ADELAIDE IS AT MY apartment now, waiting for me. Her name ricochets in my mind. It sounds ancestral, like it was passed down from a great aunt. I never call her by her formal name. She’s a blue heeler, named for the region from which she hails. I call her Addie or Addiecakes or just Cakes, or sometimes Dog when she misbehaves. Lucas used to call her Addie, but when he said it, he’d always emphasize the first syllable and draw out the last—Ad-deeee. It had a ring to it. She smells like a dog, but in a good way. She has the hardest head you’ll ever touch, designed to withstand the hooves of cattle. I’ve seen her bash her head into the coffee table and not so much as flinch. I’ve seen her run straight into a signpost, distracted by a rabbit, and barely break stride. She shows love by pushing her hard head into my head and holding it there—hard dog head against soft human head. Lucas taught her this. When she does it, I always want her to hold the position just a little bit longer because the combination of the hardness of her skull and the warmth of her fur feels so good. She can’t help herself, though. She always goes in for the lick when she’s close to my face, and I shriek, “No face licks!” and the moment passes by.
Lucas and I maintained a running gag where we’d jot down logical fallacies on scraps of paper. They all related to our lives in some way, topics that were important to us, or random or funny at the time. I wrote the date on each one and collected them in a shoebox. The oldest one is in Lucas’s handwriting:
We made some food ^ Adelaide ate the food
… Our food is dog food
I spend my days at home with Addie, the only thing I love, and my nights here, at The Final Final, the only place that will have me.
BY SIX O’CLOCK, IT’S obvious that The Final Final is a townie bar. The place is full of craggy white guys who drink too much. They all know each other “from the bar.” Go ahead—ask them. No one is wearing anything they haven’t owned for ten years. An enormous, shimmering Old Style sign hangs to the left of the bar top. It’s a mechanical sign with glitches, white lines where there should be blue water. It features a huge mug of beer, as big as the mountains behind it, with a tremendous amount of head. The head alone is greater in volume than the waterfall. The text on it reads, BREWED WITH WATER FROM WHEN THE EARTH WAS PURE. If one of my students wrote this tagline, I would have ripped it to pieces. But I like the sign, especially all that’s wrong with it.
When I started teaching Advanced Communications to MBAs at the U., I planned to do it for a year or two, just long enough to get investment banking out of my system, ditch the New York artist boyfriend, and figure out what to do with my life. I designed the course with a focus on storytelling. Students explore how to capture attention, appeal to logic and emotion, and deliver memorable conclusions. The entire class can be summed up in three concepts: beginnings, endings, and transitions. Master these, and the power and glory are yours, now and forever! Since my first year of teaching, my conviction in the importance of storytelling has become almost religious in nature. A good story can move a stock! A market! A good story is the difference between a cubicle and the C-suite.
Turns out I like teaching. Having worked in the corporate world for some years—growing up in a world where money and power are fundamental elements like air and water—I recognize that teaching, or more specifically, the decision to teach, is pure stupidity. The fact that there are all these bright, capable people holed up in high schools and universities, making, in some cases, less than a living wage is irrational. It’s what people in finance call a market anomaly. It’s what economists call behavioral economics.
The stranger to my left offers to buy me a drink.
My glass is still full, but I’ve learned to accept these gestures. I offer a simple thank-you. Amelia acknowledges our exchange. My next drink will appear on the correct tab at the end of the night.
Amelia refills my glass once or twice per hour, not too much if I only stay an hour or two. I will probably stay longer tonight.
I flip my phone over. The texts from Grace stopped but I have three missed calls from Samantha. She usually doesn’t call in the evenings. She has three kids and a husband to worry about. I check the voicemail: Can you come over to my house later tonight? Say, nine o’clock? There’s someone she wants me to meet.
I rack my brain for who she could possibly want to introduce me to. She’s not trying to set me up again, because she thinks I belong with Lucas. On a regular basis she calls him my soul mate, which drives me crazy, because if I ever had a soul, it’s gone dark, incapable of mating.
Samantha and I were like sisters in high school. We’d take the train into Manhattan and spend weekends in my dad’s condo. Or we’d crash on the floor at my uncle Nic’s place. She went to college at NYU. I assumed she’d stay in the city forever because she always talked so much shit about Wilton. But right out of school, she fell for an oncologist who took a job at a hospital upstate, here at the U. So she left the city for good. In short order, they moved into their big house, and the rest is history.
I think we’re the same people we were in high school, but back then we didn’t know who those people were yet. Friendship came easy. It’s more complicated now. But Samantha got me the job at the business school. Then she sent me Lucas, which is a debt I can never repay.
I text her: Sorry, conference call with Singapore later tonight. This is another lie because I have no intention of joining any conference call but I assume it will get Samantha off my back.
This is important, she writes.
Who is it? I ask.
A friend from Boston. Grace is going to Skype in too.
So it was no coincidence that they both wanted me at nine o’clock. Samantha and Grace have met exactly twice. They have no business being on Skype together.
I turn my phone upside down again. I’m not in the mood to go to Samantha’s house tonight. By nine, she’ll have put her kids down for the night, but the oldest always wakes up and wants something frivolous, like an organic, locally sourced yogurt in a compostable cup.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER we met, Lucas took me out to the nicest restaurant in town, a small Italian joint owned by a first-generation immigrant named Angelo Antolini. Offhandedly, I pondered aloud how Antolini found his way here, from Italy to this town, in the middle of nowhere. The question was barely formed. There was nothing behind it. Then Lucas asked me why I was here.
“You asked and I accepted,” I said.
“Here in this town, smart-ass.”
Antolini’s is small, like, twenty-tables small, mostly two-tops. That night, every table was taken, squeezed a bit closer together than usual, only far apart enough to slip a body through sideways. Lucas offered me the better seat, and I took it. I sat with my back to the wall, looking out at the restaurant. Another couple sat to my left, the woman on the inside as well. To serve her, our waitress had to stand between our tables, her butt inches from our water glasses. It was a nice butt, not a small butt but a firm, young butt: a dancer’s butt.
Later, I started noticing her around town. She frequented Soul Night at a club so divey I can’t really call it a club, more of a bar with a decent-size stage that hosts bands and DJs from out of town. She was, in fact, studying dance at the U. She had long, wavy blond hair, and a quick smile. At the restaurant, I assumed her act was a play for tips, but when we struck up a conversation at Soul Night, I liked her immediately. Her first name was Ellis, which I liked too—I liked it as a girl’s first name. I admired her sunny disposition, which was something I never had and always assumed men wanted.
Lucas only had eyes for me, though. He managed to avoid looking at her ass entirely, or if he did, it escaped my notice.
“I moved here because I don’t have a high tolerance for pain.”
His expression was quixotic.
“There was this woman,” I said, “in New York. Her name was Pamela Randolph Walsh. She had a high tolerance for pain. I didn’t.”
“Who is she?” he asked.
“Nobody, really, just a VP at an investment bank, working her way through the ranks.”
“Middle management?”
“I guess. Most of my students would kill to have her job.”
“It is he who is dead and not I! A classic Ivan Ilyich scenario: your students are destined to clamor for transfers and promotions.” Lucas remembered everything he’d ever read.
“It must be agonizing to be you. Truly horrible,” I said.
“Why?”
“To have all those books swimming around in your head all the time. What does it all mean? Das Sein! Death! The abyss!”
He bit his lower lip.
The kitchen was backed up. We downed an entire bottle of red before Ellis delivered the appetizer. A long, slow meal suited us just fine. Lucas ordered another bottle.
“I mean, how do you even stay hard?” I said. “You’ll be having sex and suddenly your brain will flood with thoughts about the basic income experiment and Bertrand Russell—”
The second bottle of wine created a false sense of privacy, even as we eavesdropped on the people around us. The couple next to us was older, a professor and his wife, from the looks of it (wrinkled khakis, shapeless after a couple hundred wash cycles, oversize navy sweater atop a button-down, collar tucked in, rimless suburban-dad glasses, brown comfort shoes, rubber soles, of course—his approach to fashion no different than his approach to God: agnostic). My attention occasionally strayed from Lucas, and I caught wind of their circumstances—he sent his steak back because it was too rare; she said he should slow down on the bread. Even as I observed them, hoping desperately that we would never become them, it didn’t occur to me that they probably heard our conversation too. Perhaps if it had, I would have bitten my tongue, curtailing talk of sex and politics. But the great thing about the second bottle of wine is that neither of us cared what they thought, and perhaps that was what separated us and them. We’d never be the kind of people who sent food back to the kitchen.
“Basic income?” This piqued his interest.
“Or whatever. Definitely something socialist. You’re a closet socialist.”
“So you’re worried I won’t be able to stay hard when we have sex, because I’ll be thinking about basic income?”
“Actually, you’re not a closet socialist. You’re totally out of the closet,” I said.
“Riiight, only bankers can maintain hard-ons these days,” he said.
“Yeah, exactly. Their heads are empty—”
“Nothin’ in there but mothballs and party drugs,” he said.
“Seriously, though. I have no idea how you function on a daily basis.”
The man at the next table ordered an espresso. His wife waited until Ellis retreated, and then said, “Do you really need that? It will keep you up.” The man insisted espresso didn’t affect him. The woman looked at her watch; it was after nine. She was ready to go home. I imagined how the rest of their night would go: He’d put down his espresso in two gulps as he paid the bill. They’d walk to their car, which was parked on the street outside. She’d offer to drive because he’d ordered two glasses of wine, but he’d insist he was fine. They’d listen to NPR on the radio, probably jazz or bluegrass at this time of night, for the duration of their ten-minute drive to the part of town where all the professors lived. He’d pour himself a nightcap and turn on the TV. On the couch, he’d drift off almost immediately. She’d head upstairs and get ready for bed. Maybe she’d read a book for a while. Then she’d go down and rouse him, telling him to come to bed for his own sake, after which she’d lie awake and listen to him snore, deferring her dreams until he left for the office in the early morning.
Lucas grabbed my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll be able to keep it up. You’re so beautiful. You’ll be like that one prostitute Nietzsche had sex with. Three minutes of bliss—he didn’t have a care in the world.”
“Didn’t Nietzsche contract syphilis from that gal?”
“That was a smear campaign. He had regular old brain cancer.”
I had only a vague memory of The Death of Ivan Ilyich from a Russian lit class I took in college—something about a man’s emotional and physical suffering at the very end.
“Ivan Ilyich played the game his whole life,” Lucas said. “The best part is when he sees himself in his wife and daughter, all that for which he had lived.”
“He doesn’t like what he sees?”
“He questions whether his life is a deception.”
“Maybe he’s just having a senior moment. The keys are in the freezer, Ivan!” I held on to Lucas’s smile for a beat. “So you think I saw myself in Pamela Randolph Walsh and questioned the authenticity of a life in banking.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“A true company woman; a total bore?” I said, thinking aloud.
“Is that what you thought of her?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “She might figure it out before she lies down to die.”
“Have you figured out what you want?”
“Most definitely not.” I lifted my glass.
“Cin cin,” he said.
After the meal, Lucas ordered a port. I ordered a white chocolate martini. This bought us another thirty minutes or so, before the worries of tomorrow set in. I had to teach a class in the morning, and though he didn’t say so, Lucas was probably due at a jobsite by seven. These were early days in our relationship, and they were marked by the time we stole—from sleep and from work—so we could be together for one more drink, which was always one drink too many and, at the same time, never enough.
THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN fast and hard, yanked by a man on a mission. He walks into the bar, pauses in the entryway, and looks around. He’s maybe thirty, forty tops, white, wearing cargo shorts and a camo T-shirt that has been washed so many times the university’s wordmark is barely recognizable. His short stature and deformed ears indicate a bygone wrestling career, most likely at the U., which has always had a good team. Glory days, long passed.
I brace myself for the Damn, girl, looking fine, for the smell of cigarettes and fast-food breath. None of this happens, though. He makes a beeline for Martin Yagla.
Martin is short too, maybe five foot nine, and he shaves his head because he has started to go bald. Though not nearly as built as the Wrestler, he works out—a tight shirt reveals biceps—but a small gut appeared in his thirties. When he smiles, his teeth take over his face, and it’s obvious he has them cosmetically whitened, because they are blue white—too white. Anyone in town would know to find Martin here. Everyone calls him Yag, or Dr. Yag, because he has an MD.
He sits to my right with the latest in a steady stream of twenty-one-year-olds he’s brought to the bar. Yag tells the girl to stop crying, which makes her wail louder. He looks around to see if people are listening and catches my eye. He notices the Wrestler, now hovering next to him.
They shake hands but it’s a hard shake, not a friendly one.
“Should we take this out to the alley?” Yag’s opener, ballsy and panicky all at once.
“Listen to you, cool guy,” says the Wrestler.
This is not one of those made-for-TV-movie situations where two guys step outside, each backed by a cadre of buddies: brothers in arms. Martin Yagla is on his own, like the fraternity brother who never sobered up—eventually everyone stops calling.
Whatever is about to happen, Yag probably has it coming. He’s always crossing someone. Himself, usually.
Amelia serves his girl another with a steady hand. I can’t tell if she’s doing it out of compassion, or curiosity, or rote service. The girl moves the straw clockwise in her glass and watches the ice swirl. She is drinking a vodka soda with a splash of pineapple juice, and she’s a hot mess. Tousled hair, coarse from bleach, covers half her face. Her shirt slips off her shoulder, revealing the strap of a pink, lacy bra. She’s wearing very short cutoff jeans, and her bare thighs are stuck to the stool. She’s not bad looking, though, attractive in the same way most college girls are. She is a caricature of youth, and youth counts for everything, especially here.
Two people in this bar are angry at Martin Yagla, and that’s if you don’t count me, because mine isn’t urgent. My anger is like rancid food that’s been sitting out too long. No one dares touch it.
Yag owes the guy ten grand. That’s the short of it. It’s a poker debt from a high-stakes table (high-stakes by Upstate New York standards, which means a little higher than a friendly game, maybe at most a hundred-dollar minimum buy-in). A ten-grand debt must have accumulated over some period. Now it’s time to pay up.
He mumbles something under his breath. Under the fear, there’s anger, and under the anger, there’s indignation.
“What’d you say?” demands the Wrestler.
Cocking his head sideways, looking the Wrestler in the eye for the first time, Yag says, “Your homies cheated. I have proof.”
The Wrestler lets out a low-pitched, dopey laugh. “You played with us every week for a year, man. You never once caught a cheat.”
“I kept track of hands and did the math. The likelihood everything was legit is 0.13657 percent.” The fifth decimal is pretty convincing, but the Wrestler’s not buying it. He shakes his head, maintaining a sly half smile—a smirk that asserts, I have the power here. “Why should I pay when I know you all cheated?” Yag says.
I can think of a reason: this guy will break his knees with a tire iron.
“You can’t calculate your way out of this one, buddy,” the Wrestler says. A surprisingly civilized response.
“I don’t have the money,” Yag says, defeated.
The Wrestler replies, “Borrow the money from your mom.”
“I can’t ask my mom for ten grand, dude. Just give me a little time.”
The guy tells Yag to get up. He complies. They stand there staring at each other, waiting for a waltz to begin.
As the Wrestler rotates his shoulder backward and clenches his fist, a soulful funk melody comes on the jukebox, and by the time the punch lands on Martin’s gut, almost everyone in the bar is bobbing and tapping to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder. It’s almost poetic.
Yag crumples into himself.
Amelia points at the Wrestler and says, “Get out now.”
He raises both hands into the air, palms open, as if to say, I mean no harm. He tells Yag he has one week, and then he’ll collect directly from his mom, and he hopes she can take a punch better than her piece-of-shit son. Then he turns and walks toward the door.
At the last second, he looks at Cal and nods. They know each other, which isn’t unusual—everyone knows everyone in this town—but the expression on Cal’s face betrays that they know each other for a specific reason. My best guess is that it’s drug related, and that this guy and others just like him have been out to Cal’s ranch many times. Most of them carry weapons and none of them are very nice people, not the types of people good parents allow around their children.
Cal’s ten-year-old daughter, Summer, is in her own world, drawing on construction paper, chewing on her tongue. Summer is allowed to hang out at The Final Final before ten o’clock as long as she doesn’t sit at the bar. Her little body moves back and forth to the rhythm of the music. She looks happy. I tell myself that I, of all people, have no right to judge, and go back to my drink.
The Wrestler swings the door gently this time. He goes silently into the night.
Outside, there’s a storm brewing, one of those big ones that mark the interlude between summer and fall. Everyone knows it’s coming because darkness looms, the air is dense, and the insects have stopped rubbing their wings.
Before Yag is back on the stool next to his girl, he looks at me and says, “Mind your own fucking business, Emma.”
“Poor little Martin,” I say. “Better run home to Mommy.”
“You’re the reason I started playing poker with those guys in the first place,” he says, which is a partial truth, but the broader truth is that Yag’s a fuckup, and that’s hardly my fault.
YAG ATTENDED COLLEGE AT the U. back in the day, along with Lucas and many of their high school buddies, but took several years to graduate because he lost his mind—a result of, as the story goes, a bad trip on LSD.
He claimed he and Marshall Mathers were going in together to buy a city block in Detroit, which they planned to develop into a luxury high-rise condo building. He lied about other things too—little things, things no one would ever lie about because they could be disproven with a single phone call or internet search. Once, he insisted Jimmy was over at his place smoking a bowl when Jimmy was three thousand miles away backpacking in the Sierras. Lucas pulled up a picture Jimmy had sent him but Yag insisted the picture was taken weeks or months earlier. Arguing with him was futile. His mind played tricks on him. Signals got crossed and he believed in these falsehoods with total, blind conviction.
According to Lucas, back when they were in college, Yag would walk into the bar talking about a big math problem he was working on. He talked about it as if he could solve one problem and it would change the world. He didn’t, or it didn’t. But he did eventually get a degree in math from the U. He bummed around for a few more years, working in restaurants and bars, dipping in and out of Lucas’s life. Yag never left town. I think, even in adulthood, he needed the stability his parents provided.
One day he told Lucas he wanted to prove he could finish something: his own life. Lucas thought he should finish something else instead. They stayed up chain-smoking cigarettes on the stoop until four o’clock in the morning, and Yag walked away knowing he would apply to medical school and study psychiatry. He entered med school at the U. around the time Lucas started working for his dad’s drywall business—they were both twenty-eight—and he graduated five years later, having to take one off because he had another psychotic break. He practiced medicine for three months as a resident physician before walking out, telling everyone that it wasn’t for him and that nurses “could be real bitches.” Through the grapevine I heard that an older nurse, someone with seniority, asked Dr. Yagla to go get the newspaper for her, which was left at the front desk of the hospital. Yag refused to do it, asserting Nurses do not tell doctors what to do. Word got back to his attending physician, who immediately put him on permanent paperboy duty. Yag quit.
I ADJUST MY BODY on the stool. Yag and his teary-eyed girl have picked up where they left off, rudely interrupted by the Wrestler. He slumps over his beer. They both look down at his phone.
The girl is preoccupied by Yag’s cheating ways. She doesn’t get hung up on the fact that he was just punched in the gut by some guy he’s into for ten grand. For a reasonable person, this would be a huge red flag, a reason to run the other direction. If I cared, even a little bit, I’d shake some sense in to her.
Martin Yagla skulks behind his girl—was it Carol, Sheryl?—as if he can use his body to muffle the sound of her tears. She braces herself, holding on to the bar with two hands.
He takes a breath so deep I can see his chest rise and fall. “People are looking, Caroline. Can we talk about this some other time?”
It’s hot and muggy outside, and in an hour, it will probably storm. I check the forecast on my phone. By eight o’clock there is a 96 percent chance of rain, which is the equivalent of certainty. Meteorologists just don’t have the balls to call it.
Yag doesn’t have a car. His license is currently suspended, a result of his second DUI. And he isn’t about to invite her back to his parents’ house, where he lives in the basement. The girl probably lives with four roommates who haven’t yet graduated from the U. There’s no place for them to fight privately. Also, they’re shameless.
The girl turns and grabs at Yag. She demands, “Let me see your phone.”
I stare but neither of them seems aware of me anymore.
He says no, but when she asks why, he can’t come up with an excuse. He’s too drunk to persuade her with an argument about his right to privacy. On some level, he seems to understand he has already shown his hand. She’s seen something, and she can’t unsee it. He thrusts the phone in her direction, and she begins scrolling silently.
“I told you I’m not interested in her romantically.” His words slur. His voice is loud and abrasive.
“But you hooked up?” Caroline lacks confidence. She knows this to be true already but she asks the question anyway.
“We were drunk,” Yag blurts out. He reaches over and asks Amelia for another stein of beer. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Did you have sex?” The girl sucks compulsively from the little straw in her drink.
He throws up his hands, What do you want me to say? He looks up at the TV. I follow his lead. The pitcher throws the ball to first base to hold back a runner boldly tagging up, way off the bag. He dives back to first. Safe.
“Why do you owe that guy ten thousand dollars, anyway?” she asks as she scrolls. You go girl—ask the serious question.
“It’s nothing,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Ten thousand is a lot of money,” she says.
I think about the Wrestler, how wrestling is the thing that defines him, even though he probably hasn’t been on the mat in years.
“I’ll handle it. Are you done?” Yag reaches for his phone. She’s not done.
“Look at me,” the girl says.
Yag turns his head toward her. His left hand is on the bar and his right foot is on the base of her stool.
“How many times did you put your dick in her?”
“I don’t know. Less than three. We were drunk. We’re just friends.”
“You are always drunk.” If the girl ever took my class, we’d have a serious conversation about up-talk.
Yag shakes his head, not in protest or denial, more like, So shoot me.
The pitcher has not yet thrown a single pitch to the batter. He’s in a standoff with the guy on first.
“You take zero responsibility?”
“It’s a Gen X thing,” Yag says.
“A Gen X thing?” I’m not sure if the girl isn’t familiar with Gen X as a category or if she’s questioning Yag’s moronic excuse. For her sake, I hope it’s the latter.
“We invented hookup culture in college,” Yag says. “Four years of popping pills and getting laid—that’s pretty hard to turn off.” It took Yag more than four years to graduate, but I don’t want to split hairs.
Every time Yag opens his mouth, I detest him more. He is brilliant—a mathematician, a doctor for Chrissake—but he will never leave this town. He’ll drink every day at this bar for the rest of his life. He won’t stop banging twenty-one-year-olds until they stop saying yes, and they might not stop saying yes for another ten years. They seem to be getting stupider by the year, less discriminating.
And maybe it is just a bad night, but I find myself disliking the girl too, though I have no cause. I find her pain distasteful because it isn’t real pain. Together with Yag. Not together with Yag. It means nothing, thin as the air at twenty thousand feet.
None of the other regulars are listening. Cal is at the other end of the bar talking shop with a young man who looks about twenty-one or twenty-two. Short Pete and Fancy Pete are chewing the fat about local politics. Summer is at the front table sucking down Cherry Cokes.
Yag puts his arm around Caroline, pulling her toward his chest. She pushes him away, kicks his foot off the base of her stool, and scoots in the opposite direction. He looks at her as if they’ve been talking about the weather or what they had for lunch, and says flatly, “I’m gonna go play pool. See ya later.” His tone reminds me of my father. It rings with superiority. It implies, I’m done with this now.
A GLIMMER SQUEEZES THROUGH the door, daylight finding its way in. Jimmy comes in from the heat, wiping the sweat from his forehead, making his way to the bar. He’s wearing a dark-blue T-shirt, a size too small. A band name, DIGISAURUS, is inscribed across a boom box with lightning bolts shooting out. The letters are stretched over his pecs, and the bolts curve over his gut, not quite reaching his belly button. This shirt is paired with old Levi’s and black-and-white Sambas—the same shoes kids wore for indoor soccer back in the nineties.
Sometimes I feel like I’m straddling where I came from—Wilton, Cambridge, San Francisco, New York—and where I am, this town, like they are two different worlds. Then the whiskey touches my lips and I realize no matter where I am it tastes just the same.
In towns like ours, there’s a fine line between rustic and run-down. There are still a few cows in the fields. There are refurbished barns where kids from the U. have wedding receptions. There is a nearby swimming hole maintained as a state park. There’s a burger place where you can get your name on the wall and a free T-shirt for eating four burgers in under an hour. There’s also an opioid epidemic. And family farms in foreclosure. And historic houses so dilapidated even the frat bros won’t live in them. Our town is like a woman who looks good from fifty yards.
Amelia tosses a coaster in his direction and says, “What’ll it be?” She says it just like that, the way the bartenders in the movies say it. Jimmy orders a stein of beer, which costs three dollars on Wednesday. Glasses clank as Amelia pulls a frosty mug out of the freezer. A little bit of beer swooshes out as she sets it down in front of Jimmy. She grabs a towel to wipe off the glass, but he is already halfway across the bar, saying hello to one of the other regulars.
Amelia lives in a room above the bar. I’ve been upstairs only once. Before Amelia moved in, Lucas’s friend Jacob had her room. One night, he sent us up to do a line of coke off his empty dresser. His bed was unmade, bare, no sheets, not even a mattress cover. The room had no kitchen, only a small microwave on the floor in the corner. There was one shared bathroom in the hallway. The experience of his room was so depressing that I never followed Lucas up there again. I imagine Amelia has fixed it up a little, maybe painted the walls a deep purple or red, hung a painting purchased from the antique shop up the street.
Jimmy walks toward me. He’s put on a few pounds. Jimmy only played soccer, never football, because his parents are scientists and thus take issue with repeated trauma to the brain. He has the anatomy of a football player, though, six foot four with broad shoulders and big hands.
I motion for him to take the empty seat to my left. He smells like a combination of hamburger and fries, greasy and stale. Not a whiff of tapioca, I think to myself.
“How ya doin’, old friend?” I ask.
It’s doubtful that Jimmy thinks of me as a friend—he’s Lucas’s friend—but the greeting seems to please him nonetheless.
I gesture toward Yag. “How do you stand him?”
He takes a long drink from his beer. “I’ve learned to compartmentalize. We’re only friends at the bar.”
“He’s being rude to that girl,” I say.
If Jimmy cares, he doesn’t let on. He shrugs, as if to say, Tell me something I don’t already know.
A jolt of worry strikes. Or is it hope? I can’t tell the difference. Lucas might meet Jimmy here. My mind says, He never comes to the bar anymore. He avoids me. But my heart asks, Maybe tonight is different?
I decide to fish. “Meeting anyone?”
“Not tonight,” Jimmy says. “It’s a slow one, so I dipped out for a drink.”
He puts a coaster on top of his beer and steps out front for a smoke.
Before Jimmy took that job at the diner up the street, he worked as an aerospace engineer. As kids, he and Lucas set off rockets in his backyard, and Jimmy talked about wanting to be an astronaut. By the time he left for college, he had a private pilot’s certificate. After college, he lived out west for several years, designing commercial aircraft for Boeing. He moved back home when the doctors announced the cancer had spread to his sister’s lymph nodes, lungs, and liver. He was here to say goodbye and to help his parents, and we all expected him to leave again when she died. He never did.
He’s going on five years at the diner. Every year, on the anniversary of his sister’s death, Jimmy wraps up two burgers to go and brings them over to his dad’s house. They sit on the porch together and eat. He told me once that they don’t say much but it’s not the talking that matters. It’s the being here. Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the fact that this Jimmy—the Jimmy who sticks around this town so he can sit on the porch with his dad—is the same Jimmy who lives to party, the Jimmy who used to do lines of coke off the kitchen counter with Lucas and take all our money at the poker table.
Amelia reads my mind. She says, “Lucas hasn’t set foot in here in months. He came in on Thanksgiving Day and then again on Christmas Eve. I remember because the second time he came in, he gave me a huge tip—called it a Christmas bonus.”
Our divorce was finalized a week before Thanksgiving, three quarters of a year ago, which feels like both an eternity and a flash, like tacky wet paint that’s already started to peel from weather. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the only two days that Lucas could be absolutely certain I would be in Connecticut with my mom.
Thanksgiving is Lucas’s favorite holiday. He likes cooking all day and walking around in socks and a flannel. But his family never celebrates it on actual Thanksgiving. His mom puts the holiday on hold until his brother, the prodigal son, makes it up from New York City with his wife and two kids. So, for Lucas, Thanksgiving falls on a random Saturday, sometime in November or December, when the big shot litigator, hair combed back and gelled, piles into his Mercedes SUV with his Barbie-doll wife and Norman Rockwell kids, drives four hours, and graces Upstate New York with his indomitable presence. It doesn’t surprise me that Lucas spends actual Thanksgiving and Christmas here at The Final Final.
“Got it,” I say to Amelia. “Thanks.” I’m not sure why I’m thanking her—I suppose for the information. Her intonation suggests disapproval. She prefers Lucas as a customer. He tips better.
ABOUT A YEAR AFTER I met Pamela Randolph Walsh and left Manhattan behind, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about her. The headline was “Daughter of a Bookmaker Becomes Darling of Wall Street.”
I showed it to Lucas. “Not Ivan Ilyich after all,” he said.
Pamela would never look back on her career and point to this article as a seminal moment. Having met her, however briefly, I understood the publicity was most likely a source of embarrassment, or perhaps not embarrassment exactly, but diminishment. Her success was not intrinsic. It wasn’t attributable to anything she did.
Maybe she wasn’t Ivan Ilyich. But what was the alternative? I pictured her stick-straight, cropped hair, the perfect arc of her back, the heaviness of her steps as she walked away from me.
If Pamela fell suddenly ill in her forties, she might suffer physical pain, but no mental anguish—and even if she did suffer mental anguish, it would not be the subject of Tolstoy. There would be more salacious points of inquiry. No one would care if her interior décor was exactly the same as every other banker—modern leather chairs, white walls, stainless steel appliances: clean and crisp. No one would question her early maneuvers, the climb from researcher to analyst to VP. No one would examine her family life and consider that time spent at the office might have been an evasion. No one, finally, would take notice of spouse and child, the former a ham-fisted kept man, the latter a private school brat, all that for which she had lived, and see, in them, Pamela: a deception.
Lucas paused, processing what he’d read, thinking, no doubt, about the writings of historians and philosophers, charting ideas in his brain. Finally, he said, “Daniel was a nobody too. Then the king threw him to the lions.”
Imagine: Wilton, Connecticut, is a modern-day Babylon. The kings of men wear blue blazers and starched button-downs. They live in six-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansions, made of stone and brick. Most of the rooms are vacant because they have only one-point-five kids. One will go to Harvard. The point-five will probably go to Brown.
If you are Pamela Randolph Walsh, this is your station in life. Your life in Babylon is the result of a series of events that transpire because of one predominant motivation: the acquisition of wealth. You have talent; you have ambition; and, if you’re like Daniel, you have piety. His Jerusalem is your Wall Street. His God, your Economy. He prays daily. You trade daily. Either way, life is a series of transactions.
You refuse the food and wine of the new money elites. You avoid their yoga studios and coffee shops. You don’t set foot in a Whole Foods. And when you take that job at a Wall Street bank, you ditch the Audi your dad bought you with his bookmaking profits, and you take the subway because it keeps you humble.
Sitting in your tower, high above the concrete jungle, you look at your tickers and study your reports, and you begin to understand visions and dreams of all kinds. Management asks you to interpret a series of disclosures, after their wisest men have failed, and you deliver a prophecy about the end of a long reign and all the ways leadership is found wanting.
The bank transitions through a series of kings—one goes crazy and moves to Brooklyn; one is overthrown in a coup. You persevere. You rise through the ranks, first, an underling in the royal court; then, having distinguished yourself among analysts, you are given the title of VP, above the satraps. You are neither corrupt nor negligent, and best of all, you have a high tolerance for pain.
Do you question your piety? Do you cry out in the night? Do you distract yourself with Prada handbags and Jimmy Choo heels and powder-white cocaine? Or, like Daniel, do you stay true to your God?
Daniel, Ivan Ilyich, Pamela Randolph Walsh: each nothing more than a subordinate leader, a talented middle manager subject to the whim of a king. They are barely distinguishable but for the stuff of legends: Daniel is thrown to the lions! Pamela is the daughter of a bookmaker! And what becomes of them? Only Ivan Ilyich dies a nobody.
Pamela’s story may never have come to light, or it may have surfaced much later—too late to have an impact on her career—if not for her father’s early death and for his obituary in a local Wilton newspaper. As luck would have it, the obit guy at the Wilton Weekly actually did his homework, and her name, occupation, and Harvard pedigree were mentioned in an unusually lengthy chronicle of the life and times of a bookmaker some twenty years prior. Apparently, after his release from prison, Walter Randolph lived a reclusive life without incident.
No one would have seen this local obit, except for the fact that a student reporter at the Harvard Crimson scoured internet news sites for obituaries of noteworthy alums. While Pamela’s father was not an alumnus, his obituary came up in the search because the school was mentioned alongside Pamela’s name.
It was this kid at Harvard who realized there was a story here, although there’s no way he would have had the slightest idea how it would all spin out. He had been working on a series of articles about Wall Street influencers after the financial crisis, which profiled a number of Harvard graduates. I read some of the articles in the series.
A fellow Harvard alum who worked at the New York Times read the one on Pamela and concluded, Who better than the daughter of a bookmaker to clean up Wall Street? That article led to the article I happened upon in the Journal.
Pamela Randolph Walsh was a nobody before she had a story. She survived on Wall Street because she had a high tolerance for pain. Then the press threw her in with the lions, their jaws locked shut by angels, and she emerged untouched and altogether more spectacular, the talk of the town, a legend.
In short order, she was head of global compliance, and then CFO.
Lucas said, “You should write a book.”
LATER, I WOULD CALL the book The Breakout Effect: How Stories Make Leaders; it would become a best seller.
The breakout effect is the phenomenon whereby a person pushes through a predetermined ceiling as a result of some extrinsic factor (i.e., not hard work or a brilliant idea). I co-opted it for my own purposes, but breakout is a common term in finance. Securities—stocks and bonds—typically move within certain thresholds. The upper limit of these thresholds is the level of resistance. Imagine a chart that shows the movement of the stock. It has peaks and troughs and jagged edges, but for a period of time, the line does not go above a certain ceiling or below a certain floor. Investors look for a breakout point—the point at which the security will climb past the level of resistance. There are many factors that might lead to a breakout: an abrupt shift in supply and demand, which is sometimes predictable; a major news event, the effects of which are often unpredictable. The goal is to take a long position when the price of the security approaches the resistance line.
When you graph the success curves of human beings, adjusting for people who have major health problems and people who are so poor that upward mobility is an American myth, you find that they look exactly like stocks. Everyone has peaks and troughs and resistance levels, and just like the market always goes up in the long run, people, collectively, trend upward. This begs the question: How do people break through their resistance levels and become leaders? This is the central concern of the book.
The key insight of The Breakout Effect is that it’s not who you are that makes you a leader; it’s the story about who you are. Because the story is what allows you to break out. The story is what matters, not the reality. Furthermore, telling a good story is like beating a polygraph: anyone can do it with a little training, or the help of a good book. Hence, the appeal.
Beyond principles of storytelling, the book espouses one idea above all else: the story, regardless of subject, must be humanizing, not humbling, necessarily, though it could be, just humanizing.
A COUNTRY SONG PLAYS on the jukebox. It’s Cal’s pick.
Ridin’ gravel to the jobsite
Smokin’ cigarettes on the morning road
Everything’s gonna be alright
While my baby dreams at home
The tune takes me back. It was playing when I brought my mother to The Final Final for the first time. The only time. She’d never spent much time on country roads. Wilton wasn’t exactly a walking community unless you count the arduous journey from master bedroom to three-car garage. Before she drove up, Mom called and asked if she should bring her boots. I closed my eyes and imagined her high-heeled, pointy-toe Ferragamos and promptly said, “Sure, Mom, bring your boots.”
Only city boys sleep through the morning
Only royals eat bacon and eggs
Only bourgeois read the newspaper
Drivin’ to work while my baby dreams at home
When she rolled into town, she said she wanted a martini so we stopped at The Final Final. Upon entry, her nose crinkled up and her body collapsed into itself. She refused to sit down or touch anything. She did not use the bathroom. So I was surprised when she ordered a second martini. She lost herself in thought for a moment as Amelia drained the shaker into her glass.
“You know,” she said, “I met your dad in a bar just like this one. It was the late seventies, right after the blackout. Hot as hell in July. The bars had opened their doors again, so I ventured out to meet some friends in the West Village. The place was a filthy dive but that night it felt like a sanctuary. Everyone just seemed so kind, willing to help out however they could.”
“Small-town kindness,” I said.
“Nico walked in off the street, glasses fogged up from the humidity. He was there to meet this gorgeous girl. She was so bohemian, so free. Just sexy. Nico was all over her. It was the girl who struck up a conversation with me first. She asked me what I did to maintain such beautiful skin.” Mom paused, searching my face. “What? You don’t believe me? I was young once too, Emma. You get your looks from me, not your dad.”
I believed her. She never talked about those days. New York in the gritty seventies. It was such a departure from the way I saw her: a stay-at-home mom in Wilton.
“Nico looked me up and down, head to toe, and gently pushed that beautiful girl off his lap. He told us he was going to call his brother. In those days, bars had pay phones in the back. Then he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I promise you’ll like him if you give him a chance.’ ”
Ridin’ gravel to the jobsite
Smokin’ cigarettes on the morning road
Everything’s gonna be alright
While my baby dreams at home
“Your father showed up thirty minutes later. He’d been at the public library, his office at the time. Apparently, when the librarian handed your dad the phone, she said, ‘I’m not your secretary.’ Nico thought that was hilarious. I’m quite certain he called him at the library all the time. Your dad introduced himself as a developer, even though he hadn’t developed anything yet. He said he had his eye on a six hundred thousand–square-foot office building on a side street in Midtown that was underpriced but no one wanted. There was so much trepidation back then. Unemployment was off the charts. Wall Street was taking a beating.”
Mom laughed to herself like she was in the middle of a daydream and forgot anyone was listening.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Your dad was just so out of place in that bar. Everyone else, myself included, tried hard to be cool. He rambled on and on about buildings. I’d never met anyone so ambitious. The way he carried himself. He was bigger than himself.”
“Sounds like a real catch,” I said. She ignored my sarcasm.
“That blond beauty was back on Nico’s lap, kissing him. He pulled back, pointed at me, and said, ‘Brother, I knew she was your type.’ Nico was the handsome one, but I was enamored with your father. I knew he’d do everything he said he would and more. It took him ten years to buy his first building. You were in grade school by then. It seems like it happened overnight but it didn’t. Those were the hardest years but they were the best. That’s usually how it is. You think you’ll never get through them, and then you spend the rest of your life missing their intensity, those beautiful years.”
When she finished her martini, she licked her lips and said, “Perfect martini, but please tell me you have a decent restaurant in this town for dinner.”
THERE IS SOMETHING EXOTIC about small-town life. Though some people (people who say things like, This is a gorgeous wine) can’t see it, and even if they do, they are unwilling or unable to tap into it. I’m not sure exactly what to call it, but it has something to do with joy.
After the relationship grew serious, Lucas invited me to join his coed softball team, sponsored by The Final Final. After my first game (I caught a fly ball in right field and hit an RBI double), we stopped for a drink in a part of town infested by strip malls. The closest place to the field was a LongHorn Steakhouse on Route 1.
Lucas inspected the menu. From across the table, I could see him scan through little pictures of various cuts of meat, filet down to porterhouse. The graphics were not to scale because the porterhouse should have been like four times bigger. The guy sitting to our left was eating one that was the size of a large plate, leaving little room for the side of limp asparagus threatening to fall off onto the table. He didn’t give a rip; he wasn’t there for the asparagus. “I wonder where they get their beef,” Lucas said.
In lieu of becoming a vegan, Lucas had gone on a whole-animal buying spree. First he bought a cow, then later a pig. His freezer and a second freezer in his parents’ garage were stacked chockablock with butchered animal parts, including pork hocks, cow tongue, and a heart that may have belonged to the pig or the cow—he wasn’t sure which. In Lucas’s mind, the zealous consumption of whole animals was the moral equivalent of a juice cleanse. Animals were sacred.
“This is a LongHorn, Lucas. Where do you think they get their beef?”
“There are a lot of cows in Upstate New York. It could make sense to source locally.” A Canadian-at-heart with the soul of a dad. He was born to hold a clipboard and deliver a slow clap. He would definitely drive a minivan. His greatest, existential question would one day be, How do I get these squirts to stop clustering on one side of the field? Bring it in, kids! One, two, three, fun! Way back then, I could picture it.
“Are you kidding? The meat probably comes from China,” I said.
“I’m going to ask the waiter.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Fremdscham.”
He laughed.
“Everyone will know you’re a thirtysomething white dude with disposable income,” I said.
He motioned with his hand at my entire body, head to toe: Look at yourself.
I wore Lululemon yoga pants, a loose racer-back tank with the insignia of the U. on the front, and a hot-pink sports bra. Two thin gold necklaces, different lengths, which I’d forgotten to remove, glimmered on my neck. I twisted and untwisted them half-consciously. So yeah: a sporty yuppie.
“What else would I wear to softball?” I snapped.
“Exactly,” he said. “Look at what you’ve become. One of those women.”
“Those women?”
“Oh, you know, one who talks about the dog all the time. Pretty soon, you’ll trade whiskey for chardonnay.”
“Whoa whoa whoa. It’s not like I have a pair of corgis named Princess and Muffin. Addie is a badass dog. She’s my best friend.”
He gave me that look: Case in point.
“I don’t post about her on the internet,” I said.
“You talk about her so much you don’t have time to post stuff on the internet,” he said.
“I do not.”
“You’re just like Sienna, going on and on about how her kid won a leadership award.”
Ugh, Sienna: Samantha’s friend and my nemesis. The leadership award Lucas referred to was handed out by her daughter’s new-age preschool. It was called the Hungry Spirit Award, and it was trending on Facebook. What constitutes leadership for a four-year-old? Not peeing on the carpet?
Sienna orders oatmeal at brunch. Sometimes she deviates and orders an egg-white, no-cheese omelet with a side of leafy greens. Her enthusiasm for charity bake sales is both gluten-free and social-media smart. She drinks herbal tea, never coffee. She uses a straw so the tea doesn’t stain her teeth. She carries compostable straws in her purse because her image would suffer if associated with plastic. The compostable straw is a natural talking point: a personal crusade to reduce her impact on fish and marine mammals. Meanwhile, her AC runs 24/7, her snow removal guy uses a blower, not a shovel, and a giant propane tank is refilled regularly to heat a massive backyard pool she had installed on the off chance her hungry-spirit kid is the next Katie Ledecky. I’ve never liked oatmeal. Or tea. Amelia knows I don’t take straws, but I don’t brag about it, because a bartender knowing my every whim is not exactly a point of pride. It’s certainly not Facebook material.
The waitress came by to refill our waters.
“Where do you get your beef?” Lucas asked. His tone was very serious, almost scholarly.
“I dunno,” she said, sweet as apple pie. “I can get a manager for you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “We’re just having a drink.”
“Really,” she said. “It’s no problem at all.” LongHorn trained servers to be very accommodating.
Porterhouse Guy pulled his face out of his steak and glanced over at us.
“People are going to think we’re from the city, Lucas.”
“You’re from Connecticut.”
The manager was maybe thirty or thirty-five—our age—with the hair and body of John Daly before his gastric-band surgery. Too much imported beef from China.
“We get most of our meat from the Panhandle.” As he spoke, I pictured him swinging a golf club, gut square with the ground, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Thank you very much,” Lucas said. “We don’t have time for food today. Maybe next time, though.”
“Sure thing,” he said.
As soon as he was out of earshot, we said in unison, “The Panhandle?”
“The Florida Panhandle?” I suggested. I went to grad school with a girl from Tallahassee so I had a vague sense that Florida had a panhandle, in addition to various oddities I associated with the region. “Holy shit, that guy looked a lot like John Daly. Do you think he took a job here at the LongHorn to pay off his gambling debts?”
“I’m pretty sure John Daly owns a steakhouse in Arkansas, so if he’s wandering around anywhere answering questions about where the beef comes from, it’s probably there,” Lucas said.
“That might be true, but you see the resemblance, right? He certainly looks familiar. Maybe I recognize him from your high school reunion. Any chance he went to Horace Mann?”
“Why do you think everyone in town went to high school with me?” He gave me a little shove. I tipped off my stool, catching myself with my foot.
“Where else would they have gone?” I smiled.
“I think he’s talking about Texas. The Texas/Oklahoma Panhandle,” Lucas said.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a panhandle in China,” I said, and we both had a good chuckle.
Of course, this is how I witnessed the LongHorn before. Light, humorous, exotic. Home of John Daly’s doppelgänger. Place where love existed. Now, after, I see it differently.
I TEXT SAMANTHA BACK. Who’s at your house tonight and why is Grace involved?
Party emoji, smiley tongue–face emoji, thumbs-up emoji, followed by the words GIRLS NIGHT in all caps. Samantha uses emojis gratuitously either to look cool or to inspire people to come over to her house, where she is a prisoner of circumstance (three kids).
Will Sienna be there? I ask.
No, not tonight.
When I don’t respond, she types that Grace’s friend Elisa Monfils is passing through town. She goes on to say that Grace asked her to host Elisa for the night because she has the space. Samantha lives in an unreasonably large house, a three-thousand-square-foot McMansion. So her claim is true on one level but it’s also a lie. No one passes through this town unless they have a reason. Samantha must realize this is suspicious because without prompting, she writes, I think she’s giving a talk at the U. tomorrow.
My whiskey is gone. I tilt back my head and use my tongue to separate a piece of ice, dropping it into my mouth. I suck on it, push the cube upward against my palate until the cold hurts, and then move the ice from one cheek to the other, crunching down to feel an uncomfortable but oddly pleasant sensation in my molar. The ice is part of the ritual—its melting away acting as a coded message to my brain: It’s time for another.
A GUY TAPS ME on the shoulder. “Did I sell you a house?”
“You must be thinking of someone else.” I recognize him right away: Aldrich Gilfillan, real estate agent. His signs say, CALL GIL. They do not say, CALL ALDRICH, because Aldrich is the kind of name that doesn’t go over well in a town like ours. Aldrich plays golf at the private club. Aldrich drinks top-shelf liquor. Aldrich takes his family on vacation to Kiawah. Gil enjoys fishing on the Finger Lakes. Gil buys thirty-packs of Bud Light for his annual backyard barbeque, and he invites the whole town.
Gil is on his second wife because, for one thing, he cheated on his first wife with some college girl, a friend of his son. His second wife, who’s with him now, stands patiently but doesn’t say a word.
“Where do I recognize you from?” Gil asks.
“Lucas,” I say. “Lucas Murphy.”
I doubt he picks up on the fact that he has just opened a wound. Real estate agents don’t know when to keep their mouths shut and pretend like they don’t know you. I live in a small town. I pretend like I don’t recognize people all the time—Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, for example. I just walk on by. I silently judge her because she has a tramp stamp and smokes cigarettes even though she has a toddler, et cetera, but I definitely don’t smile and ask where we’ve met. Aldrich Gilfillan: of all people, he should know a house is a sacred place.
He continues to talk. “That’s right! I never forget a house. That’s what I always say. I might forget a face but not a house. I sold him that little place on Catherine Street, a fine house. I knew Lucas was going to take it when we were halfway up the walk.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, and the name of my old street brings back another rush of memories. My eyes are looking at the glass in my hands but my mind is watching Lucas roll up on his bike, dismounting while still moving. I’m having a glass of wine on the porch, and Addie’s entire body is shaking with joy. She hangs back for a second until I say, “Go ahead,” and she bolts toward him.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER I moved in, Lucas said, “Come with me to the hardware store.” The small store was just a five-minute walk from the house, its proximity a pleasant legacy of the way people used to shop, before they started driving to megastores in the suburbs. We paid a premium for all sorts of things there—tools, coffee filters, even kitchen equipment. We wanted the place to stay in business.
“Okay,” I said, not bothering to ask what we needed. I grabbed Addie’s leash. The hardware store is one of her favorite places. The cashier always gives her a treat.
On our way out the door, Lucas pulled up a picture on his phone. “I made something for you,” he said. “I want you to pick the stain.”
The picture was of a traditional porch swing, propped up on sawhorses in his dad’s shop. I pinched out the screen to zoom in for a closer look, examining the grain of red cedar on evenly spaced slats.
“After we stain it, I’ll drill holes in each side and add the chain to hang it,” Lucas said.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“I know how much you love the porch,” he said. “Just figured it needs a swing.”
Our house had a traditional porch with a haint-blue ceiling, a color chosen by the previous owner, a Southerner, who believed the pale blue would keep the spirits away. I’d never had a proper porch before. Where I came from, no one wanted to sit outside and look at their neighbors.
Lucas helped me pick a light stain that would show off the grain and knots of the cedar. I insisted we take our can of stain and walk straight to his dad’s shop because I couldn’t wait another day for something that until that moment I didn’t even know I wanted.
Lucas showed me how to stain wood, applying it with a brush and wiping it off with a rag. He told me not to leave it on too thick or the qualities of the wood wouldn’t show through. Then he just let me go, like he trusted me, or he didn’t care if my method deviated from his. The staining didn’t take long. That swing was a thing of beauty.
Before we took off, Lucas’s mother, Joan, invited us into the house for iced tea. She could see how happy we were. She said, “All I ever wanted for Lucas was for him to find somebody like you.”
Lucas and his dad loaded the swing in the truck and we drove it home to Catherine Street.
ALL THE HOUSES ON our block were turn of the century, lovely houses in varying states of disrepair: peeling paint, wild ivy, broken fences. Ours was white with black shutters, classic and stately. Lucas put in a redbrick path with three steps leading to the front porch. The red brick was my suggestion. As an accent to our white house, it reminded me of New England. Lucas had more visual intelligence than I did. He was better at making these types of decisions. But he always listened to me anyway because he wanted his home to be my home. In the evenings, Addie sat on the brick dangling her feet off the top step while we rocked on the porch swing, talking about our days and the lives we dreamed up.
From the inside, the house felt like a bungalow but wasn’t really, because it had a weirdly tall body—tall for its girth. From the open kitchen, you could see the entire first floor, just a small living room and a dining room littered with toys—first the dog’s, then later, Lionel’s. No one was ever more than thirty feet away from anyone else on the first floor of that house, which satisfied Addie’s herding instinct, to have the entire family together at all times.
The view from the front window was framed by a big old tree, surrounded by hostas, which would bloom in the heat of July. Next to the window, there was a ratty, old leather chair that Addie had scratched up many times over as she clawed her way to the top. From that vantage, she could see all the neighborhood activity—the old lady who walked home with a book in her face, the guy who always wore jeans tucked into cowboy boots, a cigarette hanging from his lips, the girl next door with a boyfriend who climbed in through her window. Addie watched over the house, and if anyone walked up that redbrick path toward the front steps, she barked like crazy. The castle is under attack! It’s the mailman!
In my head, our house on Catherine Street was a palace fit for a princess, a delusion only apparent to me in the occasional glare or grimace of a visitor. When I gave Samantha the grand tour, her face read, Did I just walk into a South Bronx crack house? A family of bats had recently taken up residence in the north wall, and they squeaked mercilessly after dark. Lucas bought one of those ultrasonic devices but they took to it like a white noise machine and extended their stay. Samantha said only, “I can’t stay long. I have to pick up the kids.”
LUCAS AND I DECIDED we needed to add on to our kitchen. This required tearing down an exterior wall. (No bats were harmed in the process.) We planned a one-month job, which we knew meant three months, and we started in June to take advantage of the warm weather.
In retrospect, living without a wall on the back of our house was risky. The lower floor was sealed off from the backyard only by a thin nylon tarp. We’d heard about occasional break-ins in the neighborhood but blindly believed nothing bad would happen to us. We had a dog! Also, we owned nothing worth stealing.
Our summer project bulged into fall, finding ways to expand, like a fat body in a small wooden chair. Lucas had a football game on TV and a beer in hand. Papers strewn across the coffee table, I complained about grading—the most tedious part of my job—lopping off points for poorly structured arguments, boring first lines, weak linkages, the absence of conclusions. Beginnings, endings, and transitions! Students never learn!
When Addie’s tail knocked what was left of Lucas’s beer over onto one of my student’s papers, it was hard to place blame: Lucas’s beer, my mess, Addie’s tail? Lucas took the green pen out of my hand, drew an arrow pointing at the beer splotch, and wrote butt fumble on the paper, referring to an incident the Jets would never live down, a real low point, when your own lineman’s ass jars the ball loose. Lucas thought it was a good metaphor for our relationship. Fortunately, my student appreciated the joke. And the beer.
We were enjoying this peaceful Sunday, when Addie went nuts because she heard a squirrel. The creature had entered our home through the tarp, probably in search of food, and the second he saw Addie bolt toward him, he knew he’d made a mistake.
Barking, Addie chased him up onto the counter. Lucas and I sat dumbstruck for a beat. The squirrel scurried all the way up to the top of the kitchen cabinets, which dropped about six inches below the ceiling. He paced back and forth. Addie followed him from the floor, jumping and barking, her front paws on the counter and then down again.
The squirrel was safe as long as he held his position, but he was increasingly agitated. Lucas stood up, inched toward the kitchen, and called Addie to back down. A terrible listener, especially when excited, she continued to jump and bark. Then the squirrel made a run for it, down the side of the cabinet and toward the center of the house. That’s when Addie caught him in her mouth.
I’d never heard a squirrel make so much noise. That little guy let out a horrible, fearful squeal: the sound of helplessness. It must have been the first time Addie ever caught anything because the look on her face was of complete bewilderment. She didn’t want to clamp down. She didn’t want to toy with the squirrel. She didn’t want to kill him. But she didn’t want to let him go. This was her house. It was her job to watch over it. And she’d done that job. She’d caught the intruder. So what now? She froze.
Addie’s fangs reminded me of Lucas’s mind. She had this God-given feature that enabled her to rip another living thing to pieces, but she wasn’t psychologically capable of it. She could chase and bark and provoke but she didn’t know how to snap her jaw or sink her teeth in. An Australian cattle dog with the heart of a Canadian, just like her master!
When Lucas spoke to her—How was your day, Ruffers? Rufferstiltskin Ruffers have ridges—I couldn’t help but wonder how much of her personality was her nature and how much she’d picked up from him. Certainly, the way he horsed around with her, putting his hand in her mouth, shaking her by the teeth, taught her never to bite down.
Slowly, she opened her mouth and the poor squirrel was released into the house. Lucas lifted the tarp and exposed the back side of the kitchen to the yard, an enormous gap. Even in shock, the squirrel found his own way out.
TOWARD THE END OF the kitchen project, Lucas asked his father to come over to help with the drywall. For most of my life, I never thought much about walls. They were flat. They were covered in paint. Then I fell in love with a guy who hangs drywall for a living, and I began to see walls for what they really are: a thin façade covering up ducts and electrical wiring and insulation. The process of drywalling a room is patchwork, filling in gaps, taping joints, mudding over everything, layer after layer, until the surface is smooth. Now, when I see a beautiful human with a perfect child and a thriving vegetable garden and a clean car, I imagine her as drywall. I think about all the seams and joints and layers of mud. I think about everything it takes to make the surface appear smooth.
To watch Lucas’s father hang and finish drywall was to experience virtuosity. He made it look so easy, so fluid, so precise. His pace was about one and a half times Lucas’s pace. The old man had been handsome once, like Lucas. In old age, he had wiry gray hair that stuck straight up in the humid months, and a smoker’s face, leathery and lined. When he ran into other old-timers, he’d say, “How you doin’, my brother?” He claimed to run two miles every morning and then drink two beers to start his day.
He encouraged me to try the finishing once and only once. I ended up with a layer of mud on the wall, and also a layer on the floor and on my ripped jeans, which were, incidentally, not work pants. My pace I need not record.
Lucas may have been aware that there would be a time when his father could not so easily lift his arms over his head for long intervals, or climb a ladder without a second thought, but the notion that a father’s physical decline is the only thing that will allow his son to surpass him is not a comforting one.
Sometime before I’d ever seen him work, Lucas and I were in a conversation with two guys—one had just remodeled his master bathroom and the other was adding on a sunroom. One guy said, “Well, Murphy sure did a fantastic job on my drywall. Good price too,” and the other guy said, “Did you now, Lucas?” and then the first guy said, “No, no, I mean the real Murphy,” and I could see something in Lucas’s eyes but he just smiled and said, “Dad’s the best, no doubt about that.”
I’d like to think the reason Lucas delayed joining the family business for so long was because he had other ambitions, but I wouldn’t doubt it was also because he wanted to be a real Murphy, as opposed to some less real version of his dad. It could also be the case that I’m projecting—that I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding measuring up to my own father’s success, albeit a different kind of success.
These memories of our old home float through my mind like the ghost that comes with the house.