn the night before, but the material was denser, with an intrinsic shine, like the glow of an animal’s pelt. It was obviously very expensive—much more expensive than the one sitting in a crumpled ball in her “to be dry-cleaned” hamper.
“You really didn’t—”
“Yeah, I did. I still feel so bad about last night.”
Why was he harping on the stupid skirt? It felt to her as if he didn’t want to owe her anything, as though he wouldn’t be comfortable till he’d repaid her. She saw the size on the inside of the waistline: 12.
“I’m actually a ten,” she said. “And sometimes I’m even an eight—”
“Mike said this designer runs small. I called her while I was in the store. She’s good with stuff like that.”
It had been a truncated call, during which Mike had coined the phrase “the Retch Heard ’Round the World” and Richard had pretended to find this amusing, while failing to tell her how hurt he had been by her coldness toward Elizabeth, and her failure to come to the hospital.
He watched Elizabeth fold up the skirt and return it to the box. When she placed the cardboard lid on top of it, it felt as though she were sealing off a tomb. Was she mad because of the size?
“Marilyn Monroe was a sixteen, you know.”
“That’s actually a myth.” She was thrilled to be able to contradict him. “She was more like a ten, and that was in British sizes, which’s more like a six or even a four here. She had an unusual figure anyway, a bigger bust and hips but a really tiny waist.”
She didn’t need him to console her about her dress size.
“I did not know that,” he said—slowly, carefully, as if she were a maniac recently escaped from the local asylum whom he’d happened upon during a solitary walk in the woods. It had only been a week since her outburst at Factor’s, and he didn’t think he could handle another verbal lashing, at least not tonight. He’d been doing damage control all day, abasing himself before an assemblage of smirks (mostly electronic), and he was trying hard not to hate everyone—not to resent them for their very existence, for being there to witness his folly. He moved instinctively toward a savory smell wafting from the kitchen, so strong he could practically see it in wavy lines. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day, thanks to his hangover, and suddenly he was starving, ready to bury his troubles in food like a boy who’s skinned his knee and requires nothing more than an edible treat to make it better.
Elizabeth was relieved he didn’t question her source of information regarding Marilyn Monroe’s figure, which was an article on the website Jezebel. She’d been researching Some Like It Hot online, since he’d said it was one of his favorites, and she figured they’d be watching it eventually. It hadn’t taken long to fall down an Internet rabbit hole on Marilyn herself.
They each got a slice of pizza and sat on either end of the sofa. Elizabeth reached for the remote. They had to watch Driving Miss Daisy (which she had also researched, and was not much looking forward to—it sounded depressing) and discuss it for two hours. They might as well get on with it. This was what the next ten months would be like, she supposed. The dance had been a momentary deviation with no lasting effects, a wrong turn easily corrected. The straight and narrow stretched before them, all the way to the vanishing point in the far—but not quite as far as it once had been—distance, nothing mysterious or unknowable about it.
The Warner Bros. logo shimmered into view.
There was a knock at the door.
Elizabeth paused the movie, jumping up from the sofa.
“Who could that be?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well it could only be one person. She opened the door.
Nothing could have prepared her for what stood on the other side.
He was unrecognizable: his dreads lopped off and replaced by a smooth, silver crown of (somewhat receding) hair. His Robinson Crusoe beard was gone too, revealing a chin and jawline several shades lighter than the upper two-thirds of his face. His clothes were clean, but had obviously been bought secondhand, lending him a frayed, business-casual look. He was wearing a wrinkled, plaid button-down tucked into pleated khakis, the threadbare edges of which ended a few inches too soon; she could see his naked ankles sticking out of preppy “deck shoes,” their tips worn to a shine.
It was certainly an improvement. For the first time in their acquaintance, he wasn’t accompanied by a smell. But he had never looked more out of place or uncomfortable than he did now, fidgeting on her doorstep.
“Orpheus!” she exclaimed. He’d looked like his old self this morning. What had he been up to?
Orpheus craned his neck, peering inside. He had to see him. He had to meet the boy who’d started all the trouble.
Two months earlier, he made the first stumbling attempts at climbing up the well and reaching Lily. He needed the trappings of a sane, reasonable man again if he was ever going to wield enough influence to persuade her to reject the proposal, and for that he needed new clothes and a haircut. For that, he needed money. And for that, he needed to give up the bottle. This was the only crack or fissure he could find among the dark walls surrounding him—the only makeshift handhold he could use to hoist himself toward her.
A clear path, but easier traced than trod. If his life were a movie, the two months between the morning Lily told him about the proposal and this moment, now, on her doorstep would have been edited into an extended montage set to soulful music with jaunty interludes, as he slowly but surely progressed. The real thing was much slower, and never sure.
It was physical torture to stop drinking. After twelve hours without a drink, his brain, used to producing stimulants to counteract the depressant effect of the alcohol, was like a tiger that’s strained against the confines of a steel cage all its life and suddenly finds itself free to roam the wild. But it was less like the cage door had been thrown open and more like the cage had disappeared before the startled animal’s eyes—a liberation terrifying rather than exhilarating. Orpheus experienced the worst of withdrawal: his hands shook, he saw stars, he was sick to his stomach, and once he hallucinated an army of cockroaches swarming over his body when really there had only been one. All he had to do to end this pain was get a drink, and he did this time and time again. Why wouldn’t he? He’d lived for years on a philosophy of instant gratification grounded on the notion that life was cruel and capricious. The only sort of return he could be guaranteed was an instant one.
Each time he drank, however, he woke from the aftermath determined to try harder. He continued to meet Lily each morning per their routine, but every morsel of food she gave him stuck in his throat now; every word of kindness and encouragement turned dismissive and patronizing the instant it met his ears. He did not tell her about his plan. This secret quest to reach her as her equal became his personal obsession, lending shape to his shapeless days. After two weeks of failed attempts he destroyed all his alcohol. (He always kept a stash in his carry-on, plus several more buried in the sand.) It was easy enough in the moment; he was still half-drunk when he smashed the bottles and threw the shards into the ocean. But twelve hours later, he cursed himself as he suffered through the withdrawal symptoms one last time.
“Good evening, Lily.” He stuck his pinkie inside his collar to keep it from chafing against his neck. “I hope I’m not interrupting?”
Oh, Jesus. How was she going to explain the “Lily” thing to Richard? Or the “Elizabeth” thing to Orpheus? She was in no way prepared for the two of them to meet. But inside this squashed moment of panic, Elizabeth was surprised to find room for a speck of gratitude: there was no way to really prepare for such a meeting, so if it was going to happen she was glad not to have known about it beforehand. There was simply no time for the wringing of hands.
“Good evening, Orpheus,” she said, mirroring his formal address. “You look good.”
“Thank you.”
She stepped back, gesturing for him to come inside. A figure bounded off the sofa. Orpheus’s heart drummed in his breast. The moment was here; it was finally happening.
Three days after his last bout of withdrawal, he came out the other side as dry as the discarded chicken bones lying in a Styrofoam box next to his head. He sucked on them anyway; he didn’t think he’d ever been so hungry. A little girl walked up to him, staring at his greasy dreads with an innocent fascination until her mother caught up to her and jerked her away—so forcefully, she dropped her half-eaten cup of ice cream. It sailed the three feet from her soft little hands to his grimy paws in slow motion: graceful, in an arc, like manna from heaven. Orpheus knocked aside the pink plastic spoon with his nose and lowered his mouth to the cup, taking bites as if it were a watermelon slice, his slurps drowning out the child’s cries. From the corner of his eye he watched the mother cart the girl away and approach a uniformed cop. When she pointed at him, he tossed the cup, scurrying farther down the Boardwalk.
It was the day before the Fourth of July and the summertime revelers were out in full force. A fat man whizzed by on a skateboard, his round, hairy belly hanging over violet corduroy cutoffs. Yellow sunlight danced inside a tangled heap of blue-glass pendants being sorted by three older women with witchy hair and flowing skirts. A perfect, heart-shaped female ass clad in bright orange nylon strutted past him, and he followed it toward the green, foamy shore, then farther still into the smooth, indigo ocean where skin of all shades, whitest alabaster to blackest ebony, grew redder in the heat of a barbecue sun that made everything go wavy.
This place had been Orpheus’s prison for countless years, the site of his misery and degradation. He hated it. But for a moment he saw how beautiful it was, like a postcard brought to life. He shut his eyes and shook his head from side to side because it was too much, and he wanted—he needed—for it to go away. When he opened his eyes again, he felt as if his bluff had been called because everything had indeed been replaced by a single object: a fist, its thumb pointed sideways in a gesture Orpheus knew all too well, move along. The cop had found him.
Richard stuck out his hand.
Orpheus gripped it, shaking as hard as he could. He almost whistled in appreciation. Now here was a good-looking man in the prime of his life.
“Richard, this is my friend Orpheus. He’s a—a professor of English literature.” Elizabeth flashed him an apology; she hoped he wouldn’t mind the fib.
By nightfall that first day, on July Fourth, Orpheus celebrated his first twenty-four hours of sobriety with a bag of peanuts, which was the cheapest thing he could buy to fill his stomach. He’d spent all day begging sober, which was a new experience for him, and had discovered he was much better at it than when intoxicated. His trick was to assume a pathetic posture, legs in a pretzel, elbows jutting out on the pavement, head bowed into his crotch. People assumed he was crippled, and it was remarkable how much more loot he accumulated in this position. He’d never been able to hold the pose for more than an hour, but this time he lasted almost four.
He watched the red, white, and blue colors explode above him. He’d bought a pack of cigarettes too, a luxury he never allowed himself before, since every penny had to be devoted to alcohol. Having his own pack made him feel like a squire among knaves, and the pleasant sensation of satisfying his appetite and having a smoke afterward encouraged him to keep going in the face of the emotional torture that came with a clear head and functioning memory. His son Scott had loved fireworks. The Fourth of July had been his favorite holiday.
“A professor, cool!” said Richard. “Where?”
“UCLA.” He and Elizabeth exchanged another glance; he was happy to keep up the fiction. He needed to fit in if his plan was going to work. But he also wanted to fit in, and it was this realization—that Orpheus Washington, the erstwhile contrarian, the onetime proud defier of expectations and blazer of his own trail, had been reduced to this adolescent yearning to belong—that laid him lower in this moment than all the years of vagrancy preceding it.
In the last two months he had become a pariah who no longer belonged among his fellow pariahs. Most of his homeless cohorts were drunks or junkies, and it was no fun being the only sober one. Orpheus lost the dazed docility integral to his previous popularity. His old self resurfaced—quick-witted, ambitious—and he grew dissatisfied with his lot. For the first time he noticed how the homeless population swelled in the summer months, like bugs swarming. He saw people sniff the air when they passed him, or go out of their way not to pass him at all. The pokes and prods, the offhand interrogations from police officers began to anger instead of frighten him. Begging became intolerable, so he scored the lowest of low-rent jobs standing in the middle of the Boardwalk with a sign that read “Frozen Lemonade 99¢” on one side and “Giant Slice Pizza $1.99 (cheese)” on the other. (His “interview” had consisted of a patdown and a Breathalyzer.) With a mixture of amusement and anger, his homeless brethren decided he was putting on airs and taunted him from the sidelines: “Big man! Got a sign! Got a job!” Sometimes they ran up behind him and knocked the board out of his hands. In this regard, his new job was more humiliating than begging for change, but he was allowed to eat as much leftover pizza as he could stomach, and together with Lily’s breakfasts and Saturday dinners, this meant he didn’t have to spend any money on food. The few bucks he earned each day accumulated slowly. Every time he checked it, the bulge in the zippered compartment at the bottom of his wheeled suitcase had grown a tiny bit bigger.
“I was just in the neighborhood. . . .” He faltered, staring at them helplessly.
It sounded like the sort of outdated phrase a foreigner would use, something acquired in a language course—an elegant yet empty address that hung there, helpless and lost. What did he think he was going to do anyway? Why was he so intent on banishing this beautiful boy beaming in front of him? That would be like dumping a precious painting among the trash heaps he used sometimes as bedding, or lobbing a priceless sculpture into the fathomless ocean.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” said Elizabeth a little too brightly, as if she were projecting for the benefit of the cheap seats. “We were just eating pizza and watching a movie. Do you want to join us?” She glanced at Richard. Allowing a third person in on one of their sessions was technically forbidden.
“Yeah, join us!” he said. “It’s so rare I get to meet one of Elizabeth’s friends.” He paused. “And by ‘rare,’ I mean never.”
Elizabeth? Orpheus looked at her, but she refused to meet his eye. “Elizabeth” was obviously her real name. So why had he been calling her Lily all this time?
“Elizabeth likes to keep herself to herself, doesn’t she?” replied Orpheus, switching allegiances to the boy with an ease he didn’t know he was capable of till after it happened.
Richard grinned. “You can say that again.”
Orpheus clapped him on the back. “I just might. Huh.”
THE LAST THING he wanted was more pizza, but Orpheus stuffed himself dutifully while they sat in a snug little row on the sofa watching Driving Miss Daisy. He had to will himself not to fall asleep; it seemed outrageous to be expected to sit for two hours on a soft surface indoors without talking, and to stay awake. The movie didn’t help either. The old Orpheus Washington would never have made it all the way through such sentimental garbage, and when they got to the final scene, Morgan Freeman feeding little bites of pie to a senile Jessica Tandy, Orpheus leaned toward Richard to make a crack, an observation—something to cut through this offensively tender scene—when he saw an unmistakable dampness, a flurry of blinking. Was the boy . . . was he crying?
“Gets me every time,” said Richard matter-of-factly, or perhaps even a little defiantly, wiping away his tears with the heel of one hand.
“Huh,” responded Orpheus, surprised that anyone could be moved by a story so obviously constructed to do just that. He supposed there was still a bit of the contrarian in him yet. Now that he knew what real heartbreak was, it felt not only cheap but disrespectful to fabricate such emotions, only to resolve them a mere hour or so later. He looked at Lily, whose eyes were as dry as his, and as she stood up from the couch another flash of understanding registered between them. How could he not have seen it before? She too knew real tragedy; she had a calamity all her own. It was so obvious. But why had she never told him about it? He looked at the boy again, who was sipping a fizzy drink contentedly, and a shiver of something akin to jealousy ran through him, bursting like a geyser on the crown of his newly shorn head. Did he know, this boy who just as obviously didn’t have a care in the world? Had she told him?
“Did you guys eat all the pizza?” cried Elizabeth.
Both Richard and Orpheus whipped their heads toward her. She was standing at the counter, staring in horror at the empty pizza box.
“I only had one slice!”
The two men looked at each other like children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and laughed.
Elizabeth forced them to carry the conversation to the kitchen, where she announced her intention of making spaghetti for herself. “And you guys can’t have any!” Richard and Orpheus leaned on the counter while she retrieved a pot and colander from her well-ordered cabinets. In the harsh fluorescent light, Richard couldn’t help noticing the finer points of Orpheus’s ruined face, and Orpheus couldn’t help noticing Richard’s fascination; it reminded him of the little girl on the Boardwalk with the ice cream, and he raised a hand to shield himself from view.
It was only earlier that afternoon, after Lily had told him Richard would be coming to Venice that evening, that he took a bath in the ocean with a bar of soap purchased in a liquor store on the corner of Venice and Pacific. Afterward he headed to a hippified secondhand clothing store next to Café Collage. The woman behind the counter was a former flower child—faded, but still sharp enough to ask to see his money before letting him touch any of her merchandise. So much for free love, he thought, struggling to contain his ire. He desperately needed the clothes.
Fifteen minutes later he was wearing his new outfit out of the store, just as his daughter, Sherry, used to do, so excited was she to acquire new clothes. Down the street was a hair salon called Rock Paper Scissors. He hoped that in his new outfit he’d pass for a dirty hippie and not quite a homeless man. The receptionist was sorting receipts, and didn’t look up as she greeted him:
“Hullo, you have appointment?”
She sounded Russian. He shook his head, no.
She glanced up at him and her eyes froze, and then her smile after it, as if a frost were racing down her face. Orpheus’s heart sank; she was going to ask him to leave. Another memory bubbled to the surface, this one from long, long ago: his mother dragging him at seven years old on some errand that took them out of their way, and stopping off at an unfamiliar grocery store, not their usual place. He remembered there was no one there except an old white woman with puffy blue hair and a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She looked up at them from her cash register where she was sorting receipts, and immediately looked down again. “Out.” This was all she said: the single syllable, pointed toward the floor. It didn’t even seem as if she was addressing them. His mother faltered—confused, disoriented—and the woman repeated herself, “out,” her voice raised slightly, though she still refused to look at them. He remembered his mother pulling him away, and sensing more from her mood than a true understanding of the situation that he wasn’t to ask her any questions.
Looking at the Russian girl now, he waited to hear that same syllable again, but instead she gestured to the swivel chair farthest from the window:
“I take care of you, yes? Am in training. Reduced rate. Here, please.”
When she wrapped the black plastic cape around him, her hand brushed against the tiny dreads stuck to his neck and she jumped back, as if they’d pricked or burned her skin. Their eyes met in the mirror—hers startled, his accusing.
“What do you like?” she asked, tying her long brown hair into a ponytail.
“A buzz cut.” He imitated a razor scraping across his scalp. “Short as you can get it. And a shave too.”
She nodded, relieved.
Fifteen minutes later she announced: “All done!” and swiveled the chair to face the mirror.
He was balder than he realized under all those dreads: his hairline had retreated at least an inch or two. He’d been steeling himself for the resurrection of the old Orpheus—the husband, father, and professor—and for the fresh batch of painful memories this image would bring to the fore. But the old, shrunken man who stared back at him was like one of those age-progressed photos of a lost child printed on milk cartons, not so much a reminder of who he was as evidence of what he had become. He saw now that the Orpheus of years ago was gone, as dead as his wife and children but still separated from them. Forever.
“You look good,” the woman beamed.
He sprang out of the chair and handed her all the cash he had, which amounted to a 50 percent tip. She called out to him—gratified, amazed—but he was already out the door, head down, eyes averted, and he assumed this posture now in the tiny kitchen, staring at the fake tiles on the linoleum floor. He must have looked so old, so hideous to this beautiful boy.
“Gotta wear sunscreen,” he mumbled, massaging a large red lump—the worst offender, though it had plenty of competition—beneath his left eye.
“For real,” said Richard, “Especially for a pasty white guy like me, ha. But I’m so bad about it. I know I should wear it every day but I hate that greasy feeling, you know? And even when I go to the beach I never put on as much as I should. I got the worst burn of my life, a while back, in Greece? My stomach was seriously purple. It was insane.”
Elizabeth asked him which islands he’d visited, which led to an improbable discussion of Greek mythology, and before any of them realized it three hours had passed. It was nearly ten when Orpheus succumbed finally, falling asleep with his head propped up on the back of the couch. Richard raised his eyebrows and made a “sh!” gesture with his index finger over his lips.
“I’m going to let him sleep here,” Elizabeth whispered. “He lives alone, just around the corner, and he looks so peaceful, doesn’t he?”
Richard nodded, watching enviously as the old man’s concave chest rose and fell. He was dreading the ride home, which would bring him that much closer to another day of confronting the Retch Heard ’Round the World. It was easy to pretend it had never happened while he was here, even though this made no sense, since Elizabeth was the only person besides him who had been physically affected by the incident.
The pause between them lengthened. Richard kept staring at Orpheus to avoid the inevitable goodbye. It was childish, but he had an idea that if he stared long enough, eventually she’d ask him to spend the night.
“Do—do you want to spend the night too?”
He swung his head toward her, nodding vigorously.
“Let me go get my AeroBed,” she said. “I’ll blow it up in my room so I don’t wake him up. Be right back.”
She reappeared a few minutes later, lugging the mattress behind her. Richard jogged over to help her push it into the middle of the floor.
“Thanks,” she said. “There’re towels and an extra toothbrush in the bathroom.” She placed sheets, a blanket, and a pillow on top of the AeroBed, and draped a blanket over Orpheus, who by this point had managed to assume a somewhat horizontal position. She retreated to her bedroom.
“Elizabeth?”
She turned around, framed by the open doorway.
Richard hesitated.
She waited.
If she had been anyone else, he would have begun singing “Thank You for Being a Friend” from The Golden Girls, to simultaneously acknowledge and mock the sentiment he was feeling. But there was a good chance Elizabeth had never watched The Golden Girls, and he was well aware by this point that mockery was not her style. And yet he still wanted to convey the emotion somehow, because she had been a good friend to him last night. And tonight. She was, in fact, a friend. When had that happened? It didn’t really matter.
“Thank you,” he said finally.
Elizabeth paused. “You’re welcome,” she said, turning away, and closing the door firmly behind her.
SECONDS LATER ELIZABETH locked the doorknob, unwilling to take any chances while trying on the skirt she’d vowed hours earlier never to touch again. It fit perfectly, of course, and was even more beautiful on her hips than it had been in her hands. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, watching it sway gently, back and forth: swish-swish, swish-swish, swish-swish . . . By the time she roused herself from this skirt-induced reverie, she was unwilling to risk waking or otherwise encountering Richard on the way to the bathroom. She was too tired to brush her teeth anyway. She was exhausted, actually—more tired than she’d been in ages, deliciously spent after the prolonged adrenaline rush of an evening spent with her boys. Her boys? Now there was a ridiculous phrase. But she was too tired even to laugh, so instead she simply climbed into bed, skirt and all, and slipped beneath the covers, repeating the ridiculous phrase to herself over and over, sleepily, like a mantra:
My boys . . . my boys . . . my boys . . .