A GROUP OF COLLEGE girls rolls in. Wet high heels stomping on the doormat, umbrellas jettisoned, they shake off excess water like dogs. They never wear rain slickers or rain boots or anything else that would protect them, regardless of season. They are impervious to weather. It is a superpower of youth.
Huddled together, they shuffle over to the shot wheel, and the queen bee sends it spinning. They’ll stay for one drink and then head downtown to join the sea of crop tops and four-inch heels. Amelia half pays attention to them, waiting for them to decide what they want. No, not that one. That sounds gross. They spin again and it lands on redheaded slut. That’s offensive. One of the girls looks up at the line of men watching from their seats at the bar, seats they’ve been in all night. This is such a gross townie bar. Amelia doesn’t do or say anything to the girls. She serves other customers. She asks me if I’m doin’ okay.
Martin Yagla and I can’t share this space. This much is clear. It’s him or me. And though I’m sure he needs The Final Final as much as I do, I decide to step over him when he falls, as if he is nobody, subhuman, a danger to himself and others.
Everyone in the bar knows Yag is hard up for money. He’s on thin ice because he brought in trouble, which makes him vulnerable.
Cal is carrying that huge wad of cash in his wallet, money he’s accumulated from a week or more of odd jobs, money he’ll use to cover his bills, which probably include whatever amount he fronted for parts. I picture the fat wallet in the pocket of his rain jacket slung over the empty chair across from Summer.
She sits in front by the darkened windows, playing with a vintage, plastic Breyer horse on a high-top table, squirming left and right and back again on a low-back swivel chair. There’s a small enclave there, a nook to the right of the entrance. Lucas and his friends used to commandeer this space, back when they had a big crew, before people started moving away and having kids. I take my fresh whiskey over and position myself in the chair reserved with Cal’s jacket.
I ask Summer if her horse has a name.
“Pony,” she says. She makes it gallop toward me on the table. “Want to draw with me?” Summer hands me a piece of orange construction paper and a blue crayon. She keeps a yellow piece and the rest of the crayon box for herself. She asks me what she should draw. I suggest her pony.
She begins. Her ability to focus is impressive. She chews on her tongue as she draws.
Reaching back, I slip my hand into the pocket of Cal’s jacket and wrap my fingers around the fat leather wallet. Quickly, I shuffle the wallet from his pocket into my rear waistband, where it fits tightly between my underwear and jeans, just above the crack of my ass. I make sure my tank top is pulled down over the bulge, which is probably still visible but shouldn’t draw attention from a bunch of unsuspecting drunks.
I start doodling logical fallacies with my blue crayon:
Cal is a good dad ^ Good dads spend time with their kids
∴ Cal brings his kid to the bar
Everyone likes Lucas ^ Lucas likes me
∴ Everyone likes me
The second one nags at me. It’s a man’s prerogative to be liked. Women are sometimes respected, sometimes admired, sometimes adored, but they aren’t liked, not really. I know this because I am a teacher. My course evals don’t benefit from the affable-white-guy bump.
My own mother preferred Lucas to me. Once, she steadied herself by pawing his bicep and resting her head on his shoulder. “So firm,” she slurred. Lucas was like a funnel. He took all the love in—from his vast network of friends, from people in the town, people he’d known for thirty years, patrons of this bar, Amelia and Jimmy and Yag. But without Lucas, the funnel was gone, and these people, though I’d spent years in their company, were strangers again.
“Whatcha writing?” Summer asks.
“Logical fallacies,” I say without further explanation. She doesn’t seem to mind. She’s accustomed to adults talking. “Whatcha drawing?”
Next to her pony there is a green leafy plant. I ask her if that is what the pony eats. She shakes her head. “The pony eats hay. This is a marijuana plant.” She says marijuana with perfect diction, and the leaves on the plant really look like marijuana. The pony is sort of watching over the plant.
“This is my plant,” Summer says. “It’s not as big as Daddy’s plant even though I put all the Miracle-Gro on it.”
“So this plant is in your yard?” I ask.
“It was. It’s not anymore,” she says. “Me and Daddy had a competition—”
“Daddy and I—”
“Huh?”
“You say Daddy and I, not me and Daddy,” I say. “Trust me.”
“Daddy and I had a competition,” she says, pleased with herself. “Who could grow the biggest plant. His was always bigger no matter how much Miracle-Gro I put on mine. He said if mine grew bigger than his, he’d buy me a pony. A real pony. It never did, so I just got this one.” She knocks the plastic horse away with the back of her hand like she is disgusted with it now.
“What happened to it?”
“What?”
“Your plant.”
“One day I was out in the field playing, and up in the sky I saw a helicopter. It found us.”
“What’d you do?” I think about Pamela Randolph Walsh and all those police cars in her driveway.
“I ran all the way back to the house. I didn’t stop to catch my breath. I yelled, ‘Daddy, they found us. Daddy, Daddy, they found our weed patch.’ ”
Cal must have explained to her that what they were doing was illegal and that at some point the police might come for them. Summer knows things little girls shouldn’t know, and at the same time, she is perfectly innocent and childlike: Cal’s little girl.
“What happened?”
“We put all the weed into trash bags as fast as we could. Then we took the trash bags out to the cans.”
“Why?”
“Daddy said maybe they wouldn’t look there.” She looks at her paper, not me, when she talks. Using her green crayon, she colors in more marijuana leaves. The plant is huge now, bigger than the pony.
“But they did look there,” I say.
“Yeah, one of the cops put Daddy in handcuffs, and then another cop took me into the living room and said I shouldn’t be afraid. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. He eyeballed my tangles—I hadn’t combed my hair that morning. I wanted to keep my tangles. I yelled, ‘I ain’t afraid of no cops.’ ” She stops, looks up at me, and corrects herself. “I should have said, ‘I’m not afraid of cops.’ ”
I nod. “Very good.”
“Then I ran back into the kitchen where they were talking to Daddy, and he told me to get the duffel bag from the hall closet.” She continues, “I knew where it was already, back behind all my toys.”
“What was in the bag?”
“Twelve thousand dollars.” She says this matter-of-factly, like an adult.
“Cash?”
“Yep, the bag of Benjamins.” By the way she says it, I can tell that’s what Cal called it. “Daddy said, ‘I’ll be back in two hours.’ Then the cops took him.”
“Was he?”
“One hour and forty-eight minutes,” she says, mimicking the rotation of a clock’s hands with her finger in the air. “I timed him on the oven clock.”
“So they didn’t arrest him?” It occurs to me as I ask a little kid this question that they did arrest him but it went away. The twelve grand was to pay off the cops and the prosecutor and the judge and maybe several other people in the county. Twelve grand, and poof, the whole thing never happened. Just like that. Small-town liberty.
“Now we’re on the up and up,” she says. This too is one of Cal’s expressions.
My conversation with Summer reaffirms my plan to get rid of Yag. I convince myself that this business with the Wrestler is dangerous, that the way he treats women is inexcusable, and that he has brought an element into The Final Final that none of us, least of all Summer, wants or needs.
I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up and she says she’s not sure, maybe a veterinarian. I tell her that’s a good idea but she should keep her options open, apply to colleges someplace other than the U., go to New York or Boston, make the big bucks. She has ambition, I can see. The hard part will be pulling herself away from her father.
My eye catches Jimmy and Yag at the bar, chatting with Amelia. Sliding off the chair, I whisper to Summer, “I need to use the loo.” She asks what that is, and I tell her it’s British for toilet, to which she giggles.
Then I slip the wallet into Yag’s jacket, which hangs on a stool near the pool table drying out, and make a beeline for the bathroom. I empty my bladder, wash my hands, and take a long, hard look at myself in the mirror. There’s nothing to do now but wait.
RIGHT UP UNTIL LUCAS and I started trying to get pregnant, I’d spent all my sexually active years trying not to get pregnant, which I defined as success. The minute I went off the pill, that experience of success shifted to an experience of failure. Weird, right? One day, not getting pregnant is success and then, wham bam, it’s failure, just like that. And my sense of failure was nagging and persistent because it hit me every month like clockwork.
It was during one of these monthly mental reckonings that Lucas and I went to a party at Samantha’s house. The occasion was her daughter’s first birthday.
Lucas and I were among only a few childless couples at the party. Samantha had a full bar for the adults but that didn’t make the party fun. At one point I found myself separated from Lucas, in a circle of moms. After each of them swapped stories of the endearing mischievous acts committed by their precious children—throwing up on the Persian rug, eating an entire box of macarons carried home from Ladurée in Paris, refusing to put on clothes—I smiled knowingly and said, “Sounds like my Addie!”
Sienna, the neurotic, bake-sale tyrant with the hungry-spirit kid, replied, “Oh, you must be relieved to have a babysitter today.”
And I said, “We just leave her home alone. It’s no big deal.”
After letting the joke linger for less than a minute, Samantha informed her, “Addie’s a dog.” I couldn’t tell if Sienna was offended by the joke or by the comparison between a dog and her four-year-old. Either way, she didn’t talk to me for the rest of the party.
I asked Samantha if I could borrow a charger because my phone needed juice. When she pulled it out of the odds-and-ends drawer in her kitchen, I glimpsed a roll of “I voted” stickers. She caught me looking and said, “Oh, these? I keep them on hand in case I don’t have time to vote. It’s no big deal. Everybody does it. Here, take ten.” Momentarily, I considered declining but it occurred to me that I could stick them to my chest on random Tuesdays and really cause a stir with the politically informed set. I shoved them into my wallet and walked away to plug in my phone. That’s when I noticed: all the outlets near the floor were covered with childproof guards. Samantha’s prodigious use of outlet guards would come to haunt me later, when I had a child of my own. I would look at my unguarded outlets as if they had eyes watching me, each outlet with two sockets: four eyes for every outlet multiplied by, say, three outlets in every room, not to mention the six-outlet power strip behind the TV. A twelve-eyed power strip can register a lot of judgment all at once. I never did anything about it, though, because I thought, rationally, Electrocution by outlet is statistically very unlikely.
Samantha’s house is a Pottery Barn house. All the walls are some shade of taupe, and the tan chairs are topped with perfectly placed, color-accented throw blankets. A level-five finished house.
There are five levels of drywall finishes. Most people think of walls as smooth and perfect, or old and cracked, but in the end, they think a wall is a wall. This implies that drywall guys are always working to level five, which means they’ve applied three layers of joint compound to the tape and screws, they’ve sanded, and then they’ve applied a skim coat. In reality, level five is not the default; it’s the exception. For one thing, there’s plenty of wall that gets covered up—by tile, by wainscot paneling, by cabinets, et cetera. Does the wall need to be mirror smooth if it’s covered floor to ceiling? And most people don’t have level-five finishes in their basements and garages. No one notices or cares. Lucas probably notices, I suppose. He probably walks around judging everyone’s walls.
Occasionally, we’d go out to eat or walk into a store and he’d look around with pride and say, “I did these walls,” and I’d say, “Wow, smooth.” But we had plenty of surface area in our own house that wasn’t level five, and Lucas was perfectly fine with that.
Lucas and I assigned levels, one through five, to a variety of situations. The categorizations were unscientific but usually pretty accurate. Our yard, with all those weeds, was level-one manicured, in reference to which Lucas once said, “We all experience self-loathing to some degree.” Level two was Spanish rice made by throwing everything in the rice cooker at once: mushy, edible but not delicious. The rug under our coffee table was level-three clean—it looked okay because Lucas loved vacuuming but if you put your nose right up to it, you could smell dog. Antolini’s served level-four pasta, which was always delicious but the plating was imperfect, and the noodles weren’t always al dente. My tits, according to Lucas, were level five, which meant he adored me. Sometimes when we got drunk, we’d have meta conversations about our conversations reaching level six, but level six didn’t really exist—there’s nothing smoother than smooth—even if we were several whiskeys deep.
There was something off in the image of Lucas drinking a beer in Samantha’s level-five house—a dead space, lacking cosmetic flaws—his posture stiff, altered to match his surroundings, and beyond posture, his facial expression, uneasy and tight, a stress vein appearing just above his temple. He didn’t belong in a place like this: a beautiful flawed man inhabiting a taupe consumer world.
On our way to the car, I informed Lucas that if we were lucky enough to have a child, I would not turn into Samantha or Sienna. I would not be that kind of mother. I would be more like a French mother—I’d raise my kid like the little adult I already wanted him to be, my enfant sauvage, born from my womb with ingenuity and a taste for aged cheese.
ANOTHER TEXT FROM SAMANTHA flashes across my phone: Where are you? I’m at your apartment.
I reply: Why are you at my apartment?
Picking you up!
I’m not home.
The Final Final is only eight blocks from my place but Samantha won’t think to look for me here. She’d never suspect I spend all my free time at a townie bar (I’m good at hiding my transgressions), and anyway, as far as she knows, this is Lucas’s bar, always was.
Outside, the sky remains open. Through the darkened front window, I watch the rain come down in torrents. Thunder cracks. I’m not leaving the bar anytime soon. Fancy Pete calls the storm a “doozy.” We are all happy to be in this familiar place, comfortable and dry, drunk or well on our way to it, but we know we’ll have to leave after last call. God willing, the storm will be long over by then.
I google Elisa Monfils. Her website says she’s the Henry Ford of human productivity. I’m not sure what that means but I’m embarrassed for her. A free app is available for download. It’s called “Unstuck.” The description makes it sound like a fertility app but instead of tracking your cycle, basal body temperature, and cervical fluid, it tracks your stuck-ness: procrastination, negative thinking, and emotional consumption. Sounds like a new way to procrastinate. No thank you.
If the U. invited her to speak, we’ve sunk to a new low in scholarship. She is based in Boston, which is ground zero for the corporate psychobabble that passes for sociology these days. It doesn’t surprise me that she knows Grace.
Grace has a husband and two kids: a life outside of work filled with soccer games and family dinners, and doing whatever parents these days do to get their kids into Ivy League schools. She is one of those people who get by on four hours of sleep. A live-in nanny cooks and cleans. Grace’s strategy is to outsource all tasks that aren’t “touchstone moments.” Whether she does them, or pays to have them done, correlates to the impact on the development of her kids. Personal grooming, oversight of chores, some chauffeuring—touchstone; laundry, bathroom scrubbing, cooking—not touchstone. She eats with her family but doesn’t cook for her family. Grace is the kind of perfect I find exhausting, and though I wonder if growing up in her shadow will fuck up her kids in incalculable ways, I tip my hat to her. I really do.
THIS IS THE MOMENT when I’ve had enough to know I will be hungover tomorrow but not so much that I don’t care. I’ve always been able to hold my liquor. I don’t slur words. Anger has never been a problem. Apathy, maybe. In fact, my personality generally gets better after several drinks. In business school, we all took the Myers-Briggs, and I found out I’m a “contained extrovert.” After a few drinks, I’m just an extrovert.
But getting drunk isn’t all fields of poppies. The flip side of a good binge is a hard hangover. And kidneys be damned, ibuprofen has become my oh-God-make-it-stop drug of choice in my thirties. Gone are the days when all it took was a greasy breakfast and a hard run.
In the company of friends, revelry usually overshadows any accounting for tomorrow. But right now, I’m paying attention. And my anticipation of a hangover is almost physical. My body and mind feel good, comfortable and loose, a little absent, perhaps, but there is this barely noticeable anticipation of sickness, a physical premonition, as if my mind is telling my body, Here’s an itty-bitty taste of tomorrow. It is the physiological equivalent of receiving a text that reads, Let’s talk about this later.
I need to switch to water for a minute, so I catch Amelia’s eye.
She is a one-person dish-washing assembly line. There are three sinks behind the bar. Actually, they’re behind and under the bar so I can’t really see them, but I see her hands moving in and out. The Final Final also has a star sink, where Amelia can press a glass, rim down, into a rinser, which shoots up water to clean it one final time before she pours a beer. She doesn’t always use the rinser, though, depending on a combination of factors—whether she’s pressed for time and how well she assumes the customer will tip.
Amelia dunks the glasses in hot soapy water in the first sink, then shuffles to her left and rinses them in hot water in the second, half-soapy from the glasses that passed before, and finally she dunks a third time in a sink of cold, mostly clear water before wiping them down with a towel. It’s a germophobe’s nightmare. Drunks assume the alcohol will kill anything left behind, which may be true, but it doesn’t kill whatever’s left inside us—all those if onlys.
LUCAS TOLD ME ONCE that he was like water flowing downstream, over, under, and through all the various impediments that hold other people up. He was proud of this fact, and it was part of what made him so likeable, so easygoing and fun. I, like everyone else, loved this about him, until I grew to resent it.
“What’re you doing over there?” Lucas called to me from in front of the TV.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I was in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher so I could refill it with the new stack of dishes that had accumulated. Every third object I pulled out was still dirty, crusted with old food. I held up a fork with yellow egg webbed in its prongs.
“Jimmy’s at the bar. He wants us to meet him,” Lucas said.
“Are you constitutionally incapable of rinsing the dishes before loading them?”
“Just leave it. I’ll do it later.”
“That’s just it—you’ll do it later. And then I’ll have to redo it later.” I held up a steel pan dotted with what looked to be blackened tomato paste. “At least let Addie lick it clean before you load it.”
“I don’t think she liked that one. I burned it,” he said.
“What exactly goes through your head when you place a crusty pan in the dishwasher? Is there a voice telling you that this time it will be different? The god of the dishwasher will kick it up a notch? This time, the pan will come out shiny and clean?”
“I don’t like washing the dishes before washing them. That’s redundant,” he said.
“No, Lucas, what I’m doing right now is redundant.” I held out a mug with a ring of black coffee on the bottom.
“I’ll do a better job next time. Just leave it. Let’s go to the bar.”
“I have zero confidence you’ll do anything different next time.”
“Why?”
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
“My aversion to redundancy created cognitive dissonance, which forced me to forget we’ve ever talked about this before,” he said. “I want to do a good job on the dishes, but I can’t.”
“Your aversion to redundancy?”
“To doing the dishes before the dishwasher does them.”
“The dishwasher doesn’t do the dishes. I do them.”
“Maybe we need a better dishwasher,” he said, laughing already at the joke I knew he was about to make. “One that doesn’t talk back.”
“We’ve talked about this at least six times. That’s not cognitive dissonance. It’s motivated forgetting.”
“It’s really sinking in this time,” he said. He came up from behind and put his arms around my waist. He tickled me and I squirmed. Addie ran over to us and bounced up and down.
After wiping the coffee out of the bottom of the mug with a sponge, I placed it back in the dishwasher. “I don’t feel like going to the bar tonight.”
“I promise I’ll clean up tomorrow,” he said. “Come on. It’s Friday night.”
“Why don’t you meet Jimmy, and I’ll stay here with Addie?”
“He wants to see you too.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“I want to see you.”
“I want the kitchen to be clean.”
He watched me scrub the sink for a minute. “Just one drink,” he insisted. “Then I’ll walk you home.”
“I’m wearing yoga pants.”
“Then you will be the best-dressed person at the bar,” Lucas said.
I had on yoga pants because earlier in the evening we’d had sex, and afterward I’d thrown on clothes that were comfortable for lounging. Back then, we were very regimented about having sex on and around the time I ovulated. The sex was still good but it was also purposeful. Each time it came with the slightest dual twinge of hope and failure. Hope that this time it would work; and failure, because chances were it wouldn’t.
In my right hand, I held our plastic slotted spoon. There were grains of rice stuck in the slots and caked on the back, remnants of the pineapple fried rice we’d made for dinner. I poked Lucas in the gut with it and jumped backward, holding him off with the spoon, an extension of my arm. He batted it with his hand. Then he grabbed a spatula and we began to fence. Addie got in on it, dancing on her two hind legs for as long as she could, holding her mouth open just enough to turn the vibration of her vocal chords into a playful growl. I pointed the spoon at her. She put her nose to it, feeling me out, determining if I meant to give it to her.
“Sit,” I said. She sat. Like Lucas, she listened when motivated. I gave her the spoon.
“You’re buying the new one when she chews that one up,” Lucas said.
“Someone has to get the rice off, and we both know it’s not gonna be you,” I said.
“Two drinks,” he said.
“I’ll go for one,” I said.
“One whiskey, one beer,” he said.
“Ordered simultaneously,” I said. We had a deal.
If my math was right, this was the night Lionel was conceived. We made Lionel and then went to the bar where I had what would be my last whiskey for the next nine months.
THAT NIGHT AT THE bar we talked about death. Upon arrival, we seized the front tables with the unearned swagger of investment bankers on the squash court. We spread our legs. We stretched our arms. We made ourselves big.
All of us were there—Cal and Summer, Fancy Pete, Short Pete, Yag, Jimmy, Lucas and me, a motley crew of eight. Summer was in the second grade at the time, and her class had just finished reading White Fang. Her child mind was preoccupied by death—specifically, how awesome it was that a dog could kill a man in under three minutes with only his teeth. Summer barred her big, gapped bunny teeth and snarled. The men cheered her on.
She sucked Coca-Cola through a straw. Then she peered up at the crew, lifting only her eyes. Releasing the straw from her lips, she asked, “If you could, would you want to know when you were gonna die?”
I looked around the circle, from guy to guy. One by one, they took long, hard pulls from their drinks. Then Jimmy said, “Are we talking imminent death, or death in old age?”
“That’s the point, stupid,” Cal said. “You only find out if you agree to the terms.”
“What terms?”
“What is imminent death?” Summer asked.
“Let’s say you find out your daddy’s gonna die tomorrow,” Yagla said. “That’s imminent.” He caught my look of disapproval. “What? It was her morbid question. Jesus, Em, lighten up.”
“Imminent just means soon,” I said to Summer. “In the near future.”
“Okay, yeah,” Summer said. “Would you want to know if you were gonna die im-mi-nent-ly?”
We were in the groove, which is, as far as I can tell, the whole point of drinking. It is a looseness of the body and a dialing back of the conscious mind, not a dulling so much as a minimizing. Both the number of thoughts and the duration of rumination are cut, hour by hour, according to a long-tail curve: the x-axis being drinks and the y-axis being thoughts. The point at which the curve bends from the head to the long tail, the fat part of the curve—that is the groove.
Everything that anybody said was hysterical, laugh-out-loud, feel-it-in-the-gut funny. Lucas ordered a round of house shots and a pitcher of Amber, and Amelia served us before making drinks for all the strangers at the bar who’d been waiting longer.
We didn’t bother to clink our glasses together, but as Cal lifted his from the table, he said, “To imminent death.” Some of us repeated the toast, and all of us shot ’em down, including Summer, for whom Amelia had made a virgin shot.
Lucas stretched his arms wide, opening up his full wingspan, and wiggled his body. It wasn’t a dance, because there was no rhythm to it. It was an outward expression of inward joy. These were the moments Lucas lived for, the good times, the groove: friends, conversation, revelry. There was nothing special going on; the night was like a thousand that came before; and, at the same time, it was better.
Lucas stopped wiggling and said, “I’d want to know because then I’d be happy just to be.”
“You mean you’d live it up,” Yag said.
Lucas hadn’t thought about what he’d actually do with his final days—he knew more about what he wouldn’t do: namely, drywall a building. “Well, I wouldn’t want to spend my final hours hungover,” he said.
“So no drugs?” Yag inquired, aghast.
“I might do drugs but I wouldn’t burn time trying to find drugs.”
“If your death was imminent, it’d be pretty easy to get drugs,” I said. “You could just call up Cal and tell him you were about to die. He’d hook you up.”
Cal nodded.
“I wouldn’t need to go out in a blaze of glory,” Lucas said. He looked at me, and either he forgot a bunch of his buddies were listening or he was too drunk to care because he said, “Really, I’d just want to spend the time with you and Addie.” We did not yet know about Lionel, and if his soul existed somewhere in the ether, it was beyond Lucas’s purview. His wing closed around me. He pushed his forehead into mine and kissed me.
Cal said, “Gross—get a room.” He looked off across the bar with this huge, sappy smile on his face.
Jimmy looked lonely.
Martin Yagla rolled his eyes, wanting not what we had, wishing, probably, some hot young thing would walk through the door.
Short Pete was content to be in the company of friends.
Fancy Pete had a girlfriend at home and a project going in his woodshop.
Summer spoke directly to Lucas. “Yeah,” she said. “I’d want to know too. I’d ask Daddy to take me on an adventure.”
“Where would you go?” Lucas asked.
“You guys could come too,” she said. “We’d get out of here. We’d take a journey up the Mackenzie like White Fang.”
“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Lucas is basically Canadian anyway.”
He nodded. He was in.
Cal ordered another round of shots. This time, he didn’t have to say anything, because we all telepathically understood we were drinking to Youth. Summer had reminded us there was a world beyond this place, a world for all of us that held the possibility of adventure.
TAKING A SHOT OF Fireball is like eating a corn dog at a county fair. Do it occasionally and it’s ironic, a quick jaunt to an unfamiliar world: class tourism. Do it often, and lose your self-respect: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Yag and Cal are having a shot. Fireball shots are three dollars every day at The Final Final. The unspoken custom here is to bust out the Fireball to help a fellow barfly cycle through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, commiseration, perseveration, and drunken stupor. Dumped by your girlfriend? Fireball. Dog died? Fireball. Can’t pay off your gambling debt? Fireball.
As far as I can tell, Yag is in the second stage of grief (anger) and Cal is trying to cool him off. “I’ll kill him before he goes near my mom.”
“These things have a way of working themselves out.”
“They cheated,” Yag says. “Just can’t figure out how. You shoulda seen the hands. It wasn’t mathematically possible.”
“Did I ever tell you about when I went twenty-eight months without running water?” Cal asks.
True story. Not twenty-eight hours, or twenty-eight days—twenty-eight months. Cal’s spirit animal is a honey badger.
Poised to enter the third stage (commiseration), Yag orders a second round of Fireball shots on Cal’s tab.
Cal begins his story. “I planned to leave town for a month during slow season, and decided to turn off the water. The ranch is old as shit, so the water could only be turned off at the stop box near the street. The box wasn’t even on my property. The shutoff was up the street in front of the neighbor’s house. Public Works told me only thirteen houses in the whole county had stop boxes located that far away—but, no problem; they’d send someone out to shut off the water.
“The service guy used a key at ground level to close the valve, which was buried six feet underground. Shoulda been routine, but the box was old, and when the guy turned the key, he broke the valve. The water was turned off, but there was no way to turn it back on.”
“Moron,” Yag says.
“The guy reported back to Public Works, and Public Works said I was responsible for replacing the stop box, and to bring it up to code, it would need to be moved a hundred and seventy feet, to the front of my house. That required excavating the street. They gave me an estimate. The combined cost of excavation and a new stop box came to nearly eight grand. Can you believe it? Eight Gs. I had a guy who said he would do the excavation for five, but he couldn’t go any lower because he’d have to rent equipment.”
Classic conversational narcissism: Martin owes the Wrestler ten grand, and Cal’s way of empathizing is to tell a story about owing a similar amount of money with the same amount of indigence. In the outside world, people might not put up with this kind of thing, but bars have their own rules. If you’re the one buying the shots, you have license to talk.
“That’s fucked up,” Yag says. “The service guy broke the valve. You break it, you buy it.”
This all happened before Summer was born, and before Cal’s general contractor business took off. Eight grand was not a drop in the bucket by any means, but he could have swung it. He had the money in his freezer or mattress or buried in the backyard somewhere. Or, it’s possible he didn’t have the money at all but pride prohibited him from admitting as much. Whatever the case, it wasn’t about the money for Cal; it was a matter of principle.
“Fuckin’ A right,” Cal says. “I refused to pay but the town didn’t back down. Some asshole at Public Works actually told me I could sue them if I wanted to make my point in court. I told them, ‘I don’t sue people for shit like this; only you people do that!’ ”
“So the water remained off?” Yag shakes his head at the world he knows to be unfair.
“I started showering at the community rec center after work. I got to know all the homeless people there. When I had to take a shit at home, I used a bucket. I took my clothes to the laundromat on the other side of town.
“Things started to snowball from there. Because I was pissed at the town, I noticed there was something wrong with my gas bill. I didn’t like the way they were reading the meter. They were just estimating the data, basing it off my five closest neighbors. On the bill, it was called neighborhood estimation. I knew I wasn’t using nearly as much gas as my neighbors because, for one thing, I had no hot water, and also I wasn’t running the furnace at the time. So I refused to pay that bill, and the gas was shut off too.”
At the time, people around town started talking. Cal didn’t have water or heat. He was living like a savage.
Yag says, “I would’ve marched down to Public Works and burned the fucking building down.”
“If I’d done that,” Cal says, “I’d be in prison right now. Or dead. That’s my point. You gotta hold the course. Wait ’til things right themselves.”
“The town eventually came around, then?” Yag asks with a twang of disbelief.
“Not exactly,” Cal says. “Evie was about to graduate from college at the U. I asked her to marry me and move in. She refused to shit in a bucket. She called Public Works. The guy who answered the phone took pity on her. He told her if I came down to the office after five p.m., after everyone else had left for the day, he’d give me a used stop box. I could dig up the old broken one myself and replace it.
“I called Lucas and we did the back-alley deal with the guy from Public Works. Then we drove to the house to dig a hole six feet deep. We dug straight down, shaving dirt from the sides. Lucas brought out his Shop-Vac and we used it to suck up dirt, emptying it thirty times over.
“It was obvious when the water came back on because Evie ran out of the house screaming to turn it off again. Some of the pipes had burst. I said no way—now that the water was on, nobody was gonna turn it off. I pulled Lucas out of the hole by his ankles, and we went inside and capped the pipes. Later, I ran all new piping by myself.”
“If you did all the work, didn’t the town win?” Yag asks.
Amelia serves them a third shot of Fireball. Cal raises his glass to Yag and says, “To getting so drunk it doesn’t matter.” Drunken stupor: the fifth and final stage of grief. Cal doesn’t take the shot, though. He turns his head toward Summer and hands it off to Martin, who takes both, rapid-fire.
“At the end of the month, I got a call from the Water Department. A woman said, ‘Sir, we have a problem. We’ve identified a twenty-eight-month gap in our billing cycle.’ She couldn’t figure out why. She’d never seen anything like it before. I calmly explained that the water had been off for twenty-eight months, and now it was back on. She informed me that even if I hadn’t used any water, I was still responsible for the sewer fee, which was thirteen dollars a month. I told her to send me a bill. I’d pay it. I’d never been delinquent on a bill.”
Cal believes his name is on a list somewhere, but I highly doubt it. If the government had the wherewithal to surveil every crazy white guy in town, they’d put eyes on The Final Final, and as far as I can tell, no one gives a rip about what we do here.
“Sure, you could say I lost,” Cal says, “having gone so long without water and all. But here’s the kicker: within the year, the town installed a new stop box across the street. No one notified me, but I watched it happen while I drank in my lawn chair.”
“Fuck, man. I don’t have your stamina,” Yag says. “Those assholes cheated, and they’re gonna get away with it. I should break in and light the poker table on fire. Send a message.”
Cal puts his hand on Yag’s shoulder, a wise father calming a hotheaded son. “Wait it out. Pay off your debt. The water eventually comes back on.”
I can’t help but smile into my drink. The passage of time, all twenty-eight months of it, didn’t solve Cal’s problem, as he insists. Evie solved his problem. She picked up the phone and forced him to get out of his own way. If Yag doesn’t do something crazy first, his mom will solve his problem. I’d put money on it, if gambling didn’t seem like such a bad idea right now.
A WHILE BACK, I noticed a pattern in my students’ presentations. They’d finish a section, like a SWOT analysis, or an exploration of Porter’s Five Forces, or a rundown of KPIs, and then they’d say, “Now John’s going to talk about the financials,” or, “Here’s Alice with our recommendations.” Students assume these are transitions simply because they hand off the proverbial baton.
One day, a group came to me and asked where they should put the financials in the deck. The simple question of where, not what or how, made me realize that MBAs think of transitions in the wrong way. They think, How do I move from one point to the next? when really they should be thinking about how one point builds into the next. If content is optimally structured, the transitions don’t feel like handing off a baton. They feel like shifting a manual transmission at about 3,000 rpm. In other words, transitions should feel natural—like the right time to shift—and if successful, the engine gets a boost.
The engine, or in my students’ case, the content, dictates the shift. But unlike an engine, which is mechanical, content is organic. It is a living extension of the speaker, and transitions aren’t optimized at fixed points (the financials do not always come toward the end). I encourage my students to command transitions to work to their advantage, which is easier said than done. After beginnings and endings, transitions are the most important aspect of any presentation, whether it’s a stock pitch, or product launch, or an old story much told at the bar.
FOR OUR FIRST WEDDING anniversary, Lucas and I took our bicycles to France with the goal of escaping tourist traps and exploring the countryside. On our third day, in the hills to the west of a town west of Lyon, we came across a tiny village. In its heyday, two hundred years prior, the village was home to approximately five hundred people.
Today, it has one business: a juice bar run by a jolly old lady who makes crepes on request, and her husband, who keeps bees and sells jars of honey. They have a big, old, lazy dog that hangs by the man’s side all day long. The juice bar is located right in what was once an active town square.
Lucas and I parked our bikes and watched the old woman press the oranges for our mixed juice. Then we walked to the middle of the square, where we found the statue of a man holding his hands behind his back, as one might do when taking a leisurely stroll.
There are so many statues in France that it’s impossible to care about any of them, but this one caught my eye for two reasons. First, the subject smiled, a rarity for European statues. And second, the inscription on the stone base read Le Maire—simply, The Mayor. There was no name on the statue—I found the name, Gerard Dupris, later, back in a library in Lyon. And he wasn’t actually the mayor. In the nineteenth century, this district was unincorporated and had no governing body.
On Dupris’s fourteenth birthday, his mother, who had fallen gravely and mysteriously ill, died suddenly. Later that year, his elder sister and primary caretaker died in a tragic accident, according to legend, falling into a ravine. By sixteen, Dupris fell in love with a beautiful girl from the village. They married quickly and conceived a child. His young wife, who bore a son, died during childbirth. Dupris never loved another woman. Dupris’s son was, quite literally, raised by the village. He helped the bread baker deliver morning loaves across town. The villagers fed his belly with homemade treats and his mind with stories. He lingered in their homes and brought joy to everyone who knew him. He grew up to be very handsome and charming.
Dupris and his son farmed the land that their family had worked for generations but they also roamed freely, traveling by horse, and developed friendships throughout the provinces. They cultivated reputations for trustworthiness and sincerity, and they began to broker deals, first among merchants and landowners, and then among the ruling class.
They were welcome in monasteries and palaces; they attended feasts as guests and distributed rations to the poor as volunteers. They spoke many local dialects. They could have chosen wives for love or wealth or status, but they broke many hearts instead. Their bond with each other, forged through death, was singular and unbreakable.
Dupris and his son returned regularly to their village, bringing gifts of knowledge and medicine and invention that created great prosperity. The village had an annual festival in the town square when father and son returned for the winter months. It erupted spontaneously when they rode into town and ended as many as seven days later, when the wine jugs ran dry.
After their final journey together, and on the third day of the festival, Dupris’s son, less than twenty years old, virile and muscular, stepped into the wrestling ring, a favorite pastime among the youth in the village. In the third round, he grabbed his chest and collapsed. He was immediately unresponsive and died quickly.
Gerard Dupris was not yet an old man. Having lost his only companion, he stopped traveling but did not shut himself off from the townspeople. The village prospered for the remaining years of his life, and though it was small, it became known for art and culture and for the annual festival.
He had already planted the seeds of success but only after his son’s death did people begin to tell his story. Some called him L’Ange de la Mort because he danced with death so gracefully; those who knew him well called him Oncle; most called him Le Maire. Known for his sunny demeanor and toothy smile, Gerard Dupris was the de facto leader of his petite village.
Among the five hundred or so inhabitants of the village, there was one sculptor. In 1837, one year after Dupris’s death, the villagers commissioned a statue of the man they called The Mayor.
This story fascinated me, not because it was weird—though in the period of the French aristocracy, it was quite unusual for a peasant to achieve such notoriety—but because very little of it was written down anywhere. Dupris was not someone kids read about in history books. He was not even a particularly interesting historical figure. He didn’t start a war, or end a war; he didn’t invent anything; he wasn’t a craftsman or a philosopher, and according to legend, he wasn’t much of a lover.
The statue itself was cataloged in Lyon, which was where I found Dupris’s name, but for the rest of the details I had to hire a translator to talk to the remaining villagers—less than twenty now—most of whom were very old. They had learned of Dupris from their parents, who learned of him from their parents, who were possibly kids or maybe not even born yet when the statue was erected. It was an oral history and so it was mythologized in ways that were entirely believable to me.
The third and final section of The Breakout Effect was about Gerard Dupris. His story was about death and perseverance. At the time I wrote it, both were strangers to me.
I admired Dupris, and in many ways, he became the hero of my book. Certainly, among my three subjects—Pamela, my father, and Dupris—he was the one who found happiness, or, if not happiness, a kind of spiritual wholeness that I couldn’t define. Lucas later called it the Tao. Whatever it was, it was inaccessible to me. Dupris was many things, but he wasn’t a mother. If he had been, he’d have blamed himself for letting his son set foot in a wrestling ring, or for not making sure his wife had proper medical care, or for not being present when his elder sister fell into the ravine.
But Dupris was a man, like Chuang Tzu, free to drum on an inverted pot and sing.
GIL AND HIS SILENT sidekick—I mean, second wife—are back. They did a lap around the bar and found themselves right back where they started, next to me.
“You know what it was? You know how I knew Lucas was gonna buy that place?” The volume of his voice jars me. He doesn’t give me the opportunity to tell him I don’t want to know. “I could see him envisioning all them things he was gonna do.” He says them things in an intentional folksy tone because he figures some people find it endearing.
“Did Lucas ever fix up the porch?”
“Yep,” I say, looking only at my whiskey. I fight like a fool to appear ticked off, when what I really feel is my insides turning to salt water. That fucking porch. If only we’d just let it rot. If only. If only.
Amelia recognizes something—I’m not sure what. She holds my glare for a few seconds and purses her lips. She knows. Aldrich Gilfillan does not know. I assumed everyone in this town knew everything about everybody, but I realize now that either Gil is completely tone-deaf, or he simply doesn’t know. He thinks I still live with Lucas. He thinks we’re still married. No one told him what happened to us.
This sudden realization of my own anonymity feels fantastic. Part of pain is managing other people’s reaction to pain—the things they ask and the things they avoid. When people ask questions, they usually focus on some narcissistic need to show they care. They conflate empathy with the desire to display empathy, and they want answers that will make them feel good for having asked the questions. Strangers want to be thanked for their concern; friends want to be told how much their support means. They do not want to hear uncomfortable truths. When a soldier comes home from war, he doesn’t sit around at dinner parties talking about how his platoon mate took a piece of shrapnel and bled out in his arms, requesting only that he tell his wife and child how much he loves them. He might show off a scar from a physical wound that has healed over but he doesn’t mention his fractured mind that will never heal.
I’ve only said about three words to Gil but he’s still hovering, not taking the empty seat next to me at the bar but not moving on either.
“Welp,” I say. “Nice talkin’ to ya.”
He hands me a card. “Let me know when you and Lucas are in the market for a bigger house.”
I lift my whiskey off the bar and push it toward the second Mrs. Gilfillan, who has not spoken a single word. She’s holding a Budweiser bottle by her side. She lifts it to my glass and lightly clinks it against the rim. I think we are both, telepathically, toasting her miraculous endurance of Gil.
Before Gil walks away he says, “When you see Lucas, tell him hello.”
I LIKE A MAN who can fix things, who knows his way around a shop, who works with his hands. That’s what we all say. That’s the romantic version. But any woman who has ever lived with this kind of man knows the do-it-yourself life is one lived in a constant state of almost-done. She comes home to find a hole in the wall that he’s cut out with a saw so he could access some electrical wiring. He finishes the wiring but doesn’t bother to seal up the hole—even though he installs drywall for a living—because it’s not pressing, because it can be done later, because there are twelve other things that require attention first. Or, all the furniture has been moved to the middle of the room so he can paint but he doesn’t get it done in one weekend, so you sit on it like that for days. Or, there’s a layer of dust everywhere because he sanded something, which may or may not be toxic.
Other people—the lawyers and doctors of the world—hire professionals, and it’s not sexy but it gets done in forty-eight hours, and then they live their perfect, clean, nontoxic lives, and they have time to throw dinner parties or go to PTA meetings or whatever it is that they do. Sometimes I look at the pale skin of some of my colleagues at the U., baby-smooth hands that are only used to type, and I think to myself, Who do their wives ask to open jars? and then I imagine their gentle sex, and I find myself making a bored face—an expression Lucas could have read with one glance.
The house on Catherine Street was the night-and-day opposite of the monstrosity I grew up in: a six-bedroom, eight-bathroom, Tudor-style mansion in Wilton, Connecticut, built to look old in the late 1970s. My home with Lucas was like Baby Bear’s porridge. Every inch of it was lived in: the books on the shelves were our favorite books, the kitchen was stocked with everyday equipment—cast-iron pans and spatulas—the couch was good to curl up on, as opposed to the designer sofas and chairs of my youth, which were only meant for display.
I still think about all the woodwork that Addie scratched up—wood doors and windowsills, floorboards and paneling. Lucas and I spent hours together stripping it—one of those projects we stumbled into ass-backward. Possibly, Lucas thought these things out in advance, but I always just found myself in the middle of them. If memory serves, we decided to strip all the woodwork because we wanted to stain it dark, and we wanted to stain it dark because I had chosen a peachy color for the walls, and we had purchased one gallon of paint for thirty dollars, thereby locking us in. Lucas referred to the peach as titty pink, which I guess meant flesh toned, though it was really more apricot. He then decided the only way titty-pink walls would look good would be if the woodwork was very dark, and then a week later and we were stripping, stripping, stripping. I didn’t protest because it was exactly where I wanted to be, hanging out with Lucas.
We finished just more than half of the woodwork, basically everything in the living room and kitchen, except for the window frames—we didn’t make it to the dining room—before we decided to table the project for a year. We were sick of scraping, for one thing, and I wanted to devote more time to my book. Other projects demanded Lucas’s attention—some of the wood on the porch was rotting and the entire exterior of the house needed to be repainted. Did I want all the woodwork to have the same smooth, dark finish? Yeah, sure I did. But to be honest, I didn’t give a rip either.
WHEN I COMPLETED THE Breakout Effect, I gave the draft to Lucas to read.
Pen in hand, he read it within forty-eight hours. He flipped over the last page and said, “Let’s go to the bar and talk about it,” which was different from “I love it,” what I wanted to hear.
It must have been a Monday or Tuesday night and damn cold outside, because I remember stepping in from the frozen streets to an empty bar. Only a couple of the high-top tables were occupied by grad-student types. The regulars were all home for the night.
Lucas flopped down and stripped off his coat and gloves. He requested a whiskey, half rocks, and riffled through the manuscript, finding the second section, the one about my dad.
I could see all his notes in the margins, in three different colors of pen, and I knew this conversation wasn’t going to make me feel good. Lucas wasn’t the rubber-stamping type. I ordered a Cherry Coke and braced myself.
No one was playing the jukebox, so Amelia put her own music over the sound system, mellow and bluesy, the right tempo for the beginning of the week, something we could sit with for a while as we talked about the matter at hand. Amelia didn’t ask what was on the paper, though I suspect she already knew it was my book. Lucas and I had been talking about it for months.
Lucas said, “Do you know what I’m going to say?”
I glanced down at the marginalia and noted the red lettering, all caps: NOT LIKE THE OTHERS. I told Lucas I had no idea what he had to say.
“You don’t give your dad any credit,” he said.
“That’s the point,” I said. “He doesn’t deserve credit.”
“Pamela and Gerard get the benefit of the doubt. Your dad doesn’t. Why is that?”
At this point we were only about ten minutes into a conversation that I knew would last hours, and I was already chewing on the ice at the bottom of my soda. I asked for a refill, waited for Amelia to put it on the table in front of me, and watched the bubbles. “He was a shitty father,” I said.
“Your dad’s not so bad. I mean aside from cheating on your mom—”
“That’s one big aside.”
“Your mom is a bit of a battle-ax, not to mention a drinker.”
“That came after,” I said, suddenly defensive of mothers everywhere.
I’d taken a test and confirmed it: I was pregnant, finally, after many months of trying. I was still adjusting—fatigued, short on breath, head in a fog. Lionel was growing inside me. He had an X and a Y chromosome. And all his DNA.
PERHAPS LUCAS WAS RIGHT. My mother did drink. But my father definitely drove her to drink more. Mom suffered from postpartum depression. Or, maybe having me just triggered something that had been in her all along. However it originated, the depression came and went in bouts. There were days when she didn’t get out of bed. There were good periods too. She took me out for milkshakes and French fries. We snapped our fingers and swayed to funk music in the kitchen. She taught me how to cook real Italian food. She wasn’t Italian but she became an expert after she married my dad. Her herb garden featured basil, rosemary, thyme, and oregano, the Italian staples, and she employed techniques from the old country, like cooking chicken al mattone. She claimed Uncle Nic taught her how to cook.
I remember Uncle Nic as jolly. He snorted when he laughed. The guy was always cracking a joke, even when the situation called for restraint. In many ways, he and my mom were cut from the same cloth, which was why they got on so well. They both liked a good dirty martini. They were also both prisoners of their own minds. When I was eighteen, Uncle Nic shot himself in the head in the New York City apartment my dad rented for him. Dad refused to go to the funeral, which my mom planned. At the time, I thought this was just his way of dealing with grief.
Uncle Nic left one letter when he died. It was in an envelope with my father’s name on it. I dug it out of the trash can in the kitchen.
Caro Fratello,
Busy, busy, busy.
I’m sorry for dipping out on Mattea. A stronger man would have shut the thing down a year ago, tied up loose ends. The restaurant is a source of pain for me. Not because it failed. Because I know it will continue to fail. As tough as you are, you won’t shut it down—not immediately—either because it was my project or our mother’s namesake or, probably, both.
Every month, you’ll review the books, and you’ll be reminded of your little brother, losing money from beyond the grave. Three or five or ten years down the road, you’ll pull the plug on it. Whoever winds it down, sells off the equipment, won’t bother to strip the sign, MATTEA, and you’ll happen to walk by on your way to that hip sushi joint. You’ll try to look away, but out of the corner of your eye, you’ll see it, empty and abandoned, with a weathered awning and a homeless man sleeping in the doorway.
This is not how I want you to remember Mattea. I want you to remember the day I pitched you the idea in a garden of potted herbs, with the promise of simplicity—hand-rolled pasta, house-cured meats, table wine, espresso. I want you to remember where it all started, in our mother’s kitchen.
If I owned the restaurant, I would give it to Emma. She’d know what to do with it. Seeing as you own it, I suppose that’s entirely up to you, and knowing you, I have no doubt you’ll succumb to some free-market, invisible-hand idea, related to what’s best for her, incentives and all that, and you’ll figure you’d be doing her a favor if you left her out of it. That might be true.
As for me? Remember me for the only things I was ever any good at: making Emma smile, re-creating Mamma’s Bolognese, and, in the end, holding you to your own standards: never throw good money after bad.
Nico
Busy, busy, busy was a Vonnegut reference. Uncle Nic was an aficionado.
Some years later, my dad met me in San Francisco, where I was living, and on our way to dinner, a homeless man tripped and fell on the sidewalk just a couple of feet in front of us. The guy was so close to the entrance of the restaurant that my dad literally had to step over his body to get to the door. I was young at the time and sort of in shock so I just followed his lead. From inside the restaurant, I looked out and watched the man gather himself. Upon seeing my expression, my dad grabbed my arm and said, “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” Biographies and military histories, along with the Wall Street Journal and a few select business periodicals, comprised most of my father’s reading list. Marcus Aurelius fell squarely within his bailiwick.
Something about the word ambition, spoken through my father’s lips, reminded me of the word abomination, and I realized the two weren’t so far off—abomination was simply an exaggerated form of ambition. For the duration of the evening, I pushed the food around on my plate in shame while my dad ate heartily and talked about San Francisco real estate. He tipped generously.
When I told my mom this story, she said, “Of course that’s how he feels. Why do you think he didn’t come to Nico’s funeral?”
Dad probably would have invested in every two-bit business idea Uncle Nic ever had, but the one thing he would not forgive was the obvious eventuality: one day the spaghetti would stop hitting the wall. He despised what he perceived as the opposite of ambition: giving up.
Though my mom always blamed the other woman for their divorce, I’m sure it had everything to do with how he saw her depression. In his mind, it was only weakness. I never forgot what he said to me that day in San Francisco.
“YOU NEED TO FORGIVE him,” Lucas said. “And if you can’t forgive him, you need to set aside your personal feelings for the benefit of this book.”
“It’s a business book,” I said. “Forgiveness has nothing to do with it.” I really believed this was true. The book wasn’t a memoir. There was no mention of his affair, or his absenteeism. I didn’t even mention the homeless fellow he stepped over in San Francisco. Whatever meanness Lucas identified in the draft, I couldn’t see it. I was blind.
Lucas noticed my defensiveness and we both knew this would be easier if I was drinking. He suggested we go through the other sections first, Pamela Randolph Walsh and Gerard Dupris, and he ordered himself another whiskey.
“You know Maker’s is the same price as Bulleit,” I said, judging his choice.
Lucas had mapped out through lines in both sections, scribbled in different colors of ink. He called Pamela’s HIGH TOLERANCE FOR PAIN, and Gerard’s TAO. Each subject had different and equally complex equations, which included but weren’t limited to their unique stories—Pamela’s bookkeeping father and Gerard’s relationship with death. In both cases, their stories clearly mattered in some essential way but their personal attributes allowed them to persevere, which was really the key, because if they hadn’t, then their stories would be just that, stories, and not worth the paper they were printed on.
Lucas was right, of course. The stories were the mechanism for the subjects to break through their respective resistance levels, but beyond the mechanics of breaking out, there were all those devilish details of character and grit. Pamela Randolph Walsh and Gerard Dupris and my father all possessed both in abundance.
When we finished talking about the sections devoted to Pamela and Gerard, Lucas got up and went to the bathroom. On his way back to the table he stopped at the bar and asked Amelia for a cigarette. They didn’t sell cigarettes at the bar but that worked out just fine for Amelia because Lucas tipped her an extra dollar or two for every one cigarette he bummed, which was a pretty good return on investment.
Lucas caught me rolling my eyes at him as he headed for the door. He walked over, and before he grabbed his coat, he rubbed his shadow of a beard all over my face and said, “Enjoy it before it smells like cigarettes.”
“Gross,” I said. “Get outa here.” But I couldn’t act mad, because he was helping me with the book, and also because we were both now acutely aware that Lord, give me chastity but not just yet applied more than ever because just yet was approximately six months away for Lucas, though it had already imposed itself upon me.
By the time Lucas came in from the cold, I had read his notation in the section on my father. Green, all caps: AMBITION. My father’s through line. When Lucas looked at his own penmanship, he said plainly, “You have it too. So will he,” and he put his hand on my belly, and it was the first time we gave Lionel a gendered pronoun, and it was also the moment I started imagining what he would be like, what kind of man he would be. I felt like a mother, protective of the precious life inside me, all that for which I lived.
The best racket my dad ever ran was teaching me that I was worthy of success, financial and otherwise, that I deserved it. I never doubted that I belonged in beautiful places, hallowed institutions with manicured quads and ivory towers, palatial offices in skyscrapers that kissed the heavens, in summer homes with private beaches, and multi-acre ranches under big blue skies. That feeling never goes away. I could fail a hundred times and it would remain within me.
It’s not entirely a class thing. I can say that. Though class has something to do with it. Lucas’s mom ran the same racket. As far as I can tell, it’s a dinner-table thing. At least, that’s where our parents ran the racket—at the dinner table. That’s where they told us the world was our oyster, over and over again, from the time we could listen. And we believed it.
So I remember thinking, Yes, Lucas is right; our child will be ambitious. We would make sure of it over pastas and roasted chickens and burgers cooked on the grill.
We stayed for a couple more hours, long enough for Lucas to switch from whiskey to beer, long enough for me to fall in love with him again, as I did every time we hung out at the bar together.
Later, I rewrote the section on my father. I didn’t forgive him, as Lucas hoped I would, but I gave him the credit he deserved, and overall, the book was stronger for it. By the end of the new draft, I realized my initial hypothesis was wrong. The story doesn’t matter more than the person. The story and the person are one and the same.